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WATER POLITICS

Via Foreign Affairs, an interesting review of several books examining the emerging global water crisis:

“…Although warnings that water crises, even water wars, are pending have a long history — and a long history of being overblown — there are increasing signs that the management of water resources worldwide is now reaching a tipping point. Many lakes and rivers are vanishing, and the quality of those that remain is deteriorating. Ground-water supplies are under pressure from overuse and pollution. Some fish populations are accumulating anthropogenic toxins; others threaten to disappear altogether (remember Atlantic cod?). Climate change may already be rearranging rainfall and glacial melting patterns, making life in arid areas increasingly untenable and intensifying floods in the already wet, and more populous, regions.

Water experts have long quipped that when the problem is not too much water, it is too little water, or water that is too dirty. Increasingly, however, the problem also seems to be that water is in the wrong hands. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, nearly 70 percent of the water used worldwide goes to irrigation, rarely the most productive use for it. As economies and people shift toward cities and the demand for industrial and household water grows, the pressure on supplies is building. Some water must also be set aside for the environment, for instance, to maintain the ecosystems of river deltas. Meanwhile, nearly one billion people still lack access to minimally safe drinking water, and over 2.6 billion live without proper sanitation, a critical factor for children’s survival.

Cracks are also showing in the world’s water infrastructure. The massive inventory of dams, subsidized irrigation networks, and urban water and sewage systems built over the last half century is aging, poorly maintained, and underfunded. Cash-strapped governments and taxpayers are disinclined to pay the high costs of repairing or replacing these overstressed facilities, even while they expect them to continue to operate.

With most of the world’s watercourses shared by several countries, water management can be a major source of tension, especially between the countries upstream, which often claim to have sovereign rights over the water while it is on their territory, and the countries downstream, which feel that they are left having to make do with unpredictable supplies of less and less clean water than they are entitled to. Water disputes are legion: among others, there are those between the United States and Mexico over the Colorado River, between India and Bangladesh over the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, between China and neighboring Southeast Asian states over the Mekong River, and between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Nile River.

According to the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, which is maintained by Oregon State University, outright wars over water have been rare, and cooperation over water management has occurred in surprising places — for example, between India and Pakistan, under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. Yet the potential for instability remains real. According to the Pacific Institute’s “Water Conflict Chronology,” there is a “long and distressing” history of violence over fresh water, especially at the subnational level. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned at the 2008 World Economic Forum, in Davos, that stress on water resources was a destabilizing factor around the world, from Darfur to the United States, Colombia to South Korea. One cannot completely grasp the complexity of Israeli-Palestinian relations, for example, without understanding that the Gaza Strip and the Jordan River basin have both some of the world’s fastest-growing populations and some of the world’s lowest amounts of water per capita.

Water issues are almost never only about the water; they involve an ever-expanding list of other matters. Population growth and improved lifestyles are major drains on water supplies, especially in emerging economies. Snowbirds flock to dry climates expecting the golf courses and lush lawns of wetter regions. The world’s growing middle class is consuming more beef and more dairy goods, products that require much more water than other foods: it can take up to 75 times as much water to produce one pound of beef as it does to produce one pound of wheat. Water’s fortunes have also been bound up with energy matters since the invention of the watermill. Pumping water from underground or moving it over mountains takes enormous amounts of energy: one-fifth of California’s power today goes to watering Southern California. Conventional energy generation requires water for cooling. And now dams are rapidly being built throughout the world to provide clean energy.

Given the complexity of these issues, it is little surprise that three new books all agree that the world is facing serious water crises and yet have very different ideas about how to address them. Steven Solomon, for whom water management has long been a maker or breaker of civilizations, argues that it is becoming even more critical in this “age of scarcity” to trust the efficiency of the market. In contrast, Peter Gleick looks at the market warily and indicts the commercialization of bottled water for threatening the reliable provision of clean and inexpensive tap water by public utilities. And Peter Rogers and Susan Leal see promise in some of the innovative user-backed public-private arrangements that local government agencies worldwide have undertaken to address simultaneously water scarcity and revenue shortfalls. These three views differ on important points, especially when it comes to deciding what roles the public and private sectors should play. Still, Solomon, Gleick, and Rogers and Leal all agree that the world’s water problems are increasingly linked, often in complicated ways, to other crises concerning people, food, health, and the environment. They also agree that no universal fix can be applied to such site-specific problems: scarcity here, flooding there, pollution everywhere. And reflecting an understanding common among water experts around the world, they make clear that solving the world’s current water problems will require thinking across intellectual, geographic, administrative, and disciplinary boundaries that have long seemed impermeable and developing new forms of governance…”