ABSTRACT
The environmental impacts of inefficient water use highlight the critical importance of designing and implementing sustainable water management practices. This chapter seeks to redress an imbalance in current literature emphasizing the importance of agricultural, rather than urban, water consumption. While acknowledging that large complexes such as hospitals and casinos consume disproportionately large amounts of water, the chapter focuses on domestic water use in Australian cities, where most homes are connected to, and reliant on, metropolitan-wide distribution systems. It examines ways that water is used in such settings, review various programs and policies aimed at changing urban water use behaviour, analyses methods for achieving change, and proposes future directions for sustainable domestic water consumption. In many Australian cities, large, centralized infrastructure systems that have provided high quality water to households are meeting their limits. Our Common Future, the World Commission on Environment and Development report (WCED) gave the first wide exposure to the concept of sustainable development.
