It's World Water Day! Great to be at the 8th World Water Forum with thousands of Water Wonks!
So why not feature an article that explains how to solve the world water crisis? Scott Moore, a Senor Fellow at The Kleinman Center on Energy Policy at Penn, pened this article in Foreign Affairs: How to Solve the Global Water Crisis.
Here are the first few paragraphs.
The Real Challenges are not Technical, but Political
Few people would argue with the idea that the world has a serious problem with water. For the past several years, water has consistently been named as a leading risk in the World Economic Forum’s annual survey of global leaders, and newspapers worldwide are awash with stories warning of a water crisis. But a funny thing happens between the headlines: surprisingly little. Even in the case of Cape Town, which earlier this year proclaimed a water supply crisis that experts believed could literally cause taps to run dry, city officials blithely announced earlier this month that no emergency was imminent after all. So, is the world really facing a water crisis? The answer is yes—but not in the way most people think. The truth is, most of the world’s water woes can be solved with enough money and willpower. The real challenges are not technical or hydrological but political and ethical. The world’s water crisis, as it turns out, is really more of an existential one. But it’s one that poses plenty of real-world foreign policy challenges.
Broadly speaking, the world faces three separate water-related challenges that have each gotten much worse in recent decades. First, the world’s fresh water is very unevenly distributed, meaning that cities and farms often have to invest enormous resources in bringing it to where it’s needed. Because the world’s population is both growing and increasingly clustered in cities, it’s becoming more and more challenging to find enough water to grow more crops and at the same time fill more washbasins. This challenge is responsible for the overexploitation of many major rivers and ground-water aquifers worldwide.
Second, the hydrological cycle is fickle and often delivers either too much water, causing flooding, or too little, resulting in drought. While this pattern of flooding and drought is a perennial struggle for humanity, it has become more frequent and intense because of climate change, which is shifting both the magnitude and the seasonality of precipitation in many parts of the world.
Third, whatever water is available usually isn’t pure enough in its original state for human use. Lack of clean water is another ancient scourge, but the scale of pollution from industrialized societies, which produce vast quantities of pesticides, fertilizers, and heavy metals, has again made the problem much worse.
Although each of these problems is severe, technical solutions exist to help solve them that would allow most places to avoid a true water crisis. First of all, areas facing water scarcity can do much to improve their security of supply by using the water that they have more efficiently. An enormous amount of water used by both cities and farms is effectively wasted. In most cities, rain is simply channeled into sewers, but storm water can be recycled and reused—as can wastewater, which cities such as Singapore treat and use to meet some 40 percent of total water needs. Agricultural water use, meanwhile, can be made much more efficient by using precision irrigation, which gives crops exactly the right amount of water to maximize yield, and other water conservation technologies. Desalination from seawater, which is rapidly improving in efficiency, can protect coastal cities such as Cape Town from droughts, while using ground-water aquifers as natural reservoirsto store water during times of plenty can help farmers make it through periods of water shortage. Even very heavily contaminated water, moreover, can be purified—for a price. The problem is that all of these fixes are expensive, and at a global level, we have barely begun to answer the question of who should pay, and how much.
For the rest of the article, click here. See what Dr. Moore's solutions are.
Enjoy!
“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” — Loren Eiseley
He is correct to point to political and economic forces, rather than technical ones. Increasing efficiency of use and the amount of reuse are both certainly relevant. The issue of highest value use should also come into play.
Eventually, however, someone has to pay. In developing countries, arguably the highest value use is urban drinking water. It is also a differentiated, higher cost service. The solutions eventually may have to entail tradeable water permits or other means to shift basin level use from agriculture to cities.
Once the bulk water concerns of utilities are addressed, there are a ton of financial questions to be dealt with- not least the business model of the utility. With a decidedly poor set of customers (and potential customers not on the utility yet), the funds to increase capacity and efficiency will have to come from somewhere. This is where governments have to decide to what extent they can support households financially (through connection cost support or favourable rates) and utilities have to figure out how to finance infrastructure and operating costs. Some of this may have to be though private or blended finance, but who knows..
Of course, in many large Africa cities the bulk of their urban populations are dependent on some sort of groundwater source. The long term viability of that is also dependent on the business/operating model of the water points.
On top of these financial concerns, water projects are dependent upon a whole host of enabling environment/sector capacity concerns.. any of which can make a project fail after 5-10 years.
Posted by: Ed Bourque | Monday, 26 March 2018 at 08:58 AM