Australian Bureau of Statistics
Celebrating the International Year of Statistics 2013

MONETARY WATER SUPPLY AND USE

INTRODUCTION

This section presents the monetary supply and use tables for water and related services and other monetary information related to water supply. The Monetary water accounts presented by the Australian Bureau of Statistics follow the System of Environmental-Economic Accounts for Water (SEEA–Water) and the Supply–Use framework of the Australian National Accounts. This section covers the following:

• revenue earned by supply of distributed water and water related services in the economy by the Water supply, sewerage and drainage industry (hereafter shortened to the Water supply industry) and other industries;
• expenditure on water and sewerage services by industries, households and governments; and
• industry gross value added and water consumption by industry.

 
The scope of the section is limited to distributed water, reuse water and waste water, sewerage and drainage services. Distributed water and reuse water are defined in the Glossary. Distributed water is further subdivided as follows:

• urban distributed water
• rural distributed water
• bulk water (both urban and rural).

 
Note that for National and Environmental Accounting purposes we consider the Water supply industry to provide the service of 'water delivery' rather than being the seller of a product (water).
 
Many economic entities use self-extracted water for their own use, such as farms for irrigation or hydropower plants to generate electricity. Estimates for the monetary value of self-extracted water are not included in this section due to lack of reliable data.
 
  
MAIN FINDINGS
 
The main findings of this section are:

• Revenue earned by the Water supply industry from sales of distributed water (including reuse and bulk water sales) increased by 12% between 2008–09 and 2009–10, from $6,173 million to $6,938 million.
• Expenditure on total use of water in all sectors increased by 13% while physical water consumption increased by 1%.
• Consumption of distributed and reuse water by households rose by 5% from 1,594 GL to 1,670 GL while corresponding expenditure rose by 23% from $2,826 million to $3,488 million.
• The Agriculture industry generated a total of $4 million of gross value added (on average) for every GL of water consumed in 2009–10.
• The Mining industry recorded a total of $196 million of gross value added per GL of water consumed, a 13% decrease from 2008–09.
• The Manufacturing industry generated a total of $164 million of gross value added for every GL of water consumed, a 2% increase from 2008–09.

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