Improving water markets and trading through new digital technologies

Summary

Civic Ledger’s improving water markets and trading through new digital technologies pilot project focused on agricultural irrigators operating within the Mareeba-Dimbulah Water Supply Scheme (MDWSS) on the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland.

The pilot project sought to deploy and test Civic Ledger’s blockchain enabled peer-to-peer water market and trading platform, Water Ledger. The Water Ledger trading platform was adapted to the MDWSS business and operating rules to observe how blockchain technology can reduce trading costs, improve the efficiency of trade processes, and increase water market transparency.

Project participants include Far North Queensland (FNQ) Growers, Queensland Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy (QDNRME), Griffith University and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Blockchain Innovation Hub. SunWater supported the research and was a key stakeholder in the research collaboration.

This report provides an overview of how the pilot tested the potential of blockchain and smart contract technology to address three fundamental challenges for effective and efficient water markets:

Reduce transaction costs,

Real-time price discoverability

Interoperability.

The report identifies three horizons for future work and outlines next steps for implementation. Part three of the report is written by Griffith University and includes additional investigation of the Water Ledger trading platform’s technical architecture beyond water trading and correlation or co-dependency on digital technologies such as IoT, sensors, AI, process mapping and analysis, and digital twinning.

Scaling Next Generation Water Markets in Northern Australia

This project explored the interconnectedness between water market design and institutional governance goals to address water security and social equity issues related to water access. It focused on the question: How can investor confidence be enhanced through a grower-led transformation of northern Australia’s emerging water markets? Research leads, Civic Ledger, are investigating the design of next-generation rules to manage future uncertainty and deliver water security across northern Australia. This work builds on the Improving Water Markets and Trading through New Digital Technologies research, published in December 2020, and further explores the linkages between enabling institutions and water market design. In parallel, Civic Ledger is testing the next-generation water market paradigm at scale by transitioning the Mareeba-Dimbulah Water Supply Scheme (MDWSS) in the Atherton Tablelands, Far North Queensland, to its blockchain-enabled water market and trading platform – Water Ledger. This transition has established MDWSS as a strategic research test-bed with applicability across northern Australia, enabling real-time, continuous water accounting and trading. It also provides a framework to evaluate and validate the linkages between transparent governance and the design of next generation water markets.

This project focused on testing Civic Ledger’s blockchain Water Ledger trading platform, which is currently at the Minimum Viable Product stage of its software development lifecycle. The pilot was conducted with horticultural irrigators within the Mareeba Dimbulah Water Supply Scheme (MDWSS) on the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland. The objective of piloting Water Ledger in the MDWSS was to research and evaluate the potential of blockchain technology to support and enhance the design and development of innovative water markets in northern Australia. This objective included evaluation of opportunities to enhance real time price discoverability, reduce trading costs, and improve liquidity of transfers to ensure water availability through the removal of information asymmetry by creating perfect water trading and market conditions. The project’s trading platform conducted trades in parallel with existing Water Information Systems used by the irrigators at MDWSS to collect data for analysis and determine a smart market based on blockchain technology: Incentivises optimisation of water allocations Increases market confidence Decreases transaction costs Improves data integrity. Through this process, the project generated essential data to inform future researched aimed at optimising trading markets relevant to northern Australia’s growing agriculture industry. It also provided valuable feedback for the further development of the Water Ledger platform, including the application at a water supply scheme.