Sustainability in Australia

44 per cent of Australia is occupied by desert.
Source: NASA World Wind public domain satellite image.

Australia faces special challenges in achieving sustainability.

As the driest inhabited continent on earth, water resources are scarce and must be carefully managed. Clean drinking water is already precious, and even scarce, in some parts of Australia.

Our location and size makes it expensive to import energy resources such as oil and to transport other resources such as coal and gas from where they are found to where our population prefers to live. It also means that we travel further to visit friends or foreign places, using more energy.

Our small population and our variable climate and terrain makes it more expensive to build the infrastructure needed to transport energy and brings many other challenges to building electricity, water and gas networks.

Even though Australia has many years' reserves of coal and gas to meet our energy needs, we do not have abundant oil for petrol, diesel and petroleum products and have few rivers suitable for hydropower.

This makes it important for Australians to consider sustainable use of our resources. There's something all of us can do to improve our use of energy and water resources, in our schools, businesses and homes.