Managing Our Water Resources
Can water data help us understand and better manage our water resources and environment?
Go to Challenge | 7 teams have entered this challenge.
Team Name:
The Vikings
Team Members:
Water Warriors
Project Info
Team Name
The Vikings
Team Members
Ryan , Lavinia K
Project Description
Water. It makes up 73% of our bodies. 71% of our planet's surface. But, only 4.5% is fresh water and it's under threat.
Severe drought in the middle east is widely reported to have inflamed the Syrian conflict. Cape Town neared day zero - no water - in 2018 impacting up to 300,000 jobs with the BBC reporting 11 cities including Sao Paulo, Moscow and Jakarta to suffer a similar fate.
Locally, our droughts have cost our economy billions of dollars and required billions more in taxpayer relief.
As we come to a climate crossroads, what can be done?
—
The current approach to raising awareness about water usage isn't slick. It isn't smart. It's often dry (excuse the pun), and focuses on restrictions, penalties or offsets.
We believe that the issue of water can be gamified. In public/private partnerships using proven competitive success as step counts have been through FitBit, dull subject matters can be fun and highly engaging.
Water Warrior is our simple tool. An all-age solution to bring awareness through a simple, interactive app.
Trust is built through community consent. We ask for consent to access your Water Warrior data. An opt-in model, where you're rewarded through prize draw entries by joining our data sharing community of consenters.
Our app asks for your location and water-based activities, so you can see how your usage compares. Consenting Water Warriors win entries to eco-friendly prize draws and are rewarded for reduction efforts. Join a community and share water stories with a like-minded community of users.
Our app will send notifications when dam levels fall and additional entries for deeper reductions with additional entries for good water usage in times of water threat.
We believe in a public/private partnership, publicly funded, privately delivered to increase trust with the community.
We believe that the data from consenting Water Warriors can be used for marketing awareness campaigns during times of water stress. Campaigns can be localised at a community level. We can learn what areas of water reduction are easiest to commit to by postcode - think: Reduce sprinkler use in North Sydney, or use less water washing your car in Minto. This style of tactic has proven 3 times more effective than rebates in a recent South Californian campaign. Local messaging for global problems through shared learning.
Through data, Water Warrior can help us build pre-emptive water management campaigns before our precious water resources hit crisis point. Through community-led engagement, we can build community-informed resilience in a world where water has become more precious than ever.
Become a Water Warrior, before it's too late.
Evidence Base Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-42982959
https://www.swinburne.edu.au/research/institutes/social-innovation/society-4-0/2019/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links-syria-conflict-to-drought-caused-by-climate-change.html
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019-03-05/value-of-australian-farm-production-drops-abares-figures/10867294
https://www.centralwesterndaily.com.au/story/6368855/water-run-to-help-out-drought-stricken-residents-of-small-town-near-orange/
Team DataSets
ABS National State & Territory Population Statistics
Description of Use We used the different states' population numbers to extrapolate from a single person's water usage amount to an entire state's water usage. The extrapolated caclulation needs tweaking to be more accurate of the real-world (which does not only include household use of water, and not every person washes their clothes every day), but it's a start.
Greater Sydney Dam Levels
Description of Use This data source, along with its Melbourne Water counterpart, allowed us to create a prototype app combining water data across borders that calculated household usage and compared it to the dam capacity and volume of water in megaliters.
Melbourne Water: Water Storage Levels
Description of Use We used this to extract a sample of Victorian dam storage levels to prototype a solution using one of the datapoints.
Water Supply - Daily Volume observed for storage dams operated by Melbourne Water
Description of Use We found this historical dataset too late to pursue our map visualisation idea, but it helped us get an idea of the different dam and reservoir volumes around Victoria. This dataset did not include recent dam volume data that we required for a more relevant user experience in our game, so we found an alternative source with latest values for volume_ML.
Vicmap Hydro 1:25,000
Description of Use Our initial project idea (included in Github repo) was to visualise the changes in water areas over time and enable side-by-side visualisation of various socioeconomic and agricultural indicators. While we managed to plot the current water area onto a map of Australia, we could not find a historical dataset large enough to allow a time-based slider. This dataset and our React map visualisation did help us understand the complex network of rivers and storage areas in VIC, and made us realise the limitations of our original idea, as well as sparked our thinking for our final project.
Challenge Entries
Water information without borders
How do we better bring together information about our water systems across states borders?
Go to Challenge | 8 teams have entered this challenge.
Create a solution to a customer need using the ABS Data API
We are excited to provide innovators with machine to machine access to ABS Data and see what exciting customer solutions can be created. Here is a chance to draw in ABS Data and answer an important question through visualisation, mapping or even blending with other data sources. Create a solution to a customer need using data drawn from the ABS Data API.
Go to Challenge | 20 teams have entered this challenge.