Tomorrow is World Environment Day, a United Nations initiative to help stimulate worldwide awareness of the environment and encourage political attention and action. To celebrate, many Australian councils, schools and community groups are organising activities to help educate others.

Today’s Age includes a fantastic environmental liftout aimed at children and teenagers, with some interesting feature articles on environmental learning across the globe and the pros and cons of different water crisis solutions. (Unfortunately I can’t provide a link as unusually, the articles are not reproduced online).

Victoria has enjoyed plenty of rainfall in recent times - hard to believe but it has been the wettest start to the year since 1995. The recent downpours and the scientific opinion that El Nino weather patterns are changing are great signs for the future, but we musn’t get ahead of ourselves.  As last month was the second warmest May recorded in Australia, high temperatures led to insufficient water run-off as the rain fell on highly parched earth.  So unfortunately, despite the heavens opening up there has been negligible impact on the catchment levels.  I have been closely watching the Melbourne water capacity percentage statistic featured on the front page of The Age for the past few months, and the figure continues to drop, albeit more slowly than before.

It’s clear therefore that demand is exceeding supply and we are simply using an unsustainable quantity of water in homes, offices and industry. Australian households have been found to have the world’s worst record for water consumption. After witnessing a few weeks of confidence-increasing unrelenting downpours, I feel the danger is that many will begin to slacken their water conserving habits if the message is not continually pressed home.

So until this is rectified, our water crisis will continue.  A lot of rain has fallen recently but not enough to ensure a positive outlook for irrigated agriculture.  Only after prolonged, above-average rainfall can it be announced that the drought has broken.

That is why I’m striving to promote Fill The Dams as a way to influence change in this country.