WATER POLITICS

THE WATER thieves come at night. They arrive in trucks, suck water out of irrigation canals and drive off. This infuriates Alejandro Meneses, who owns a big vegetable farm in Coquimbo, a parched province of Chile. In theory, his landholding comes with the right to pour 40 litres of river-water a second on his fields. But thanks to drought, exacerbated by theft, he can get just a tenth of that, which he must negotiate with his neighbours. If the price of food goes up because farmers like him cannot grow enough, “there will be a big social problem,” he says.

The world’s water troubles can be summed up in six words: “too little, too much, too dirty”, says Charlie Iceland of the World Resources Institute (WRI), a think-tank. Climate change will only aggravate the troubles. Already, roughly half of humanity lives under what the WRI calls “highly water-stressed conditions” for at least one month a year.

Adapting will require not only new technology but a new politics. Villages, regions and countries will need to collaborate to share scarce water and build flood defences. The needs of farmers, who use 70% of the world’s freshwater, must be balanced with those of the urbanites they feed, as well as industry. In short, a politics of trust, give-and-take and long-term planning is needed. Yet the spread of “them-and-us” demagoguery makes this harder. A global study by Jens Marquardt and Markus Lederer of the University of Darmstadt notes that populists stir up anger, sow distrust of science and dismiss climate policies as the agenda of liberal elites.

Around 97% of the water on Earth sits in the salty ocean; land-, lake- and river-bound life depends on the remaining 3%. Although the amount of water on the planet is immutable, the daedal workings that move it around are not. The water cycle is made up of a dizzying number of processes, many of them non-linear, which operate across various timescales and areas. All are, ultimately, driven by the energy of the sun, which makes seawater evaporate, plants transpire and, by disproportionally heating the tropics, powers ocean currents and weather systems.

Global warming alters the ways water behaves. It intensifies the water cycle, increasing the severity of both very wet events and very dry ones. Warmer air can hold more moisture, which also evaporates more readily up out of warmer oceans. More moisture in the atmosphere means more can fall back out as rain or snow. This increases the likelihood of heavier deluges in wet regions. That, in turn, means less potential precipitation is left for drier spots. “Thirsty” air there is more likely to suck moisture out of the soil, prolonging and worsening droughts.

The UN reckons that, between 2002 and 2021, flooding affected around 1.6bn people, killed nearly 100,000 and caused economic losses of over $830bn. Droughts, in the same period, affected 1.4bn, killed over 20,000 and cost $170bn. The global supply of freshwater per head that can be sustainably used has been steadily falling (see chart), and is expected to fall especially fast in Africa in the coming decades.

In Chile, “too little” is becoming a crisis, for which politics is nowhere close to finding a solution. It is the most water-stressed country in South America. “Santiago [the capital] is OK now but in ten years it might not be,” warns Jessica López, the public-works minister.

For centuries, Chileans who wanted water simply took it from streams and rivers, or sank wells to pump groundwater. But as parts of the country dry up, rules written in wetter times are increasingly out of date. Intense distrust between left and right—in a country that has seen massive protests in recent years—makes them hard to revise.

Conservative governments granted many landowners “water rights”, allowing them to pump a generous amount each day, for free and for ever. Today, the total volume of granted water rights far exceeds what can sustainably be extracted. So farmers like Mr Meneses have had to sit down with their local water association and agree on how much everyone can pump. Yet some people cheat, sinking illicit boreholes. Tension between big farmers, small farmers and villagers is high. “We’re surrounded by farms with illegal wells, and that’s why we have no water,” says Erica Díaz, a hard-up villager who relies on water trucks and recycles her washing-up water onto her vegetable patch.

Conservative Chilean landowners think of “water rights” as a natural part of property rights. But water is not like land. A house need not encroach upon a neighbour; but a well depletes groundwater for everyone. Granting a fixed volume of water rights in perpetuity is nuts.

Meanwhile, the Chilean left push the notion that water is a human right. A draft constitution, backed by the current government but rejected by voters in 2022, mentioned “water” 71 times, affirming everyone’s right to it, especially if they were poor or indigenous, but giving little clue as to how that right might be delivered.

The trickiness of water politics is on display at a meeting of small farmers in Punitaqui, a town in northern Chile. Everyone agrees water is too scarce. Some farmers complain big companies have taken an unfair share. Others complain of widespread criminality–including a water inspector getting death threats. An expert shows how to use ultrasound to detect leaks, which are common. Yet many farmers in the room admit they don’t even know where their local pipes are buried.

In one sense Chile has plenty of water: to the west is the Pacific Ocean. But getting a permit to build a desalination plant can take more than a decade. The problems are political more than technical. Just for permission to use a bit of shoreline for a plant, a firm must apply to the ministry of defence—taking three or four years. The archaeological-monuments council needs to be assured nothing of cultural interest is being damaged. That can take another three or four years. And then transporting water is a bureaucratic maelstrom.

Chile needs to think about water logically, says Ulrike Broschek of Fundación Chile, a think-tank. Desalination is useful, but unless powered by renewables it is bad for the climate. By one estimate, global emissions from desalination could match all of those from Britain by 2025.

In Chile, bigger, cheaper gains are to be made. Farms, which account for four-fifths of water use, could use drip irrigation and hydroponics more. If farmers paid directly for water, they would use it more efficiently. Cities, instead of having impermeable pavement everywhere, could use “rain gardens” to capture rain and recharge the groundwater below. And the rules need to be simpler: 56 public bodies regulate water, with no overall co-ordinator, Ms Broschek complains.

Ms López, at least, offers an encouragingly pragmatic view. A pending bill will speed up permits for desalination, she promises, and more water infrastructure will be built. More broadly, she argues that water “needs to have an appropriate price”.

Elsewhere, sensible water pricing is as rare as it is necessary. Even in places where it has been shown to work, it can be politically fraught. Take Australia, another dry country where farmers use more water than everyone else combined. Federal and state governments thrashed out an agreement in 2012 to conserve water in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia’s biggest system of interconnecting rivers. It relied on an existing scheme allowing farmers to buy or sell water entitlements. The goal was to save 3,200 gigalitres (gl) by 2024, either by “buying back” entitlements from farmers or by investing in projects that could save equivalent amounts, such as more efficient irrigation systems.

Australia has conserved about 2,130gl of water, equivalent to over 20% of what was previously consumed. Meanwhile, farm output has risen. It helps greatly that the country is rich. The government has pumped A$13bn ($8.8bn) into water-saving. Systems for measuring water use are sophisticated. When Malcolm Holm, a dairy farmer, needs to irrigate his pastures, he orders water online. Sensors measure out the volumes. Locks are raised, and it trickles into his fields. The system sustains his 1,200 cattle.

Yet nearly everyone is unhappy. Environmentalists say the targets should be more ambitious. Farmers say they are too strict. No one is forced to sell their water to the government, but because many do, the system reduces the total amount available to trade for irrigation. This is one reason why water prices have risen in the past decade. That is the point: higher prices spur conservation. But they also threaten rural livelihoods. Protests have erupted in rural New South Wales. “Preschools are struggling to get children in. Footy clubs haven’t got enough players,” says Linda Fawns, a councillor in Deniliquin, a small town. Jamie Tasker, a local agricultural mechanic, claims the government is “scaremongering” about the environment and squeezing irrigation to shore up city votes.

Almost nine out of ten Australians live in cities, and politicians, certainly, do not want their taps to run dry. But priorities change as parties alternate in power. The (conservative) Liberal Party, which is more pro-farmer and reluctant to do much about climate change, stopped doing water buybacks. The Labor Party, in federal power since 2022, resumed them.

Allegations of water theft abound. Last year a farmer was fined a mere A$150,000 for illegally taking over A$1.1m-worth of groundwater. “Theft is a business model, because fines don’t fit the crime,” grumbles Robert McBride, who runs an outback sheep station.

The Murray-Darling plan comes up for review in 2026. As droughts grow worse, the government ought to buy back more water, thus raising water prices and driving the least water-efficient farms out of business. They won’t go quietly.

From conflict to compromise

If the politics of water is touchy in well-off, stable places like Australia and Chile, it is explosive in poorer countries. Climate change seems to be making the weather more erratic in many of them, for example, by magnifying the variability inherent in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a global driver of monsoons and their rains.

In April and May floods in Kenya were the worst in memory. Bridges, schools and railways were destroyed. Perhaps 300 people died. Following years of drought, the government was caught off-guard, says Kennedy Odede of SHOFCO, a charity serving Nairobi’s slums. “When it started raining, people were happy. Nobody was expecting there to be too much.”

The government should have been better informed. Persistent drought paves the way for flooding, since the soil hardens and the water has nowhere to go but sideways. Kenya’s populist president, William Ruto, ignored warnings last year of impending floods.

Benninah Nazau, a vegetable hawker in Mathare, a Nairobi slum, recalls rain pounding on her tin roof at 5pm on April 23rd. When she peered out, she saw tables and chairs swept along by the nearby river. By 1am the water was surging through her home. She grabbed her five children and took them to higher ground, unable to salvage any possessions. “It was life or death.” Neighbours were carried off in the deluge.

Political dysfunction makes cities less resilient. Rules barring the construction of homes dangerously close to the river–such as Ms Nazau’s, which was only six metres—are ignored. Landowners bribe officials to look the other way when they flout planning codes. Builders pave over wetlands.

Whereas scarcity has an obvious solution—higher prices—the problem of too much water does not. Flood defences must be built and people discouraged from living in the riskiest places. But where, and how? Kenya’s government is sponsoring tree-planting along Nairobi’s river banks, to help hold back future floods. A moratorium has been placed on new building permits in the city. Officials are evicting people from homes built 30 metres or less from the riverbanks and destroying the buildings. In the worst-affected part of Mathare, all that remains is rubble and a stench of sewage. Each household was offered 10,000 shillings ($77.60) compensation.

Many residents, however, are resisting. Some are still in shacks by the river, refusing to leave. Others want more compensation. Many distrust the government, widely seen as corrupt. Some Kenyans think politicians deliberately caused the flooding, to pave the way for the slum clearances that followed. Belief in such far-fetched conspiracy theories makes co-operation between state and citizens less likely.

Squabbles over water can turn violent. The Water, Peace and Security partnership, a global body, crunches data to predict water-related conflicts. Its latest update, in June, notes that herders and farmers across the Sahel are fighting over scarce water. Drought-related skirmishes are expected in South Africa, Madagascar and Mozambique, and floods in Iran and Afghanistan have displaced populations into areas where they may not be welcome.

Tensions between states are common, too. As rivers grow more erratic, negotiations between downstream countries and upstream ones may grow more fraught. Dry countries (such as China and the Gulf states) are buying up farmland in Africa and the Americas to secure future supplies of food. In effect, they are importing vast quantities of water in the form of wheat and soyabeans. This could become a political flashpoint.

Water wars between states are fortunately rare. But Egypt is furious about an Ethiopian dam that could disrupt its access to the Nile river, from which it gets nine-tenths of its water. Talks over how to share the water keep failing. Egyptian officials hint they might go to war. They may be bluffing, but no one can be sure.

To avoid water wars, countries need to use water more efficiently (Egypt wastes it copiously) and negotiate more amicably. Much work needs to be done in both areas. The world spends roughly 0.5% of GDP on water, the World Bank estimates, but 28% of allocated public funds go unspent, and a typical water utility has “efficiency losses” (leaks and theft) of around 16%. As for amicable haggling, three-fifths of the world’s 310 international river basins lack frameworks to govern disputes.

Another thing that makes water policy hard is that many people—such as those whose homes are too costly to defend from floods, or whose crops wither—will eventually have to move. Chilean vineyards are already shifting south. Outback towns will shrink. Inundated Africans and Asians will keep migrating to cities or abroad.

Rich countries may be able to help compensate those whose homes and fields are rendered worthless, but the process will be disruptive everywhere. Nonetheless, it should be manageable. The WRI estimates that solving the world’s water crises would cost 1% of GDP per year until 2030, and that every $1 invested in sensible ways to do so would yield $6.80 in benefits. However, getting the politics right will require calm, collaborative leadership, disproving the epigram attributed, perhaps erroneously, to Mark Twain: “Whisky’s for drinking; water’s for fighting.”