Solving the World’s Water Problems
Colin Chartres and Samyuktha Varma
We have a looming water crisis. This crisis is the response to growing population, changing dietary habits, and competition for water from other sectors of the economy. Lack of water for growing food will be one of the most critical issues for us to overcome in the twenty-first century. Evidence that the water crisis is happening in some places already or that it will happen elsewhere comes from simple supply and demand comparisons and projections. We are now faced with the knowledge that climate change will accelerate the water crisis in many regions of the world and have a disproportionately serious effect on the poor. Many knowledgeable scientists still argue that we don’t really have a crisis because current water scarcity is caused by inefficient water use. To an extent this is true and provides a basis for hope in that if we can improve efficiency, we can deal with many of the problems. However, the fact is that while we know this, trends in water use efficiency and water productivity in agriculture, the major consumer, are not very encouraging particularly in the developing world. Furthermore, many biophysical and engineering solutions to increasing productivity are also available. It is not as if we are waiting for the next scientific breakthrough to occur. So we have to look more closely at socio-economic factors to determine what might be done to get us on the water use efficiency bandwagon. Scientifically, this is easier than dealing with the energy crisis, but in terms of applicability, solutions are severely handicapped by people just not understanding the potential severity and magnitude of the impending crisis and as yet, generally not altering the ways in which they view and use water. If we don’t succeed in changing the way we manage water, the future looks bleak and will consist of increasingly frequent food crises, social and political unrest, and potential mass migration out of areas most severely affected.
We need to consider an action agenda that will promote a so-called “Blue Revolution.” We perhaps ought to call this a Blue-Green Revolution because it is imperative that we do not ignore the use of green water for rainfed agriculture. To an extent, there are examples of regions and projects that have been successful in implementing water reform, but the task ahead of us is to ensure that these successes are repeated time and time again across the globe. To do this we need a change in the way people think about and view water. It has to be viewed and thought about on a similar basis as we currently consider energy supplies.
In the following sections, we lay out a blueprint for water reform. It draws on several of the previous suggestions detailed in the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture1 and adds additional thinking and material. This blueprint is focused around six critical challenges:
1. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
2. Treasure the environment.
3. Reform water governance.
4. Revitalize agricultural water use.
5. Manage urban and industrial demand.
6. Empower the poor and women in water management.
1. If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It
This simple yet essentially true saying holds applies to water, as it does for most goods and services. Indeed, one of the reasons that so many countries have got into a mess with their water management is that there is not enough attention paid to determining the flows and storages that make up their water resources. Furthermore, as a wave of divestment of so-called noncore activities hit the western economies in the Reagan-Thatcher era, many governments sold their water utilities and monitoring networks to the private sector. Not surprisingly, when the private sector looked at the state of some of the infrastructure and the investment required to maintain it, they abandoned or reduced the scope of some previous activities. One of these was often measurement and monitoring of the resource. At the same time, previously publicly available data were sometimes made inaccessible because it was now considered to be commercially-sensitive and thus valuable. So by the turn of the twenty-first century, many developed countries entered the new water era with less than adequate information about their water resources. Developing nations have never had the opportunity and resources to invest in monitoring networks to the extent required, and as a consequence there is often a dearth of useful data. The situation is also made more difficult in some countries by an unwillingness of governments to share water data with the public and science agencies on the basis that it is of high national security value and must be classified. This is essentially nonsense, as the basis of establishing transboundary water agreements has to be common understanding of what the resource consists of in the first place.
Access to high-quality data and information should be the goal of all water planning and management departments. These data can provide essential information about responses to rainfall events, flood hazards, seasonal flow variations, groundwater level changes, and the impacts of major extractions on flow. Ironically, as hydropower generation becomes increasingly important, those who produce hydropower are vitally interested in water availability and discharge data, particularly where they may be competing in the market place for electricity supply. Their measurements of water flow are often recorded every few minutes. When these data are accumulated to daily or weekly totals, it has less commercial interest and should be made readily available to downstream planners and managers.
In 2006, the Australian National Water Commission indicated in a press release2 that open access to water data will
• Ultimately reduce costs to data users, including transaction costs
• Reduce data inconsistencies, data gaps, and lack of comparable data
• Enable performance benchmarking
• Enable national water assessments on a repeatable basis
• Enable better water planning, including cross-border
• Underpin markets
• Redress declining community confidence in the national water market
• Reduce multiple requests for information to data custodians
• Reconcile the sometimes conflicting data needs of water data gatherers, managers, and users
When this list is analyzed, it becomes apparent that virtually all the points can help to lead to greater efficiency of water use. It goes without saying that similarly having appropriate data is the best way in which to discuss transboundary water sharing, provide a basis for water allocations, and also to provide a moving picture of the impact of climate change and additional water use on the water resource and the environment as a whole.
While water gauging and monitoring can be a time-consuming and expensive exercise, developments in technology are making things cheaper and easier all the time. Once installed, many gauging stations and groundwater bores can be monitored remotely by satellite or mobile phone linkages. Similarly, database and geographic information technologies have made the storage, retrieval, and spatial display of information straightforward, and most information can be portrayed at the press of a button or mouse-key. Exciting new advances in remote sensing technologies have recently opened up the possibility of monitoring major changes in groundwater levels using gravity data.3
All currently water-scarce countries and those approaching scarcity need to consider how they can develop water measurement and monitoring systems that will underpin water management at national, regional, and local levels. The degree of investment and sophistication will depend upon the ultimate needs of water managers and users. There is one final word of caution here. That is that under climate change scenarios, the risk of relying on past water data may be an inappropriate way to plan for the future. Scientists and engineers cannot rely on what is called the principle of stationarity and will have to build improved downscaled climate change predictions into their water models to cope with this issue.
2. Treasure the Environment
It is strikingly clear that a growing water quality problem accompanies water scarcity. While many western nations have made very significant inroads in cleaning up rivers highly polluted by industrial effluents and human sewage, this is still not the case in many developing countries. Furthermore, pollution issues now also include the threats posed by pesticides and persistent organic pollutants (POPs). The UN Environment Program describes the latter as
“...chemical substances that persist in the environment, bioaccumulate through the food web, and pose a risk of causing adverse effects to human health and the environment. With the evidence of long-range transport of these substances to regions where they have never been used or produced and the consequent threats they pose to the environment of the whole globe, the international community has now, at several occasions called for urgent global actions to reduce and eliminate releases of these chemicals.”
In Sri Lanka, for example, overuse of fertilizers, encouraged by high government subsidies, and the use of pesticides cause pollution of water courses and ultimately coastal lagoons. Eutrophication caused by the fertilizers can lead to algal blooms and their choking impact on aquatic life, whereas the POPs can impact all life forms in the food chains dependent upon the waterways affected and also subsequently marine life.
It is important that we start to think about the environment not just as the receiver of human effluents, but as a highly valuable series of ecosystems that if treated properly can play a very significant role in the cleaning and decontamination of wastes and in providing sustainable supplies of fresh uncontaminated water. A well-known Australian hydroecologist, the late Professor Peter Cullen, described the first mile of river downstream of a sewage treatment plant as “the magic mile,” magic because sewage was treated by dilution and biological processes to such an extent that people were prepared to extract the water further downstream for drinking purposes. A common saying is “dilution is the solution to pollution.” While dilution processes may hold for small discharges and large rivers, unfortunately the quantities of sewage are now often so great that they totally befoul rivers and destroy their wildlife. In the worst cases, virtually all living materials are being destroyed, and all that is left is a black, stinking, anoxic flow of water.
However, we know that this does not have to be the case. Regulations and economic incentives and fines can be used to limit point source discharges, and improved agricultural management practices including minimizing runoff and erosion can be used to reduce non-point pollution. However, these often do not work as well as they should because of a combination of factors. Flouting the law in developing countries is commonplace, and often the authorities do not have the human resources or authority backed up by the judiciary to ensure compliance. Corruption also often raises its ugly head in terms of allowing polluting industries to establish themselves in totally inappropriate areas.
So two key issues have to be dealt with: The first is that nonbiodegradable and endocrine disrupting substances (including POPs, heavy metals, and certain other chemicals) should never be allowed to enter the hydrological cycle unless they are either proven to be safe or diluted to such levels that any risks are minimal. The second is that rivers need to have a portion of flow set aside for the environment. These flows should be managed in such a way that they emulate natural conditions in terms of peak and low flows and overbank discharges that flood the floodplain. Environmental flows can also be managed in such a way that water used for the environment in one section of the river can often be used for other purposes downstream.
3. Reform Water Governance
Technological and engineering solutions to double food and feed production are the easier part of the equation to solve. Overcoming the social, economic, and sometimes environmental impediments and obtaining the needed financial investment is the hard part. Institutional and governance arrangements often were designed in the middle of the last century based on inappropriate colonial models where water was viewed as an infinite resource.
Even if they are renewable, water resources are finite. A new governance paradigm is needed to meet the challenge of feeding growing populations (see Table 1).
Table 1 Changes in Water Resource Governance Expected as basins Move from Open to Closed*
If the challenge to feed more with less was not great enough, the shift from planned and regulated (albeit inadequately) surface irrigation systems to anarchic pump-based irrigation systems based predominantly on groundwater that has occurred in South and East Asia threaten to literally dig us into a deeper water hole. The inability of governments to regulate water use in such systems can create the scary scenarios of groundwater overdraft and exhaustion. These can in turn lead to regional food crises and social disruption.
Governments lack incentives to implement the reforms necessary to ensure more productive and equitable use of water. Fear of potential political repercussions for those who push reform permeate the water and agricultural sectors from top to bottom.
To develop incentives and support for reform, water has to be seen as something that can be valued—and ultimately priced. It cannot continue to be treated as a “free” good. This does not mean that the human right to water is overlooked in the process. Few would argue against access to clean water for drinking and sanitation being a fundamental human right that must be protected in any wholesale change to the way water is governed and managed. However, this human right accounts for a very modest amount of total water use. The rest, probably about 90%, goes to beneficial uses and the environment. The biggest beneficiary is clearly agriculture.
Measures that governments can take to drive up agricultural water productivity are nonexistent in many countries. Clearly the first measure has to be the development of effective water allocation policies, which can be used to reduce allocation as the total pool shrinks or when demands for water resources from other sectors increase. However, allocation policies depend on good water availability measurements, historical data, and models as well as defined water rights. Reduced allocations must be accompanied by support mechanisms for farmers that can improve on-farm efficiency. Currently, if a farmer invests in improving productivity, he or she can keep the water saved and use it to increase the area irrigated. While this may increase food production, it does not solve the problem of reallocation of water to other economic sectors or to the environment. A real challenge here is to try and develop incentives that link the broader society to farmers and lead to the broader society paying farmers for the improved environmental services and other benefits that result from improved on-farm water savings.
In the search for improved governance, we must examine the potential solutions that have been and are currently being developed. In parts of Australia and several other countries, a series of mechanisms are used to regulate water use and allocation that depend on seasonal available supply. In the Murray-Darling Basin of Australia, a new system of separation of water and land rights, water trading, and water pricing based on supply and demand, albeit under an overall planning framework, has evolved through a combination of market and political forces. The result: water is traded from low- to high-value uses, which can potentially allow for a market mechanism for trade out of water from agriculture into urban areas. It is a model worth exploring elsewhere. So long as individual water rights and allocations can be defined, it provides farmers opportunities and incentives to sell temporarily or permanently. It also gives governments opportunities to buy out system tail-end users (those irrigators at the end of the distribution system), improve overall system efficiency, and to buy water for environmental flow purposes.
Water scarcity is an increasingly urgent challenge to the developing world. It can be combated, but it needs politicians and policy makers to develop some enthusiasm for reforming the water sector. Developing appropriate market-based and other incentives is vital to reform in the water sector. Better definition of water rights and better measurement of water are needed to even contemplate better systems for valuation, pricing, and trade. Without these improvements, there will be few incentives to improve productivity whether by the use of economic or regulatory instruments.
4. Revitalize Agricultural Water Use
An aspirational goal for agriculture everywhere is to produce twice the yield of half the area and use no more water than at present. If this goal can be achieved and the productivity of developing country water and agricultural systems doubled, it is likely that food security issues would be a thing of the past as long as population stabilizes. In many respects, doubling crop yields should be easy in many countries. For example, the productivity of water in Pakistan is among the lowest in the world as exemplified by crop yields that are up to three to four times lower than those in developed countries like the United States. This reveals a substantial potential for increasing the productivity of water. However, lifting productivity and increasing efficiency are often extremely complex tasks in all countries. Generally, while the same factors including water availability, quality, pumping costs, soil properties, agronomy, fertilizers, pests and diseases, and farmer capacity are the same controlling factors everywhere, the way they combine differs substantially from place to place. Thus, low productivity in one area might be due to soil conditions, whereas across the fence it might be limited by lack of fertilizer, inadequate water management, and/or other factors.
However, there is good evidence from many countries that with improved knowledge sharing, improved management practices, and appropriate market incentives, productivity can be raised significantly. Research and development undoubtedly plays a major role in helping lift yields and water productivity. However, as demonstrated in an earlier chapter, investment in R&D in agriculture as a proportion of total overseas development aid has decreased significantly since the 1980s and may be a principal reason for the reduction in the rate of yield increases particularly in developing countries, which are not pushing against biological potential. This decrease in investment was a response at the time to the success of the green revolution. However, what aid agencies forgot was that the creeping tide of population growth was swallowing up the yield increases stimulated by the green revolution at a rate faster than yield growth.
If we look specifically at improving agricultural water management as part of the broader equation of lifting agricultural yields and productivity, a number of solutions are already apparent. These can be viewed across national, regional, and local scales. At the global regional and national levels, a recent report released by IWMI and FAO4 has highlighted the significance of irrigation to food production in Asia where 34% of the cultivated land is irrigated in contrast to 10% in North America and 6% in Africa. This essentially was a major reason why the green revolution was so successful in parts of Asia. Irrigation facilitated a 137% increase in cereal production between 1970 and 2007. However, the report points out that many of the Asian irrigation schemes were built in the 1960s and 1970s and are aging and in need of significant rehabilitation. Also the face of Asia is changing fast, with more urbanization, greater opportunities for people, and in irrigation a shift from surface water systems to groundwater. A key recommendation not only of this report, but one we believe is imperative is that governments in Asia must review the extent, status of their irrigation systems including their productivity if food production targets are to be met. They must also give attention to how they can harness and appropriately regulate, with respect to sustainability, the growing extraction of groundwater, and they must ensure that the institutions managing their irrigation systems focus on providing farmers with the services they want and when they want them, rather than bureaucratic convention.
In Africa, the opportunity is to invest in new irrigation schemes. There has been a reticence to do this because of past failures. Growing food demand will, however, provide the incentives that farmers need to drive a new wave of irrigation. However, it does not have to be based on the old twentieth-century models that have been seen to have major shortcomings in Asia and elsewhere. Irrigation does not have to be implemented on massive scales with a monocultural (year-in, year-out cropping with one crop type) cropping focus. It can work and improve livelihoods and production at smallholder level with supplies being drawn from rainwater harvesting, groundwater, or small ponds and reservoirs with a focus on supplementary irrigation of both staple crops and cash crops such as vegetables to diversify diets and insure against crop failure. There are already many examples of, often, NGO (non-governmental organization) driven projects that focus on multiple use water systems that have succeeded in providing both supplies of domestic water and some limited water for irrigation of small plots. These kinds of developments, if adequately supported in terms of development of the entire value chain from water provision to marketing of produce and backed up with capacity building with respect to parts supply and maintenance, are beginning to show major success in Africa and Asia.
In some respects, increasing water productivity in rainfed agricultural areas is a more difficult challenge. These areas are subject to the increasing variability of rainfall as well as increasing temperatures caused by climate change. They also often suffer from low fertility and land degradation issues. Consequently, smallholders are often impoverished and live on their crops and animals in a hand-to-mouth manner. Looking at whether improving water supplies and the provision of opportunities for supplementary irrigation is one solution for some of these areas. Other solutions include looking at how soil water can be conserved and protected from runoff and evaporation losses. Given the areal extent of rainfed agriculture, particularly in Africa, there have to be significant productivity increases from these areas. We cannot simply rely on increasing productivity of existing irrigation areas in Asia and building new irrigation systems in Africa. Furthermore, dealing with rainfed productivity issues also brings a significant opportunity to increase the livelihoods of some of the world’s poorest people.
Recycling of wastewater will also have an increasingly important role to play in increasing water productivity. However, the issues regarding the development of safe practices have to be given significant attention. Studies point out that policies and decisions on wastewater use in agriculture should generally be motivated locally, as the socio-economic, health, and environmental conditions, which vary across countries, will dictate how far common recommendations are applicable.5 They also developed some rules and guidelines for wastewater use that are shown in the following:
Recommendations and Guidelines for Safer Use of Wastewater in Periurban and Urban Irrigated Agriculture6
1. Deal with knowledge gaps. The gaps in knowledge of the true extents of the often informal use of wastewater at a country level must be addressed by governments through detailed assessments, which will allow them to evaluate trade-offs and decide on the hot spots that need immediate attention.
2. Ensure World Health Organization (WHO) Guidelines are applied. The WHO guidelines for the safe use of wastewater7 should be extensively applied as it allows for incremental and adaptive risk reduction in contrast to strict water quality thresholds. This is a cost-effective and realistic approach for reducing health and environmental risks in low income countries.
3. Link water supply and sanitation sectors. Implementation of the Millennium Development Goals should more closely link policies and investments for improvements in the water supply sector with those in the sanitation and waste disposal sector to achieve maximum impact.
4. Separate industrial and domestic discharges. To improve the safety of irrigation water sources used for agriculture and enhance the direct use of wastewater, it is imperative to separate domestic and industrial discharges in cities and improve the sewage and septage (partially treated waste) disposal methods by moving away from ineffective conventional systems.
5. Understand health risks. A research gap clearly exists on quantitative risk assessment studies, which include multiple sources of risk, and such studies must be commissioned at a city or country level before decisions are made on water and sanitation sector investments.
6. Apply simple hygiene rules. Acknowledging that off-farm handling practices like washing of vegetables can be very effective as a means of reducing/eliminating contamination, and supporting widespread use of good practices can facilitate trade exchanges for developing countries exporting vegetables.
7. Develop economic and financial incentives. In addressing health risks, on the one hand state authorities have a role to play in planning, financing, and maintaining sanitation and waste disposal infrastructure that is commensurate with their capacities and which responds to agricultural reuse requirements. On the other, as a comprehensive treatment will remain unlikely in the near future, outsourcing water quality improvements and health risk reduction to the user level and supporting such initiatives through farm tenure security, economic incentives like easy access to credit for safer farming and social marketing for improving farmer knowledge and responsibility, can lead to reducing public health risks more effectively while maintaining the benefits of urban and periurban (partially developed areas around fringes of towns and cities) agriculture.
8. Develop local policies and regulations. Finally, countries must address the need to develop policies and locally viable practices for safer wastewater use to maintain its benefits for food supply and livelihoods while reducing health and environmental risks.
5. Manage Urban and Industrial Demand
A great deal of progress has been made already in this area, particularly in water-scarce countries. Water utilities have been able to convince and to some extent coerce their customers through media campaigns about water shortages and pricing water according to consumption. The history of what happened in Sydney, Australia, in this regard is a good example. Sydney’s major water storages were built in the 1950s and early 1960s, and they were designed from rainfall data from a period that in retrospect was wetter than the present. Australia has always been subject to considerable climate variability, and the dry periods in southern Australia now appear to be being amplified by climate change impacts. Sydney has put in place a number of demand management measures over the last few decades. These measures included a series of steps that include replacement of leaking infrastructure, restriction of times at which gardens can be watered, banning the use of automatic sprinklers, prohibiting car washing except at commercial premises that recycle the water, and so on. During 2008–2009 Sydney has had better rainfall, which has allowed more severe restrictions to be lifted and replaced with Water Rise Rules (see the following Sydney Rules. Additionally, there have been campaigns to reduce water usage in the home by fitting dual flush toilets and water-save shower heads, not to mention providing information about how much water is wasted by long showers and brushing one’s teeth with the tap running. Complementary to these physical interventions have been increases in water prices. In comparison with inflation these have been quite small, and there is concern that pricing policies can often hit the poorest hardest and have little impact on water use by the more well-off sections of society. Overall, these measures have been combined with targets to recycle water to supply 12% of the city’s needs by 2015. This water will only be used for industry, irrigation of parks, gardens, and golf courses and to provide environmental flows in the major river systems. As population in Sydney grew, supply was able to keep pace with demand largely because of a series of demand management practices put in place by the city water authorities. However, because of the still increasing city population and climate change, Sydney has also had to commit significant investment to the development of a seawater desalination plant, that by 2015 will be able to provide 250 million liters (66 million gallons) of water per day (15% of demand), using renewable energy as a power source.
Sydney Water Corporation Water Wise Rules
• All hoses must have a trigger nozzle.
• Hand held hoses, sprinklers, and watering systems may be used only before 10 a.m. and after 4 p.m. on any day to avoid the heat of the day.
• No hosing of hard surfaces such as paths and driveways is allowed. Washing vehicles is allowed.
• Fire hoses may be used for fire fighting activities only.
In other Australian cities and elsewhere, new movements focusing on water-wise urban design principles have been developed that aim to minimize losses to stormwater and promote recycling of urban runoff. In California, Orange County has led the way with recycling sewage and injecting the treated water into the aquifer. Initially this was in order to minimize saltwater intrusion from the ocean, but now apparently, the aquifer water is being used for public water supply. This form of reuse is described as indirect potable reuse. It often causes considerable public controversy and is often opposed by sections of the community ranging from firefighters, to plumbers, to occasionally the medical profession on the grounds that we can’t be sure that all contaminants and pathogens are removed. In one community, Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, which has severe water scarcity, water recycling has been taken a step further.8 There, treated sewage is recycled directly back into the water purification plant, where a combination of activated carbon filtration, ozonation, and pressure membrane filtration supplies potable water back into the urban pipe network. Here it is mixed with reservoir or groundwater. This system of direct potable reuse has been operating since the late 1970s and had a major upgrade about 10 years ago. There have been no incidences of illness associated with drinking water in the city in this entire period.
Most industries that use significant quantities of water have been aware of their need to monitor and reduce water consumption for several years, and some major progress has been made in this regard. Their interest in minimizing water use comes from an understanding of water scarcity, concerns that a sustainable water supply increases their own sustainability, and in some cases in response to corporate social responsibility objectives. In many cases, such as in the mining industry, a viable supply of fresh water may be a critical input into processing, and similarly, release of treated clean water into the environment may be fundamental to their ongoing survival under increasingly tough environmental legislation in more advanced countries. So the trend toward water awareness and water saving in industry has been one that initially looked at the amount of water used in their factories and processing plants with a view to minimizing the liters of water used per liter or kilogram of product. More recently, industry has been looking at the concept of water footprinting in terms of the total water demand not only in the product processing, but in its growth (if a foodstuff) and subsequent preparation for use/consumption. This work is in its infancy but promises to assist in highlighting inefficient water use and thus the introduction of best practice measures to deal with it. These programs are being actively supported by agencies such as the World Economic Forum and the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group. In some cases industry leaders are becoming champions of efficient water use and speaking out about the need for it at a range of public venues and high-level fora.
It would be fair to say that the concepts of demand management, water reuse, and water treatment described here are predominantly those of developed and intermediate economies. However, they provide lessons for the way forward for cities and industries in the rest of the world.
6. Empower the Poor and Women in Water Management
Water is crucial to the lives and livelihoods of farmers across the world. The conditions under which water and poverty intersect are complex and deeply intertwined. Water is not just the key to improving the productivity of agriculture for the poor who own small shares of land and live on subsistence agriculture; it is also crucial at the larger scale of achieving food security to prevent the deaths of millions from starvation and malnourishment.
The question of equity in how resources are shared between people belonging to different groups such as women, children, particular minorities, or historically vulnerable groups is something that is being taken more seriously in water management. The representation and voice of the poor and marginalized in water infrastructure development and planning has a poor record as past efforts to build and invest in them was focused more heavily on construction and less so on the impacts on people or the environment. Although irrigation has made significant impact on poverty alleviation, by improving the productivity of vast regions particularly in Asia, smallholder farmers that depend largely on rainfed farming for their livelihoods need a greater investment through programs and interventions to improve their productivity. Farming in vulnerable environments such as uplands that are most susceptible to shocks and stresses caused by climate change and environmental degradation is usually performed on a small scale and dominated by a large number of the rural poor. These regions have the potential to be far more productive, and efforts to improve these need not be high-cost. Simple technologies to improve productivity and also to store water can make a very large difference to the lives and livelihoods of the poor in these regions, while also contributing to improving the food security challenge.
The question of rights and access to resources for the poor is also critical to the discussion on water management. Although in many countries this is a deeply political issue that often brings in the problems that power and politics play in aiding or pushing out vulnerable or marginalized groups of people, there is a strong need for institutions to play a better role in facilitating dialogue to address equity. Efforts to do this within institutions such as river basin organizations, water treaties, and in the assessments of the impacts of water infrastructure are increasingly being given more importance in water development. However, these concerns are only as good as the political will behind them, and as debate about the cost and valuing of water comes into the fore, particularly in water-scarce areas, so must the debate about securing water for the poor.
The role of women in water management is most often described in terms of the amount of time women spend collecting and carrying water. While this is an important aspect of the critical role of women, the productive contributions of women’s labor in agriculture and food production is one that needs to be paid more attention. Many efforts at poverty alleviation involving technology have not adequately paid attention to women farmers by excluding them from decision making. Addressing the fact that women are involved in food production and play a large role in agriculture and as users of water is imperative to addressing poverty as well as food security (see Figure 1). Policies and investment need to be more proactive in addressing the inequities of resource allocation. Without a direct effort to improve the distribution of water and other inputs into agriculture, there will not be a serious impact on poverty. Many development organizations are now targeting their programs to the poor, women, and smallholders in an attempt to address equity. The approach of governments to addressing poverty among farmers has largely been based through welfare programs such as food-for-work on water infrastructure, and with the idea to provide safety nets. While many of these have been successful, it is important to remember that agriculture can be made more profitable through relatively small but targeted investments.
Figure 1 In many countries, women do the bulk of agricultural work, but societal "norms" often mean that their voice is not heard. Recognizing the key role of women in agriculture is a fundamental requirement for water governance. Here, women farmers discuss key issues in Gujurat, India.
Photo: Sharni Jayawardane
Conclusion
We distilled a large amount of material and concepts into six actions that will help address the imminent water crisis. Key challenges and actions are shown in Table 2.
Table 2 Actions Required to Underpin a Blue Revolution
As we have shown, agriculture is in most countries the major user of water. In a world where increasing competition for water and negative climate change impacts are going to reduce the water available to agriculture in many countries, it seems logical that most attention then has to be paid to making agriculture water use more efficient and productive. However, as we have shown, while this is not rocket science, it will only be achieved through an integrated approach that combines the best science and engineering with first class economic and social policies that create the reforms needed to empower all in the water sector. In the past societies and science have never dealt brilliantly with similar complex issues. Indeed, science has thrived on reductionist principles that provide explanation to smaller and smaller parts of our natural environment. If we are to solve the closely related problems of water scarcity and food security, we have to move forward with a truly integrative approach to these mighty challenges. The problem is that we have a very limited time frame in which to do this.
Endnotes:
1 Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture, Water for Food, Water for Life: A Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture, D. Molden (ed.), (London: Earthscan and Colombo: International Water Management Institute, 2007).
2 http://www.nwc.gov.au/www/html/835-new-water-sharing-data-arrangements-on-the-way.asp.
3 Matthew Rodell, Isabella Velicogna, and James S. Famiglietti. “Satellite-based estimates of groundwater depletion in India,” Nature 460 (2009), http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7258/abs/nature08238.html
4 A. Mukherji, T. Facon, J. Burke, C. de Fraiture, J-M Faurès, M. Giordano, D. Molden, and T. Shah. “Revitalizing Asia’s Irrigation: to sustainably meet tomorrow’s food needs.” Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management Institute. Rome, Italy: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.
5 L. Raschid-Sally and P. Jayakody, “Drivers and Characteristics of Wastewater Agriculture in Developing Countries: Results from a Global Assessment,” Research Report 127. (Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management Institute, 2008).
6 Ibid.
7 WHO, “Guidelines for the safe use of wastewater, excreta and greywater,” Volume 2: Wastewater Use in Agriculture. World Health Organization. Geneva, Switzerland, 2006. http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/wastewater/gsuweg2/en/index.html.
8 P. L. Du Pisani, “Direct reclamation of potable water at Windhoek’s Goreangab reclamation plant,” Desalination (2006) 188(1–3): 79–88.