An Expert Voice on the Global Water Challenge

Best practices introduced by Nestlé and the Rainforest Alliance, an NGO dedicated to sustainable agriculture, minimize the environmental impact of coffee farming in Costa Rica, while offering economic and social opportunity to thelocal community Ismail Serageldin is currently the Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt. He was formerly the Vice-President of the World Bank, the Founding Chair of the Global Water Partnership, a founding governor of the World Water Council, and the chairman of the World Commission for Water in the 21st Century.

From Water Wars To A Water Secure Future? Some Issues

The Setting

On August 6^th, 1995, I had said that “the wars of this century have been on oil, but the wars of the next century will be on water…. Unless we change the way we manage water”! This statement, especially the first part of the sentence, was very widely quoted. It caused wide ranging concern, and was perhaps instrumental in getting the World Water Commission (sponsored by all the agencies of the UN) empanelled. I had the honor of chairing that commission, which delivered its report at the start of the new century in 2000.

With these words, the World Commission called for a “Water secure World”. The vision for water in the new century was well defined. But can it be achieved?

But why should we be so concerned about water? How scarce is water? How serious will the problem become in the 21st century?

so it is fair to ask how far we have come in managing our water and how much more do we have to do.

A precious resource:

Fresh water is a precious resource. Only 2.5% of the world’s water is not salty, and of that two-thirds are locked up in the ice caps and glaciers. Of the remaining amount, subject to the continuous hydrological cycle, some two thirds are “lost” to evapotranspiration, water that evaporates directly or passes through plants to become clouds. Of the remaining amount of potentially useable water, some 20% is in areas too remote for human access, and of the remaining 80% about ¾ come at the wrong time and place, monsoons and floods, and is only partially captured for use by people. We actually get to use less than 0.08 of 1% of the total water on the planet. It is precious indeed.

This water is used predominantly in agriculture to grow the food and fiber on which human society depends. A small amount is used for municipal water use, for households and Industry. Water is also used to drive the generation of hydro-power and for navigation and leisure. Finally, environmental needs also require water to wash away salts that would otherwise destroy farmlands, and to renew the ecological systems by the magic of wetlands. Water is also very useful in taking away human pollution, but in the process it becomes itself polluted, and is therefore not available for uses that clean freshwater is put to.

From all these competing uses, Agriculture claims the largest share, some 2/3 globally and over 80% in many of the developing countries. What is more, it is used quite inefficiently, although in some places, basin level efficiency is already quite high.

That is the setting.

Response:

The international community through various meetings, notably Dublin, Rio, Beijing, the Hague, Johannesburg, Kyoto and most recently Mexico, has articulated and affirmed a set of principles, originally known as the Dublin principles, to reverse the patent waste and mismanagement of water. These principles call for recognizing the economic value of water, observing the polluter pays and user pays principles. They call for better institutional arrangements to overcome fragmentation (both geographic and by use) and recognize the need to think in terms of river basins and catchment areas, while respecting subsidiarity. The principles call for participation, and the recognition of environmental aspects and the gender dimensions of water management. The principles have found expression in carefully crafted documents including the World Water Commission’s report For A Water Secure World issued at the Hague in 2000, and subsequent reports that looked at financing and other aspects of meeting the Millennium Development Goals, many of which will require adequate water management for their achievements. Institutions such as the World Water Council (WWC) have kept the issue at the forefront by the triennial World Water Forum (WWF), while the Global Water Partnership (GWP) has succeeded in making Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) widely accepted throughout the world.

Indeed, the road-map articulated in the World Water Commission report of 2000 clearly spelled out how to move away from the damaging practices that currently prevail, underlining a comprehensive set of measures including the following:

• A holistic, systemic approach relying on Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) must replace the fragmentation that currently exists in managing water. Some see water only by use: water for municipal use, for industry, for irrigation, for environmental needs, as if the latter was a competing use, not an inherent part of maintaining the entire ecological system on which all water services depend. We must manage at the catchment and basin areas that nature prescribes as the management units for water rather than the political and administrative boundaries we use as the basis of decision making
• Participatory approaches involving all stakeholders, with special efforts to involve users and ensure the role of women and disadvantaged groups must be the norm. Subsidiarity, whereby decisions are taken at the lowest possible level fo decision making is encouraged.
• Full cost pricing of water services with equity will be needed to promote conservation, and to attract the very large investments that are needed. The polluter pays and user pays principles must be enforced.
• This full cost pricing recommendation was linked with the absolute need to ensure access for all by providing adequate subsidies to the poor as required to help poor communities develop and manage their own water supply.
• Incentives for resource mobilization (investments by communities and community action not just the private sector) and technology change, involving both recognizing the traditional wisdom of the people who have lived with nature for centuries, making use of existing knowledge and technology that is often not applied as well as to promote the deployment of new environmentally friendly technologies. traditional wisdom has much to offer.
• Governments are key actors. Governments must not shirk their responsibilities in budget decisions, in setting the enabling framework for local community-based action and for a properly motivated and regulated private sector; and in protecting the public goods nature of wetlands and groundwater, or of the needs of ensuring the water-related services necessary for the health needs of all the people at all times.
• All of this will require political will and behavioral change by all, And an important educational effort will be needed.

In short, the water experts have largely recommended a combination of demand side management, less waste and proper arbitration of claims against the available water supplies. The question is whether this set of prescriptions, all excellent in their own right, would be sufficient to meet rising consumption needs driven by population and income growth. This is considered likely because water use in agriculture, by far the largest sector, is deemed very inefficient in its use of irrigated water.

The problem restated:

Lets look at aggregate balances, with due recognition of the fact that the issues of water are specific to time and place.

Assume 3 billion more people on the planet, mostly in the developing countries. Assume further that food consumption per person does not increase, a very conservative assumption, as all models forecast a growth in consumption with rising income and changes in diets.

Note that currently, on average it takes a liter of water to produce a calorie of food. The average human being, who consumes 2700 calories of food per day, requires some 2700 liters of water to produce them. It takes 2000-5000 tons of water to produce a ton of rice, and about 1200 tons of water to produce a ton of wheat.

Assume further that the contribution of irrigation to that increment in food production is equivalent to the contribution of irrigation to all food production, or about 40%. This is another very conservative assumption, since in the last spurt of agricultural production, the green revolution, irrigation accounted for about 80% of the increment. Assume further that all irrigation systems achieve water use efficiency of 70% at the basin level, a remarkable achievement if it were to come to pass. Then you still need to use 17% more water in irrigation to meet the food production demand! Relaxing any of those assumptions results in forecast increases of about 50% or more.

Irrigation is not likely to get more water. The urban populations of the developing world are going to treble in the next 30 years. Industry is going to increase, pollution is not going to decrease, and the cost of not attending to the environmental role of water are all too plain today from the experiences of many countries, from the Aral sea to the Everglades. So what does this tell us?

If irrigated agriculture is not going to get more water, then the increases in rain-fed agriculture to meet the demand in food for 8-9 billion people will be enormous and would have very detrimental environmental impacts: far more land cleared for agriculture, with concomitant losses in forests, habitats and biodiversity on a massive scale, and many other problems as well.

Recapturing the massive rain-water that is not presently captured, would call for an extensive program of dam building, and other techniques, which all raise additional issues.

All this is not to say that the Dublin principles are not correct or that we should not pursue the general thrust of the recommendations of the international water community. Rather, it is to ask if they may turn out to be insufficient in the aggregate, even if they prove to be extremely effective in particular locations. Indeed, we all know that water problems and their solutions will vary dramatically from place to place, and that many of the proposed management solutions are going to be common to all of the actions needed for any solution.

But both the demand forecasts and the proposed solutions do not take sufficiently into account possible changes in supply, in technology of production or in re-use. Other factors could also intervene, such as patterns of spatial allocation of settlement or of production.

So, let’s ask some questions.

Some Questions

The overarching trends - Population and the environment:

Environment: What is likely to be the overall effect of climate change? More volatility, variability and desertification? Where? What can we say about the impact of climate change on water issues regionally?

Population: Recall that as poluation trebled over the last century, water consumption increased six fold. What can we say about the most likely scenarios of population change? Are there any possibilities of slowing down population growth? What are the likely impacts? On which regions?

Increasing the supply of useable freshwater:

This falls into discovering new sources of freshwater, and reducing that part of the available freshwater that humans do not use.

Increasing the supply of freshwater: Can we discover unknown quantities of underground water? after all, the proven reserves of oil have significantly increased since the first oil shock of 1974.

How about desalinization? Can new efforts at reducing the costs of desalination be envisaged? What sort of energy requirements would that have? Are there promising new technologies? How about old technologies (e.g. wind power) that could be harnessed in certain locations?

Reducing the losses of the available water:Can we capture more of the water from rains and runoff? How do we cope with the problem of the massive rainfall in monsoon areas, where most of it goes back into the sea? Can we reduce evapotranspiration? How about the new Nestle product? Is it likely to have more than a marginal impact? Or does reducing evapotranspiration really require going through redeployment of agricultural production in areas where the climatic conditions are less severe? How about water harvesting techniques for arid zones? Are the traditional methods used for generations in these regions something that can be adapted in higher technology applications? Where and how much effect would they be likely to have?

Reducing pollution and re-use:

Reducing pollution would not only be beneficial in terms of water use, but it would also help ecosystems and have beneficial effects beyond the narrowly utilitarian. What are the new approaches to dealing with Industry to reduce both water use and water pollution? What can we do to reduce pollution from other sources such as agricultural runoff or untreated sewage?

Can we imagine the use of Single Cell Protein (SCP) technology to purify water for re-use in a high value urban agriculture in this increasingly urban world?

Reducing the needs for water consumption:

Can we achieve the same ends with less water? For agriculture, biggest user of water, can we get more crop per drop? What breakthroughs can we think of in irrigation techniques or management? What are realistic water use efficiency figures at the basin level by what time frame? How would this be achieved?

How much can be achieved by changing current practices? Better agronomic techniques? How much will have to come from new technologies?

Can biotechnology transform the metabolism of the plants to be more drought resistant and more sparing in their use of water?

On the municipal side, can we think of alternatives to the current flushing toilets that contribute so much to municipal water consumption?

The mismatch between need and availability:

One of the problems of water is the mismatch between need and availability in terms of space and time. Time (i.e. seasonal rains, etc.) we addressed above. Space is another matter. Even within countries such as India or China, different parts of the country are differently endowed in terms of population and production (and hence water needs) and in terms of water availability.

So what does this mean in terms of spatial distribution of populations and of settlement patterns? Or of land use?

Regardless of how one answers the preceding set of questions, what does the answer mean in terms of investment priorities? Should we be thinking of massive projects (like the China South-North water Transfer project) or lots of small ones? Can one seriously rethink an urbanization strategy? What incentive frameworks are required to channel private capital to priority needs and new technologies?

How about ideas of Water transport? Huge balloons of fresh water pulled by tugs across the sea from areas of plentiful supply to parched areas? How about tankers capturing rainwater in the oceans?

Markets, trade and institutions:

What can we say about the impact of global trade in commodities? if agricultural yield starts being measured as much by tons per unit of water as per unit of land, comparative advantage takes on another dimension. Can one anticipate a different pattern of trade in agricultural commodities that would change the impact of production on water needs?

How about water markets for efficient allocation of water between competing uses? What are their promises and what are their limitations? What preconditions are required to make them a viable proposition?

What are the roles of community action, of the poor, of women in managing water resources? How do we maintain the objectives of participatory management and empowerment of the weak in this increasingly globalizing world?

Conclusions

The overall problems are clear. Equally clear is the direction we have to go, and that the scope of the effort required to address the problems demands solutions that may well have to go beyond the application of current conventional thinking. We will need to be bold in thinking, innovative in our initiatives and determined in our pursuit of the new, as we insist on the application of the best current practice today. So let us dare to dream, to think differently about the future. After all, were it not for dreamers, people would still be living in caves.