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WATER POLITICS

Via The Boston Review, an excellent analysis of the impending water crisis and ways in which we can manage our way of this predicament.  While a bit long, I recommend reading it through.  Below, I have noted a few of the most important points:

“…Salinization remains a serious threat to irrigated lands, but we are now hearing warnings about something much more dangerous: a genuinely global scarcity of water. Reports describe majestic rivers such as the Yellow River in China no longer reaching the sea. Ships sit on the dry bed of the Aral Sea. Droughts such as those that have ravaged the Australian countryside in recent years appear to be increasing in frequency and severity. In 2006 the International Water Management Institute, which I directed at the time, reported that water scarcity affected a full third of world population. In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that, due to climate change, the number of people facing water scarcity would grow. Others, too, say that there is a global water crisis, the availability of water is dwindling, the world is running out of water, water is the blue gold, and that future wars will be fought over water. In When the Rivers Run Dry (2006), Fred Pearce characterizes this emerging shortage as the defining crisis of the twenty-first century.

So, is the planet drying up? Not exactly, but a growing number of people are sharing a fixed amount of water, and that water is badly managed and increasingly polluted. Thanks largely to unsafe drinking water, more than 2 million children die of diarrhea each year. Six hundred million subsistence farmers lack irrigation water and are mired in poverty. Wetlands have been decimated in Europe, North America, and Asia, and fish populations are collapsing. Drought caused a more than 50 percent drop in Australia’s wheat production in 2007 and sparked a ten-year peak in global wheat prices. Burgeoning African and Asian cities, from Dakar to Beijing, face severe water shortages. Water rationing in these cities, to several hours per day or several days per week, is the norm rather than the exception.

Does the population increase mean there will not be enough water? That is not quite the right question.
We can avoid a full-blown global disaster. Unfortunately, the water crisis is complicated, often misunderstood, rarely grasped holistically, accelerated by climate change that melts glaciers and icecaps, and exacerbated by biofuel expansion that further stresses scarce water supplies. Forestalling it will require a mix of sustained technological innovation and institutional reform, all guided by deeper understanding and some new thinking.

…Does the population increase mean there will not be enough water? That is not quite the right question. Water is only valuable to people if it is available at the right time, in the right place, and at the right level of quality. Rain does not fall in an even drizzle throughout the year, except in my native Holland. And it is distributed unevenly in space, with some 24 percent of the world’s estimated renewable water resources falling in Canada every year, and no rain most years in arid areas or deserts. Rainfall is distributed unevenly in time as well, especially in monsoon areas such as India, where 90 percent of the annual rainfall is concentrated in just a few major storms that may occur in less than one hundred hours. Bangladesh is well known for destructive flooding but, like India, can suffer as much or more from droughts.

When we think about water scarcity, then, we should not be focusing on an absolute shortfall between the total needs of the earth’s population and the available supply, but on where the usable water is and what it costs to bring enough clean water to where people are.

That means not only ensuring the accessibility of safe drinking water, but also the availability of enough water for growing food. The former alone is no trivial undertaking. More than a billion people in developing countries invest a significant share of their time and resources in securing drinking water. Available water supplies are so limited in quantity and poor in quality that, combined with poor sanitation and personal hygiene, they are associated with ill health. Diarrheal diseases, generally caused by drinking or handling biologically unsafe water—water that has been in contact with human or animal feces—account for an estimated 20 percent of deaths among children under age five.

…to understand the water crisis we need to distinguish two fundamentally different problems, which will require different solutions. The first, the drinking water problem, is about access to affordable water services: here we face a service crisis. The second is about the lack of the vastly greater water resources needed to grow food and maintain ecosystem services: here we face a problem of water scarcity, a resource crisis.

…Addressing the water crisis—the service crisis (water to drink) and the resource crisis (water for food and clothing)—will require both technological and political innovation. Climate change will introduce additional challenges associated with increased climate variability in many parts of a world. But advances in water science in recent decades have led to a better understanding of the key issues that need to be addressed to solve the water crisis, and speedy innovation in water technology during the last decade or so looks promising.

…it is unlikely that water problems will be successfully addressed without new dam projects….Generations of water engineers have been educated to solve water problems by developing “new” water resources. This usually involves capturing the water where it is available in nature, storing it to overcome temporal variability, and transporting it through canals or pipes to overcome spatial variability. Of course this water is not new—all water on earth already serves some purpose, generally producing ecosystem services that are valuable in the aggregate. Water storage—ranging from cisterns in residences to Lake Volta, formed by the Akosombo dam, the largest man-made lake in the world—was the twentieth century’s primary adaptation to variations in rainfall. Largely in the last century, the governments of the United States and Australia built between 5,000 and 6,000 cubic meters of storage per inhabitant.

These dams have displaced people, reduced and regulated the flow of rivers, and eliminated the natural rhythm that supported riverine ecosystems in general and wetlands and fisheries in particular. For these reasons, dams have become a controversial subject. Environmentalists in the American Northwest, for example, campaign to have dams decommissioned and removed to restore salmon runs. Throughout Europe, North America, and Asia, the most productive dam sites have been essentially used up, and many river basins are closed, or closing, because no more water can be developed without affecting existing human uses downstream.

But the debate should not focus on whether dams in general are bad or good. They need to be assessed in each specific context for their potential benefit as well as their full impact on the environment and the burden they may place on displaced people. Some of the dams built in the past would not pass such a test, though there are areas in which new dams are still worth the difficulties they create. In Ethiopia, for example, the current stock of water infrastructure is so low, less than 50 cubic meters per person (less than 1 percent of that in Australia or the United States), that dams should be considered. In large parts of Africa there are still environmentally viable and reasonably inexpensive opportunities to build even large dams that can offer significant social and economic benefits.

…The most significant institutional innovation in fighting corruption in water management has been the development of water-user associations that take responsibility for managing water and irrigation systems. Large numbers of such associations have emerged in Mexico, Turkey, the Philippines, Pakistan, India, and, more recently, Central Asia. This irrigation management transfer, or participatory irrigation management, has become standard World Bank policy even though its benefit is hard to prove.

…Solutions to the world water crisis will not be technological fixes of the sort attempted in the past. The water-service crisis is most likely to be resolved through a combination of much-improved, cheaper, small-scale, off-the shelf water purification technology, combined with better information; a reformed public water-sector; and large numbers of indigenous, small to medium-scale private water-service providers. People affected by the water-resource crisis and their allies need to increase water productivity in a manner that maintains ecosystem services—particularly, but not exclusively, through increased green-water productivity in Africa’s savannahs—and buttresses the local capacity to manage climate risk. A tall order, perhaps, but the current world food crisis demonstrates what is at stake. While that crisis appears to have been triggered by the production of cereals-based biofuels, the next food crisis could easily be triggered by water scarcity.”