John’s vision 12 However, over centuries, original water systems
have been misused and damaged. We discharged pollutants into
them, changed their direction to suit development needs – and
more often than not physically obscured them from sight Despite
billions of dollars spent on costly hard solutions like sewers
and treatment plants, the hard systems we have put in place are
now an impediment to managing water as a vital ecological asset.
With increasingly extreme change, droughts and floods, a more
erratic climate with more extremes, even the hard infrastructure
is outdated. The size of water storage we have putm in place
does not reflect the extremes that are likely to occur. Rainfall
is becoming more intense, but less frequent; reservoirs are not
sized to hold the extra water, and downstream flooding is more
likely to occur. We have to re-visit thousands of storage
faclities and reassess their design paramaters to see how prooof
they are against climate change. We’ve also created an urban
landscape that m