Media Release
October 15 2003
SA to share Israel’s water wisdom
Carving out the means for sustainable production in the heart of the Israeli desert may have been lauded as a modern miracle, but according to international environmental and water policy expert Dr Alon Tal, there has been a flip side to the Israeli success story.
Presenting the 2003 Australia-Israel Hawke Lecture on October 30 at 5.45 pm in the banquet room at the Adelaide Festival Centre, Dr Tal says mistakes in Israel have had ecological consequences including increased salinisation.
And with national attention in Australia directed squarely at how we can better manage water supplies, Dr Tal will provide an insight into a range of Israeli initiatives including irrigation innovation, waste water re-use, drip irrigation and its new vision for desalinisation. He will also explore the impact politics on water policy.
Dr Tal will offer an overview of Israel’s water experience including some interesting insights into the influence of culture on past and present water policy.
He will also look at current policies and new ideas for sustainable use of water resources and the new technologies that may be the salvation of what is still one of the most water poor regions in the world today.
D Tal's career has been a balance between academia and public interest advocacy. He holds faculty appointments at Tel Aviv and Hebrew Universities in Israel, at the University of Otago in New Zealand and between 1990 and 1999 was an adjunct faculty member at Harvard University.
He was also the founding director of the Israel Union for Environmental Defense in 1990, a public interest law group (presently Israel’s second largest environmental NGO) and has been chairman of Life and Environment, an umbrella group for eighty environmental organizations in Israel since 1998.
In 1996, he founded the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a graduate studies center in which Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian students join environmentalists from around the world in an advanced interdisciplinary research program. He currently heads its regional environmental research program there.
This lecture is jointly presented by the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre at the University of South Australia and the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce.
Media contact
Michèle Nardelli (08) 8302 0966 or 0418 823 673