Giving Compass' Take:

• Neela Banerjee explains how the long-term threat of drinking water contamination will create problems in Australia for years to come. 

• How can communities in Australia and around the world protect themselves from contaminated drinking water? What role can philanthropy play in helping communities prepare for and recovery from drinking water contamination? 

• Read about taking action on climate change for the long term. 

Even as bushfires push into new swaths of Australia, the communities close to and within the nearly 30 million acres that have already burned are starting to reckon with a complex, expensive aftermath: fire's threat to their drinking water.

It's a vexing problem that a growing number of people around the world have had to cope with over the last two decades, as climate change fuels hotter, bigger fires that destroy forested catchments and consume towns and their water systems, engineers and scientists said.

More than a year after a 2016 wildfire turned into the costliest disaster in Canadian history, Fort McMurray, Alberta allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional funding to remove ash from drinking water sources. In 2017, the Tubbs Fire damaged the water distribution system in part of Santa Rosa, California. A year later, the enormous, deadly Camp Fire led to widespread chemical contamination of the water infrastructure in Paradise, California.

Wildfire poses layers of risk to drinking water that unspool over time and geography, with some effects emerging years later, sometimes outside the burn zone, depending on where waterways take the pollutants. Water utility managers, engineers and scientists have only recently begun to grapple with the aftereffects of fires that consume entire neighborhoods and towns—as they did in California—and that in the process, release dozens of manmade pollutants into water lines. As climate change increases the risk of wildfire and more communities encroach upon fire-prone zones, the threat to drinking water promises to grow.

Read the full article about the drinking water contamination threat by Neela Banerjee at InsideClimate News.