My Ten Cents: The World Bank and the UN High-Level Panel on Water Tell Us to Value Water. Does That Include Groundwater?

The World Bank folks launched this video on 20 September. I'm slow these days. If the embedding doesn't work, view it here.

Here is the message in the email that accompanied the video; it is also on the video's YouTube page: 

Today water is undervalued, misused and misallocated. Too many of us take it for granted - we turn on the tap and it flows.  But did you know that only 4% of Earth’s water is freshwater and only 0.5% of that is safe for human consumption? [Italics and emboldening are mine.] As shocks of drought and deluge unleash their devastation, water has forced itself to center stage. It demands that we change fundamentally; it asks that we value it profoundly.

Do you value water? Join the High-Level Panel on Water to keep the promise of #ivaluewater. View the video here. 

What about the aforementioned percentages? Are they correct? Read on!

The video's graphics are very good and the message about valuing water comes across well. It would have been nice to have a graphic showing groundwater depletion. There really aren't misstatements - except for one.

I don't know the origin of the 0.5% figure. I have never heard it used to refer to the amount of water safe for human consumption. It's commonly used as the percentage of the world's fresh liquid surface water relative to total freshwater. I'll accept that. Then again, if that 0.5% is the only water safe for human consumption, then groundwater is being neglected, and that is a staggering 30% (give or take) of the world's total freshwater. Much of that 30% is no doubt safe for human consumption.

The graphic is from the USGS.

Keep in mind that the small percentages - 4% and 0.5% - are percentages of a very large number. By one measure (USGS), the total amount of freshwater - the 4% figure - is around 35 million cubic kilometers (about 8.4 million cubic miles or about 28 trillion acre-feet). That number represents about 28,000 times the total annual worldwide groundwater pumpage (c. 1200 cubic kilometers per year). Note: These figures are rounded and were revised on 25 September 2017 - my original numbers lumped saline groundwater with the total freshwater.

So in my view, the World Bank and the High-Level Panel on Water got it wrong by essentially eliminating groundwater from the conversation.   

Seems to me the high-level panel could use some low-level groundwater experts.

I am also skeptical of the 263 million figure - the number of people who spend more than 30 minutes per day collecting water. That number seems quite low to me. Also - how can you be so certain of that exact number? That's a high degree of resolution. 

BTW - friend and colleague Sharon Megdal commented on why there always seem to be male narrators. Excellent point!

”Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” - Albert Einstein

Comments

[Ed Bourque]

Water, by its nature, is a location and quality-specific good. Globally, there's plenty of it, and any scarcity that does is exist is spatial (regionally, etc) and temporal (droughts, etc) in nature. It's not evenly distributed across the planet spatially (if it was , we'd all be under water) and it is not meted out equally to every person on the planet.

It's also heavy (1 kg per liter) and of uneven quality and drinkability (for reasons of quality, salinity, etc).

For all these reasons, I think that discussions of IWRM-level use are nuanced and different from those of drinking water.

The former is a natural resource management exercise, where, sadly, there are endless examples of poor management. Efficient pricing and markets do not seem to rule the roost in IWRM too often. Unaccountable decisionmaking often does.

In many countries, drinking water provision is often highly affected by underfunded and poorly run utilities that have very small and relatively poor customer and potential customer bases.

Drinking water is service delivery. It is often purified and transported water...In some cases it is not purified and self-transported in buckets.

Purified, piped, and delivered water has a much higher value, so you'd think that the much higher per-unit value for drinking water would limit the number of situations where utilities are desperate for a steady supply of bulk water. Nope. The bureaucrats and the ministers just decide! (thumbing their noses at the public, rationality be damned)

(Having said this, the amount of water pushed through a utility is really not all that drives access. Utility coverage and the affordability and provision that affect that are bigger factors.)

As far as I have seen, water markets are dysfunctional.

I'd love to read case studies of effective water markets. Could you point me to any?

Ed

[PAUL MILLER]

I see this as a rhetorical questions as “value” has been placed on water long ago when we allowed it to become a commodity for sale...That potable is increasingly becoming more difficult to obtain world bu$$ine$$ interests will unquestioningly choose to own all the water they can enabling them to $ell it at exorbitant prices at Amazon did in Florida to those facing hurricanes...

[Elaine J Hanford]

The video also fails to ask the critical question with regard to water - be it surface or undergound:

"Who is responsible for the pollution of our water?