Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] A World Without Water

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] A World Without Water
  • Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:04:44 -0700


A World Without Water
February 16, 2009
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090302/lohan

If you've read anything about the global water crisis, you've likely read a
quote from Dr. Peter Gleick, founder and president of the Pacific
Institute, and one of the world's leading water experts. His name has
become as ubiquitous as drought itself, which is suddenly making major
headlines. A report from the World Economic Forum warned that in only
twenty years our civilization may be facing "water bankruptcy"--shortfalls
of fresh water so large and pervasive that global food production could
crater, meaning that we'd lose the equivalent of the entire grain
production of the US and India combined.

But we don't have to wait twenty years to see what this would look like.
Australia, reeling from twelve years of drought in the Murray-Darling River
Basin, has seen agriculture grind to a halt, with tens of billions of
dollars in losses. The region has been rendered a tinderbox, with the
deadliest fires in the country's history claiming over 160 lives so far.
And all this may begin to hit closer to home soon. California's water
manager said that the state is bracing for its worst drought in modern
history. Stephen Chu, the new US secretary of energy, warns that the
effects of climate change on California's water supplies could put an end
to agriculture in the state by 2100 and imperil major cities.

The bad news is that these droughts are not just characteristic of a few
hot spots around the world. Climate change is liable to affect already
stressed drinking water in countless places, including much of Asia,
Africa, the Middle East and parts of the Americas and Europe. Water is the
essence of life, vital not just for drinking and sanitation but for
agriculture and industry. If we don't change our ways, and fast, we are
courting global economic collapse, the World Economic Forum warned.

But there is good news, according to Gleick. For years he has advocated for
a fundamental change in policy, infrastructure and thinking that he calls
the "soft path" for water. I first met Gleick when I edited Water
Consciousness, the newest book from AlterNet, which takes a comprehensive
look at solutions to the global water crisis. With the flurry of drought
related headlines recently and the release of Gleick's newest edition of
his biennial book, The World's Water, this seemed like the perfect
opportunity to catch up with him again and see how we can begin to put his
thinking into practice--before it's too late.

>From what I've read in the newest edition of your book, The World's Water
2008-2009, (Island Press, 2008) it seems that China faces some of the most
difficult water challenges on earth, and the trends are only growing worse
as climate change intensifies. For example, the glaciers that supply much
of China's (and other Asian nations') drinking and irrigation water are
melting fast and some portion of them will be lost forever. What is China
doing to prepare for the impacts of these and other developments?

Nothing. The glaciers are melting. In China, and in general, nobody is
doing anything different.

Since the Tibetan Plateau is a source of drinking and irrigation water for
an estimated one billion people--one out of every six people on earth--how
will this impact other Asian nations?

For China, the international ramifications of their water policies are vast
and under-appreciated. Just about every major Asian river originates in the
Tibetan plateau--the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Ganges, the
Brahmaputra--there are almost no major rivers that don't derive some of
their flow from water that comes out of Tibet. That means whatever happens
in Tibet doesn't just affect China, or the Tibetans. And yet there is very
little public discussion about the international nature of those water
resources. With climate change it will be a growing source of tension in
the future.

What should they be doing?

The same as everyone else. We need to do two things, broadly. We need first
to slow the rate of climate change. The second thing is that we need to
start adapting to the climate changes we can't avoid. And the best way to
say it is that we need to avoid the unmanageable and manage the
unavoidable. We need to avoid the kinds of climate changes that will, in
the long run, be catastrophic. And we need to start managing those climate
changes that we know we aren't going to be able to avoid because of the
gases in the atmosphere and the inability of policy-makers to deal with the
problem.

What China has done with water, seems to epitomize what you call the "hard
path" for water. But you advocate for the "soft path." Can you explain what
that means?

The idea of a soft path for water is most simply to move toward a
long-term, sustainable management of our water system. The old way, the
"hard path," was the way we managed water in the twentieth century--with
centralized infrastructure, big construction projects, and narrow
management by a small number of specialists. The hard path brought
benefits, substantial benefits, to many parts of the planet. But the idea
that infrastructure alone--and that style of management alone--is enough to
solve our water problems is I think obviously wrong. We need to rethink
demand for water and efficiency; and we need to rethink distributed water
systems, rather than centralized systems; and we need far more transparent
decision-making and institutions.

One of your points on the soft path is about matching the quality of water
with its use so that we are no longer flushing our toilets or watering our
lawns with potable water. How can we begin to make this transition?

We are making it. The places that are really water scarce are making that
transition faster than other places. Water re-use has been going on for
many years in Namibia. Singapore is moving very aggressively to something
called NEWater, which is a state-of-the-art water treatment that is not
used for direct potable re-use right away but for other demands for water.
We can treat any quality water to potable standards. We have the
technology. There is a psychological barrier and an education barrier and
an expense barrier, but we are seeing it more and more. Another barrier is
that we have one set of pipes that come into our homes. We don't need
potable water for flushing our toilets, but often that is the only water we
have. So part of the challenge is changing our infrastructure, so we can
use different qualities of water for different purposes. That takes
investment: money, time and education.

So who should be doing this? Cities? States?

In general, we want our water to be managed and regulated at the lowest
possible level: the most local. We want communities making decisions about
water management, where appropriate. But there are things we want at the
federal level--like efficiency standards and water-quality standards. One
of the key points of the soft path is to manage water at the proper level.

You've mentioned that new technology like desalination should be used
"where appropriate." Since desal has some serious drawbacks in its use of
energy, its impact on marine ecosystems, and hazardous brine waste, where
would an appropriate place or use for it be?

Compared to most water alternatives facing us, desalination is very
expensive, environmentally and economically. But, there are places where we
are willing to pay a lot for water. It is also possible to build a bad
desalination plant that harms marine systems--we've built plenty of them
around the world. But it is possible to build them in ways that don't harm
them, and I just think it ought to be mandated. It makes the water more
expensive, but so be it. Too much of the twentieth century was built while
ignoring the environmental impacts. That's why we have a climate
problem--these externalities have been ignored.

Right now an enormous amount of attention is focused on energy issues. You
mentioned at a recent talk in Berkeley that some of the cheapest ways to
save energy are actually through water efficiency. Can you explain the
interconnection?

It takes a lot of water to produce certain kinds of energy--oil, coal,
natural gas, nuclear. Thermal plants, in general, all require a lot of
water for cooling. And in the US probably the single largest use of water
is for power plant cooling. Whereas, solar and wind and other energy
systems require very little or no water. If energy is an issue and water is
an issue, let's think about the two together.

But conversely, it also takes a huge amount of energy to collect and treat
and move water. There is a big energy cost in our water systems, but it
turns out that some of the cheapest remaining energy efficiency options for
us are not saving energy per se, but are saving water. So, a simple example
is front-loading washing machines, which save water, detergent and energy.
And so, that is a no-brainer. We should be seeing more of these kinds of
things implemented to save both.

And maybe we'll start rethinking a lot of the biofuels stuff, too.

Biofuels, like ethanol, are a great example of solving one problem and
causing another--and in this case, solving one problem and causing a lot
more problems.

We hear a lot these days about "peak oil," but you write about "peak
water." What do you mean by this?

Discussion of peak oil got us thinking about the idea of peak water. Rather
than run out of water, what we're going to run out of is the ability of the
planet to sustain the amount of water we use and the way we use it. Water
is a renewable resource, mostly. After it is used, it just goes somewhere
else in the hydrologic cycle, and it comes back. And so we are not
literally running out of water, with some exceptions. For example, there
are parts of the planet where we use groundwater faster than nature
recharges it.

Like the Ogallala under the Great Plains?

Yes--the Ogallala, the North China Plain, parts of California's Central
Valley, parts of India. In that sense, it is very much like oil. And the
idea of peak water very much applies in the way it does for oil. There
comes a time when it is harder and more expensive to get, and so use drops
off. And that is a problem in many parts of the world. A lot of our
agriculture relies on non-sustainable groundwater use.

Where are you seeing this the most?

We see it in almost every ecosystem: the Everglades, the Aral Sea, the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the Yellow River, the Colorado River. There
are, unfortunately, a distressingly large and growing number of places
where the ecological consequences of our water use is significant and bad.

So we have a new president now. What should we be pushing for at the
national policy level?

Without forgetting that there are important things to be done at the local
level, with a new administration we have a new opportunity to change a lot
of things. I think we need a new national water commission. The last
national water commission was in 1970.

There are many suggestions that came out of that commission that are still
perfectly relevant, but there are new things as well. They don't talk at
all about climate change and it is a reality that we have to deal with.
They don't talk about the role that water should be playing in our foreign
policy. I think we can spend more money in some areas to help meet needs
for water and sanitation.

We also need to talk about how at the international level we can play a
role as a country in reducing the risks of conflicts over water. There are
many parts of the world where water is a growing source of conflict and
violence.

And another thing is that it is really time we rethought water quality at
the federal level. We have two major laws, the Clean Water Act and the Safe
Drinking Water Act, which we've had since the early '70s. They need to be
brought into the twenty-first century by updating the kinds of things that
we monitor, how we monitor, how we enforce our water quality laws, and the
kinds of technologies we encourage to protect our water. We need to do a
better job at protecting water quality than we're doing, and that should be
done at the federal level.

Maybe we have that opportunity now.





  • [Livingontheland] A World Without Water, Tradingpost, 02/16/2009

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page