Working with Community and Council: The Kirirri Story
Ensuring safe, accessible and acceptable drinking water in remote communities in Australia requires culturally and socially appropriate, technically feasible and economically viable approaches. Arguably, technical and economic factors have been the main focus for remote communities in the water sector, as engineers historically drove the design, planning and construction phases of water supply management options. More recently, increasing focus has been on understanding and integrating local people and place into water supply and demand management. This paper focusses on community-based water demand management in the inner Torres Straits community of Kirirri. The aims and methods are outlined, along with a discussion of the findings which describe the community-preferred demand management tools that were piloted in 25 households between 2018-2019.