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Official Publication Published under license from Perl PCO for the Secretariat of The 5th World Water Forum A Words into Action title published by Faircount Media Group

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Office Manager Chantelle Alvarez Contributors Mehmet Emin Bariç Peter Brabeck-Letmathe Colin Chartres Genevieve Connors Boru Douthwaite Pay Drechsel Victor Dukhovny Karen Frenken Antoine Frérot

Contributors (cont’d) Kim Geheb Pamela George David Grey Larry Harrington Annette Huber-Lee Aybike Ayfer Karadag˘ Sophie Nguyen Khoa Upmanu Lall Julia Marton-Lefèvre Ken Matthews Sunita Narain Letitia A Obeng Gérard Payen Liqa Raschid-Sally Claudia W Sadoff Tushaar Shah Alain Vidal Jonathan Woolley Winston H Yu Dinara Ziganshina

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5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

FOREWORD

Photo: UNPhoto

T H.E. Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey

H.E. Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an became Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey in 2003. A graduate of Marmara University’s College of Business with a degree in management, he was elected to a four-year term as Mayor of Istanbul in 1994, and is credited by the public for improving services, as well as for making the city greener and cleaner. He formed the AKP in August 2001 and his party won the November 2002 elections, gaining a comfortable parliamentary majority. Identifying Turkey’s EU entry as a top priority, he pledged reforms to make Turkey more democratic and pluralist, and to bring it in line with the Union’s membership criteria.

H.E. Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an first delivered the remarks reproduced here in his call for registration in January 2009. 2

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

urkey is fully aware that water is ever-increasingly becoming the single most precious and essential item that sustains life in this world, enabling all humanity as well as nature to survive. We perceive water as a crucial element of civilization. In this regard, the Turkish proverb “Water brings life” has a special place in our culture. Without doubt, the future of life and civilization on Earth depends on water. In recent years, Turkey has made great progress in this area and has participated actively in World Water Forums and Ministerial Conferences. 2009 will be recorded in history as a year during which all the progress made on waterrelated topics since the Rio Conference, Agenda 21, the UN Millennium Development Goals and the 2002 Johannesburg Plan of Implementation will be reviewed and new initiatives will be discussed. The year 2009 will also mark the halfway point of the 2005-2015 UN Decade of Water for Life. The 5th World Water Forum will be convened under the theme ‘Bridging Divides for Water’. Given the unique geographical location of Istanbul, bridging West and East as well as connecting the North and South axis, Turkey is the ideal country to fulfil the purposes and goals of the Forum. Istanbul will be the venue for participants from all governments, parliamentarians, international organizations, local authorities, institutions, the private sector, major groups, non-governmental organizations and academia who will come to the Forum to develop new ideas that will have the greatest possible impact on all issues in the field of water. We regard this gathering as being of the utmost importance. Let us commit ourselves to the creation of a sustainable 21st Century that will be the inheritance of our children, who will embrace and continue to manage water with gratitude for the following generations. We look forward to welcoming all participants to The 5th World Water Forum in Istanbul in 2009, with traditional Turkish hospitality, in order to come together for a prosperous and wealthy world. H.E. Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey

Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water 4th Award 2008-2010 Introduction On 21 October 2002, His Royal Highness Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Crown Prince, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Defense and Aviation and Inspector General â&#x20AC;&#x201C; announced in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia that nominations were being accepted for a new global Prize to be awarded biannually: the "Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water". This internationally acclaimed scientific award has proven to be one of Saudi Arabia's key contributions to water-related issues on a global scale, issues which represent some of the world's most pressing humanitarian, economic and political concerns. Goals of the Prize This Prize aims to give recognition to the efforts that scientists, inventors, and organizations around the globe are making in water-related fields. The Prize is established to acknowledge exceptional and innovative scientific work which contributes to the sustainable availability of potable water and the alleviation of water scarcity, particularly in arid regions. Description & Value of the Prize The Prize is an international award judged by leading scientists from around the world and bestowed biannually in five branches. One million Saudi Riyals (about $266,000) is allocated for the Creativity Branch, while half a million Saudi Riyals (about $133,000) is allocated for each of the other four Specialized Branches. The Prize is accompanied by a gold medallion, a trophy and a certificate. Branches & Topics for the 4th Award of the Prize 1-Creativity Prize (open to a breakthrough in any water-related field) 2-Specialized Branch Prizes: 2-1 Surface water. Topic: Innovative Methods for Rain and Runoff Water Modeling 2-2 Groundwater. Topic: Assessment and Control of Radioactive Contamination in Groundwater 2-3 Alternative (non-traditional) water resources. Topic: Innovative Methods for Water Production from Non-Traditional Water Resources 2-4 Water resources management and protection. Topic: Remote Sensing and GIS Applications for Water Resources Management Nominations All applications for nomination for the current award of the Prize will be made online at the Prize website: www.psipw.org. For more information, including the events schedule and conditions of nomination, please visit the Prize website or contact the General Secretariat of the Prize at the Prince Sultan Research Center for Environment, Water and Desert at the following address: Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water General Secretariat Prince Sultan Research Center for Environment, Water and Desert King Saud University P. O. Box 2454 Riyadh 11451 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Phone: +966-1-4675571 Fax: +966-1-4675574 E-mail: info@psipw.org

FOREWORD

Photo: AP Photo

W H.E. Veysel Erog˘lu Minister of Environment and Forests of the Republic of Turkey

H.E. Veysel Erog˘lu is currently Minister of Environment and Forests of the Republic of Turkey and a Member of Parliament for Afyonkarahisar. He graduated in civil engineering from Istanbul Technical University, going on to an academic career there until becoming general director of the Istanbul Water Board in 1994. He became head of the State Hydraulic Works in 2003, where he supervised a programme of investment for renewal. He was elected to Parliament in 2007, where, as part of his ministerial duties, he is responsible for Turkey’s strategy on global warming.

H.E. Veysel Erog˘lu first delivered the remarks reproduced here in his call for registration in January 2009. 4

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

ater is the beginning of life. As it makes its way between cities, countries and continents it brings together the cultures, people and civilisations of the places it has passed through and forms bridges between them. The chemistry of water, which is the key to bridging these differences, is, in fact, the best example of turning differences into benefits and reconciliation. Hydrogen and oxygen are inflammable and corrosive gases in isolation. However, when combined they turn into water, which endows the world with the gift of life and mankind with coolness. Gaining inspiration from the ability of water to unite and integrate, it has been decided to hold The 5th World Water Forum in Istanbul, at the crossroads of two continents, from 16 to 22 March 2009, and to set the main theme of the Forum as ‘Bridging Divides for Water’. World Water Forums, organised every three years, bring people from different parts of the world together in order to find sustainable solutions to the world’s water problems. During the Forum, the water issues of the world and our country will be discussed and humanity’s issue of water will be brought to the agenda. One of the main themes of the largest water event in the world will be climate change. The importance of water due to the increasing needs resulting from climate change and its effects will be taken into consideration in a scientific manner, and the steps to solve these problems will be analysed by the Forum panels. With the belief that water is a natural right for everyone and a building stone for humanity’s development, many regional meetings have been organized both inside and outside of the country in order to provide more interaction between the participants of The 5th World Water Forum, which will establish bridges between people and states. Regional meetings were organised by Turkey in Amman, the capital of Jordan; in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina; in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan; and in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia. Then in Nicosia, with the Mediterranean countries, and in Istanbul, with the Black Sea countries, we exchanged ideas on the impacts of climate change in those areas. Also, in order to contribute to the regional process of the Forum, meetings were organised in Morocco, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Japan and many other countries. All in all, the Forum’s preparation process has been a marathon, which has involved hundreds of countries from seven continents. What is more, the Forum will be used as an opportunity to explain to everybody the importance of water and to increase public awareness. The Turkish Republic Prime Minister’s Water Prize will be awarded to journalists who contribute news items serving this purpose. I look forward to meeting everyone concerned with water in Istanbul, where solutions aimed at creating a more beautiful world will be shared. H.E. Veysel Erog˘lu Minister of Environment and Forests of the Republic of Turkey

PROTECTING WATER RESOURCES TO RESTORE BIODIVERSITY AND FIGHT AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING As one of the world’s leading producers of natural mineral water, Groupe Danone is deeply concerned by the critical challenge of water resource and has spent over two decades working hard to preserve the availability and quality of its water sources.

Protecting Water resources As a flagship brand of Danone’s portfolio, Evian has pioneered an indepth expertise in water resource protection, built on two key principles. The first principle is having a detailed hydro geological knowledge of the source that ensures its sustainable use. The second is being actively involved with local stakeholders (farmers, public authorities, utilities suppliers, local residents) and working together with them to ensure the protection of the local source and the catchment area.

10 years of Danone-Evian and RAMSAR partnership

The aim of this Fund is to raise awareness of the importance of water resources amongst decision-makers and the general public, particularly the local populations. Its aim also includes making these audiences aware of water management issues by developing educational tools and sharing best practices on the management of natural sites. As a sign of an increasing commitment, the Evian Water Protection Institutes were launched in 2008. This three-way project involving the RAMSAR Convention, non-profit organisations who implement local projects and Evian, was designed to help local people manage water in a sustainable way to improve their living conditions.

Evian’s commitment to water resource protection in September 2008 led the RAMSAR Convention to include Evian’s catchment area in the RAMSAR List of wetlands of international importance to the environment and biodiversity.

Tackling global warming through wetlands protection and mangroves restoration

Providing access to good-quality water and maintaining vital activities such as fishing and agriculture, while respecting local ways of life represent key development challenges. Today, three sites selected by RAMSAR host the program: • Argentina, Jaaukanigas and Chaco wetlands, which are part of the Plata Basin, one of the world’s largest fresh water reserves, • Jagadishpur, a Nepalese reservoir, close to the Indian border, an important area for birds, • Thailand, Beung Khong Long lake, important for services and culture.

After 10 years of cooperation with RAMSAR, a new agreement between Evian, RAMSAR and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) was signed in October 2008. The three partners joined forces to fight against global warming through wetlands restoration, a key contributor to carbon sequestration. In 2009, this restoration plan will focus on mangroves, which are particularly rich in carbon sequestration potential and play a key role in biodiversity. Evian is committed to achieve carbon neutrality, and has implemented several operational initiatives since 2000. It is on course to eliminate half of its carbon footprint by 2011. Through its support for various restoration programs, Evian aims to offset its remaining carbon footprint, based on certified calculation patterns under the authority of its partners. Pilot projects are currently being set up and will drive a 3 year-program to achieve Evian’s objective of carbon neutrality in 2011.

In 1998, Groupe Danone and Evian decided to support the RAMSAR Convention by setting up the DanoneEvian Fund for Water Resources, which was a first - never before in the history of international conventions had a business got involved in implementing an intergovernmental treaty and in providing financial backing to protect wetland areas.

Over the years this collaboration has paved the way for local sustainable development initiatives that have benefitted the environmental, social and economic needs of the local community.

FOREWORD

Photo: Gettyimages

T Loïc Fauchon President of the World Water Council

he Earth is succumbing to its future. We discover problem after problem that humankind has created over the last century: overly rapid population growth in certain regions of the world and its most visible consequence, the creation of dozens of mega cities each with over ten million inhabitants. The influx of nearly half of the world’s population in coastal regions, and the obvious conflicts between different uses of water: for agriculture and its disproportionate wastefulness, and for industry and services, whose needs are considerable. All of this creates scarcity here and there, pollution, and, consequently, tensions in mastering water resources and developing their use. Given this worrying situation, states are fragile. Often, they are economically and democratically fragile. But, they are also fragile in guaranteeing access to water and, at the same time, in protecting ecosystems and guaranteeing respect for biodiversity. This is one of the contemporary stakes of water politics. It is one of the essential subjects at the heart of The 5th World Water Forum in Istanbul, organised with our friends from Turkey, whom I would once again like to thank for their commitment. All must bring forth their contributions to this Forum. All must participate in it in order to make progress on the answer to one of the greatest challenges of this 21st Century: that of access to water for all. Welcome to Istanbul on 16 March 2009. Loïc Fauchon President of the World Water Council

Loïc Fauchon has been a Governor of the World Water Council since 2000, first as a special advisor to the President, then as Vice-President, and finally as President in 2005. He holds a postgraduate degree in political sciences, as well as a diploma in higher economic studies and a PhD in economics and law. He has also served as Mayor of Trets, France, and he created the Transahara Association with which he has travelled to Romania, Bosnia, Mali and Tunisia on emergency and development assistance missions.

Loïc Fauchon first delivered the remarks reproduced here in his call for registration in January 2009. 7

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

AGENDA

The 5th World Water Forum Programme 08:30-10:30

MARCH 16 MONDAY

11:00-13:00

OPENING CEREMONY (Starting at 10.00am)

13:00-14:30

14:30-16:30

17:00-19:00

19:30-21:00

LUNCH

HEADS of STATE SUMMIT THEMATIC OPENING

WORLD WATER DEVELOPMENT REPORT

YOUTH FORUM OPENING

REGION: AMERICAS PANEL on WATER & DISASTERS

MARCH 17 TUESDAY

OECD REPORT on FINANCING & PRICING

TECHNICAL EXPERTS on WATER & FINANCE

THEME 1: GLOBAL CHANGE & RISK MANAGEMENT SESSIONS

REGION: EUROPE PANEL on FINANCE

LUNCH

THEME 4: GOVERNANCE & MANAGEMENT SESSION

THEME 4: GOVERNANCE & MANAGEMENT SESSION SENIOR OFFICIALS’ MEETING PARLIAMENTARIANS’ MEETING LOCAL AUTHORITIES’ MEETING

SENIOR OFFICIALS’ MEETING PARLIAMENTARIANS’ MEETING LOCAL AUTHORITIES’ MEETING

REGION: AFRICA

MARCH 18 WEDNESDAY

PANEL on WATER, FOOD & ENERGY THEME 1: GLOBAL CHANGE & RISK MANAGEMENT SESSIONS

SESSION on WATER MANAGEMENT 2020 THEME 1: GLOBAL CHANGE & RISK MANAGEMENT SESSIONS

REGION: IN & AROUND TURKEY PANEL on SANITATION LUNCH

THEME 4: GOVERNANCE & MANAGEMENT SESSION

THEME 2: ADVANCING HUMAN DEVELOPMENT & THE MDGs SESSIONS THEME 5: FINANCE SESSIONS

SENIOR OFFICIALS’ MEETING

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

AGENDA

MARCH 19 THURSDAY

MARCH 20 FRIDAY

08:30-10:30 11:00-13:00 PARLIAMENTARIANS’ & LOCAL AUTHORITIES’ MEETING REGION: MEDITERRANEAN PANEL on ADAPTATION (Regional)

13:00-14:30

LOCAL AUTHORITIES’ MEETING REGION: ARAB / MENA

THEME 5: FINANCE SESSIONS REGION: ASIA / PACIFIC THEME 3: MANAGING & PROTECTING WATER RESOURCES SESSIONS

THEME 3: MANAGING & PROTECTING WATER RESOURCES SESSIONS

THEME 2: ADVANCING HUMAN DEVELOPMENT & THE MDGs SESSIONS

THEME 6: EDUCATION, KNOWLEDGE & CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT SESSIONS

LUNCH

PANEL ADAPTATION (High Level)

THEME 6: EDUCATION, KNOWLEDGE & CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT SESSIONS 3 WAY THEMATIC REGIONAL SYNTHESIS 2 DIALOGUE MINISTERIAL ROUND TABLE CLOSING MINISTERIAL UN WATER DAY

19:30-21:00

PARLIAMENTARIANS’ MEETING

THEME 3: MANAGING & PROTECTING WATER RESOURCES SESSIONS

MARCH 22 SUNDAY

17:00-19:00

THEMATIC THEMATIC SYNTHESIS 4 SYNTHESIS 1 THEME 2: ADVANCING HUMAN DEVELOPMENT & THE MDGs SESSIONS THEME 5: FINANCE SESSIONS

THEMATIC SYNTHESIS 5

MARCH 21 SATURDAY

14:30-16:30

THEME 6: EDUCATION, KNOWLEDGE & CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT SESSIONS 3 LEVEL MINISTERIAL POLITICAL OPENING DIALOGUE THEMATIC SYNTHESIS 3

YOUTH FORUM CLOSING

THEMATIC SYNTHESIS 6

LUNCH MINISTERIAL ROUND TABLE

LUNCH

CLOSING CEREMONY

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

CONTENTS

Contents A Turkish language version of the text of this publication is available at http://www.faircount.com/wwf5turkish Page

Foreword

By H.E. Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an, Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey

Foreword

By H.E. Veysep Erog˘lu, Minister of Environment and Forests of the Republic of Turkey

Foreword

By Loïc Fauchon, President of the World Water Council

Agenda

Writers & Contributors

What happens when the rivers run dry? Introduction by Colin Chartres

Water Resources Management in Turkey: Issues and Recommendations By Mehmet Emin Bariç and Aybike Ayfer Karadag ˘

Water Security: Achieving the Millennium Development Goals By Letitia A Obeng

The Water Security Imperative: We must and can do more By David Grey and Genevieve Connors

Reform or morph? Unlocking value in Asian irrigation By Tushaar Shah

The challenges of transboundary water resource management in Central Asia By Victor Dukhovny and Dinara Ziganshina

The Water-Sewage Connection: Changing ways to the future By Sunita Narain

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

CONTENTS

Page

Integrated food and water research for development

By Jonathan Woolley, Larry Harrington, Annette Huber-Lee, Kim Geheb, Boru Douthwaite, Alain Vidal, Pamela George and Sophie Nguyen Khoa

Seizing the Initiative: How the private sector can help improve access to public WATER SERVICES By Gérard Payen

Benefit Sharing in Water Management and Development: a tool for growth and equity By Claudia W Sadoff and Winston H Yu

Managing climate risks for water resources in a changing environment By Upmanu Lall

Making an asset out of wastewater By Pay Drechsel and Liqa Raschid-Sally

The Australian Experience: Reforming water management in times of scarcity By Ken Matthews

Water and the Food Industry By Peter Brabeck-Letmathe

Safe to Drink? By Antoine Frérot

Water: Improving the flow of information By Karen Frenken

From Environmental Flows to Negotiated Flows: The future of rivers in the era of rapid global change By Julia Marton-Lefèvre

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

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WRITERS & CONTRIBUTORS

Colin Chartres is the Commissioning Editor of this publication, and serves as Director General of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). He has more than 30 years’ experience in driving research and policy reform in natural resources management. Prior to joining IWMI in 2007, he was Chief Science Advisor to Australia’s National Water Commission, where his role included developing improved national water data and information systems, the development of a national groundwater action plan, and advising on the role of science in a range of more general water reform issues. Previously he held senior research and research management positions with CSIRO, the Bureau of Rural Science and Geoscience Australia, and has also worked in academia and the private sector. He believes that most of today’s water issues cannot be solved without an integrated triple bottom line approach involving environmental, social and economic inputs.

Mehmet Emin Bariç is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Agriculture at the Department of Landscape Architecture at Ankara University and at the Department of Real Estate Development at the university’s Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences. After graduating from Ankara University’s Department of Landscape Architecture in 1984, he completed his MSc in 1987 and his PhD in 1995 in landscape architecture at the Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences. In 2001, he gained an MA from the Urban Management Centre, Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies and Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Since 1986, he has given lectures in the field of landscape planning, landscape ecology, GIS, and tourism and recreation planning at the graduate and undergraduate level at Ankara University. He has published articles in various international journals, as well as several books on the subject of landscape architecture. He has also been part of several national and international projects. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe led the Nestlé Group from 1997 to 2008, first as CEO until 2005 and then as Chairman and CEO. In April 2008, he handed over the office of CEO and is now Chairman of Nestlé SA. Born in 1944 in Austria, he graduated from the University of World Trade in Vienna with a degree in economics. He also serves as Vice-Chairman of L’Oréal and Credit Suisse Group, is a member of the Board of Directors of Roche Holding SA and Delta Topco Ltd (Formula 1), a member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum, and a member of the European Round Table of Industrialists. He has been awarded La Orden Mexicana del Aguila Azteca, the Schumpeter Prize for outstanding contribution in economics, and the Austrian Cross of Honour for service to the Republic of Austria.

Genevieve Connors is a Water Specialist at the World Bank and is currently based in New Delhi, working with the Senior Water Advisor. As part of the Bank’s new South Asia Water Initiative, her current focus is on inter-jurisdictional and transboundary water challenges – including river basin planning and management and river clean-up – primarily in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan. Originally an urban water supply specialist, she has previously worked with the World Bank in Africa and East Asia. She has a BA from Columbia, an MPhil from Cambridge, and a PhD in planning from MIT, where she researched the role of street-level bureaucrats at the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board in extending services to the urban poor.

Boru Douthwaite was recently appointed Innovation and Impact Director for the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF). He is an evaluator and technology policy analyst with a PhD in agriculture from the University of Reading. Joining the International Rice Research Institute in 1989, he worked for seven years as an agricultural engineer before beginning his PhD research into the early adoption and adaptation of postharvest technologies in the Philippines and Vietnam. In 1999, he joined the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture to work on adoption and impact. In 2003, he moved to the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, where, amongst other assignments, he led the CPWF’s impact work.

Pay Drechsel is an environmental scientist with 20 years’ experience in projects aiming at integrated natural resources management and sustainable agricultural production in developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. After several years with the International Board for Soil Research and Management, he joined the International Water Management Institute in 2001, where he is currently leading their Global Theme on ‘Water Quality, Environment and Health’. He is also heading several projects on food safety where – usually untreated – wastewater is used for irrigation in urban and peri-urban agriculture. He is a member of the scientific and technical advisory committee of different FAO and WHO projects, and the author or co-author of more than 150 publications.

Victor Dukhovny is a Governor of the World Water Council. Born in Uzbekistan, he has been awarded an MS, PhD and Doctor of Science in civil engineering. From 1957 to 1973, he participated as a Chief Engineer of the Hunger Steppe development, a Director of Construction for the Karakum canal, and a Chief Engineer and First Deputy Chairman of the Central Asia Board for irrigation and development of new lands. From 1973, he served as Director of the Central Asian scientific research institute SANIIRI. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he helped create the Interstate Coordination Water Commission of Central Asia and has served as Director of its Scientific Information Center since 1993. He is also Vice President of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (Honourable), a member of the ICID Advisory Group of IPTRID, and a member and chair of ST-ARAL of ICID. In 2003, he was given the title of Academician by the Russian Academy of Water Science, and has received the Award of Excellency from ICID in 2002 and the award of Water Voice Messenger at the 3rd World Water Forum. He is author of more than 350 printed works, including12 monographs.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

WRITERS & CONTRIBUTORS

Karen Frenken is a Senior Water Resources Management Officer at the Land and Water Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). As an agricultural engineer, she worked for 15 years in different countries in South Asia, the Near East and sub-Saharan Africa, mainly on irrigation and water management for agricultural purposes, in particular dealing with fragile ecosystems and paying special attention to women and irrigated agriculture. After that, she spent five years as FAO’s Water Resources Management Officer for Southern and Eastern Africa, based in Zimbabwe, before joining FAO Headquarters in Rome, Italy in 2003. One of her responsibilities at present is managing the AQUASTAT Programme, FAO’s global information system on water and agriculture.

Antoine Frérot is Chief Executive Officer of Veolia Water. Born in 1958 in France, he is a graduate of the École Polytechnique and holds a PhD in civil engineering from the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. He began his career as a Research Engineer at the Bureau Central d’Études pour l’Outre-Mer. In 1983, he joined the research centre at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées as Project Manager, before becoming Deputy Director from 1984 to 1988. From 1988 to 1990, he was Head of Financial Operations at the Crédit National and joined the Générale des Eaux in 1990 as Attaché to the Managing Director of CGEA. In 2000, he was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Veolia Transportation and a member of the Veolia Environnement Board of Directors. On 21 January 2003, he was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Veolia Water and Executive Vice President of Veolia Environnement.

Kim Geheb is a member of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food management team, based with the International Water Management Institute at their regional offices in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He holds a doctorate from the University of Sussex, where he trained as a human geographer. His research interests include social institutions and political ecology.

Pamela George is Program Manager of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) with experience in project management in the field of agricultural research and development, particularly in the design, implementation and management of competitive grant funds. An Australian national, she commenced her career at the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research. Prior to joining the CPWF, Pamela designed and managed a fund in Bangladesh aimed at institutionalising the new agricultural extension services policy of the GoB that emphasised partnerships in service delivery. She has also worked in the World Bank’s Rural Development Department, during which time she undertook a study on the use of competitive grants in World Bank loans aimed at reforms in the agricultural research sector.

David Grey is the World Bank’s Senior Water Advisor. He has 35 years’ experience working in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East on water issues, including policy and institutions, transboundary cooperation, water supply and sanitation, irrigation, hydropower, hydrology, and climate variability and change. From 2003 to 2006, he had oversight responsibility for the World Bank’s global water resources agenda and chaired its Water Resources Management Group. He is currently based at the Bank’s New Delhi office, with responsibility for water resources operations in the South Asia and Africa regions. His current interests include: the roles that water insecurity plays in poverty and dispute and that water security plays in growth and stability; how benefit sharing can resolve inter-jurisdictional disputes over water at all levels; and the risks that climate and other changes mean for water security.

Larry Harrington received a PhD in agricultural economics in 1980. Joining Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo (CIMMYT) in 1983, he was posted to the Asian region, where he worked with national programmes on farming systems research. In 1995, he was appointed Director of CIMMYT’s Natural Resources Group, and managed projects on conservation agriculture and natural resources management in South Asia, Southern Africa and Mesoamerica. For five years he had oversight responsibility on behalf of CIMMYT for the Rice Wheat Consortium. He currently holds an adjunct faculty position with the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Cornell University, and was recently appointed Research Director for the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food.

Annette Huber-Lee is the Science Leader for the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food, and has more than 20 years of professional experience in international and domestic planning and management of water resources and agricultural development. Her interests focus on the integration of economic, engineering and ecological approaches to solve environmental and social problems in a comprehensive and sustainable manner, as well as the development of innovative approaches to social and environmental policy and natural resource conflict management. She earned her PhD in engineering sciences at Harvard, an MS in civil engineering at MIT, and her BSc in agricultural engineering at Cornell University.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

WRITERS & CONTRIBUTORS

Aybike Ayfer Karadag˘ is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Forestry at the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Düzce, Turkey. Born in Isparta, she graduated from the Department of Landscape Architecture at Ankara University in 1999, before being awarded her MA and PhD from the university’s Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences. She has worked as a Control and Maintenance Engineer for the Greater Municipality of Ankara and her areas of expertise include watershed management and planning, water management, water politics, landscape management and planning, participatory management, environmental pollution and recreation planning.

Sophie Nguyen Khoa is Associate Director of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food and is currently based in Sri Lanka. She was previously Leader of the Theme ‘Aquatic Ecosystems & Fisheries’ of the CPWF. She was also Researcher at the International Water Management Institute and the World Fish Center, developing interdisciplinary research on the management of water and fisheries, the integration of fisheries in agro-ecosystem analysis, and wetland conservation and poverty alleviation. She received a PhD in fisheries ecology and socio-economics at the Imperial College of London.

Upmanu Lall is the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering, Departments of Earth and Environmental Engineering and Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, and Senior Research Scientist, International Research Institute (IRI) for Climate and Society, at Columbia University. He received his PhD in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Texas in 1981 and, prior to joining the IRI, he was a Professor for the University of Utah and Utah State University. He has been the principal investigator on a number of research projects funded by the USGS, NSF, USAF, NOAA, USBR, DOE and State of Utah agencies. He has more than 30 years’ experience working in the areas of water resource systems analysis, hydrologic modelling, applied statistics and climate risk management, and his current research focuses on a causal understanding and prediction of water scarcity in the 21st Century, including innovations towards addressing this emerging global problem. Julia Marton-Lefèvre is the Director General of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Before joining IUCN, Julia was Rector of the University for Peace and remains a member of the UPEACE council, Executive Director of Leadership for Environment and Development International, Executive Director of the International Council for Science, and a Programme Specialist in Environmental Education for UNESCO-UNEP. She currently sits on a number of boards and commissions, including the China Council for International Cooperation in Environment and Development, LEAD International, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the International Advisory Board of the James Martin 21st Century School, Oxford University and the Conseil de Fondation of the Graduate Institute of Geneva. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the World Academy of Art and Science. In 1999, she received the AAAS Award for International Cooperation in Science and, in 2008, was named Global Ambassador for Hungarian Culture by the Hungarian Minister of Education and Culture, and was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government. Ken Matthews is both Chair and Chief Executive Officer of the National Water Commission. He has an economics degree from the University of Sydney and is a Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration and the Australian Institute of Management. He received a Centenary Medal for services to public administration in 2001, and was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia in 2005. Mr Matthews has held the positions of Secretary of the Department of Transport and Regional Services, and the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

Sunita Narain is an Indian environmentalist and a major proponent of the concept of sustainable development. She is Director for the Centre for Science and Environment and the Society for Environmental Communications, and is the publisher of the fortnightly magazine, Down To Earth. Her research interests are wide-ranging – from global democracy, with a special focus on climate change, to the need for local democracy, within which she has worked both on forest-related resource management and water-related issues. Under her leadership, CSE won the 2005 Stockholm Water Prize. She is now working on understanding how sewage systems in the country can be re-invented so that water is recycled and waste is minimised.

Letitia A Obeng was born in Ghana and holds a PhD in public health and water resources engineering from the Imperial College of London. She worked at the World Bank for 25 years and has extensive experience in water and sanitation strategy development and service delivery. She is the current Chair of the Global Water Partnership, an international network of more than 13 regional and 80 country partners committed to supporting the sustainable development and management of water resources at all levels.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Dr. Carlos Humberto Ben President of AySA AySA is the Argentine State company in charge of giving continuity, improving and expanding the essential drinking water and sewage collection services in the capital city of the country and 17 districts of the province of Buenos Aires, a strategic area with almost ten million residents.

1. As President of one of the largest water distribution companies in the American continent, what are your expectations for the new WWF assembly? I believe this world water forum will be a renewed step towards the implementation of new and better solutions, that are concrete and objective, in connection with the main problems related to the provision of drinking water and sewage collection. It is, at the same time, a great challenge, since these are urgent matters that admit no delay. This is why the Government of Argentina has considered the problem to be a top priority among its State policies. 2. In 2008, the first Latin American Symposium on Wastewater took place in Buenos Aires. In this respect, what degree of regional progress may be observed in connection with the UN Millennium Development Goals? The Symposium was a very important experience, not only for being the first one of its kind but also for allowing us to have a global vision of the local and regional reality, to detect problems in common and to share solutions. Likewise, this event - organized by AySA - ratifies the priority given by the Government of Argentina to meeting the Millennium Development Goals with reference to the coverage of these sanitary services. In the specific case of our region - Latin America and the Caribbean - in spite of having approximately 30% of the world’s water resources, distribution among the inhabitants is irregular, which stresses poverty and inequalities.

At present, 150 million Latin Americans lack drinking water services (or safe water) and 250 million lack sanitation services (if we understand by access to the service, service reaching the house). This is a tangible and sad reality that needs an urgent and committed solution in the long run.

5. The motto “Bridging Divides for Water” is appealing (something like “Reconciling divides for water”). In what aspects should progress be made to set up those bridges to bring together those who are separated over fresh water?

Although the various operators in the region are making progress, with different degrees of implementation according to the social, political and financial characteristics of each context, it is clear that the time schedules foreseen in terms of the Millennium Development Goals will undergo certain delays, which would be intensified unless credit lines are strengthened.

The agendas are well-known by every specialist in terms of water and environment. Sanitary services are a key issue, there’s no doubt about that. However, more than once I’ve wondered “why is there a need for so many forums, congresses, meetings over an issue of such unquestionable priority…? The answer is to be found in reality: millions of people worldwide, some of them kids, are still dying today, because they lack these basic services.

3. In regard to multilateral financing for water and sewerage works, what aspects should be enhanced for such goals to be met? In my opinion, financing by organizations such as IBRD and IDB is of the utmost importance, particularly for emerging and poor countries. In this respect, further fluency in fund allocation for the different projects becomes an essential aspect for the Millennium Development Goals to be fully met. 4. Fresh water is a strategic resource both for its vital need and for its growing shortage. Do you fear there might be future wars over fresh water? In previous forums such as Johannesburg and Kyoto, a slogan was repeatedly used that was absolutely clear: “No water, no future”. The sentence is categorical: water is so essential for life that scarcity will do away with any possibility of war. If current imbalances persist, more than war, we should be talking about the impossibility of any life whatsoever.

Working towards its universalization is an unavoidable mission. To these ends, it is essential to continue fostering the alliance among all the actors involved, and that these encounters turn into effective solutions that are translated into commendable facts. It is with this wish and the spirit proposed for the Decade: “Water, Source of Life” that Argentina adheres to the execution of this new World Water Forum.

w w w. a y s a . c o m . a r

WRITERS & CONTRIBUTORS

Gérard Payen is the President of AquaFed, the International Federation of Private Water Operators, and a member of the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation, for which he is also the Head of the Finance and Monitoring groups. He has been working for more than 20 years to solve water issues in many countries around the globe and has taken part in most of the recent intergovernmental conferences relating to water, including the first four World Water Forums, the Beppu Summit and the UN Commissions on Sustainable Development 13 & 16. Prior to his work with AquaFed and the UN, he headed all water activities of the Suez business group, to make them and the brand name ONDEO the world leader in delivering water and wastewater services.

Liqa Raschid-Sally is a Senior Researcher for the International Water Management Institute based in Ghana. An environmental engineer with over 20 years’ experience of working in Asia and Africa, she has been involved in urban planning and pollution control, environmental assessment, natural resource management, and capacity building in the water supply and sanitation sector. She has been a consultant in the sub-Saharan region for various aid agencies, non-government organisations and private sector consultancy firms. In Africa, she led the Continuing Education and Training Programs of the Regional Engineering School for Rural Development and the Regional Water Supply and Sanitation Center in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. She was also Head of the IWMI-West Africa Office. She has published over 60 research papers and other scientific material, and has edited numerous technical publications. Her main areas of interest are in integrated urban water management, with a focus on pollution control, recycling of wastewater, and urban and peri-urban agriculture. Claudia Sadoff is a Lead Economist at the World Bank, currently based in Nepal and working toward cooperative water resource management and climate change adaptation strategies on the rivers of the Greater Himalayas. She holds a PhD in economics, was a founding member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Water Security and of the Water and Environment Federation’s International Programs Committee, and now serves as a member of the Global Water Partnership’s Technical Committee. She has served as leader of the World Bank’s global Water Resources Anchor Team, a founding member of the World Bank’s Nile Team, and as Economic Advisor on joint appointment to the International Water Management Institute and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Her expertise is in water resources policies and institutions, cooperation and benefit sharing in international rivers, and the dynamics of water, wealth and poverty.

Tushaar Shah, an economist and public policy specialist, is a former Director of the Institute of Rural Management at Anand in India and is currently a Researcher with the International Water Management Institute. Over the past 25 years, his main research interests have been in water institutions and policies in South Asia, a subject on which he has published extensively. His notable contributions have been in comparative analyses of groundwater governance in South Asia, China and Mexico. More recently, his interests have lain in comparative analyses of water institutions and policies across Asia and between South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. He received the Outstanding Scientist award of the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research in 2002. His most recent publication is Taming the Anarchy: Groundwater Governance in South Asia.

Alain Vidal received his PhD in water science from the University of Montpellier in 1989. He started his professional activity in Morocco in 1986, followed by a 10-year research career with Cemagref, the French Environmental Research Institute, before joining the FAO’s International Programme for Technology and Research in Irrigation and Drainage as Regional Theme Manager in Rome for four years. His expertise covers land surface fluxes and water conservation in agriculture, on which he has written or co-authored more than 40 refereed papers, and has been editor of five books. Since 2003, he has been the Head of European and International Affairs of Cemagref and, since 2005, a part-time member of the Management Team of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food.

Jonathan Woolley is Coordinator of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food, an inter-institutional joint venture with more than 200 active partners. He has over 30 years’ professional experience and residence in developing countries, working first as a researcher and trainer in national, regional and international agricultural institutions, with a strong interest in farmers’ cropping systems. He then focused on the preparation and review of development projects that addressed participatory natural resources management, through a wide range of consultancies for multilateral and bilateral agencies, private firms and international organizations. Jonathan has significant practical experience in some 50 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Oceania.

Winston H Yu is a Water Resources Specialist at the World Bank in the South Asia region. He received his PhD from Harvard and his BS from the University of Pennsylvania. He has extensive experience working on technical and institutional problems in the water sector, and has carried out a number of project investments, studies and research projects in a variety of countries. His special interests include river basin management tools, irrigation sector reform, hydrologic models, flood forecasting and management, groundwater hydrogeology, water allocation mechanisms and instruments, international rivers, and climate change. Prior to joining the World Bank he was a Researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins.

Dinara Ziganshina is a Legal Adviser for the Scientific Information Centre of the Interstate Commission for Water Coordination in Central Asia. Born in Uzbekistan, she earned her law degree from Tashkent State Institute of Law in 2001. She has served as a consultant for national water authorities on drafting legal instruments in the context of integrated water resources management and, as a coordinator of the first Central Asia Gender and Water Network Initiative, has been involved in promoting gender equity in water management. In 2007, she was selected from more than 3,000 candidates to study at US universities under the Edmund S Muskie Graduate Fellowship and, in May 2008, completed her LLM in the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program at the University Of Oregon School Of Law and obtained a Master of Law degree. Her areas of expertise are international water law, international environmental law, human dimensions of natural resource use and management, environmental conflict resolution, water security and climate change issues.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

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AnSabesp_20.3X26.6.indd 1

1/27/09 6:29:23 AM

INTRODUCTION

and a consequent dramatic increase in water treatment costs • Increased frequency of water supply interruption and rationing in many cities of the world, impacting domestic and industrial water users alike

Photo: Bruce Lankford

• Potential conflicts between nations over scarce water resources

A group of hydrologists observe zero flows in the Great Ruaha River in Usangu, Southern Tanzania (above). Many vulnerable areas of Africa are likely to face problems with increasing water scarcity over the coming years.

What happens when the rivers run dry? By Colin Chartres

While the world struggles to cope with financial and energy crises, have policymakers been distracted from an impending catastrophe involving water scarcity?

T 24

he current problems being faced by the world’s money markets have alerted politicians to the dangers of ignoring the warning signs of an impending global crisis. However, many of those involved in water science and policy, myself included, feel that concerns regarding water scarcity are falling on deaf ears, particularly in comparison with recent food, fuel and financial crises. Too many politicians and policymakers remain almost entirely unaware of the emerging significance of a looming world water crisis and its consequences.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Such a crisis will lead, inter alia, to: • More food crises, starvation and consequential societal unrest • Failure to meet the Millennium Development Goals on safe drinking water and improved sanitation, with consequent increases in disease, mortality rates and inhibited development prospects for millions • Collapse of environmental services that currently help to provide freshwater

Cumulatively, the cost of this will be hundreds of billions of dollars in terms of health, economic development and environmental damage, not to mention the consequences of a further, more severe, food crisis. This article provides an overview of the current availability of freshwater. It analyses what’s likely to happen to water supplies over the next 40-50 years, suggesting the most promising adaptive strategies to avert the potential catastrophes outlined above. Particular attention is given to how people are being affected by the water crisis and what national and international government policies are necessary to address the challenge.

Feeding the world The past 18 months have seen the emergence and subsequent disappearance of a world food crisis that seemed to result from price rises due to a classical supply/demand imbalance. However, in my view, the underlying causes of such food crises are more fundamental and are highly likely to reoccur repeatedly over the next few decades, getting worse on each occurrence. I make this assertion because, over the next 40 years, we can expect approximately 2.5 billion more mouths to feed. Whilst there is still enough land to grow food for the expected population of about 9 billion in 2050, there is clear evidence from many regions of the world that we are running out of freshwater. In the future, there will be increasing competition for existing water resources from growing urban centres and from biofuel production. Additionally, the trend towards diets that are high in dairy and meat protein requires increasing volumes of water compared with a

vegetarian alternative. Finally, climate change, the effects of which are already being felt, is likely to reduce rainfall in many subtropical areas, cause inundation and salinisation of coastal areas, and result in more intense storms and flooding in other areas. Even from an optimistic viewpoint based on mankind’s adaptive abilities, there is much cause for concern about our future water supplies and our ability to feed ourselves. Many countries are already in the early stages of a water crisis and it is unlikely to disappear. This does not mean that we are going to run out of water immediately. However, it does mean that we have to revise the way we think about water, its productivity, its relationship with the environment, and the way in which we invest in its supply and treatment. The best evidence for how our freshwater supplies are being depleted is given in Water for Food, Water for People: A Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture1, an authoritative study featuring contributions by more than 700 scientists. It shows that if we want to feed the world in 2050, we cannot continue managing agriculture on a business-as-usual basis. If we don’t improve productivity, we’ll need a further 5,500 km3 of water and 1,200 million Little or no water scarcity Physical water scarcity

Photo: Corbis

WATER SCARCITY

Farmer Ian Shippen (above) walks past a mobile irrigation boom on a dying oat crop on his farm in the heart of the Murray-Darling river basin, an area which has come under extreme stress as a result of the Australian drought.

hectares of land to produce the required amount of food. If we can achieve a major improvement in productivity of irrigated and rained land, these figures revert to 1,500 km3 and 100 million hectares respectively. Looked at from another perspective, if we each require a basic diet of 2000 calories per day and one calorie requires one litre of evapotranspirated water for its production, we will need another 2100 km3 of water per year, which is the equivalent of the annual storage of about 20 dams as large as the High Aswan Dam on the Nile.

Approaching physical water scarcity Economic water scarcity

Not estimated

Water under pressure There is also clear evidence that a number of major river basins around the world are under extreme stress. These include the Yellow River in China, the Murray-Darling in Australia, the Krishna in India, the Indus in Pakistan, the Syrdarya and Amudarya in Central Asia, the Jordan in the Middle East, the Limpopo in southern Africa, and the Colorado in North America. Many of these basins are now ‘closed’, resulting in either a sporadic outflow to the ocean or else none whatsoever. Several of them have seen recent climate change reduce their flows to well below long term averages, thus exacerbating water shortages. The consequences of the utilization of all their water resources are not only affecting development and livelihoods in the basins, but also having a severe environmental impact. (Elsewhere in this volume, experts explain how water scarcity is being dealt with at the policy level in the Murray-Darling basin, as well as outlining what reducing flow rates mean for transboundary water agreements in Central Asia.) Whilst all the rivers listed above are in areas of the world with physical water scarcity problems, elsewhere a lack of investment in water resources development has seriously hindered the provision of water for agriculture, drinking water and sanitation. This type of water shortage can be referred to as economic water scarcity and is a major problem in much of sub-Saharan Africa (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. A global map indicating the particular regions of the world which are facing physical and economic water scarcity. Source: The Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture (2007)

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

INTRODUCTION

Taking the River Jordan as an example, the work of Courcier et al2 demonstrates that 83% of the renewable surface and groundwater in the Lower Jordan is used (see Figure 2), but that this value obscures the fact of the already critical overdraft of the aquifers. In reality, overall flows from the Jordan into the Dead Sea have reduced from 1.3bn m3 in the 1950s to 20% of that today (i.e. 200m m3 per year). The cause of this reduction is excessive abstraction of surface and groundwater for growing towns and the irrigation industry in the surrounding countries, resulting in a

Even from an optimistic viewpoint based on mankind’s adaptive abilities, there is concern about our ability to feed ourselves.

gradual desiccation of the Dead Sea. A recently mooted solution to this problem has been the construction of a long canal from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, coupled with desalination plants. But, at current prices, desalination is not an economical way of providing water for agriculture. The cost of the Red Sea to Dead Sea conduit alone is $4.7bn, while the high costs of desalination – not to mention the inability of agricultural users to pay the higher prices offered by other water users – call into question the logic of much agricultural production in water-scarce regions. It is often more appropriate to import ‘virtual’ water in the form of food and use the limited water resources for urban, industrial, tourism and environmental purposes. However, fears over national food security, coupled with a lack of understanding of true water cost and value, often dictate otherwise. Some Middle Eastern countries are already major importers of ‘virtual’ water and have recently been looking to Sudan as a potential area in which they can grow their food using

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Lower Jordan River Basin Water Balance

1950

2000s

mid 1970s

Projected 2020s

Figure 2. Charts indicating the changes in water use and flows from Jordan into the Dead Sea from 1950-2020s.

the available water. Whether such logical approaches will prevail in the face of political imperatives to be self sufficient in food is as yet uncertain. China, for example, has begun the gargantuan task of preparing to transfer large volumes of water from the Three Gorges Dam to the North China Plain. India is also contemplating a transfer program in which water is transferred from the well-watered

north to the water-scarce southern and central river basins. Both these cases and their outcomes depend not so much on the logic and scientific need to make these water transfers, but on satisfying social and political demands. In most similar situations – not to mention the enormous growth in hydropower generating stations in Asia – the environment almost always comes off second best.

INTRODUCTION

Unsanitary practices Whilst providing enough water to produce food, fibre and biofuels presents a daunting task, other areas are even more problematic. Current evidence suggests that, without a major increase in effort and financing, the Millennium Development Goal on access to improved sanitation will not be met, although the goal of access to improved drinking water may be achieved. With respect to sanitation, there is a quandary. Improving sanitation means affording access to a toilet or latrine. However, not enough attention or investment is being given to the treatment of sewage generated from household systems. Currently, most cities in the developing world have very limited sewage treatment facilities; some

don’t work because of lack of maintenance, while others provide primary treatment and then discharge domestic and industrial waste direct into rivers and the ocean. This waste has been seen by many opportunistic farmers as a resource rich in nutrients and has been used for irrigation of food and fodder crops in peri-urban environments in most of the world’s developing cities. A survey of 53 cities3 showed that over 700m people depend on produce irrigated with these untreated or insufficiently treated waters. Whilst the agricultural use of this water helps reutilise nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, there are still major health risks to the farmers and consumers as a result of the presence of faecal bacteria, viruses, helminths and, depending on the source of the effluent, heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants. The paper by Drechsel et al in this

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Photo: Still Pictures

Without a major increase in effort and financing, the Millennium Development Goal on access to improved sanitation will not be met. The scale of water pollution in the Yangtze river in China (above) poses a serious health hazard to communities.

volume outlines the risk management practices needed to deal with this issue. Other authors in this volume provide further details of how water scarcity and contamination can affect the environment, water supply services and industrial water users alike. In water-scarce countries, these problems are usually cross-sectoral. And they are already beginning to bite even before the expected impacts of climate change. However, there are solutions. The key areas where action is needed are outlined below, but unless much more funding is provided for research and development, infrastructure, water treatment, environmental services and climate change adaptation there is genuine concern that we will not overcome many of the water issues described in this book.

• Better information and data The old adage ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ holds true with respect to water resources. Good water management starts with having access to information and data. Unfortunately, many countries invest little in obtaining data to determine how much water is available, pinpoint where it is being used, and analyse major trends in availability and use. In some countries, privatisation of water service providers has seen monitoring networks reduced and stations abandoned. In other countries, budgets are too low to install and maintain even rudimentary hydrological monitoring networks. With increasing water extraction, it is vital we accurately measure and monitor this precious resource.

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vessel-based desalination. By integrating water treatment technology on its Seawater Desalination Vessel™ (SDV™), WATER STANDARD provides a flexible, environmentally responsible, cost effective, drought proof alternative for new water supply.

H2OCEAN CRISTINA VESSEL HIGHLIGHTS :: Producing water in early 2010 :: Flexible contract arrangements with the ability to provide all equity financing :: Designed for a minimum water production of 50,000 m3/day :: Utilizes advanced, proprietary, environmentally-focused technologies :: Self-generates power on-board; compliant with emission regulations :: Designed to be energy efficient, utilizing waste heat The H2OCEAN Cristina is supported by a strategic team of vendors, designers and contractors including VEOLIA, Wärtsilä, Siemens, Babcock International, Norit, DOW, ERI and V.Ships. RIGHT FOR THE OCEAN. RIGHT FOR THE ENVIRONMENT. RIGHT FOR THE WORLD.

INTRODUCTION

Photo: IWMI

productivity of the water that we have. This means growing increasing amounts of food on less water, wasting less water in our cities and industries, and developing cost and energy efficient means of recycling waste water for reuse. It also means adopting the most water efficient means of food production, even if that entails importing ‘virtual’ water in food commodities rather than pursuing water-squandering food security policies.

Across the length and breadth of sub-Saharan Africa, access to a clean, reliable water supply for domestic usage can often mean having to pump and transport water by hand over long distances on a daily basis (above).

• Management of water resources in an integrated manner Water does not respect political boundaries or sectoral economics. Water flows across and under the ground following natural basins and hydrogeological principles. Groundwater is usually (except where fossil) intimately linked to surface waters. Consequently, we have to consider this connectivity when managing water systems. Far too often, one government agency manages the surface water while another is responsible for groundwater. Similarly, water supply and sanitation are managed separately from irrigation water. A simple solution would be to ensure that water management principles and practices follow the tenets of integrated water resources management, which views the system in its hydrological entirety.

• Improved water governance and policy frameworks for water management For too long, water has not been given the attention it deserves by central governments. It is only now, as it becomes scarce, that politicians and policymakers

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are scrambling to try to improve its governance. Too often, water reforms are ineffective and based on populist ideals that maintain votes. What is needed is a change at central government levels that sees water policy formulated on scientifically based evidence and which considers the sustainability of the resource and the people it serves as the fundamental premise. Furthermore, policies need to recognize the link between water, the environment and the role environmental services play in the provision of clean water. Effective solutions have been demonstrated that empower water user associations and participatory irrigation management groups to make decisions that promote more efficient use of the resource, rather than employing centrally planned and implemented management practices. • Improved water productivity The volume of freshwater available for our use is finite and, unless there are major breakthroughs in cheap desalination technologies that are carbon neutral, our best option is to increase the

If we look into each of these areas where solutions are required, there already exists a myriad of options and opportunities. On the positive side, many effective solutions have already been trialled and implemented. However, if we are to avert some of the unpleasant consequences of water scarcity mentioned at the beginning of this article, we need to ensure that water resource governance and management issues are elevated to the forefront of the political agenda in water-scarce countries. We also need to make loans and grants to the poorer of these countries to ensure that solutions are implemented and that there is transparency and equity in how this is achieved. It can be done and the papers in this volume will explain in detail the obstacles to success and how they can be overcome.

References: ‘Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture’. Water for Food, Water for Life: A Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. (Earthscan/IWMI. 2007.) 2 Courcier, R, Venot, J-P and Molle, F. ‘Historical Transformations of the Lower Jordan Basin (in Jordan): Changes in Water Use and Projections (1950-2025)’. Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture Research Report 9. (IWMI. 2005.) 3 Raschid-Sally, L and Jayakody, P. ‘Drivers and characteristics of wastewater agriculture in developing countries: Results from a global assessment’. IWMI Research Report 127. (IWMI. 2008.) 1

Libya: The Great Man-Made River Libyaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s $US 19.58 billion Great Man-Made River Project is one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest water supply projects. It involves mining ancient groundwater reservoirs under the Sahara desert and piping it to the coast, where most of the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 6 million inhabitants live. Libya is one of the driest regions of the world with an annual rainfall ranging from just ten millimetres to 500mm. Only five percent of the entire area of Libya exceeds 100mm annually. Evaporation rates are also high, ranging from 1,700 mm in the north to 6,000 mm in the south. The Great Socialist Libyan Arab Jamahiriya was aware from a very early stage of the impending water shortage crisis in Libya and put forward a plan that, if implemented, could be the solution to the crisis. Ground water is the primary source of freshwater, supplying 96 percent of demand. During exploration for oil in the Libyan Desert, investigations showed the existence of potentially vast fresh water aquifers, lying at depths of less than 100 meters below the surface. There are four major underground basins in the region with estimated groundwater storage capacities as follow: s 4HE +UFRA "ASIN CUBIC KILOMETRES s 4HE 3IRT "ASIN CUBIC KILOMETRES s 4HE -URZUK "ASIN CUBIC KILOMETRES s 4HE (AMADAH "ASIN CUBIC KILOMETRES In a recent study conducted under the supervision of the UN Centre for Environment & Development in the Arab Region & Europe (CEDARE), THE .UBIAN "ASIN OF WHICH +UFRA IS A PART WAS ESTIMATED TO CONTAIN X m . If the neighbouring countries extract water at a rate of -#-9 IT IS CALCULATED THAT THE RESERVE WOULD LAST FOR YEARS

Studies were conducted to establish if it was more economical to convey the water from its sources in the desert to the coastal areas compared with other alternatives and found that the quantity of water THAT ONE ,IBYAN $INAR ,$ 53 CAN BUY WOULD BE s "Y $ESALINATION M ). s "Y 0IPELINE FROM SOUTH %UROPE M ). s "Y 4RANSPORTATION VIA 3HIPS M ). s "Y )MPLEMENTATION OF '-2! M ).

(ENCE THE DECISIONS FOR THE )MPLEMENTATION OF THE 'REAT -AN MADE 2IVER 0ROJECT WERE MADE AT THE GRASS ROOTS LEVEL BY THE 'ENERAL 0EOPLES Congress of the Great Socialist Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

4HE 'REAT -AN -ADE 2IVER 0ROJECT SINCE ITS CONCEPTION IN has grown to include the following conveyance systems: 3ARIR 3IRT 4AZERBO "ENGHAZI 3YSTEM DESIGNED TO CONVEY -#-$ COMPLETED (ASAOUNA *EFRA 3YSTEM DESIGNED TO CONVEY -#-$ completed. 'ARDABIYA !SSDADA SYSTEM DESIGNED TO LINK BETWEEN THE ABOVE SYSTEMS COMPLETED 4HE 'HADAMES :WARA 3YSTEM DESIGNED TO CONVEY -#-$ COMPLETED +UFRA 4AZERBO 3YSTEM DESIGNED TO CONVEY -#-$ UNDER construction. -ORE THAN PRE STRESSED CYLINDER CONCRETE PIPES 0##0 ALMOST KM MILES OF MAINLY METRE DIAMETER WERE manufactured locally to build the above systems. /VER +M OF ROADS WERE CONSTRUCTED ALONGSIDE THE PIPE LINE INSTALLATION TRENCH TO ENABLE THE HEAVY TRUCK TRAILERS TO DELIVER PIPES to the systems, and the volume of trench excavation was in excess OF - . %VENTUALLY OVER MILLION MÂ¨ ACRE FEET OF WATER WILL BE CONVEYED EVERY DAY FROM THE WELLS DRILLED DEEP IN THE 3AHARA desert to the population centres that are concentrated on the northern coastal strip. 4HE 'REAT -AN -ADE 2IVER 0ROJECT IS BASED ON SOUND CLEAN technology which provides minimal environmental impact and MAXIMUM SOCIO ECONOMIC BENElTS AND THE PROJECT IS MODEL FOR alleviating the water scarcity problems in north and northeast Africa.

Photo: Photoshot

FOCUS ON TURKEY

The river Tigris courses through Batman province in Turkey (above), which is already the centre for angry public protests about plans to build Ilisu Dam further upstream.

Water Resources Management in Turkey: Issues and Recommendations By Mehmet Emin Bariç and Aybike Ayfer Karadag˘

Like many countries of the world, Turkey is facing an impending water crisis due to dwindling resources. Yet this crisis can be averted if appropriate action is taken in time.

W 34

ater is the basis of life and is the driving force not only for economic and social development, but also for poverty eradication. Yet it is generally agreed that rapid population growth and urbanisation, along with the spread of more water-intensive lifestyles and agriculture, is leading to the over-utilisation of limited and, in some cases, diminishing supplies of fresh water – supplies which will lead to growing water shortage in certain parts of the world

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

where water resources are already are scarce. This will have very serious repercussions and will lead to catastrophic water crises and conflicts over resources 1,2,3,4. Turkey, like many countries today, faces challenges in efficiently developing and managing its limited water resources while maintaining water quality and protecting the environment. To add to the challenge, Turkey will need to continue to develop its water resources in order for its economic and social

development to keep pace with its rapidly growing and urbanising population. This article deals with the water resources management problems facing Turkey and provides recommendations on the issues at the country level. Its objectives are, firstly, to summarise key water resources management issues and review the institutional and legal frameworks necessary to resolve those issues and, secondly, to provide suggestions for how water resources management can be made more effective throughout the country.

Putting water management in perspective The first 80 years of the 20th Century saw a 200% increase in the world’s average per capita water use, which accounted for a remarkable 566% increase in withdrawals from the world’s freshwater resources. This massive increase in water extraction coincided with another ‘debt’ on the water-ledger: a significant portion of the world’s water resources have become unusable due to industrial and agricultural pollution. Since all life depends on water, present trends of water waste and pollution threaten the Earth’s basic life support systems5,6. Already, 1.1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water and almost 2.6 billion do not have access to adequate sanitation. By 2025, according to the World Water Council,

WATER MANAGEMENT

policies, institutions and pricing regimes drain central and local government budgets and lead to poor water resources management and service delivery14. To review matters related to water resources, Turkey has been divided into 26 water collection regions. Turkey has a total land area of 779,452 km2, of which 14,300 km2 is water surface. The actual surface area of the Turkey, inclusive of its lakes, is 814,578 km2. Turkey has influential geopolitical status because its location

means that its water supplies are often not to be found in the right place and at the right time to meet demand. While the world average precipitation is 1000 mm, the annual precipitation in Turkey is only 642.6 mm, but this figure conceals wide variation from region to region15. Rainfall accounts for an average of 501 billion m3 of water annually. It is estimated that 274 billion m3 of this returns to the atmosphere through evaporation and transpiration from soil, water surfaces

Since all life depends on water, present trends of water waste and pollution threaten the Earth’s basic life support systems. serves as a natural bridge between Europe and Asia; it is bordered by the Black Sea in the north, the Mediterranean in the south and the Aegean in the west. Turkey possesses 177,714 kms of rivers, 203,599 hectares of natural lakes and 179,920 hectares of artificial lakes created by dams, an area which is increasing continuously. The rivers often have irregular regimes and natural flows cannot generally be considered as usable resources. The country’s great geographical and climatic diversity

Photo: 4Corners Images

almost a third of the world’s population will face water shortages and will have to divert water from irrigation and food production to household consumption, implying further underdevelopment7. Water management is akin to conflict management among human beings. Water and river basin management systems are created to avoid, prevent or resolve such conflicts. Since the relative scarcity of water will become ever more pressing as time goes on, as a result of economic growth, social demands and climate change8,9,10,11,12,13, humankind needs to learn to live with these conflicts and deal with them adequately. Effective management of water resources is essential for sustainable growth and poverty reduction. Poor river basin management increases economic damage and loss of life from floods, droughts, landslides and erosion. Low-quality water carries health risks, damages fisheries, tourism and recreation industries, and leads to loss of ecosystems and biodiversity. Poor drinking water delivery service affects the wellbeing of local communities, while unreliable irrigation water leads to loss of livelihoods. Weak inter-sectoral allocation of water can result in insufficient supplies for irrigation, hydropower, municipal water supply and ecosystem maintenance. Inadequate water

and plants; 41 billion m3 feeds underground reservoirs through leakage and deep percolation; and 186 billion m3 runs off into seas or lakes. Around 6.9 billion m3 of water is added to the country’s water potential through the rivers of neighbouring countries16. Therefore, the renewable fresh (surface) water potential of Turkey is approximately 234 billion m3, depending on climatic fluctuations. The total safe yield of ground water resources is estimated at 12 billion m3. It is estimated that – both technically and economically – the total usable surface and ground water potential of Turkey is 110 billion m3, with 95 billion m3 of this coming from internal rivers, 3 billion m3 from external rivers, and 12 billion m3 from ground water resources. Between 1990 and 2008, Turkey’s population grew by almost 15.05 million – from 56.47 million to 71.52 million. About 75% of the population was classified as urban in 2008. The population is expected to grow to 84.3 million by 2020, of which threequarters will live in urban areas17. Water resources play a key role in the economy of Turkey: between 30-40% of the total electricity production of the country is based on hydropower, and between 15-18% of the crop land is irrigated, contributing to 34% of agricultural GDP15.

A panoramic cityscape of Istanbul (above), looking out over the Galata Bridge, which spans the Golden Horn.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

FOCUS ON TURKEY

Water resources management in Turkey Studies for the development of water resources in Turkey began in the 1930s. They were originally initiated for the development of small-scale irrigation projects, but the size and scope of these studies expanded in a relatively short period of time. However, it was not until the late 1940s that basin-wide hydrologic assessment and master plan

studies were introduced. Master plan and individual studies were followed by intensive design and construction work, which has so far contributed to the building of many large and small dams. Activities in this respect gained momentum and accelerated with the establishment of a number of institutions. In modern Turkey, the responsibility for the development, management, protection and conservation of water resources is shouldered by numerous ministries and agencies. A large number of organizations, both governmental and non-governmental, have direct and indirect interest in all aspects of water resources management throughout the country18. Information about the main organizations and their responsibilities are summarised below:

The Ministry of Environment and Forestry The Ministry of Environment is the main body responsible for environmental management and charged with coordinating all national and international activities concerning water resources. The Ministry of Forestry protects mountainous regions and upper basins as the

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Photo: Photoshot

In modern Turkey, the responsibility for the development, management, protection and conservation of water resources is shouldered by numerous ministries and agencies.

Despite having almost 50 laws relating to water management, Turkey still faces problems with pollution (above).

origin of streams, and undertakes the development of projects to protect such areas (i.e. utilisation and protection of in-forest streams, rehabilitation lakes and creation of reservoirs; afforestation; rangeland rehabilitation; erosion control etc.). The Ministry conducts studies and surveys on problematic basins and areas as identified by The General Directorate of State Hydraulic

Works and other organizations, and identifies relevant measures to control erosion. The General Directorate of State Hydraulic Works (SHW) Affiliated to the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, SHW is the leading body carrying out most of the sub-sector activities at all stages of water resources development. SHW ensures the

WATER MANAGEMENT

long term supply of drinking and industrial water, and also plans, executes and, in most cases, operates works for flood protection, irrigation, drainage and hydropower generation. The responsibilities of SHW also include performing basic investigations such as flow gauging, soil classification, water quality monitoring, preparation of river basin development plans and formulation of proposals for constructions, including the financing and subsequent operation of these works.

carrying out investigations and research, and planning programmes and projects to meet the needs for protection and development of water and soil.

The General Directorate of Bank of Provinces Affiliated to the Ministry of Public Works and Settlement, the responsibilities of Bank of Provinces is to provide infrastructure projects for municipalities on a turnkey basis, to provide credit for financing these projects, to prepare urban development plans, to provide technical assistance for construction, mapping, selling or renting materials and equipment, to insure property, and to train the staff of the municipalities.

Local Government Water and Sewage Administrations connected to the Metropolitan Municipalities (which includes 15 out of 80 provincial capital municipalities) have taken part in the implementation of pollution control policies, including water supply and construction, and the operation of wastewater treatment facilities.

The General Directorate of Electrical Power Resources Survey Affiliated to the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, this department has the responsibility of carrying out hydrological studies, geotechnical investigations and mapping activities to evaluate the national hydroelectric potential. It also prepares reconnaissance, pre-feasibility, feasibility and final design studies of identified projects. The Under Secretariat of State Planning Organization (SPO) Its principal function is to prepare annual investment programmes and Five-Year Development Plans (FYDPs) for various sectors of the economy. In line with the policies and principles set out in the development plans, SPO adjusts the national fund for the allocation of projects and programmes which are under the responsibility of various ministries. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Responsible for the development of villages and agriculture, offering assistance in the development of water and soil resources,

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) Environmental protection activities and public consciousness about the scarcity of water resources, mostly seen in the last decade, have led to the development of many NGOs operating at the national and regional level in the field of the environment in Turkey. The main national NGOs are actively involved in creating public awareness of many water and environmental problems, as well as encouraging public participation. They propose efficient solutions and act as pressure groups in the decision-making process.

Photo: Photoshot

The Ministry of Health Responsible for monitoring water quality, performing physical, chemical and microbiological analyses of water, assessing the use of chlorine, and issuing licenses and permits for water use.

The Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates river (above), located on the border of Adıyaman and S¸anlıurfa provinces in southeastern Anatolia in Turkey.

The legal framework in Turkey

The major systematic aspect of water-related activities in Turkey is central planning. At the national level, FYDPs are aimed at ensuring the optimum distribution of all types of resources among various sectors of the economy. Every five years, the State Planning Institute, along with experts from all sectors, prepares the Development Plan. In the ninth FYDP (20072013), the main principles, policies and objectives with regard to proper management of water resources were as follows19:

In Turkey, there are almost 50 laws related to the water resources and management, including laws identifying the responsibilities of related organizations. In general terms, Turkish law regarding water resources and environmental protection has been developed in four key areas:

• Systems and technologies most suitable for the conditions of the country will be preferred in the construction, maintenance and operation of water, wastewater and solid waste infrastructure facilities related to environment protection.

• Constitutional Mandates • Regulatory Law • Natural Resource Utilisation Regulations • Public Health Law

• Efficient use of the water resources of the country will be ensured by reducing losses and illegal uses in existing water supply facilities.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

of the cross-border waters, has consolidated itself as the largest binational (Brazil and Paraguay) hydroelectric project in the world, in terms of electric energy generation with social and environmental responsibility.

B R A Z I L

Prata's Hydrographic Basin Paraná Rive's Hydrographic Basin Itaipu Reservoir's Hydrographic Basin

Considering the world problem with climate changes, global warming and concerns regarding the quantitative and qualitative availability of water in the world, in 2003 ITAIPU expanded its mission through a broad strategic planning process: “Generate quality electric energy with social and environmental responsibility, boosting economic, tourist, technological and sustainable development in Brazil and Paraguay”. ITAIPU’s programs and actions were designed due to this mission and are based on planetary documents such as the Earth Charter, the Treaty on Environmental Education for Sustainable Societies and Global Responsibility, the Millennium Development Goals, Agenda 21 as well as the policies of Lula’s (Brazil’s current president) administration. The Cultivating Good Water Program really stands out among these efforts. The Paraná 3 Drainage Basin (BP3) is the focus for this program. The area is made up of 8,000 km² of a dense river system, excellent soil and intense farming and livestock production. However, being the largest poultry, pig, dairy cattle and grain producing region and having the largest number of farm companies in the state of Paraná has resulted in innumerous environmental concerns, such as deforestation, erosion, and water and soil contamination through animal waste, pesticides, sewage and garbage, the majority of which flow into the ITAIPU reservoir. In spite of not presenting an immediate threat to electricity generation, these drawbacks contribute to eutrophication (appearance of toxic algae) and siltation of the reservoir, placing the lake’s multiple uses at risk, such as fishing, sailing, supply of water for human consumption, tourism and principally degrading the quality of the environment and life in the region.

In 2008 it broke its own record, generating 94.6 million megawatts/hour

In facing this local and global reality, the Cultivating Good Water Program, focused on the quantity and quality of water, on protection, recovery and conservation of soils and biodiversity, on the improvement of environmental flow, on diversified and clean production systems, on environmental education, and on the improvement of the quality of life, principally within socially-environmentally vulnerable areas, aims to provide new ways for the inhabitants of BP3 to BE and FEEL, LIVE, PRODUCE and CONSUME, with the application of innovative management, environmental education and action methodologies, as follows: a) Watershed-Basin Management - the actions are planned and carried out from micro-basin to micro-basin (70 micro-basins), correcting the environmental problems, reaching more than 500 km of protective fencing for riparian forests, 321 km of suitable roads, 4,404 ha of conserved soils, 190 wells/community water supply units installed and 4 animal waste treatment project demonstration units for production of energy. b) Territorial Information Management - with the use of the best geoprocessing techniques in the implementation and maintenance of a GIS - Geographic Information System, the aim is to maintain, make available and evolve the collection of cartographic and geographic information in the Itaipu region of influence about the quality of water, sedimentology, production systems and environmental conditions of the rural properties (SIG@Livre), helping with decision making for the suitable evolution of territorial and environmental management (5,000 projects development). c) Participatory Management – all of the projects and micro-drainage basins have management committees, which are made up of the basin’s social actors. The participatory planning, execution, monitoring and evaluation of the actions generate the commitment

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and co-responsibility necessary to the programâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sustainability. There are currently 38 managing committees, more than 2,100 partnership, involving more than 40,000 people in the 175 workshops of the future, 43 water agreements, five annual Program meetings and their respective pre-meetings. d) Management of More Sustainable Production Systems - with an increase in rural diversification, implementation of organic agriculture with the involvement of 967 farmers, production of medicinal plants for use in 29 municipalities, development of aquaculture with services for more than 1000 fishermen, support to family farming involving 534 families and training for improved rural tourism. e) Management for cultural and behavioral changes with a broad process of formal, informal and non-formal environmental education, consolidating the network of environmental educators (10,400 educators) and implementation of Environmental Education projects in all of the cities, reaching more than 500,000 people through awareness, training processes and educational material (edu-communication). f) Management for protection, recovery and conservation of biodiversity - through the conservation of 104,340 ha of protected area, production and planting of 23 millions native tree saplings for the recovery of regional

flora, reestablishment of the migratory flows for fish populations with the operation of the Piracema Channel (where fish go upstream to deposit their eggs), germplasm banks, protection and reproduction of wild animals in captivity and implementation of the biodiversity corridor. g) Management for sustainability of vulnerable segments - with the implementation of cooperative waste collection, providing more than 1,600 garbage collectors with uniforms, carts (with 50 being electric), and supplying the waste sorting units with presses and scales; promotion of Native American community sustainability (200 families), with stimulation for farming and livestock production, fish cultivation, cultural preservation (encouraging handcraft production and tradictionals settlements); development of aquaculture in net-tanks and improvement in working conditions for fishermen with added product value and suitable fishing spots; settlement and family farming support with the implementation of sustainable production systems (560 families), farm companies, technical assistance in addition to carrying out collective activities in the settlements; training, education and full education of youths in the Young Gardener program. h) Institutional networks for dissemination, technical exchange and replication of actions and methodologies - Center of Knowledge and Social-environmental Care of the Plata Basin, Hydroinformatics Center and Itaipu Technology Park. Integration generating power and development

w w w . i t a i p u . g o v. b r

Photo: World Bank

FOCUS ON TURKEY

A modern concrete aqueduct built to traverse the Adana Plain in south central Turkey (above), a region which comprises the combined deltas of the S¸eyhan and Ceyhan rivers.

• The works, which were created to make regulations and establish an administrative structure in Turkey related to the allocation, use and improvement of water resources as well as protection against pollution, will be completed. • Ground water and surface water resources will be protected from pollution, and the use of treated wastewater in agriculture and industry will be encouraged. • A priority will be placed on the effective use of water resources through saving water within a comprehensive mechanism. This mechanism has been arranged to provide strong and structured coordination among relevant institutions, enabling the integrated planning of activities for developing water resources basin-wide, yet providing flexibility in meeting changing consumer demands. • To identify the urban infrastructure requirement in the whole country with a view to protecting the environment. This includes preparing an urban infrastructure master plan and financing strategy, which will determine the infrastructure needs such as drinking water services, sewer systems, wastewater treatment, and solid waste disposal facilities.

The Turkish Constitution of 1982 states that water resources are a part of the natural wealth of the country and, under the authority of the State, to be used for the benefit of the public.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

As defined by the Constitution, control over all ground and common surface waters, with the exception of some privately owned springs and small waters, is vested in the government. The 1983 Environmental Law was the first piece of legislation to address the qualitative assessment of water resources. This law introduced the ‘Polluter Pays’ principle for controlling damage to the environment and water bodies. A subsequent piece of legislation was the Water Pollution Control Regulation, which became effective in 1988. This regulation classified all inland waters in line with water quality standards and identified industrial effluent discharge criteria. The main priorities of the regulation are the prevention of pollution in surface waters, protection of groundwater, prevention of coastal and sea pollution, and the restoration of polluted aquatic ecosystems. It refers to the creation of an action plan for water quality improvement and long-term water basin quality management20. The legal framework concerning water rights and ownership is complex. So far, there is no specific law covering surface water rights. The use of surface water for hydropower production and thermal waters is subject to prior authorisation, while other uses of surface water are not subject to any prior authorisation.

activities in Turkey all put pressure on water resources. Surface water resources are threatened by point sources of pollution from municipal and industrial waste and diffuse pollution from agriculture activities. With rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, domestic and industrial wastewater has become a major threat to water resources. Large volumes of untreated wastewater is dumped into water bodies. Surface water resources are also threatened by point sources of pollution and diffuse pollution from agriculture activities14. The main problems related to water resource management of Turkey are summarised below:

Present and future problems facing Turkey

• There are almost 50 laws related to water resources and management. The effectiveness of the laws and relations, which depend on the monitoring and enforcement abilities of

Unplanned urbanisation, uncontrolled industrialisation and unconscious agricultural

• A large number of organizations, both governmental and non-governmental, have direct and indirect interest in aspects of water resources management in Turkey. The responsibility for the development, management, protection and conservation of water resources is shared by numerous entities. While existing institutions are technically strong, they are managerially weak. There are problems caused by a lack of coordination and overlapping duties in the same area by several organizations, resulting in the waste of precious time and money.

WATER MANAGEMENT

the government, has yet to be established. Legislation needs to be updated in order to take full account of good international practices and principles in water resources management and to specify the responsibilities of various institutions and different water users more precisely. • Strategies do not address water management broadly, even though water resources management has been identified as a priority area in the National Environmental Action Plans (NEAPs) of Turkey. The policies related to this field are directed towards mainly economic aspects instead of sustainable protection and management principles21. Lack of financial and technical resources to implement policies and enforce regulations is an issue in Turkey. • The environmental problems related to water resources have reached quite dangerous levels in recent years in Turkey. With rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, domestic and industrial wastewater has become a major threat to water resources. Cities are the major culprits in water pollution. According to available statistics, 82% of the population has access to sewage systems17; however, in many urban areas, the system is insufficient and, in most rural areas, systems do not exist at all15. • Current monitoring programmes of water quantity and quality are inadequate, and reliable data is lacking for the past. This prevents monitoring of flood or drought situations and constrains preventive measures to reduce damage14. • The number of conflicts over the use of water is growing, and is especially evident during drought periods. No statutory priority on the use of the resource exists in the legal framework. Priorities are established on a case-by-case basis in light of public interest, beneficial use criteria, and national interest and planning. The default priority list is as follows: drinking water supply, industrial

water supply, irrigation, power generation, flood control and navigation. • Quality of surface water and groundwater is a serious concern. The deterioration of the quality of water resources due to the use of pesticides is largely observed in the areas of intensive agriculture. Runoff, drainage and deep percolated water from irrigated lands contain high levels of agricultural chemicals, as a result of excessive fertilizer and chemical usage. Some drainage discharges and city sewages seriously threaten nearby lakes, estuaries and marine life as well. • Sediment accumulation in dead storage of dams, and the reduction of available water for irrigation and domestic use is threatening irrigated agriculture in many locations because of severe soil erosion from upper watersheds. Turkey is not counted among the countries that have scarce water, so the annual renewable amount of fresh water per capita is rapidly decreasing. The amount was 8509 m3 in 1955, but has fallen to 3623 m3 in 1990, 3431 m3 in 2000, 3124 m3 in 2005, and is expected to decline to 2186 m3 in 202520,22,23,24. The prevailing trends toward a rising population, increasing urbanisation, a spread of more waterintensive lifestyles, as well as the increased use of agricultural technology, are going to make water resources even scarcer unless timely action is taken.

Overcoming the obstacles to effective water management Turkey, like many countries today, faces challenges in efficiently developing and managing its water resources, while working to maintain water quality and protect the environment. To add to the challenge, Turkey will need to continue to develop its water resources in order for its economic and social development to keep pace with its rapidly growing and modernising population.

Towards this goal, new management approaches and organisational arrangements need to be designed to address the critical issue of water resources management. The following measures should be considered as guidelines to provide for effective management of water resources: Appropriate Institutional Arrangements Multiple groups manage and use water resources. Left to themselves, each group tends to give priority to its own needs as coordinating mechanisms do not always exist in a sectoral treatment of water. Consideration of all users and uses within a river basin facilitates the introduction of such inter-sectoral coordination. Additionally, the stakeholders may collectively derive some synergic benefit from being able to integrate their administrative efforts. To derive some significant benefits from an integrated administrative effort, acceptable forms of institutional arrangements (i.e. rules and roles) should be in place. The expected behaviour by the various stakeholders should be reflected in well-defined rights and responsibilities, as well as in policies, laws, administrative structures and procedures. The stakeholders should be structured through effective organisational and procedural arrangements so that each stakeholder group is aware of its own – and others’ – rights and responsibilities. The main objective should be to coordinate effective planning and implementation of equitable, efficient and sustainable use of natural resources in the basin with a view to improving the sustainability of its agricultural development. Water resources should be managed within river basin boundaries The European Union Water Framework Directive calls for the establishment of appropriate institutional arrangements – in particular, the identification and setting of competent authorities within river basin districts, adoption of cross-sectoral and cross-border cooperation, and active participation of all stakeholders, including

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Photo: World Bank

the future requires a comprehensive approach, involving all stakeholders and covering all activities affecting the water resources throughout the watershed. To work effectively, management plans must be developed at the community level, involve the participation of all the groups who benefit directly and indirectly from the water bodies, and have clear and transparent rules for resolving conflicts.

A farmer working on an irrigation canal in the Adana Plain (above), one of the most fertile regions in Turkey.

• To update and/or amend the legal framework and pass needed regulations.

socio-economic conditions, such as the population density and pressure on the resources, the economic and environmental objectives, legal policy, and the institutional setting of which the water body is a part. The basic principles, within those natural geographic boundaries of the river basin, are:

• To improve coordination among waterrelated institutions.

• To put forward an integrated water resources policy in order to prevent natural hazards.

• To improve the badly deteriorated water quantity and quality monitoring systems.

• To rationally satisfy the various uses.

NGOs and local communities in water management activities. The key institutional reform challenges for Turkey are:

• To set up an integrated river basin planning process in a few pilot basins.

• To meet the requirements of sustainable development. • To protect the aquatic environment.

• To formulate coordinated and comprehensive policies and strategies for water resources management, development and pollution control. • To increase participation from users (urban, agricultural, industrial and environmental) in the formulation of policies and strategies for optimal use of water resources.

Water Resources Planning Comprehensive strategies for managing lakes and reservoirs need to be designed for the unique characteristics of the watershed, including the type of ecosystem, climate and topography. They also need to consider the

An integrated view of water resources would require multidisciplinary policymaking, placing planning-and-executing teams in place of the largely undisciplined civil engineering-oriented groups which exist at the moment. It is particularly necessary that there is effective interface between hydrological and socio-economic planning units. Academic and scientific communities, environmental groups, and representatives of project-affected people should also be involved in the management of water resources25. Effective Management Managing lakes and reservoirs so that they can continue to provide their varied benefits for

Cooperative partnership and strong community participation To even consider the management of a complex ecosystem like a watershed or lake it is necessary to foster a cooperative partnership approach10,26,27. Effective partnerships are based on good information and educational efforts. Cooperation requires that the parties have a knowledge of why, how, when and where to cooperate, which can only be gained from shared information and communication. Mutual trust is necessary to make partnerships work, and trust can only be earned28. Participation of all stakeholders to developmental activities both in the planning and operation stages, especially to those of water resources, is of critical importance. Pollution prevention and abatement Reducing pollution effectively requires controlling both point and non-point source pollution. Many countries have successfully reduced point and non-point source pollution using regulations, economic instruments, public education and enforcement measures. Choosing the right combination of regulations and market-based instruments for controlling pollution will require careful assessment of the nature and sources of pollution and the practical issues of implementation. Action also needs to be taken to increase the share of the population connected to sewage treatment. The price structure of water should be revised to reflect the investment and maintenance costs, and to ensure its rational use. Finance for investments in water supply, sanitation, sewage treatment and solid waste disposal is still a burden for both the central government and Turkish municipalities.

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Monitoring In order to define environmental and social guardrails for water quality, it is necessary to carry out monitoring operations as comprehensively as possible29. Efforts to build a database on freshwater ecosystems are in need of support. Geographical and ecological parameters should be included, as should adverse anthropogenic impacts. The database should also provide the results of a coordinated water body monitoring programme, support the production of specialised maps, and be available via the Internet to a wide range of users. Special research needs exist with respect to: • Determining the status of aquatic habitats by expanding water body monitoring in regions and categories (e.g. wetlands, groundwater and lakes) on which little data has been collected hitherto, in order to provide a foundation for the national database. • Collecting reference data from relatively unpolluted water bodies, and investigating the natural variability of factors relevant to quality (e.g. lacustrine sediments) in order to assess national and regional changes. The monitoring of environmental parameters must be rigorously undertaken. NGOs and the affected public should be involved with this process. Monitoring can be strengthened by fixing realistic norms and standards, providing training, and allocating sufficient funds to the programme. According to Hayworth and Hoenicke30, the development and implementation of a monitoring programme follows a logical progression and contains 10 essential elements:

• Investigation of the role of limit values in the acceptance of risks.

Flood control Floods are the third major threat to human life and health, after disease transmission and droughts. More research is needed on:

• Implementation of preventive measures, such as afforestation, rehabilitation of streams and flood plains, restoration of natural flood plains and marshlands, and prevention of urbanisation in river basins and flood plains.

• Integrated analysis and modeling of the entire causal chain, from precipitation, formation and concentration of runoff, the course of flood events (also in flooded areas), through to damage assessment. • Earlier and more precise forecasts of precipitation with the help of mathematical models. Greater use of remote sensing techniques to predict flood events, and refinement of techniques for direct conversion of remote sensing data into stream flow figures. • Derivation of scenarios for extreme weather situations, both on a regional and local scale. • Research into the social processes of perception, communication and response in connection with the handling of flood risks as compared to other risks to which individuals and societies are exposed.

• Research to develop simple flood control technologies for decentralised use.

Conclusions For several years now, Turkey has been implementing the principles of sustainable development based on water resources through activities. However, the existence of various organizations that have responsibility in different areas of water resources management could lead to duplication in implementation. Along with this, the issue of the allocation of surface water resources is still waiting for legal arrangements. In this context, solving all of the problems related with water issues requires the development of effective coordination and cooperation among the relevant organizations carrying out programmes and projects. It will also entail strengthening the capacity of the administrative system – including installing qualified staff and equipment – and ensuring that an effective legal framework is in place to support these efforts.

• Clear management goals and monitoring objectives • Assessment questions formulated directly from goals • Monitoring programme design • Indicator selection • Quality assurance • Data management

Photo: Gettyimages

• Data analysis and assessment • Program reporting, • Programmatic evaluation • General support and infrastructure planning

The historic town of Hasankeyf in southeast Turkey dates back more than 10,000 years, but there are fears that the entire region will be flooded if plans go ahead for the Ilisu Dam on the Tigris, which is due to be completed in 2013.

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Photo: World Bank

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The Keban Dam in Turkey (above), the first ever largescale dam to be built on the Euphrates river.

References ‘Integrated Water Resources Management’. Global Water Partnership Technical Advisory Committee Background Papers No. 4. (Denmark, 2000.) 2 Giordano, MA and Wolf, AT. ‘Sharing Waters: Post-Rio International Water Management’. Natural Resources Forum 27. (2003.) 3 Clausen, TJ. ‘Integrated Water Resources Management and Water Efficiency Plans by 2005’. Why, What and How? (Global Water Partnership Publication. Sweden, 2004.) 4 Cai, X, Ringler, C and Rosegrant, MW. ‘Modeling Water Resources Management at the Basin Level Methodology and Application to the Maipo River Basin’. Research Report 149. (International Food Policy Research Institute. 2006.) 5 Pottinger, L and Horta, K. ‘Finding a Better Way for Water Management’. Environmental Defense Fund, ITT Industries Guidebook to Global Water Issues. (1999.) 6 Jackson, RB, Carpenter, SR, Dahm, CN, McKnight, DM, Naiman, RJ, Postel, SL, and Running, SW. Water in a Changing World. (Ecological Society of America, 2001.) 7 Water Crisis. (The World Water Council publication. 2008.) 8 Dourojeanni, A. ‘Water management at the river basin level: Challenges in Latin America’. Natural Resources and Infrastructure Division. (United Nations Publication. Chile, 2001.) 9 Rao, RJ. ‘Participatory Watershed Management: An Approach for Integrated 1

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Development of Rural India: A Case Study from Karnataka, Southern India’. International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management, 5:1. (2005.) 10 Johnson, N, Ravnborg, MH, Westermann, O and Probst, K. ‘User participation in watershed management and research’ Water Policy 3. (2001.) 11 Sakthivadivel, R, Bhattacharya, K and Scott, C. 2004. ‘Biophysical and Institutional Factors in Watershed Management: A Comparative Analysis of Four Pilot Watershed Projects in India’s Tribal Belt’. Working Paper 88. (International Water Management Institute. 2004.) 12 ‘California Water Plan Update: Public Review Draft’. Resource Management Strategies, Volume 2. (2005.) 13 Bruneau, R. ‘Watershed Management Research: A Review of IDRC Projects in Asia and Latin America’. International Development Research Centre, Rural P overty and Environment Working Paper Series 18. (2005.) 14 ‘Integrated Lake and Reservoir Management: World Bank approach and experience’. World Bank Technical Paper, No 358. (The World Bank Group, 2004.) 15 ‘Gateway to Land and Water Information Turkey’. TT Industries Guidebook to Global Water Issues. (FAO, 2001.) 16 Country Report. Prepared for The 3rd World Water Forum. (The World Water Council, 2003.) 17 Population and Development Indicators. (Turkish Statistical Institute, 2008.) http://www.tuik.gov.tr 18 Alpan, S and Openshaw, K. ‘Turkey Anatolia Watershed Rehabilitation Project’. Regional Environmental Assessment and Environmental Management Framework, E695. (Turkey, 2003.) 19 Ninth Development Plan (2007-2013) TR. (Prime Ministry State Planning Organization, 2006.) http://ekutup.dpt.gov.tr/plan/ix/ 9developmentplan.pdf 20 Kuleli, S. ‘Institutional and Legal Framework in the Water Sector In Turkey’. Euro-Mediterranean Conference on Local Water Management, Marseille in 1996.

Uzun, O. ‘Landscape Evaluation of Duzce Asarsuyu Watershed and Proposal of Management Model’. (Department of Landscape Architecture, Ankara University Graduate School of Natural and Applied Science. 2003.) 22 ‘UNSTATS Environmental Indicators and Selected Time Series’. Water Resources: Year 2000. (UNSTATS, 2007.) http://unstats.un. org/unsd/environment/Questionnaires/Websi te%20tables%20and%20Selected%20Time %20Series/water_resources_2000.pdf 23 2006 World Development Indicators. (The World Bank, 2008.) http://devdata. worldbank.org/wdi2006/contents/cover.htm 24 ‘Local Water Supply, Sanitation and Sewage Country Report: Turkey’. EuroMediterranean Information System on Know-How in The Water Sector. (EMWIS, 2005.) http://www.emwis.net/countries/ fol749974/semide/PDF/Sogesid-turkey 25 Teodosiu, C, Barjoveanu, G and Teleman, D. ‘Sustainable Water Resources Management 1: River Basin Management and The EC Water Framework Directive’. Environmental Engineering and Management Journal, 2:4. (December 2003.) 26 ‘China: Addressing Water Scarcity’ Background Paper No 1. (The World Bank Environment and Social Development East Asia and Pacific Region.) 27 Das, PJ. ‘Integrated Water Resources Management: A Northeast Indian Perspective’. National Workshop on Learning Platforms to Understand and Operationalise IWRM. Held between 19-21 December, 2005 in Assam, India. 28 Honeoye Lake Watershed Management Plan. (Honeoye Lake Watershed Task Force, 2005.) http://www.co.ontario.ny.us/planning/ 29 Murakuni, S. ‘Water Resources Management in Japan: Policy, Institutional and Legal Issues’. World Bank Analytical and Advisory Assistance Program. (2006.) 30 Hayworth, J and Hoenicke, R. ‘A Watershed Monitoring Strategy for Napa County’. Prepared for the Watershed Information Center & Conservancy Board, San Francisco Estuary Institute Watershed Program. Contribution No. 428. (2005.) 21

ollowing the decrees issued by the Council of Ministers, the Supreme Economic Council (SEC), and the Shoura Council encouraging Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) to conduct a study to restructure and privatize the corporation and to encourage the private sector to invest in developing new plants. SWCC took the following initiatives to achieve the objectives of the privatization and restructuring program:

for a period of 17 months. 4) Formed an internal team of 115 people to work with the consultants to implement the privatization and restructuring program Based on the above, SWCC will be transformed into a holding company owned by the government. The subsidiary companies will be partially owned by investors and developers from the private sector.

1)Developed a business plan to privatize and The share of the local and foreign private restructure SWCC to work on a commercial basis sector investors should not be less than 2) Received approval on the privatization and 60%. restructuring program from the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques his Majesty King Abdulla privatization and restructuring ( % &EHIED "IN &AHD !LSHAREEF The Bin Abdul Aziz Head of SEC program has already started and 3) Started the implementation of the Governor of Saline Water Conversion Corporation the commercialization of SWCC privatization and restructuring program by will happen in phases as described in the detailed plan. selecting the consultants who will be supporting SWCC during the implementation of the privatization and restructuring program )!- + +&) )+! !' +!&% !% )& , +!&% &$' %! *

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To cope with technology developments in desalination industry, SWCC established Saline Water Desalination Research Institute (SWDRI) in 1987 at AlÂŹl-Jubail in eastern province and its services are available for national and international use. SWDRIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s research has major significance in the improvement of the functional tools of the plants, the development of existing desalination process, optimizing plant operation, reducing the operational and maintenance expenditures to the minimum, extending life span of the plant, selection of best chemicals and construction materials, innovate and explore new processes, of desalination, and protection of healthy environment with the objective to meet out the drinking water demand. SWDRI is equipped with the latest laboratories containing highly advanced scientific instruments in six continues expanding laboratories viz. Advanced chemical laboratory, Chemical analyses laboratory, Corrosion & metallurgical laboratory, Marine Biology & Environment laboratory, MSF, RO and MED Pilot Plants of different capacities and Membranes Autopsy laboratory. SWDRI has achieved many milestones

in the field of desalination including registration of newly invented processes for no. of patents (5 processes patented and 8 pending in various patent offices) in different parts of world. SWDRI is recognized worldwide in the field of desalination and have won many national and international prizes. Institute can provide impartial, timely, accurate, and cost effective analysis and research of high quality. Finally, the future aims of SWDRI are to implement the nano membrane technology with the thermal MSF/MED desalination, implementing the renewable energies in the desalination field, developing the hybrid desalination systems, coming-out with zero discharge desalination, implementing the green chemistry in the desalination processes and inventing super RO membranes able to work with high pressures under extreme pollution conditions. In general, SWDRI looking for further advancement to desalination research all over the world to help in delivering the potable water with better environment, high quality and lower price to thirsty people.

Technical Training Center (TTC) Because SWCCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main job requires skilled manpower to operated and maintain its projects, a modern Technical Training Center (TTC) was established in 1987, in the Eastern Province (Jubail). The training center adopted a new approach to its vision Excellence in training on the manufacture of desalination water. Hence, in order to cope with the fast developments in desalination and power technology, full modern technical facility has been supplied to (TTC), such as training simulators for different desalination systems (MSF, RO, DCS, MED), Various laboratories (Electrical, Electronics, Instruments and Chemistry) and several workshops (Mechanical, Electrical, Welding and A.C.). In conjunction with investment in Human Resource, TTC runs two kinds of training programs: A. Basic (Qualifying) programs (640) fresh Engineers successfully completed a (86) weeks technical program, and (3556) fresh technical college graduates successfully completed a (24) months technical program.

B. Advanced programs, More than (230) focused desalination and power technology programs run in (TTC) yearly, which promote workerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s competencies and meet different job needs.

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OVERCOMING OBSTACLES

Water Security: Achieving the Millennium Development Goals By Letitia A Obeng

There is a need for fast and decisive action if we are to meet the targets set out in the Millennium Development Goals – and there’s a price to pay if we don’t.

Photo: Greenpeace

ocieties have always sought to establish themselves near bodies of water or alongside rivers as part of our primary instinct for survival. Thus the drive for water security – which is defined as the availability of an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods, ecosystems and production, coupled with an acceptable level of water-related risks to people, environments and economies – has been a part of the development arena from time immemorial. Water has a beneficial impact on all aspects of life: health, nutrition, transport, energy, gender equality, industry, job creation, human security, ecosystem health; the list is endless. Water has numerous positive uses – domestic consumption, waste disposal, recreation, tourism, power generation, industry etc – which both rich and poor countries need to support their economic growth and social development. Unfortunately, water also has a negative impact on life: floods, hurricanes, droughts, landslides, desertification, pollution, water related diseases, and disputes that can cause havoc with economies. The hardest hit are generally the poorer countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The poorer developing countries often do not have the infrastructure and conveyance systems to help them tackle these waterrelated shocks and improve their resilience to them. In Kenya in 1997/1998, for example, the The unfortunate citizens of Xinshao in Hunan Province, China (above) faced the backbreaking task of ferrying bottles of water to their homes after catastrophic flooding washed away the main roads into the district.

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winter floods resulted in $2.39 billion of infrastructure damage. From 1998 to 2000, drought in the same country cost them a further $2.41 billion – about 16 % of GDP. It is quite amazing that something so essential for sustaining life can, at the same time, be so destructive.

The drive to 2015 As 2015 draws near, those involved in the drive to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are subject to two conflicting emotions: ‘quiet confidence’ and ‘panic’. In countries where everything is on track, there has been little need to worry – unless, of course, the current global economic crisis results in a tightening of the development support purses. However, many of the world’s poorest countries are having difficulty keeping up with the competing demands to meet all the MDG targets at the same time. With respect to water supply and sanitation services, there is a mixed picture. There has been much attention paid to monitoring

Sanitation was an attempt to bring the right kind of awareness and focus to the dire need for governments to help their people improve management of human waste. Unfortunately, experts predict that, by 2015, approximately 2.4 billion people will still lack basic sanitation. Furthermore, at the present rate of delivery of sanitation services, 700 million people will still lack improved sanitation by 2015. On average, 173 million people a year would need to have access to improved sanitation if the MDG target is to be reached. The majority of the countries where progress is particularly slow are the poorer areas of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia (South and East). Inadequate sanitation combined with a lack of safe drinking water and poor hygiene contributes to terrible sickness, loss of productivity and death in developing countries. Children, women and men are equally vulnerable. There has been more progress towards reaching the water supply targets. Current trends show that more than 90% of the

Many of the world’s poorest countries are having difficulty keeping up with the competing demands to meet all the MDG targets. progress in reaching the MDG targets related to water supply and sanitation. Access to water supply and sanitation are viewed as a basic human right that must be met. Access is also viewed as fully justified from an economic perspective. The quality of life and the ability of people to contribute to economic growth are improved with access to water supply and sanitation services. Sadly, there is much cause for concern with respect to the progress being made towards achieving the sanitation goals. Currently, more than 2.5 billion people do not have access to an improved sanitation facility and, of these, almost 1.8 billion are in Asia. Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of the poor sanitation conditions to which they are exposed. The 2008 International Year of

world’s population will have access to improved drinking water by 2015. Much of the progress can be attributed to China and India, who now have between 76% and 90% coverage. However, in the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania, progress is still very slow and additional efforts will be needed to help those countries move as close to reaching the targets as they possibly can within the next few years.

Setting the goals Sustainable water management will be required, not just to reach the MDG target for water supply and sanitation, but also for the other targets – in particular, those related to tackling poverty and education, and addressing hunger, health and gender issues.

Photo: Greenpeace

WATER SECURITY

A young girl in Kampong Chnang in Cambodia (above) clutches a bottle of precious drinking water after extreme drought dried up the village wells.

Indeed, social and economic development cannot occur without sustainable access to enough water. The various points set out below can help us to understand how the sustainable management of water is essential to the achievement of the MDGs. Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger Water security is essential for improving the quality of life – for health (drinking, eating and bathing) and for economic development (manufacturing and business). Ensuring that safe water supply, sanitation and irrigation demands are met is a direct opportunity to help the poor address their food and income generation needs. Access to a safe water supply and sanitation help to increase productivity by reducing sick days and the time spent drawing water. Mitigating against floods, droughts and other water related vulnerabilities also help keep the poor on a steady growth path. When the poor can benefit from the opportunities offered by access to sustainable water-related services, this goes a long way to helping to reduce poverty.

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OVERCOMING OBSTACLES

Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education Sustainable access to water supply, sanitation services and hygiene education at home helps to keep children healthy so that they can attend school regularly. Sanitation and water facilities also underpin a healthy school environment. Furthermore, it has been clearly shown that girls will go to school if latrines are provided. In the Nokali district of Pakistan, for example, it has been shown that installing water and separate sanitation facilities for girls increased their attendance by 15%. Finally, improved water management can help to reduce the risk of floods and other natural disasters that interrupt educational activities.

Goal 4: Reduce child mortality The quality of their immediate nurturing environment is crucial for the survival of babies and children. Without safe water, adequate hygiene and sanitation, children are constantly at risk. Ensuring that safe drinking water is available and that improved personal/household hygiene and excreta disposal are practiced will help to reduce infant/child morbidity and mortality. Nutritional status and the ability to do better in school will also improve for children with

access to a safe water supply and sanitation. Furthermore, one cannot imagine a child walking by a body of water or a stream without stepping in for paddle or a swim, splashing other kids or, at the very least, really wanting to do so. You canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t keep kids away from water, but the water they are exposed to is generally unsafe for them to play in. Improved water management can help with tackling food security and vector control for example, important issues to address where the health of children and infants is at stake. Goal 5: Improve maternal health Better water supply and sanitation services contribute to improving maternal health. Reducing the burden of fetching water and looking after sick children helps maintain the health of women and their families. Improving hygiene services for women also has a beneficial impact. Also, improvements in water management can help with tackling food security and disease vector control, such as dealing with the malaria mosquito.

Photo: Panos

Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women The burden of managing the family and sustaining the household has always fallen disproportionately on women. Managing household hygiene and sanitation is also a task that is often left to women. Fetching and storing water takes up much of their time,

so interventions that make water more directly available are a specific contribution to the promotion of gender equality and empowerment. Domestic burdens are lightened, facilitating womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s participation in other affairs of their communities if they so choose. Time saved from fetching water also allows women to take better care of themselves and their families. And a community water supply provides an excellent opportunity for women to break into management.

A makeshift refugee camp in Kenya (above), which shelters more than 380 households of herders and nomads who have all lost their livelihoods due to continuing drought.

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INVITATION TO HOLD THE 6th WORLD WATER FORUM 2012 IN SOUTH AFRICA It gives me great pleasure, on behalf of our country and all the peoples of Africa to invite the World Water Council to hold its 6th World Water Forum in 2012 in South Africa. Water is essential to the survival of all living things as well as our economic and social development, hence the maxim “Water is life”. This living resource transcends most political and administrative boundaries and largely flows where and when it wills. If we are to forge a future for our mutual benefit, then it is important that we engage in conversations looking at water beyond boundaries, in order to secure our common future. The world’s available water supplies must be shared and harnessed among and between individuals, economic sector, interstate jurisdiction and sovereign nations, while respecting the need for environmental sustainability. These conflicting demands present challenges surrounding the equitable sharing of water resources. The problems associated with it are complex and will continue to intensify due to population growth, development pressures and changing needs and values. The growing competition between different development sectors in countries has intensified and to varying degrees this has placed increasing strain on water supplies both in terms of quantity and quality. This has resulted in tensions and, indeed, conflict between uses, users and across political boundaries. Africa is not immune to these tensions and challenges and given her history and her transformative journey, it is our view that finding solutions to challenges and problems in Africa provides potential solutions to the world’s problems as the nature of our challenges mirrors albeit in a particular sphere. With these scenarios in mind, we would be honoured to host the 6th World Water Forum in 2012 as this presents an ideal opportunity for us to further and deepen the urgent conversations around this precious resource. The African continent endorses our bid to bring the 6th World Water Forum to the Southern Hemisphere and to participate in and share with Africa and the world’s engagement on these challenging issues. May I assure you that South Africa has the infrastructure and beauty to host a Forum of this nature especially after hosting the 2010 FIFA World Cup. South Africa looks forward to welcoming you onto African soil.

OVERCOMING OBSTACLES

Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases Malaria, onchocerciasis, shistosomiasis, guinea worm, diarrhoea, cholera and dysentery are all water related diseases, related to how well we manage water and excreta. Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability Water security is key to the sustainable use of land, plant and animal resources. Pollution, erosion and loss of biodiversity in wetlands and estuaries are all related to water security. If water resources are not adequately managed and protected, they will not be able to sustain human communities. The Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) approach offers a structured

mechanism to facilitate the achievement of a balance among social, economic and environmental sustainability objectives of development. Communities that are organised to manage their water are also better equipped to manage their local environments.

Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development Since water security is key to achieving the MDGs, it is critical that it is managed sustainably. Countries need to collaborate across national boundaries, within basins and at a local level to manage competing demands from water users. They need to look for win/win solutions for economic and social development. Donors must be bold in supporting countries that need to build infrastructure and necessary conveyances to help them better deal with water-related shocks and to better store and transport water for future use, at a small or large scale. They also need to support accompanying improvements in institutions, governance

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Photo: Greenpeace

When there is ownership of this agenda at the highest political level, then change will come.

A woman from Ahora in Papua New Guinea (above) takes a sample of water from the local well, which has been contaminated by emissions from the palm oil industry and has affected the health and lifestyle of the community.

and sector management. One of the most important things that donors can do is to work in partnership with national sector/ development plans. The time is past when each donor worked to have their own individual development support programmes.

Addressing the issues There are three important issues that need to be addressed if the water supply and sanitation millennium development goal targets are to be met by 2015. Firstly, policy and decision-makers need to make this a priority, provide leadership and allocate the support and resources that are needed. Secondly, responsible sector agencies need to establish sustainable water supply and

sanitation service delivery plans that involve recipient rural and urban communities responsibly and integrate hygiene education. And thirdly, competing demands for water resources need to be tackled consistently and comprehensively, to ensure there are adequate amounts available for service delivery needs. Of these three, the most important at this late stage is the first one. When there is ownership of this agenda at the highest political level, then change will come. Leaders such as the President of Madagascar, who has publicly declared his intention to meet his peoplesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; need for adequate water and sanitation services, are the examples for others to follow.

WATER RESOURCES IN SPAIN: GUARANTEEING SUSTAINABILITY The water policy of the Spanish Ministry of Environment, and Rural and Marine Affairs is based on a sustainable management that ensures all its uses: public supply, economic activities, ecological functions, and social values.

The main aim is to achieve an economic development compatible with environmental protection by applying strategic actions:

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

National Water Quality Plan (2007-2015) Spill Control Management National River Restoration Strategy

EFFICIENT WATER USE

Modernisation and Maintenance of Dams and Hydraulic Works Water Reuse National Irrigation Modernisation Plan Desalination

RISK MANAGEMENT

Floods: National Flood Risk Map System Droughts: Drought Management Plans

HYDROLOGICAL PLANNING AND PUBLIC PARTICIPATION River Basin Management Plans

Through these actions, Spain is adapting its water policies to the European Union legislation and criteria, highlighting standards such as economic rationality, environmental sustainability, and public participation. The ultimate goal is to achieve a balance between water management and protection, improving the status of both surface water and groundwater.

DURING THE 5TH WORLD WATER FORUM EXPO, WE INVITE ALL PARTICIPANTS TO VISIT THE SPANISH STAND WHERE WATER TECHNOLOGIES, CURRENT PROJECTS, AND EXPERIENCES WILL BE SHARED AND DISPLAYED.

Photo: Eye Ubiquitous & Hutchison

OVERCOMING OBSTACLES

The Yellow River (above), China’s second longest waterway, is running low as a result of higher temperatures, lower rainfall, and increased industrial and agricultural usage.

Managing the supply

Sustainable water management is complex and challenging because it is connected to so many social and economic activities and sectors – agriculture, industry, urban development, health, industry, transport, environment, energy – which often address their water management needs and issues separately. Because the requirements of different sectors vary, higher priority is given to different sectors depending on individual country needs and political decision-making. The IWRM approach offers a framework for countries and transboundary regions to develop sustainable systems and plans for water management, within which trade-offs among development objectives of different sectors can be considered, resulting in win/win water-related investment solutions. Different interests are aligned and integrated to support socially equitable and economic development efforts. This approach used as an applied research tool helps to raise awareness, promotes links among the different water interests, and helps decisionmakers obtain the right information so that they can make the right, albeit sometimes difficult, choices for the common good. Water is too precious a resource to be left unmanaged. Its power needs to be harnessed and its potential channelled in the right directions, supporting development objectives.

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Countries need to allocate and manage water strategically – both before and after its use – in the light of national development goals, going beyond individual sectoral needs if necessary. If poor countries are to achieve their economic and social development goals, there needs to be immediate focused action. Issues such as better management systems, strategic allocation and sharing, and dealing with the destructive impact of water need to be taken seriously. More effective

Water is too precious a resource to be left unmanaged. Its power needs to be harnessed and its potential channelled in the right directions. communication and shared decision-making among different agencies, organizations, interest groups and communities can help overcome both administrative boundaries and rural/urban divides. There needs to be greater awareness among decision-makers about costs and benefits, as well as the positive and negative roles that water can play in economic and social development.

Countries need to adopt reasonable levels of water security if they are to meet the MDGs, particularly the water supply and sanitation targets. However, achieving and sustaining the higher levels of water security that are needed to meet the MDGs will be made more difficult by the many emerging challenges – climate change, growing urbanisation, higher food and energy prices – that we see on the horizon beyond the current global economic crisis. 2015 is fast approaching. The water sector should continue to do its part to help ensure that all the MDG targets are met.

References: Grey, D and Sadoff, C. ‘Sink or Swim: Water Security for Growth and Development’. Water Policy Vol 9 No 6. (IWA Publishing, 2007.) Grey, D and Sadoff, C. ‘Achieving Water Security in Africa: Investing in a Minimum Platform of Infrastructure & Institutions’. (Power point presentation at the First African Water Week, 26- 28 March, 2008.) ‘Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation’. Special Focus on Sanitation. (UNICEF and WHO. 2008.) ‘How IWRM will contribute to achieving the MDGs’. GWP Policy Brief 4. (Technical Committee. 2006.) ‘Health, Dignity, and Development: What will it take?’. Task Force Report. (Stockholm International Water Institute. 2005.)

SETTING PRIORITIES

The Water Security Imperative: We must and can do more With a myriad of crises facing the world today, the problem of water security is often overlooked. However, it needs to be placed at the top of the political agenda.

e write this essay as 2008 draws to a close and 2009 dawns upon us. As always we, the salaried and educated from around the world, use this time to look back on a year gone by and reflect on the news stories that captivated us – the ‘new, near and now’ news that makes our headlines. This past year ended with a flurry of stories about the financial meltdown and on the huge wealth made and lost on the back of poorly regulated and little-understood financial products. We worry about our jobs, invested savings and pensions. Other stories that dominated the news include the historic US presidential election, the terror attacks on Mumbai, and the creeping realities of climate change and our potentially frightening future. We worry about growing insecurity and how our lives and those of our children may change. But as we gather in Istanbul for The 5th World Water Forum, let us pause for a moment and reflect on the realities of water insecurity faced today by a huge proportion of the world’s population. Although very large events, such as Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar and the Kosi floods in Nepal and India, do grab the attention of the salaried and educated, they rarely hold it for very long. And most of the world’s water shocks make little or no appearance in anything but the local news. For most of us, it isn’t something we have to worry about.

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Yet limited access to an acceptable quantity and quality of water is a defining condition of the daily lives of millions of poor people in both rural and urban settlements. They pay a huge amount for often abysmal water services – in cash for vended water, in time spent collecting water and in ill health. In addition, water-related shocks – floods, droughts, landslides, pollution incidents and disease, all combined with ill preparedness and low coping capacities – present unacceptably high levels of risk for most of the world’s poorest

Photo: Gettyimages

By David Grey and Genevieve Connors

economic mainstay. It is perhaps a measure of this centrality that water infrastructure is often visible and cherished – the ancient, ornate step wells of South Asia being a stunning, deeply cultural example of this. In contrast, we the salaried and educated do not worry about water insecurity. It is no longer a defining condition of our lives. In a highly urbanized economy, water is just one of many inputs to production, and whereas it remains central to growth, its perceived importance declines in the eyes of an urbanized elite. Admittedly, the members of

Most of the world’s water shocks make little or no appearance in anything but the local news. people. They are deeply water insecure. In cities, for example, the poor are often cramped into the most flood-prone areas, where land and housing are cheap but coping costs are high. In rural areas, unreliable rainfall can mean disaster and, even with good rains, tail-end farmers are usually the poorest who get too little water too late. Across the entire developing world, water security is a priority goal – both for the urban poor, where livelihoods are eked out on the margins, and for large rural populations where agriculture is the

the global water community care greatly about these issues, to which many of us have devoted our professional lives, whether as engineers or social scientists, as members of the private or public sector, or as government or non-government representatives. But, for the most part, we too are isolated from water-related shocks, the memory of which has receded to a distant, even ancestral, past. Floods in rich neighbourhoods are brief and mitigated and rarely displace us from our homes; a water supply, however intermittent and stored locally, runs through

WATER SECURITY

In the headlines

our taps and flushes our toilets; diverse agricultural produce graces our tables. For us, the risk of water-related shocks is low and our coping capacities high. Moreover, in order to overcome complexity, we have made a discipline of water, slicing it into sectors (e.g. urban and rural water supply, sanitation, hydropower, irrigation, water resources management) and topics (e.g. gender, participation, climate change). We come to Istanbul with a wide range of values, ideologies, preferences and prescriptions. These ‘sacred cows’ range from the opposition of policy prescriptions (e.g. ‘privatisation is good/bad’ or ‘large/small dams are good/bad’) to focused attention on favoured themes (e.g. cost recovery, user associations and participation, demandbased approaches, integrated management). The former spark intense debates and the latter, although perhaps sound in themselves, have created a limited and prescriptive toolkit of solutions. Although the elevation and subsequent spurning of ‘sacred cows’ has fostered much learning, we have tended to drift away from the basics of the water security imperative. This short essay is intended as a reminder of what water security really means to so many people, and how important a development goal it remains.

In August, tens of thousands of people were displaced by heavy flooding in Togo and nine major bridges were destroyed. And in November, heavy rain in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina resulted in more than

We come to Istanbul with a wide range of values, ideologies, preferences and prescriptions. 4,000 mudslides and the destruction of 80,000 homes. Throughout the year, the signs of creeping desertification manifested themselves around the world. Australia continued to reel from a long-standing drought, with huge production cuts in major crops and farmer suicides double that of the national population. And countless stories of disaster were hidden in local news reports in Africa, each too small to be heard but collectively telling a tale of a deeply water-insecure continent. While such water-related shocks are indiscriminately scattered, it is invariably the wealthy who cope best and the poor who

Photo: Gettyimages

Villagers from Bihar in India (above) queue for milk after being displaced from their homes when the Kosi river breached its embankment in 2008.

Looking back on water stories in the year gone by reveals a shocking tale. The effects of Cyclone Nargis and the Kosi floods were catastrophic and the numbers speak for themselves. In Myanmar, entire villages were submerged when the tropical cyclone hit the low-lying Irrawaddy delta, killing more than 75,000 people. The breach in the embankment of the Kosi river in Nepal displaced more than 70,000 people in Nepal and 650,000 people in India, with about 3.4 million people and 340,000 hectares of cropped land affected in Bihar alone. Much less coverage was devoted to other large and small water-related shocks in what was not even a particularly devastating year. In February, an oil pollution scare cut off the water supply to 100,000 people in the Chinese city of Foshan, while flooding brought the Indonesian capital of Jakarta to a standstill, with 100,000 people displaced. In June, major floods hit the midwest of the United States, with 25,000 people evacuated in the Iowan city of Cedar Rapids alone. And China, still reeling from the Sichuan earthquake, saw the worst floods in 50 years in its southern provinces, inundating 1 million hectares of farmland and forcing the evacuation of 1.66 million people.

The disastrous floods in India and Nepal in 2008 resulted in millions of people being rendered homeless and reliant on the emergency aid parcels distributed via relief helicopter by the Indian Air Force (above).

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SETTING PRIORITIES

struggle the most. Indeed, the ability to cope with such events – along with others less extreme – and to lower the variability in their incidence in the first place, is perhaps what defines water security the most.

These already challenging conditions are being compounded by climate change, which will be felt most acutely in developing countries.

Water is both productive and destructive. Therefore, water security can be defined as, on the one hand, ensuring the availability of an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods, ecosystems and production and, on the other hand, maintaining an acceptable level of waterrelated risks to people, environment and economies1. Defined in this way, water security is essential for growth and development. Improving the quantity and quality of water must be balanced with reducing exposure to water-related risks, including both hydrological and nonhydrological shocks (e.g. crises due to human activity, including errors, hostile action, or simply choices made regarding land use and management). The imperative of achieving water security is intensified by disturbing evidence of the ‘difficult hydrology’ of many poor countries, which indicates that people are poor because they are water insecure and not the inverse. Analysis of global data reveals a statistically significant relationship between greater rainfall variability and lower per capita GDP, placing most wealthy nations in a small window of favourable climate with low variability and moderate rainfall2. In contrast, developing countries on average face much more challenging conditions, typically

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Photo: Gettyimages

Defining water security

An aerial view of the devastated Madhepura district (above) in the state of Bihar in 2008, where entire villages were engulfed by flood waters after the Kosi river breached its embankment in Nepal near the border with India.

including higher mean annual rainfall and/or higher rainfall variability. Poor countries with particularly high variability are unusually hard hit, lacking the storage infrastructure needed to capture seasonal excesses to provide supply in shortfall months. For example, there are only about 30 days of reservoir storage capacity on the Ganges and Indus rivers in South Asia, compared to 900 days on the Colorado and MurrayDarling rivers in the US and Australia. Today, these already challenging conditions are being compounded by climate change, which will be felt most acutely in developing countries and regions least able to cope with the predicted threats and to bear the

associated – and potentially enormous – adaptation costs. Climate change is already happening and further changes are predicted, including higher temperatures, more variable rainfall, sea level rise, intensified drought and flood shocks, glacier and snow melt, all resulting in a higher incidence of extreme events and natural disasters. The potential impact of climate change on the water security of countries and regions with already ‘difficult hydrologies’ is frightening. More than 1.5 billion people live in the basins of the rivers that rise in the Greater Himalayas, over 700 million of them in the international basins of the Indus and the Ganges-Brahmaputra. This is an extreme example of the extent to which

WATER SECURITY

Bridging the gap To some extent, the rich in countries with difficult hydrologies cope with water insecurity by investing their way out, both at the household and the sub-national level.

and infrastructure (including physical assets). For countries with high rainfall and runoff variability – which are predominantly developing countries – this strategy on three fronts will cost more but will, in turn, produce greater gains. High costs require trade-offs to be made in the choice and mix of investments, particularly in developing countries where resources are scarce. This requires planning and investing in water security from at least a basin context, in which choices need to be negotiated, yielding a blend of irrigation, rural and urban water supply and sanitation, hydropower, ecosystem, and multipurpose investments. Outcomes will depend on perceptions of associated costs and benefits, including the levels of water-related risks a particular basin community seeks and can

Photo: Gettyimages

achieving water security, as well as associated political stability, will often require crossing national jurisdictions and international borders. The Himalayas also contain the largest body of ice outside the polar regions and observations suggest they are undergoing fast glacier retreat, with potentially catastrophic consequences for dry season flows in the long term. There are already many millions of climate migrants today. Without great international effort to achieve water security, what does the future have in store?

For example, enclave behaviour enables the wealthy to import the skills and capital needed to build infrastructure and institutions for the distinct areas that service them, while all around them poor fellow nationals remain awash in a sea of insecurity. But the wealthy also suffer from the absence of national water security for their country’s growth and development. What is more evident is that those countries that are water secure have, on average, benefited from an easy hydrology (i.e. less variability and more predictability) and, as a consequence, have harnessed their water resources early on in their development paths with catalytic reductions in waterrelated risks. And where today’s water-secure countries have not benefited from so easy a hydrology, they have usually been wealthy enough to act early. Food-prone but wealthy Japan, for example, invested heavily in flood control starting in the 1960s, resulting in huge improvements in water security, including a dramatic reduction in the cost of flood damages as a percentage of GNP. Today’s developed economies have all invested heavily in institutions, information and infrastructure to build water secure futures, and the imperative to do so now in developing countries is indisputable. We mention this evidence not to despair at the difficult hydrology of developing countries, but to return to the basics of the water security imperative and to highlight the need for solutions suited to local contexts and free of compartmentalized and normative ideologies. After all, as Tvedt and Jakobsson3 observe, water landscapes affect societies and their development patterns so immensely that theories and prescriptions with universal ambitions must be seriously questioned. The toolkit currently at the disposal of the global professional water community is extensive and we must be prepared to identify solutions from all the methods at our disposal, adapted to local context every step of the way. To achieve water security, investments must be made in a minimum platform of the three ‘in’s: institutions (including rules, regulations, incentives and organizations); information (including data and education);

Refugees from the 2008 floods in India (above) take shelter in one of the temporary medical camps set up in the Bathna area of the district of Araria.

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SETTING PRIORITIES

and remaking of the water agenda, the water security imperative has receded from the forefront of political priorities and of our professional interests. Let us then pause for a moment in Istanbul to remember our responsibility to all those who live their lives with limited access to an acceptable quantity and quality of water and with high levels of risk of water-related shocks. They do not think in sectors, nor do they have particular ideologies about the ‘how, what or who’ of

Water security needs to be an explicit universal objective, not only for reasons of ethics and equity, but also for global political security.

Photo: Gettyimages

investing in the three ‘in’s. They just want and need water security so that they, like us, can forget what it once meant to be water insecure. And so that they, like us, can live lives of dignity and opportunity. We, the members of the water professional community, must and can do more.

Villagers who have been marooned by flood waters in Birpur (above) in the district of Sapaul in Bihar, India, race to retrieve emergency food and medical parcels dropped by helicopter by the Indian Air Force.

afford. Evidence suggests that the poorest may face the highest costs to achieve the minimum platform for water security, which is one cause of the deep poverty trap in which they find themselves. Without grant financing, their water security is an impossible goal. Water security needs to be an explicit universal objective, not only for reasons of ethics and equity, but also for global political security. The point is obvious but important: to achieve water security for the poorest, we must ignore sector bias and normative ideologies, regroup around basins as a collective professional community, consider

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every tool in our toolkit, campaign for major financial resource transfers, and reach for pragmatic solutions that recognize the hydrology of individual water landscapes, political economies and societal values. The call in this essay for greater attention to the global water security imperative is not new. Neither is the call for a basin approach (which shares its roots with the integrated water resources management approach) or for consideration of political economy and local context in the diagnosis. But we make the case that, at some point in the urbanisation and industrialisation of societies and in the making

Please note: The findings, interpretations and conclusions in this paper are entirely the authors’. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent.

References: Grey, D and Sadoff, C. ‘Sink or Swim: Water Security for Growth and Development’. Water Policy Vol 9 No 6. (IWA Publishing. 2007.) 2 Brown, C and Lall, U. ‘Water and Economic Development: The role of variability and a framework for resilience’. Natural Resources Forum Vol 30 No 4. (Blackwell. 2006.) 3 Tvedt, T and Jakobsson, E. ‘Water History is World History’. A History of Water, Volume 3: Water Control and River Biographies. (IB Tauris, London. 2006.) 1

We look forward to Building Bridges with you! AQUAFED is the International Federation of Private Water Operators, a not-for-profit organisation representing private water and sanitation service operators: companies that deliver drinking water and manage wastewater under the direction of governments. WHO WE ARE Membership is made up of individual companies and their respective national associations. AquaFed is open to companies of all sizes and nationalities and brings together over 300 water services companies from 40 countries. Since its creation in 2005, AquaFed has been recognized as the voice of the private water industry vis-à-vis international organisations. In 2008, AquaFed became an official Friend of UN-Water.

RESULTS COUNT OUR MEMBERS MAKE A DIFFERENCE FOR COMMUNITIES WORLDWIDE AquaFed is proud of the performance of its members. In close collaboration with authorities, they deliver good quality services to hundreds of millions of people in both developing and developed countries. The trend for more private sector participation in water and sanitation services delivery continues. More private operators and more public-private partnerships are a clear sign of the potential that private sector participation offers as an additional lever that enables Governments to turn their ambitions for better services into a reality.

BRUSSELS OFFICE 6, rond point Schuman box 5 B1040 Brussels – Belgium Tel: +32 2 234 78 07 Fax: +32 2 234 79 11

PARIS OFFICE 54, avenue Hoche F75008 Paris – France Tel: +33 1 56 60 50 07 Fax: +33 1 56 60 56 50

OUR KEY MESSAGES IN 2008 AND 2009 Call for recognition and implementation of the human Right to Water and Sanitation. ● More ambitious water policies and more projects in the field are necessary, in particular to satisfy the needs of the 3 billion people who have to carry water every day. ● Sanitation includes several components that must be managed simultaneously. We launched the “Integrated Sanitation Management” concept. ● Promotion of the concept of Sustainable Cost-Recovery that ensures financial sustainability and affordable prices for all simultaneously. ● Private operators contribute significantly to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and to governments’ water policies. ● We contributed to the Global Corruption Report 2008 published by Transparency International and the global Water Integrity Network (WIN), of which the Federation is a founding member. ●

OUR PARTICIPATION IN THE FIFTH WORLD WATER FORUM In Istanbul, AquaFed, a member of the World Water Council, contributes in the following ways: ● We have been involved in the thematic preparations for more than 2 years and co-organised several sessions in partnership with various other stakeholders. ● Our Members and representatives participate in the thematic forum and have various booths in the technical exhibition. ● Together with the International Chamber of Commerce, the World Business Council for Sustainable development and their local Turkish counterparts, AquaFed formed the “Business Action for Water”, the platform that represents the Business and Industry Major Group in the Political Process.

Photo: Panos

PUBLIC IRRIGATION

A Bangladeshi farmer uses a water pump to irrigate his fields (above), saving himself the hundreds of man-hours he would otherwise have spent manually supplying the 5,000 litres of water that it takes to produce 1 kg of rice.

Reform or morph? Unlocking value in Asian irrigation By Tushaar Shah

Public irrigation systems have failed to adapt to changing times in Asia and it’s the farmers themselves who have seized the initiative. Is it too late for governments to catch up? “The development of irrigation has outrun its administration.” Colonel W Greathed, Chief Engineer, Upper Ganga Canal, 1869

ravity-flow irrigation has dominated irrigated agriculture in Asia for millennia. Until European colonial powers began constructing large, centrallymanaged irrigation systems in the 19th Century and later, much irrigation in Asia, barring some exceptions, was on a small scale and organised around irrigation communities. During the colonial era, European initiatives in building large irrigation projects under centralized management marked a watershed

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in Asia’s irrigation history and, up until the 1940s, much new irrigation development took place under colonial governments that viewed irrigation as a way to blend “interests of charity and the interests of commerce.” In India, the British levied enhanced taxes from irrigated land; in Taiwan and China, the Japanese sought enhanced rice supplies by investing in irrigation. With the end of colonialism, the tradition of centralised irrigation development and management has been continued by national and sub-national governments for food security and poverty reduction, with significant support from multi-lateral international financial agencies.

However, poor management and performance of public irrigation systems was a concern throughout the colonial era and this concern has multiplied manifold in post-colonial Asia. During recent decades, surface irrigation is in decline in many parts of Asia. Public irrigation systems have tended to be underutilised and over-capitalised, and typically serve only a fraction of the designed command. With ageing, irrigation commands have been sinking under the weight of their managerial, economic and environmental problems. In the Indian sub-continent, with by far the largest areas under surface irrigation in Asia, small surface structures – tanks in southern India and Rajasthan, karezes in Pakistan and Iran, kuhls in the Himalayas, ahar-pyne systems in southern Bihar – had been losing irrigated area since the 1950s. But during the 1990s, even large public irrigation systems began shrinking. Between 1994 and 2001, India and Pakistan together lost over 5.5 million hectares of canal-irrigated areas despite massive investments in rehabilitation and new projects. In Central and Southeast Asia, figures are not as dismal, but the present performance and future sustainability of irrigation projects has remained a matter of growing concern.

Institutional reforms in surface irrigation In recent years, researchers, donors, non-governmental organizations and governments have sought to reverse this declining trend through institutional reforms, in the form of Participatory Irrigation Management or Irrigation Management Transfer (PIM/IMT) to farmer associations. This idea derives from the variety of Farmer-managed Irrigation Systems (FMIS) that proliferated – and can still be found – in Asia. As with all complex socio-technical systems, these systems required, generated and nurtured a ‘culture of irrigation’ in order to work efficiently. So central was this culture to shaping the social lives of irrigators that anthropologist Robert Hunt called such

WATER MANAGEMENT

Large systems were built and managed effectively only when external authority could enforce rules. size of irrigation systems. Unsurprising, then, that most FMIS were small-scale systems that could be sustained over centuries by local irrigation communities, often with cooperation aided by coercion from local authority

structures. These survived and thrived as long as they met three ongoing challenges facing all multi-user irrigation systems: Rule-enforcement To keep in check the anarchy endemic to these systems by punishing deviations such as water thefts, vandalism and violation of distribution norms. Anarchy control ensured efficient and equitable provision of irrigation service and helped maximize ‘member-value’, but required deft system management backed by authority. Regular maintenance To counter the atrophy endemic to irrigation systems due to gradual disfigurement, arrested only by constant investment in their maintenance and upkeep. Atrophy control ensured the physical sustainability of the systems – which sometimes lasted for centuries – but required ruthless collection of irrigation service fees, often in the form of labour. Upgradation To minimise the ‘noise’ – which is defined as the gap between the service a system is capable of delivering and the service irrigators demand at a particular point in time – of adapting the system

Photo: Still Pictures

groupings “irrigation communities”. With large gravity-flow systems constructed by the state, system design and centralised operation acquired greater significance. But despite caution from the likes of Hunt and sociologist Walter Coward, it had been widely assumed that catalysing and nurturing vibrant irrigation communities or Water User Associations in command areas would ensure that large irrigation systems functioned as well as traditional FMIS. This assumption is now proving farfetched. For centuries, the feasibility of catalysing a viable irrigation community determined the

A communally-farmed vegetable and fruit garden (above) in Kutepe, Oecussi-Ambeno in East Timor.

to changing service expectations of irrigators as changes in farming systems modified irrigation demands. ‘Noise’ is minimised by constant upgradation to meet changing irrigation demand patterns. Until some decades ago, ‘noise’ control was not much of an issue in Asian irrigation. However, during recent decades, with household farming systems in the throes of massive change, ‘noise’ control has become a critical driver of irrigation system performance.

Photo: IWMI

Clearly, authority – either constituted endogenously within the irrigation community or provided from outside – was always central to sustained control of anarchy and atrophy. Large systems were therefore built and managed effectively only when external authority could enforce rules, as well as secure resources and labour for maintenance and repair. The colonial state had the necessary authority as well as incentive to keep anarchy and atrophy in check. In many parts of Asia, the post-colonial state has neither. Moreover, ‘noise’ was never as important a performance depressant in Asian irrigation systems as it is today, with farmers expecting on-demand irrigation all year round to support intensification and diversification of their subsistence farming. In this sense, decline in community and public irrigation systems is a reflection of larger changes underway in Asian society. The ready availability of inexpensive water pumps has led to an explosion in atomistic irrigation in India (above).

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PUBLIC IRRIGATION

Changing socio-technical foundations of Asian irrigation Table 1 (see right) summarizes a selection of socio-technical conditions that prevailed during pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial eras in many Asian countries. The hypothesis is that the particular forms of irrigation organization we find in these eras were in sync with the socio-technical fundamentals of those times. Irrigation communities thrived during pre-colonial times when: [a] there was no alternative to sustained collective action in developing irrigation; [b] strong local authority structures – such as zamindars in Mughal India – promoted and even coerced collective action to enhance land revenue through irrigation; and [c] exit from farming was difficult.

Pre-Colonial (Adaptive Irrigation)

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Post-Colonial (Atomistic Irrigation)

Unit of irrigation organization

Irrigation community.

Nature of the state

Strong local authority; land taxes key source of Strong local authority; state income; forced state and people lived labour; maximising land off the land; forced revenue and export to labour; maximizing land home markets is chief revenue chief motive for motive for irrigation irrigation investments. investments; state used irrigation for exportable crops.

Weak state and weaker local authority; land taxes insignificant; poverty reduction, food security and donor funding key motive for irrigation investments; forced labour impossible; electoral politics interfere with orderly management.

Nature of agrarian society

No private property in land; subsistence farming, high taxes and poor access to capital and market key constraints to growth; escape from farming difficult; most command area farmers grow rice.

No property rights in land; subsistence farming and high taxes; access to capital and market key constraints to growth; escape from farming difficult; tenurial insecurity; most command area farmers grow uniform crops, mainly rice.

Ownership or secure land use rights for farmers; subsistence plus high value crops for markets; growing opportunities for off-farm livelihoods; intensive diversification of land use; command areas witness a wide variety of crops being grown, with different irrigation scheduling requirements.

Abundant land going begging for cultivation; irrigable land is used by feudal lords to attract tenants.

Population explosion after 1950 and slow pace of industrialisation promoted ghettoisation of agriculture in South and Southeast Asia and China.

Lifting of water, as well as its transport, is highly labour intensive and costly.

Small mechanical pumps, cheap boring rigs, and low cost rubber/PVC pipes drastically reduce cost and difficulty of lifting and transporting water from surface and groundwater.

Agrarian economies are the throes of massive change. Similarly, large scale irrigation systems during colonial times kept anarchy, atrophy and ‘noise’ in check because: [a] land revenue was the chief source of government income, and enhancing it was the chief motive behind irrigation investments; [b] the state had a deep agrarian presence and used its authority to extract ‘irrigation surplus’ and impose discipline in irrigation commands; and [c] farmers had no practical alternatives to subsistence farming livelihoods nor to gravity-flow irrigation. These socio-technical conditions created an institutional lock-in that ensured that public irrigation systems performed in terms of criteria relevant to their managers at those times. Post-colonial Asian societies present a wholly new array of socio-technical conditions in which neither irrigation communities nor disciplined command areas are able to thrive. The welfare state’s revenue interests in agriculture are minimal, while the prime motive for irrigation investments is food security and poverty reduction, not maximizing government income.

Colonial (Constructive Imperialism)

Demographics

State of irrigation technology

Lifting of water, as well as its transport, is highly labour intensive and costly.

Centrally managed irrigation system.

Individual farmer.

Table 1: Chart outlining the socio-technical context of surface irrigation during different eras in history.

Governments have neither the presence and authority nor the will to collect even the minimal irrigation fees needed to maintain systems. Aside from this, agrarian economies are in the throes of massive change. Farmers can – and do – exit agriculture with greater ease than ever before. Growing population pressure has made smallholder farming unviable except when it can intensify land use and diversify

to high-value crops for growing urban and export markets. Finally, gravity-flow irrigation systems have been hit by the mass availability of small pumps, pipes and boring technologies that have made the irrigation community redundant. These have also made the irrigator impervious to the anarchy, atrophy and ‘noise’ of surface systems, and therefore reduced their stake in their performance.

Photo: Eye Ubiquitous & Hutchison

PUBLIC IRRIGATION

A farming woman using a treadle pump (above) to provide pedal-powered irrigation for her fields in Bangladesh, a country where farmers have mostly abandoned centralised water management in favour of atomistic irrigation.

The shrinking of surface irrigation does not mean irrigation areas of Asia are declining overall. In fact, they are not. Old community and government-managed systems are rapidly giving way to a new atomistic mode of irrigation, in which millions of smallholders are creating their own mini irrigation systems and scavenging water at will using mechanical pumps, wells and rubber or PVC pipes. The rise of this new water-scavenging irrigation economy is most visible in South Asia and the North China plains, where pump irrigation has begun dominating not only dry-land areas but also irrigated areas where public and community irrigation ruled the roost until the 1960s. In India, for example, even as governments keep investing in large, centrally-managed surface irrigation projects, over 60% of irrigated areas today are under atomistic pump irrigation. Farmers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal have created more irrigation under this atomistic mode in the past 30 years than governments and colonial powers created in the 200 years previously. During the 1950s and 60s, Mao’s China built massive irrigation systems to water the North China plains, but today the region irrigates mostly with small pumps and boreholes.

The same trend is now also evident in rice economies of South East Asia, which has long been the home to gravity-flow irrigation communities. In Sri Lanka, which is known for its centuries-old tank irrigation of rice paddies, farmers were unfamiliar with irrigation pumps until the 1980s but, by 2000, were using some 106,000 pumps to scavenge water from a wide variety of sources – wells, tanks, streams – to irrigate dry season rice and vegetables. By 1999, Vietnamese farmers had pressed into service more than

Photo: Eye Ubiquitous & Hutchison

Rise of atomistic irrigation

800,000 diesel pumps. In Thailand, farmers increased their pumps from 500,000 in 1985 to more than 3 million in 1999. And the trend was just picking up. Water management specialist François Molle found that, between 1995 and 1999 alone, Vietnamese farmers purchased more than 300,000 irrigation pumps, and Thai farmers added more than a million. Between 1998 and 2002, Indonesian farmers increased their use of pumps from 1.17 million to 2.17 million. And in the Philippines, economist David Dawe noted that “approximately 23% of rice farms now use pumps to access water, either from sub-soil reservoirs, drainage canals or natural creeks and rivers.” Observers have been struck by the pace of the spread of pump irrigation in Southeast Asia. In Thailand’s Mae Klong project, the World Bank estimated that, in the early 1990s, a million pumps were drawing water from canals, drains, ditches and ponds to irrigate dry season crops. In Thailand’s Chao Phraya delta alone, 80% of farmers are said to have at least one pump. Regarding the Makhamtao-Uthong canal system in Chao Phraya, water management officer Thierry Facon wrote: “Use of groundwater for irrigation has exploded during the last five years. It is reported that 28,000 tubewells are in use in the region… All the farmers interviewed during the field visit reported

Workers engaged in building a new irrigation canal (above) in Hungzhong county in Qinghai province in China, the region from which the country’s mightiest rivers – the Yangtze, Yellow and Mekong – all originate.

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Central Asia

South Asia

South-east Asia

China

1. State’s revenue interest in irrigation agriculture

High

Low

2. State’s capacity to enforce discipline in irrigation systems

Some to high

Low

High

Cotton and/or wheat

Monsoon and summer rice, wheat, cotton, fodder, sugar cane, vegetables and fruit

Wet and dry season rice; high value market crops

Rice

3. Crops in irrigation commands

Reform or morph?

4. Government compulsory ‘levy’ of irrigated crops

Yes

Not any more

5. Spread of pump irrigation within irrigation commands

Low

Very high

High

6. Population pressure on farmland

Low

Very high

High

7. Ease of exit from farming

Low

Some

High

8. Core strategy for unlocking value

Improvise on estate-mode of irrigation farming with PIM or entrepreneurial model in distribution

Adapt surface irrigation systems to support and sustain atomistic irrigation

Modernize irrigation systems to support dryseason rice and diversified farming

Improvise and build upon the incentivised contractor model for distribution and fee collection

Table 2: Chart outlining the socio-technical environment of Asia’s surface irrigation systems.

having individual pumping equipment used to pump from any possible source of water.” Today, the irrigation scene in Asia resembles a palimpsest, with layers of old texts that are constantly being erased to make room for the next stage of atomistic irrigation. This boom in water-scavenging has been supported by the rapid rise of the Chinese pump industry, which has pared the cost as well as the weight of their diesel pumps to a fraction of their competitors’ products. The Chinese export some 4 million diesel pumps annually. Serving 1 hectare per pump, these

is making the farmer immune to the anarchy, atrophy and ‘noise’ in surface systems, and reducing their stake in countering them. The ascent of atomistic irrigation is at different stages in different parts of Asia, as are the socio-technical fundamentals. In South Asia and the North China plains, it is peaking, threatening the relevance of irrigation communities and public irrigation itself. In South East Asia, it is in its early stages, but is already challenging surface irrigation. In central Asia, the jury is out: well irrigation is rising, especially for backyard garden irrigation, but from a small base.

are adding around 4 million hectares of atomistic irrigation every year, mostly in South and Southeast Asia. What atomistic irrigation is able to do – and what community and public surface irrigation is unable to match – is help farmers control the ‘noise’ endemic to surface irrigation systems. Hard-pressed by shrinking land holdings and energised by growing markets for high value farm products, Asia’s smallholders are both intensifying and diversifying their farming systems, which necessitates on-demand irrigation all year round. Atomistic irrigation

In the midst of these changing sociotechnical fundamentals, Asia’s surface irrigation enterprise is up against some hard questions. Everywhere, PIM/IMT is being tried as the panacea. But can PIM/IMT help restore control of anarchy and atrophy in irrigation systems? Can institutional reforms ensure financial and physical sustainability? Can these help improve the rehabilitation of Asia’s surface irrigation systems? The evidence from some decades of experiments is far from encouraging. By far the most celebrated experiments – catalysed, sustained and micro-managed by NGOs with the help of unreplicable quality and scale of resources and donor support – have reported only modest gains in terms of performance and sustainability, leading many researchers to demand a ‘reform of reforms’. Low, uncollected irrigation service fees, growing deferred maintenance, rampant anarchy and inequity in water distribution in Asian surface irrigation are all symptoms of a larger malaise that PIM/IMT seem unable to address. Unlocking value from Asia’s public irrigation capital demands a nuanced exploration of the farmer/system interplay in the context of today’s socio-technical fundamentals, which differ across Asia. Table 2 (see above left) presents a first-cut view of the socio-technical environment in which irrigation systems function in Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and China. Institutional reforms such as PIM/IMT appear

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PUBLIC IRRIGATION

to have the best prospects in central Asia, especially if integrated in the estate mode of irrigated agriculture that European colonial powers popularised in Africa. In China, the model of contracting-out distributaries seems to have produced better results compared to PIM, and this model needs to be improved and built upon. The authority and backing of the

irrigation systems themselves need to morph to fit into today’s socio-technical context. For millennia, irrigation systems were supplydriven. They offered a certain volume of water at certain times with certain dependability. Farmers had no option but to adapt their farming systems to these. Atomistic irrigation, which affords water-on-demand all year

Surface irrigation systems themselves need to morph to fit into today’s socio-technical context. round, has made south Asian irrigation increasingly demand-driven, giving a whole new meaning to the term ‘irrigation management’. With the option of ‘exit’ available, farmers in command areas are now reluctant to exercise ‘voice’ through PIM/IMT, refusing to give their loyalty to an irrigation regime that cannot provide them sufficient water when they need it.

References: Shah, Tushaar. Taming the Anarchy: Groundwater Governance in South Asia. (The RFF Press, Washington DC. 2008.)

Photo: Eye Ubiquitous & Hutchison

Village Party Leader seems essential for such privatisation to work and, for that reason, this model is unlikely to be suitable for South Asia and Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asia, the key may lie in upgrading and modernising irrigation systems to support dry season rice cultivation, as well as diversification of farming systems. The situation in South Asia suggests that instead of institutional reforms, surface

If we are to unlock the value hidden in South Asia’s surface irrigation systems, they must morph in ways that can support and sustain the rising groundswell of atomistic irrigation and, by doing so, secure the resources and cooperation of farmers to counter anarchy, atrophy and ‘noise’. If the systems themselves cannot become demand-driven, attempts should be made to integrate them with a demand-driven atomistic irrigation economy. This is already happening in many systems, but by default. Much hidden value could be unlocked if this were to happen by deliberate design. But that would require a paradigm shift in irrigation thinking and planning.

70 A young boy operating a traditional water distribution device to irrigate rice paddies in Vietnam (above), a country which is regularly affected by crippling seasonal droughts.

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FOCUS ON CENTRAL ASIA

The challenges of transboundary water resource management in Central Asia By Victor Dukhovny and Dinara Ziganshina

Central Asia offers an important lesson to the world about how nations can be brought together by hydrosolidarity – and a warning about how easily they can drift apart again.

Photo: World Bank

hared water management in Central Asia is a remarkable example of hydrosolidarity that was initiated during the transition from the Soviet Union’s federal governance system into five independent states. However, the region’s experience demonstrates that transboundary water management is not easy to achieve or to maintain. Hydrosolidarity in the region, initially based on Soviet principles and carried out by professional water specialists, has been weakened over time by various external and internal factors. At present, the system is at a critical stage, with years of hard-earned cooperation threatening to break down. Management and development of transboundary water was secured by Central Asian water leaders immediately after the collapse of USSR in September 1991 through the Protocol that established the Interstate Commission for Water Coordination (ICWC) and the 1992 Agreement1 between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In essence, these actions were an attempt to preserve the Soviet regime for water allocation and sharing, as well as the planning and monitoring system that had originally been set up by the Ministry for Water Resources of USSR and the Soviet State Planning Committee. One of Kyrgyzstan’s irrigation channels (above), which are maintained by the country’s water users association.

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The five states laid the groundwork for the potential growth of a unique, mutually beneficial water management framework. The consensus amongst the political leadership of the countries underscored many political documents, particularly decisions of the Heads of State in March 26, 1993 and January 11, 1993, the Nukus and Dashkhovuz Declarations, as well as other documents adopted during this period. The significance of the provisions made in those documents should not be underestimated, as they count as the only decisions made at a regional level that remain in force after almost 20 years. Moreover, those decisions laid the foundation for further development of joint works by ICWC, the International Commission for Sustainable Development (ICSD), and the Executive Committee of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS) to peacefully maintain any mutually beneficial activity involving water resources and environmental development. This is especially relevant in light of Turkmenistan, which, after declaring its independence, has been refused membership from all regional organizations except for ICWC and IFAS. The five states laid the groundwork for the potential growth of a unique, mutually beneficial water management framework. ICWC created a network for joint training that provided an interactive framework for the representatives of states. The regional information system, the

Central Asia Regional Water Information Base, operated with openness and trust between states and provided support to all interested in assessing present and future water scenarios. Joint work on regional projects for water saving and the improvement of water productivity demonstrated an understanding of the need for coordinated and goal-oriented activities, as did the organised planning and operation of two great interstate rivers, Amudarya and Syrdarya, by the executive bodies of ICWC. For 16 years, the Basin Water Organizations (BWOs) of Amudarya and Syrdarya (which are the main sources of water for Uzbekistan), together with the five ministries, promoted water allocation between the states that was virtually conflict free. However, some seeds of discord remained and were exposed in 2008, particularly over the Syrdarya river:

• A lack of interaction between the financial instruments that reflect the interests of the countries in collaboration. • A lack of parity amongst the national governments involved in management, taking into account that most regional agencies had been placed in Uzbekistan from the onset. Along with quasi-internal institutional disadvantages that were discussed continuously at the ICWC level, some external destabilizing factors have intensified. These include:

• A lack of sufficient interaction between hydropower and environmental agencies, on the one hand, and water resources agencies, on the other.

• Population growth • Expected increase of withdrawals by Afghanistan • Climate change • Growth of unilateral water resources decision-making and monetarism • Changes in cropping patterns • Increase in environmental demand

• The underestimation of future changes in economic relations between the countries, as well as the possibility for sharp differentiation in their economic conditions (as is the situation at present) as well as in national socioeconomic, financial and legal frameworks.

The intersectoral meeting of interests between water and power, the aspiration of owners of reservoirs to get more benefit than in previous multi-water years (2002 and 2006), and a sharp increase of extreme events such as floods and droughts led to an approach

Photo: World Bank

At present, collaboration between the region’s countries is based on the will of the leadership of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, who, between 1992 and 1999, acted upon a common understanding of the importance of water and environment security for socio-economic development in Central Asia.

An irrigation dam in the Kyrgyz Republic (above), part of the five-state water user scheme in Central Asia.

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Photo: IWMI

FOCUS ON CENTRAL ASIA

A group of researchers from the International Water Management Institute testing the soil salinity in the Syrdarya basin (above), a region of Central Asia which is facing severe land degradation and water scarcity.

that treated the symptom rather than the cause of water problems. The water crisis of 2006/2007 resulted from a power organization, Kyrgyz Energo, ignoring recommendations made by the Scientific Information Center of ICWC and the BWOs in the water-rich years of 2003 to 2006 to prepare for multiyear regulation. During these 4 years, water had not been conserved in Toktogul as was strictly recommended. Moreover, the advice to limit annual water release from Toktogul to not more than 12.2 km3 for all needs – including 4-5 km3 in summer and 7-8 km3 in winter – was ignored. Water released exceeded this recommendation by 6.7 km3 for the four years and an additional production goal of 5.5 billion kWh of energy was set for shortterm financial benefit. This meant that, in the water scarce years that came later, the volume of water in Toktogul was only 13.5 km3 – far lower than the recommended 17-19 km3. This energy policy was directly responsible for three years of artificial floods in the lowlands of Syrdarya. During that period, Kazakhstan paid an annual $15-17 million for protection works and, consequently, was unable to use the multiyear regulation on

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Toktogul and faced an additional shortage of water in 2007/2008. Kyrgyz Energo brought harm not only to Uzbek, Kazakh and Tajik irrigation, but also to Kyrgyz irrigation, as the interstate network system follows a single set of rules for water limitation that affected all countries. As a result, all states had 50-65%

production, investment and the environment is crucial. Close attention should be paid to the growing challenge of climate change and water management adaptation. According to a recent report by the United Nations Development Programme, assessments based on different climate scenarios forecast that the Syrdarya and Amudarya river basins2 may see a reduction in water volume of 30% and 40% respectively3. Other forecasts suggest that such a substantial reduction in volume is unlikely3. In all the models, however, the demand for water is growing faster than the supply. Moreover, the expected growth in economic activity will put increasing pressure on river runoff, global climate and moisture circulation, causing problems associated with water deficiency in the arid and semi-arid regions of Central Asia to become increasingly critical3. Although the ‘Right to Water’ is still a controversial issue, it must be considered in all future global water governance agendas. General Comments No 15 on the Right to Water4 is a good starting point, but, because it is not legally binding, it has not been used to build a strong system that guarantees this right for every man and woman. Other types of water consumption – the right to water for

This energy policy was directly responsible for three years of artificial floods in the lowlands of Syrdarya. of water availability in normal months, when the natural inflow to Toktogul was close to 75%. However, instead of improving the situation during a water-scarce year on the base of regulation flow, Toktogul made this situation worse. When Uzbekistan refused a request from Kyrgyz Energo to pay 8.5 cents per 1 kWh for additional water because Kazahkstan were only being charged 4.5 cents, it caused an artificial water scarcity. Thus one can see the delicate interplay between water and energy regimes, water and investment regimes, and water and ecosystems regimes. Synchronisation of water-relevant developments in the areas of energy

food, the right to water for nature – have only recently become the topic of discussion at a global level. The challenge of addressing global water need has prompted discussions on ‘virtual water’ and the potential of trading water within the business of agricultural products. However, this approach has created a great deal of disagreement in agricultural countries, where the bulk of the population lives in rural areas and the lack of a local provision for water would leave millions of people destitute. An understanding of the socio-economic dimension of irrigation in arid countries – a practice completely different from western notions of farming – is

essential to addressing the issue of water use for food production in these regions. Therefore, a very careful look at ‘virtual water’ is necessary. Using ‘virtual water’ to address water scarcity requires the development of water markets. Water markets have never been simple; hydropower, industry and irrigation have always been very different in terms of their profitability and their production costs. Moreover, water is considered a market good only after it has satisfied social and ecological needs. The system is also not a free market where everybody can buy water. Water markets can be organised within countries (not at international level) to save water under conditions of strict state regulation that do not permit reduction in land use and employment, and that ensure food and environment security. Although the trading of water through ‘virtual water’ can address water scarcity between countries, it can also result in a greater dependence of developing countries on developed ones. Putting water high on the global agenda is a priority and the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly may be a good platform for achieving this goal. These organizations would ensure protection both of water as a precious resource and of vulnerable groups at different levels in the water-use and management chain. The current terms of globalisation are biased in favour of stronger groups and nations, leaving many other groups out of the game. This asymmetry manifests itself in many areas that affect water resources management, access, uses and security, and affects present as well as future generations. In the foreseeable future, water scarcity, combined with climate change, poverty, power imbalance and inequality, will require that water security become a subject of concern for the UN Security Council. This does not necessarily mean that the Security Council must become the ‘global water police or legislator’. The legally binding nature of Security Council Resolutions made on issues other than Chapter VII (Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression) of the UN Charter are

Photo: World Bank

WATER MANAGEMENT

A woman takes a drink of water from a public water fountain near the market in Samarkand, Uzbekistan (above).

unclear under international law5, however the Security Council is the only body that has the teeth to enforce Millennium Development Goals in the area of water supply to combat poverty and hunger. The powers of the Security Council to determine whether or not a situation constitutes a threat to international peace and security, or to create subsidiary organs, could be useful in addressing severe water problems. What we really need are good national water laws, international water instruments and

strong implementation mechanisms that can guarantee a strict system of water rights. ‘Right to water’ involves going through a long chain of consequent connections that can establish (or destroy) sustainability and availability of water supply for end users, whether personal or communal. A very large number of powerful factors are involved in the transformation of natural water to be used by people and on farms, and these can affect delivery, allocation, adoption to use, management and protection of water resources.

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FOCUS ON CENTRAL ASIA

This chain has different boundaries and dimensions, from global, international, national, basin and municipal levels right down to local water users’ associations and end-users. Thus, implementation of the ‘Right to Water’ depends on: • The legal definition of the ‘Right to Water’ at an international level. • The mechanism to guarantee water at the transboundary level, as a framework to ensure stable water rights for human needs, food production, for nature as well as for wellbeing. • The legal definition of the ‘Right to Water’ at a national level.

References CA Water Info. http://www.cawater-info. net/library/eng/agreement.pdf 2 CA Water Info. Water Resources of the Aral Sea Basin. http://cawater-info.net/ aral/water_e.htm 3 Water - Critical Resource for Uzbekistan’s Future. (2007) Available at http://www.undp. uz/en/publications/publication.php?id=70 4 The Committee of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. General Comments No 15 on the Right to Water. (Document UNE/ C12/2002/11. 2002.) 5 In 1971, a majority of the International Court of Justice members asserted in the non-binding Namibia advisory opinion that all UN Security Council resolutions were legally binding. This assertion by the ICJ has been countered by numerous international lawyers who argue that Chapter VI resolutions cannot be binding. 1

Photo: World Bank

• The implementation of the ‘Right to Water’ from the state to water agencies and to water users.

The ‘Right to Water’ should be connected with a quantitative assessment of the need for water not on the base of previous water use, but taking into account the ability to achieve potential water productivity by using the best possible and economically suitable water practices and technology. At the same time, there are no rights without obligations. Therefore, the right to water should be combined with various duties, obligations and responsibilities, including water pricing and the ‘polluter pays’ principle. More attention should be paid to securing and allocating sufficient flows of water to protect ecosystems, thus considerable facilitation is needed to achieve nature’s right to water. It would be hoped that the experiences of Central Asia, both good and bad, provide useful lessons for transboundary water management elsewhere.

A woman walks past the rusting hull of a ship in the former harbour of Muynak, Uzbekistan (above) which, due to the receding of the Aral Sea, is now 20 miles from the water.

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Photo: Jeremy Horner

POLLUTION CONTROL

The textiles and garments produced in the town of Pali in Rajasthan, India (above) are renowned for their colour and vibrancy – but their beauty comes at a hefty price.

The Water-Sewage Connection: Changing ways to the future By Sunita Narain

Water scarcity isn’t the only problem facing modern India. The formidable task of dealing with effluents and sewage is leaving the country drowning in its own waste.

T 78

he public health implications of unclean water are enormous. What should concern us is that we are caught in a deadly spiral – on the one hand, water scarcity is growing and, on the other, water is getting increasingly polluted, which is further increasing the cost of treatment or leading to deaths and illnesses. It is shocking to note that, in many of our countries, diarrhoea and other waterborne diseases are one of the most common causes of death among children under the age of five.

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Clearly this is not acceptable. Here are two stories that point the way ahead.

A tale of pollution A few years ago, I wrote about a textile town called Pali, in Rajasthan in western India, which had completely toxified its seasonal river Bandi with industrial discharge. At the time, I said the real story was not about pollution but about the anger of farmers whose agricultural lands had been destroyed as a result of effluents, whose well water

had turned poisonous, and whose fight resulted in the town setting up the country’s first common effluent treatment plant. The question I raised was: did we know how to clean up chemical pollution in water-scarce areas? The answer is still ‘No’. But the persistence of pollution-affected farmers is ensuring that the search is on for solutions. In 2006, even with three Common Effluent Treatment Plants (CETPs) in place and a citywide system to charge a tariff on

WATER SCARCITY

But the pollution did not go away. Farmers reported that the water was as bad as ever. In 2007, at their request, my colleagues from CSE returned. More samples were collected, checked and analysed. The pollutants remained, as did the controversial ‘bypass’ system. To make matters worse, since the town’s drainage had not kept up with its industrial growth, much of the waste did not even make it to the plants for treatment. The furious farmers took the matter to court. In April 2008, the high court ruled in

This is a region where the river has no water for most of the year. Even partially treated effluents (assuming the upgraded treatment plants meet discharge standards and no waste is bypassed) lead to pollution, because there is no water with which to flush it or to clean it. The farmers’ association called us again. This time, my colleagues used a testing kit in the presence of farmers and industry representatives. The samples showed toxins. The bypass was found. All hell broke loose. At a public meeting, held in Pali town hall,

The real story is not about pollution but about the anger of farmers whose agricultural lands had been destroyed as a result of effluents. their favour. It instructed the government to set up water flow meters in every industry to measure discharge; to shut down ‘illegal’ units not connected to the effluent plants; to set up CETPs for the waste being generated by the new industries; and, in all, to ensure that all waste was treated completely. It was no small victory. Nevertheless, the pollution continues. The problem is more complex than current pollution textbooks can fathom or explain.

Photo: Centre for Science and Environment

every bale of cloth to pay for treatment, the river Bandi was still being contaminated. That year, my colleagues at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) went to Pali, travelled downstream of the dry river and collected water samples. They tested the samples at our pollution monitoring laboratory in Delhi and found high levels of toxins, even in the water of wells more than 50 km downstream of the town. Their analysis showed that the CETPs were not meeting stipulated standards; there was a high concentration of heavy metals in the wastewater. My colleagues also found evidence of ingenious ways to ‘beat’ the system – the treatment plants had built bypass channels, allowing effluents to flow without check. ‘Unacceptable’, said the farmers for whom we had prepared the report. So the government agreed the CETPs would be upgraded. The problem was not the result of industry, but of changing market preferences. When the plants were set up, cottons were in demand. Then when synthetic cloth came into fashion, the dyeing units shifted from alkaline to acidic processes and the CETPs could not keep pace. New investment would now improve treatment, by changing the retention time, chemical dosing and aeration of effluents.

politicians, administrators, industry and affected farmers came together to say “industry is important, but not at the cost of the pollution of our river and the suffering of farmers. Enough is enough. The answers will have to be found differently.” The farmers do not want industry to discharge effluents into the river. They want them to treat, reuse and recycle the effluents. The court has upheld this plea, stating that “the treated water may not flow into the Bandi river.” However, the situation in Pali is not an isolated instance. We have found at least three further court decisions insisting on “zero discharge or complete recovery and reuse of water discharged from factories.” One was in a town neighbouring Pali, called Balotra, where a similar case was fought and won. The second was in the famous textile town of Tiruppur, in Tamil Nadu, where affected farmers took the issue to court, which directed, in no uncertain terms, that no treated water would be discharged into the river. The third was in the industrial town of Ludhiana, in the Punjab, where the court issued notices that “all electroplating, textile dyeing and bleaching units have to set up individual or collective treatment plants to achieve zero-discharge.”

The effluents from Pali’s textile industry flow into the Luni river (above) and can be traced up to 50 km downstream.

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POLLUTION CONTROL

generated, has to go somewhere, and it invariably goes into the streams, ponds, lakes and rivers of the town, polluting the waterworks so that health is compromised. Or else it goes into the ground, contaminating the same water that will be used by people for drinking. It is no surprise that surveys of groundwater are finding higher and higher levels of

Photo: Gettyimages

Public pressure is driving industry and government to innovate faster than they would like in order to find solutions. The camel fair at Balotra in Rajasthan, India (above). Located near Pali on the banks of the Luni river, the area is famous for its hand block printing and fabrics, and there are more than 800 textile companies in Balotra alone.

The problems are two-fold. Firstly, we worry about water and not the waste that the water will generate and, secondly, we believe we have a ready solution in (still unbuilt) sewage treatment plants that will deal with this problem. Therefore, even as planners worry – sometimes excessively– about the water they need to supply to their citizens, they have no clue about the other side of the coin: the waste that this water will generate. But sewage, once

Photo: Centre for Science and Environment

The question now is to determine the next step on this pollution ladder, and whether that will lead to results. The fact is that re-use technologies such as reverse osmosis are expensive, they need high quality water as their input, and, most importantly, they leave behind a high amount of ‘reject’, which then has to be disposed of. In Tiruppur, the government is currently coming up with bizarre proposals to deal with the tedious ‘reject’ problem. But the quest continues. The fact is that public pressure is driving industry and government to innovate faster than they would like in order to find solutions. Also, we have not even scratched the surface of finding appropriate and cost-effective technology solutions that will fit our size. But let me not rush that way. The search is on. The farmers of Pali, Balotra and Tiruppur, not to mention other pollution warriors, will ensure we get answers.

nitrate contamination, which is a sure sign of sewage contamination. We are caught in a deadly and costly spiral. As surface water or groundwater gets contaminated, the city has no option but to hunt for newer sources for its supply. This search becomes more extensive and, as the distance increases, the cost of pumping and supply also increases. Most cities today spend anywhere between 50-70% of their water supply accounts for electricity to pump water. As the distance increases, the cost of building and then maintaining the water pipeline and

Drowning in sewage

We often forget one simple truth – if there are humans, there will be excreta. In the modern world, there is also another truth – if there is water use, there will be waste. It has been estimated that roughly 80% of the water that reaches households leaves as waste. Farmers have discovered that waste from the textile industry at Pali has contaminated the local groundwater (above).

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WATER SCARCITY

70-80% of the water officially supplied by municipalities is returned as sewage. The problem is that the figures are not accurate: water is supplied but lost, or else water is not supplied and households have no option but to depend on groundwater or buy water through private tankers. But all the water they use will be discharged as sewage, regardless of the source of supply.

cannot do so because they do not have the sewage to treat. This is because, like water pipelines, sewage pipelines have to built and then maintained. The fact is that most of our cities, old and new, do not have underground sewer systems and, even if they do, most of the pipes are old and defunct. When all of this is taken into account, then officially the country actually treats only 13% of the

We assume that 70-80% of the water supplied by municipalities is returned as sewage. The problem is that the figures are not accurate. This is also only part of the problem. Many municipalities are already struggling to recover the cost of supplying water, let alone pay for the treatment of sewage. Currently, the country has installed capacity to treat roughly 18% of the ‘official’ excreta it generates. But it is well accepted that some of these plants do not function because of the high recurring costs of electricity and chemicals, and those that are operational

human excreta it generates. The final blow comes when this partial sewage cleaned through expensive treatment then gets mixed with the untreated sewage of the majority. The result is pollution. India is drowning in its excreta. The fact is that we cannot catch up with the water we use, the sewage we generate, the sewage we transport, and the sewage we actually treat and then dispose of in ditches,

Photo: Centre for Science and Environment

its distribution network increases – and, if the network is not properly maintained, then water losses also increase. Today, municipalities officially report that anywhere between 30-50% of the water supplied is ‘lost’ in leakages, which means that there is less to supply and more to pay. The result is that, as the cost of water increases, the state is not able to subsidise the supply of water to all. As the city municipal water system collapses under the weight of under-recoveries, the rich move to private water sources such as bottled water. The poor suffer the cost of poor health. Add to this the problem of dealing with the excreta that the water will generate. We have no national accounts for the excreta we generate or the excreta we treat or do not treat. The fact is that we have no way of really estimating the load of sewage in our cities, because of the different ways in which people source water and the different ways in which people dispose of sewage. Currently, we measure sewage in the most rudimentary of ways. We simply assume that

81 Textile industry effluents continue to be released indiscriminately throughout the industrial area in Pali (above), despite numerous legal judgments against the polluters.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Photo: Centre for Science and Environment

POLLUTION CONTROL

Swathes of dyed cloth being transported by bullock cart from a factory in Pali (above). Both the dyes and their associated chemical processes take their toll on the environment.

lakes or rivers. In any case, our rivers have less and less water to assimilate our mess. To resolve the situation, we will have to think differently. Firstly, we will have to spend less in bringing water to our houses. In other words, cut the length of the pipelines in order to reduce the electricity, pumping costs and leakage. This means that we will have to revive local water bodies and recharge groundwater, so that we can source water from as close as possible. Secondly, we must use less water in our homes, so that we have less to treat and less to dispose of. Thirdly, we must cut the costs and transportation of sewage, using existing drain networks and a variety of technologies to treat sewage as locally as possible. Finally, we must learn to reuse every drop of our sewage: turn it into drinking water with expensive technology, or recycle it in our

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

gardens, in our industries or use it (after treatment) to recharge our groundwater. Life is about re-inventing the cycle of water to water.

LeARNINg THe LeSSONS Of HISTORY There are lessons we can learn from ancient Rome and the Japanese city of Edo, which was later renamed Tokyo. The Romans built huge aqueducts that ran for tens of miles to bring water to their settlements. Even today, these aqueducts are the most omnipresent symbols of that societyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s water management and many experts have praised the Romans for the meticulousness with which they planned their water supply. In actual fact, these aqueducts represent the exact opposite. They demonstrate the

utter environmental mismanagement of the mighty Roman Empire. Rome was built on the river Tiber. The city did not need any aqueducts. But because the waste of Rome was discharged directly into the Tiber, the river was polluted and clean water had to be brought from long distances. As a result, water outlets were few and the elite appropriated these using a system of slaves. By contrast, the citizens of Edo never discharged their waste into the rivers. Instead, they composted the waste and then used it in the fields. By ensuring the purity of their rivers, Edo had numerous water outlets and a much more egalitarian water supply. Water and culture go together. Water shortage is not about the mere failure of rain. It is about the failure of society to live and share its water endowment.

MEW Objective The main objective of the Ministry of Electricity and Water is to provide the country with adequate and efficient electric supply together with fresh and brackish water. Water resources of Kuwait Kuwait has no surface water resources, although occasional flash floods occur during winter. The mean annual rainfall in Kuwait is 145 mm. Due to the high evaporation losses and the high deficit of soil moisture, only a small quantity of rainfall infiltrates into the ground. Therefore, Kuwait depends mainly (about 90%) on desalination plants in producing the required potable water. Water consumption The Ministry has shown a high commitment towards the adoption of new technology to meet the water requirements of the country. The total daily per capita water consumption in Kuwait has increased from 200 to 640 L between 1970 and 2007. The current rates of water consumption are very high and are increasing at rapid rates: during summer, daily consumption is sometimes exceeding the capacity of the desalination plants. The residential sector consumes 70% of the overall water demand in Kuwait. Water network The water distribution system comprises two networks, with 8070 km of freshwater network: over 86% of freshwater network have a parallel brackish water network. Each system has its own ground reservoirs, pumping stations and elevated towers. Water management Paramount issues of water management in Kuwait revolve around enhancing the ef efficiency and outputs of desalination plants. Network losses have been reduced to 6% by fitting all water networks with ductile piping. More efficient water management is in progress to safeguard the existing water resources, economize the demand without affecting the quality of life of the customers, and adequately protect the fragile desert ecosystem of the country. A new set of legislation aiming towards the rationalization of water use, and increasing

Kuwait

the level of public awareness of water scarscar city and the need for the downscaling water demand is expected to yield positive results. MEW issued The Uniform Potable Water Plumbing Code for Kuwait, based on best international practices and standards, and extensively adopted to local conditions. Public awareness campaigns are seen as contributing to the reduction of water demand. Water research has a prominent position in water management, and the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research which is one of the leading water research institutions in the Region is a major partner for MEW in getting use of the R&D results.

H.E. Nabeel Khalaf bin Salamah The Minister, Electricity andWater

Water desalination Desalination is a costly process, and with increases in population and standard of living, the demand for water is rising rapidly. The installed capacity becomes increasingly insufficient, and major upgrades of installations are under way. There is a need to further increase R&D effort, which could involve the development and application of novel technologies in desalination, solar desalination, and other methods aiming at the increase of water potential of the country, and the protection of environment. Capacity building in desalination is seen as an essential step for safeguarding water production in the country. The installed capacity of six desalination plants is 720 million m3 and expected to increase to 900 million m3 per year in 2010. Brackish groundwater (3000 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 7000 TDS) is used for blending of desalinated water and gardening.

Ongoing Projects Name

Commission

Capacity MIGD

Type

SHUAIBA NORTH

2009 - 2011

MSF

SHUWAI HUW KH HUWAI

2009 - 2011

Future Projects Name

Future Commission

Capacity MIGD

Type

AZ-ZOUR NORTH 1ST AND 2NDPHASE

2009 - 2013

200

MSF

AZ-ZOUR NORTH 3RDPHASE

2009-2012

MSF

AZ-ZOUR NORTH 4TH PHASE

2010-2014

Existing Desalination Plants Name

Capacity MIGD

Type

SHUWAI HUW KH HUWAI

MSF

SHUAIBA

MSF

DOHA EAST

MSF

DOHA WEST

110

MSF

AZ-ZOUR SOUTH

115

MSF

SABIYA Y YA

100

MSF

TOTAL

423

Ministry of Electricity and Water Kuwait Tel: +965 2537 1661 Fax: +965 2537 1660 Web: www.mew.gov.kw

IMPROVING QUALITY & QUANTITY

Photo: Greenpeace

Water uses and water scarcity

Imported water being brought into the Chinese town of Guiyu (above), infamous for being the dumping ground for the world’s electronic waste. The local water is unsafe because of the high levels of toxins from the waste.

Integrated food and water research for development By Jonathan Woolley, Larry Harrington, Annette Huber-Lee, Boru Douthwaite, Kim Geheb, Alain Vidal, Pamela George and Sophie Nguyen Khoa

With so many users competing for water resources, the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food is looking for an integrated solution to ensure that demands are met.

hen water is scarce, integrated food and water research for development provides an effective way not only to improve water and food security, but also to enhance the resilience of livelihoods and ecosystems. Amidst a rapidly changing global situation – affected by everything from climate change to economic uncertainties to political instability – it is resilience that is needed in order for the world’s poor to survive.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

In this essay, ‘integrated’ is defined as being across multiple water uses, across scales and across disciplines. It also means integration of scientific research, development and social learning. We first discuss these various manifestations of integration, and then go on to describe the progress and achievements of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF)1 in carrying out integrated food and water research and development in a number of major river basins around the world.

People use water for many purposes: for drinking, growing food, fishing, bathing and cooking. Their food and water security, livelihoods resilience, and freedom from disease depend on having enough water of sufficient quality. They use waterways to transport products and hydropower to run their businesses and homes. Water is fundamental to the provision of many ecosystem services – for example, biodiversity preservation in wetlands, estuaries, rivers and lakes. Sometimes, there is enough water for all of these uses. Often, however, there is not. Water scarcity is one of the great challenges of the 21st Century, with scarcity likely to be more frequent and long-lasting than in the past eras2. Of freshwater abstractions for human use, most is for agriculture. Increased agricultural water productivity – which is to say, more food, feed, fibre and fuel being produced with less water – is a powerful means of freeing up water for non-agricultural uses. Such productivity improvements can be attained through suitable new technologies, institutions and policies.

Questions of scale Upstream water use affects downstream water users. Land and water management in upland agriculture affects water quality and quantity for downstream cities. Deforestation in hillsides may lead to uncontrolled downstream flooding or poor water quality. Damming rivers for hydropower generation may impinge on water availability for fisheries or agriculture. Excessive abstraction of water for irrigation may harm downstream wetlands, or reduce water levels in reservoirs. When communities in upper catchments engage in water harvesting, sources of water for downstream communities may be either positively or negatively affected. The design of strategies aimed at increasing agricultural water productivity needs to take account of these numerous interrelationships. It is not enough that strategies be effective at a local scale. Their consequences on other

WATER SCARCITY

water users at a larger scale need to be understood. Achieving such understanding, however, requires skills drawn from a number of disciplines.

Widespread increases in agricultural water productivity rarely emerge from technical change alone. Such increases are more likely to be achieved through strategies that integrate technologies, policies and institutions. For example, it has been learned in CPWF projects that the productivity of hillside agriculture may be increased – and land and water degradation reduced – through the widespread adoption of conservation agriculture practices, stimulated by ‘payment for environmental services’ programmes funded by downstream communities seeking to augment their supplies of high quality water. Improved rainwater productivity in dry areas may depend on farmer access to inputs, credit and markets, fostered by suitable policies.

Stakeholders and partners Water has multiple, competing uses. Upstream water management affects downstream water users, and effective strategies to improve water management often feature integration of technologies, institutions and polices. For all of these reasons – and, indeed, many more – the number of parties with a stake in water management questions is enormous. Because these questions are complex, input from multiple disciplines is essential to understand and address them.

Integrated approaches The CPWF carries out integrated water and food research and development, with integration understood in terms of: • Integration across water uses and users, and across scales • Integration across disciplines, partners and stakeholders • Integration across research, development and social learning

Photo: Greenpeace

Technologies, policies and institutions

A Greenpeace campaigner (above) bends to take a sample of the ash debris in the water that is issuing from the discharge pipe of the coal-fired thermal power plant in the province of Batangas in the Philippines.

The following sections provide some examples of CPWF progress in these areas. All of these examples are drawn from CPWF projects and are intended as illustrations, not as an exhaustive description of CPWF research and development activity.

livelihoods resilience among the rural poor. The research has resulted in a change in water management policies in South Africa. Moreover, the approach has been adopted by many international agencies and donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Water scarcity is one of the great challenges of the 21st Century, with scarcity likely to be more frequent and long-lasting than in the past eras. Integration across water uses and users, and across scales In the Limpopo, Mekong, Ganges, Volta and several small Andean basins, a CPWF project synthesized experiences in eight basin countries regarding the introduction of multiple-use approaches to water management at community, intermediate and national scales. In these multiple-use approaches, water systems are designed and managed so as to provide water of suitable quality for irrigation or other productive uses, as well as for direct consumption. The project found that multipleuse approaches contributed towards livelihoods diversification and therefore increased

In the Mekong delta, another CPWF project, building on earlier research by project partners, developed diversified farming systems that combined rice with shrimp, fish and crabs; introduced short-season rice varieties to increase flexibility in harvest dates; and worked with a provincial government in the application of locallymodelled decision support systems for zoning of fresh versus saline water production systems. Research outcomes have contributed to rapid economic growth in Bac Lieu, formerly Vietnam’s second poorest province, without adversely affecting the environment. More specifically, project activities resulted in improved livelihoods for over 10,000 farm

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

IMPROVING QUALITY & QUANTITY

families. Because the decision support system is updated throughout the year, the zoning and control of sluices adapts to changing climate and conditions, making this a particularly resilient solution to physical and social problems in the delta. In the Nile basin, where livestock consumes as much water as crops and where crop/ livestock systems have always been of importance, a CPWF project concluded that the integration of grass- or residue-fed livestock into cropping systems helped increase water productivity. To maintain biomass production levels for both food

and feed, it was found that nutrient cycling and soil fertility maintenance were important. This research also found that crop/livestock systems have greater water productivity than crop systems alone, and the diversification further adds to livelihood resilience. In the Volta and Limpopo basins, CPWF research showed that total evaporation from small multi-use reservoirs was half previous estimates, and no greater than that from a single reservoir of the same capacity. This finding opens the way for NGOs and governments to invest in making a larger number of small reservoirs available to more farm communities. The ease of access and localised control of small reservoirs translates into increased water access and use, as well as enhanced benefits for local people.

In the Limpopo and Nile basins, a CPWF project is studying awareness of climate change, along with agricultural adaptation strategies, at four levels of analysis: household, basin, national and regional. A surprisingly high awareness of climate change was found among farming households in Ethiopia and South Africa, with around 25% of them actually having tried out different adaptation strategies. A surprising result of this study was that the top priority for poor farmers was to have more information about climate change â&#x20AC;&#x201C; even over having addition inputs or access to markets. Groundbreaking modelling that links the effects of climate change on different people and places is leading to interaction with policymakers and the development of national climate change adaptation plans.

Integration across disciplines, partners and stakeholders

Photo: Greenpeace

CPWF integrated research and development on water and food brings together more than 200 partners working on more than 50 projects. Partner institutions include more than 110 national research and extension programs, 43 NGOs, 39 advanced research institutions from developed countries, and 11 international centres from the CGIAR system. Network mapping shows which partners interact, who does what, and whose expertise can be brought to bear on particular issues. CPWF research partnerships have been recognised for their equality, effectiveness and emphasis on building social capital. Network analysis has shown that they have been successful in bringing together two distinct research for development communities, one on water and the other on food. More work remains to be done in increasing the effective partnerships with development institutions and this is one of the challenges for CPWF phase 2. CPWF projects are implemented by teams with a wide range of disciplinary skills, including agronomy, anthropology, economics, hydrology, irrigation management, This farm in Guangdong province in China (above) is located close to a Compeq factory, from which it has been alleged that toxic contaminants from the electronics facility are being released into the environment.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Photo: Greenpeace

WATER SCARCITY

In the South African town of Maguqa (above), a boy plays near a brook which is polluted not only by seepage from the local sewage works but also by acid mine drainage from the nearby open coal mine in the Brugspruit Valley.

livestock science, plant breeding, policy analysis, remote sensing and GIS, rural sociology, and simulation modelling. Participatory approaches and gender and diversity analyses are interlaced into the rest. A particular type of CPWF project, named Basin Focal Projects, are examining the interrelationships amongst poverty, water availability, water access and water productivity; how these are influenced by institutional performance and policy design; and how integrated strategies featuring technical, institutional and policy innovations can address major water, food and poverty challenges. Basin Focal Projects are being implemented in ten river basins, including those in which CPWF will concentrate its work from 2009 onwards: the Ganges, Limpopo, Mekong, Nile and Volta basins, and a set of small basins in the Andes.

of experiment stations and into farmers’ fields, while Participatory Approaches involved farmers in the design of innovations and the selection of those innovations most helpful in meeting farmers’ needs. It has become apparent, however, that not even these approaches are enough. The CPWF is one of a growing number of institutions that conceptualise research, development, extension and adoption in terms of integrated innovation systems. Successful innovation is seen as a social process in which stakeholders and technologies co-evolve. Interaction among so-called ‘actors’ – project partners or basin stakeholders – results in

greater diversity in possible innovations. Further interaction results in a Learning Selection, which determines which innovations are carried forward, which are adjusted and adapted, and which are simply dropped. Innovation systems are dynamic and evolve over time. Unlike biological evolution, what is learned, selected and carried forward is influenced by power, gender and institutions. In applying innovations systems concepts to the planning and monitoring of integrated research and development, the CPWF uses several tools. The most important of these is Participatory Impact Pathway Analysis (PIPA), in which stakeholders involved in a project

Successful innovation is seen as a social process in which stakeholders and technologies co-evolve. map out who and what is necessary to achieve their goal, then analyse how the project will contribute to bring about these changes. When periodically revisited against actual progress, these maps or Impact Pathways (IPs) provide a framework both for adaptive management and for ‘action research’ on processes of change3. To date, staff members from 44 CPWF projects have constructed IPs and their use has spread

Integration across research and development

Photo: Greenpeace

In a naïve conceptualisation of research, development, extension and adoption, the researchers develop ‘new technology’ which they pass on ‘as is’ to extension workers, who immediately place it in the eager hands of grateful farmers. It has long been recognised, however, that the world is not that simple and that this conceptualisation is inadequate. To address these inadequacies, Farming Systems Approaches took water and food research out As in the photograph on the opposite page, this farmer (above) lives near to the Compeq factory in Guandong and his livelihood may be at risk if allegations that the electronics firm is polluting the environment prove to be true.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Photo: Greenpeace

IMPROVING QUALITY & QUANTITY

A Greenpeace volunteer (above) displays a pair of discarded pesticide bottles – both potentially harmful to humans – found in a stream near a farm growing choi sum in Xinlou, a village northeast of Guangzhou in China.

widely, with mutual, iterative learning between the CPWF, several CGIAR centres, and several national research centres and universities in Latin America.

Learning to integrate

CPWF recently concluded its first five-year phase from 2004 to 2008. Achievements and future plans were reviewed in a one-week forum, attended by 240 CPWF project researchers, policymakers and development specialists. Amongst the striking results was the progress made in different projects across a range of integrated topics4. Beyond scientific results, many independent observers, as well as project researchers themselves, commented on the outstanding energy generated amongst the research community, the important role given to younger researchers, and the opportunities throughout the CPWF – and particularly in the forum itself – for mutual learning. As a research network facing a complex challenge, the CPWF adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Almost all CPWF projects provide opportunities for study towards advanced degrees, exposing MSc and PhD students to development issues in practical situations while working as part of interdisciplinary teams. For experienced researchers, synthesis across projects offers opportunities for professional sharing and learning. The forum is just one example of this. Another is a recent workshop on crop water productivity in Ghana, featuring 26 papers from 7 river basins in 18 countries and encompassing 11 CPWF projects. Issues ranged from models to optimise water and land productivity, in-field methods for estimating water balance, upstream/downstream interactions, and methods for enhancing farmer adoption.

Conclusion We live in a world where water has multiple, competing uses; where upstream water management affects downstream water uses and users; where strategies for improving agricultural water feature combinations of technical, institutional and policy change;

where numerous stakeholders are concerned with various water and food issues; and where the input of multiple disciplines is needed to define water and food problems, then generate possible solutions. In such a world, the CPWF has learned that integrated research for development on water and food is indispensable. In its second phase from 2009 to 2013, the CPWF will continue investment in six of its present benchmark basins. In each basin, research will initially focus on a single development challenge. These include improving rainwater management, benefitsharing mechanisms to improve water productivity and reduce water related conflict, integrated agriculture and aquaculture, and multiple use of reservoirs. Cross-basin topic working groups will emerge in support of basin research as CPWF development challenges mature and adjust their focus. In planning and implementing such research, the CPWF harnesses the expertise of a wide range of partners, works at multiple scales of analysis, and aims to foster change through dynamic, evolutionary, self-organising and self-propelled innovation systems that can be understood – and, in part, guided – through participatory Impact Pathways analysis. The overall outcome is one of increased resilience for the rural poor and those seeking to support the goal of poverty alleviation globally.

References: Woolley, J, Cook, S, Molden, D, Harrington, L. ‘Water, Food and Development: The CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food.’ Water International. (forthcoming March 2009)  2 Molden, D (editor). Water for Food, Water for Life: A Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. (IWMI. 2008) 3 Douthwaite, B, Alvarez, S, Cook, S, Davies, R, George, P, Howell, J, Mackay, R, Rubiano, J. ‘Participatory Impact Pathways Analyses: A Practical Application of Program Theory in Research-for-Development’. Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation Vol 22 No 2 (2007.) 4 Humphreys, E (editor.) Proceedings of the Second International Forum on Water and Food, Addis Ababa, 10-14 November 2008. (CPWF, Colombo. 2008) 1

Ministry of Minerals, Energy & Water Resources Republic of Botswana The Republic of Botswana is approximately 582,000km2, bordered by Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia and SouthAfrica. The country boasts a stable political environment, a growing economy based on gemstone diamonds, tourism and beef exports respectively. Botswana has some of Africa’s last great wildernesses including inland, Okavango Delta and the Kalahari Desert, which is sand filled basin averaging 1,100m above sea level. The country is semi-arid with limited renewable water resources, depended on erratic rainfall. The main source is groundwater which supports about 80% of the population particularly in rural areas primarily for domestic and agricultural purposes. Despite these challenges, the Government of Botswana has prioritised access to portable water and sanitation to all its citizens. Hence, nearly 88% of the country’s households have access to piped or tapped water in 2001. The government developed boreholes, dams and water transfer schemes to meet the national demands. To date six dams are in operation and four under construction. Once complete, the combined volume of dams will increase from 393 million cubic metres to 967 million cubic metres. Combined yield will increase from 68 million cubic metres to 151.5 million cubic metres per annum.

Okavango delta.

To augment the national supply, Botswana has entered into cross-border agreement with South Africa for transboundary water transfer from Molatedi Dam in South Africa into Gaborone dam in Botswana. It has been indicated that Botswana’s future water demand will be met by the utilization of the shared watercourses. Botswana reliable surface water sources are with trans-boundary rivers, namely the Limpopo River shared with Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa; Okavango River shared with Namibia and Angola; Zambezi with Angola, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe; and Orange-Senqu with South Africa, Namibia and Lesotho. As such, Botswana has signed and acceded to treaties and conventions that have implications for water resources development. The Revised Southern African Development Committee (SADC) Protocol on Shared Watercourses has made provisions for countries to jointly coordinate the management, protection and utilization of shared watercourses. To date, Botswana has entered into four (4) Agreements with watercourse states in relation to the four trans-boundary rivers. The benefits derived from these rivers are massive and the need to keep their ecosystems healthy is highly important.

Ntimbale dam.

Dikgathong dam construction.

Building bridges with her neighbours is thus unavoidable particularly that Botswana is downstream of the shared rivers and related aquifers, if Botswana is to meet her growing demand for water.

Republic of Botswana Ministry of Minerals, Energy & Water Resources PO Box 0018, Khama Crescent, Gaborone, Botswana Tel: +267-365-6600 Fax: +267-372-738

PRIVATE SECTOR INITIATIVES

Seizing the Initiative: How the private sector can help improve access to public water services By Gérard Payen

AquaFed, the International Federation of Private Water Operators, reviews the progress on meeting the Millennium Development Goals on water and sanitation that were set by the United Nations. Their conclusion: greater efforts need to be made.

must not divert governments from their duty to provide satisfactory access to drinking water and sanitation to their population. The fate of billions of people rests on their governments reinforcing their commitments at the 5th World Water Forum in Istanbul. Shortage, indignity, sickness, drudgery – this is still many people’s water world. Access to water and sanitation is key to their health, dignity and education, to the protection of the environment, and to economic development.

Affording better access to drinking water In developed countries, almost everybody has piped water at home and accepts it as an essential service. But in developing countries more than 1 out of every 2 families – which amounts to more than 3 billion people – do not have tap water at

home or even nearby. Water sources are often far away, forcing people to suffer the daily burden of fetching all the water they need. Viewed globally, the MDGs regarding water access might be achieved in 2015. However, in many parts of the world, a serious shortfall will still exist. There is some hope that the second half of the unserved people might be reached soon after 2015. This would be a very valuable achievement, but would only mark an intermediate step towards satisfactory access of people to drinking water and sanitation. People expect a better level of access to water than the one that is currently measured to monitor the water MDGs. They dream of not having to queue to fetch water and of not having to carry water to home every day. There is an urgent need to extend drinking water and sanitation networks in all urbanized areas, in order to turn the basic human right to

Photo: Alamy

n April 2005, the thirteenth session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD13) resolved to both sustain and accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) regarding water access. They affirmed the need to prioritise water in national development plans and to facilitate access to water and sanitation. In March 2007, echoing the decision of CSD13, AquaFed, the International Federation of Private Water Operators, launched a call to address the urgency of the situation by creating more water and sanitation projects worldwide. The 2008 report by the WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme confirms that the world is falling behind schedule with regards achieving the targets on access to toilets and that Africa is missing the target on access to safe water (see Figure 1). There has still been no evidence of the acceleration decided by CSD13. Nor has there been an adequate response to the numerous calls to action in the interim. Needless to say, it is now more urgent that action is taken than it was four years ago. New challenges have emerged that make people’s access to drinking water and sanitation more difficult to prioritise in political agendas, including the impact of climate change on water resources, increasing water stress due to increasing water demands, and increasing needs of water for growing food. All these challenges

In countries such as Nigeria (above), access to water often entails transporting daily supplies over long distances.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

WATER MANAGEMENT

water at an affordable price into a reality for all. In rural areas, efforts must be stepped up to develop access to water and cut down the distances that people, often women or girls, have to carry water every day. The number of drinking water and sanitation projects worldwide is totally insufficient to meet the needs: a renewed effort is needed urgently.

Global data derived from JMP 2008 report

WORLD

Harnessing the private sector In all parts of the world, local, national and international companies are increasingly being approached by governments to help them implement their water policies. The experience

AFRICA

Unserved people

Basic sanitation (toilets)

People

Deficit

People

Deficit

1990

1.2 billion

23.2 %

2.4 billion

46 %

2006

0.9 billion

13.4 %

2.5 billion

38 %

Target 2015

0.8 billion

11.6 %

1.7 billion

23 %

Year of achievement with current trends

More sanitation projects Unless progress is stepped up to a significant degree, it is now certain that the sanitation target adopted in Johannesburg in 2002 will be missed by a very wide margin. This failure is unacceptable. Knowing that the 2015 target is only to meet half of the need and that it aims to provide only one of the sanitation components that people require, more can and must be done. The Johannesburg Plan of Implementation targets basic sanitation, which is defined as access to private toilets and removal of domestic wastewater from the household. However, in practice, only access to toilets is currently measured and monitored. For this indicator alone, the target will probably not be achieved. There is an urgent need to develop more sanitation projects with more ambitious targets. People need their solid and liquid waste to be removed from their homes; they also need to be protected from contamination by neighbours. Their wastewaters need to be collected. In many parts of the world, pollution needs to be removed from these wastewaters in order to protect the environment and safeguard the health of the people living downstream. These challenges are not well monitored by the global community. More ambitious goals are necessary to master all sanitation needs. Integrated Sanitation Management (ISM) must be established to manage water after use, controlling man-made pollution, wastewater flows and water reuse in a context of growing water stress and increasing environmental challenges in many countries.

Unserved people

Safe water (improved sources)

On time

2036

1990

0.28 billion

43.8 %

0.43 billion

67 %

2006

0.34 billion

36.4 %

0.58 billion

62 %

Target 2015 Year of achievement with current trends

21.9 %

34 %

2038

2084

Figure1: Table showing the progress being made to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, including a prediction of the likely date that the goals will eventually be reached given the current rates of implementation.

and expertise of these companies is being harnessed to solve technical, managerial, financial and even societal challenges through various schemes involving Public/Private Partnership contracts, Water Operators Partnerships and other models, sometimes misleadingly lumped under the heading ‘Privatisation’. The rationale behind the creation of AquaFed back in 2005 was to connect international

It is now more urgent that action is taken than it was four years ago. organizations with private providers of water and sanitation, as well as to combine the expertise of each individual member of the federation – which now amounts to more than 200 water service providers spread across 38 different countries – in order to solve problems on a global scale. Private water operators are used to making the right to access to water and to sanitation a tangible reality for people. That is their job all around the globe. They have helped to improve water access and sanitation to tens of millions of families in the developing world. And they are willing to continue to contribute to ambitious water policies. To a very large extent, both public and private sector service operators suffer from exactly the same obstacles in implementing public water

policies: unrealistic economics, unsustainable cost recovery, inconsistent planning, absence of long-term targets, and low levels of political support. These are the problems that need to be surmounted and resolved. The formal discussions that take place in the development community about the conditions necessary to improve the levels of participation and investment by the private sector have the benefit of drawing attention to many of the institutional and governance issues that affect the whole water and sanitation sector. Overcoming these institutional hurdles benefits the whole sector. Money is not the principal problem. What is required is political determination, focused planning, human capacity and competence, supported by financial resources. Politicians at the appropriate level must take the lead in this. Where they do, experience has shown that individuals, communities, labour, the business and financial sectors are all ready and able to make a meaningful contribution. To do this they require stable conditions that are predictable over the long term. It is not too late to reverse the currently inadequate progress being made in the field of water access, nor to meet the Millennium Development Goals. But it requires a genuine will to confront the issues and resolve the problems that stand in the way of success. For further information, please visit www.aquafed.org

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Photo: South Photographs/africanpictures.net

BENEFIT SHARING

Fishermen on the Ash river outfall (above), part of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, one of the most successful examples of benefit sharing in water management. Water from Lesotho pours through two tunnels cut through the mountains to join the Ash and Vaal rivers, which eventually flow into the industrial heartland of South Africa.

Benefit Sharing in Water Management and Development: A tool for growth and equity By Claudia W Sadoff and Winston H Yu

Water recognizes no territorial boundaries. Benefit sharing is one way to ease the numerous tensions that can arise from competition between users for this precious resource.

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anaging water resources to achieve growth has always been a goal of humans and society. Hydrology demonstrates that these resources are best managed from the river basin perspective, this being the logical physical unit of analysis. However, this is complicated by the fact that river basins cross and form boundaries indiscriminately. There are 261 international river basins and 145 nations have territory in shared basins. These basins cover almost half of the

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world’s land surface and include about 40% of the world’s population. Water can also cross political and administrative boundaries within countries and arbitrarily intersect various social and economic entities. Without some measure of transboundary cooperation, the efficiency of water management is generally weakened. Across all of these boundaries, different groups will increasingly vie for their share of water resources and the benefits from productive water use. History tells us that

wherever and whenever there are competing demands for the use of water there will be tensions. Also, as water resources become scarcer relative to demand, conflicting expectations over the development and management of shared rivers will grow. Tensions exist to varying degrees between and within many nations today. These tensions – and the ways in which they are or are not resolved – can fuel social and political instability, undermine economic growth,

WATER MANAGEMENT

framework to consider the types of benefits possible. Firstly, cooperation can enable riparian nations to better manage shared ecosystems, providing benefits to the river such as improved water quality. Secondly, efficient, cooperative management and development of shared rivers can yield major benefits from the river, such as increased food and energy production. Thirdly, cooperation on an international river may result in the reduction of costs because of the river, such as improved flood protection for downstream nations. And finally, as international rivers can

History tells us that wherever and whenever there are competing demands for the use of water there will be tensions. Benefit sharing to achieve efficiency The idea that cooperation on international rivers can lead to efficiency gains that would otherwise be unachievable through unilateral development is not new. The specific conditions – economic, political, historical and social – necessary to foster cooperation and realize these concomitant gains have been the subject of analysis by numerous researchers. A growing body of literature suggests that a focus on benefit sharing (i.e. sharing the benefits derived from the multiple uses of water rather than physical water allocation) yields far greater scope for identifying mutually beneficial and sustainable arrangements among different stakeholders1. By engaging in a dialogue about allocating the benefits derived from water use, rather than the physical water itself, one necessarily shifts the exercise from a zero-sum to a potentially positive-sum game. Moreover, although the water balance in a river basin is finite (unless transfers are built), the benefits derived from water can be extremely elastic if managed properly. The types of benefits that are possible from transboundary cooperation vary greatly across basins, reflecting a wide range of political, geographic, economic and cultural circumstances. Sadoff and Grey2 offer a

be catalytic agents, cooperation can pave the way to much greater cooperation between states – including regional stability and even economic integration – generating benefits beyond the river. In some cases, the scale of benefits may not justify the costs of cooperative actions; in others, the sum of benefits can be transformative in nature. These benefits may also not necessarily be one-time in nature. With the prospect of such gains, it is no surprise that appropriate benefit sharing mechanisms can be an important determinant for successful transboundary cooperation. The concept that the benefits generated from water management be shared instead of the water per se is simple and intuitively appealing. Hamner and Wolf3 demonstrate, for instance, that for nation/nation negotiations, out of 145 international water agreements, only 37% deal with volumetric allocations. That is, many recent international water agreements already address economic benefits at some level, rather than specific water allocations. This is not surprising, as the benefits being shared usually conform to national development objectives. In some cases, even non-monetary benefits (such as political gains) and non-water benefits (such as land and capital) may be important drivers for successful cooperation.

There are many examples today of negotiated benefit sharing arrangements that have yielded efficiency gains far greater than what could have been achieved by each nation alone. For instance, the commitment to the principle of benefit sharing for Mali, Mauritania and Senegal, the three nations on the Senegal river, was codified through the establishment of a number of legal conventions and a remarkable degree of supra-national executive authority vested in their regional river basin organization, the Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du Fleuve Senegal (OMVS). By cooperating, the three riparian countries were able to put in place the necessary infrastructure and institutions to develop large areas of land for agriculture, generate hydroelectricity to solve the problem of the low supply and high cost of electricity in the region, and maintain a sufficient flow depth in the rivers to make navigation to the Atlantic Ocean possible. The identification and acceptance of a benefit (and cost) sharing methodology to allocate across countries (in this case, the adjusted separable cost remaining benefit approach) helped to cement the regional cooperation relationship that exists today. These efficiency gains, however, do not come easily. Yu1 argues that the challenge for reaching a distribution of mutual benefits that is agreeable to all parties is, firstly, in the quantification of these benefits and, secondly,

Photo: The Media Bank/africanpictures.net

and prejudice the distribution of wealth. This has critical implications on both achieving economic efficiency and equity for society. Benefit sharing can be instrumental in both regards. It can promote efficiency by motivating stakeholders at the river basin scale to cooperate on water management in order to maximise the collective benefits from various water uses. Thus it can lead to economic gains that are larger than the sum of individual actions. Benefit sharing can also enhance equity goals specifically through the structuring of the distribution of benefits derived.

A young boy from Lesotho (above), the water-rich country which shares its resources with South Africa.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

BENEFIT SHARING

in the negotiation of an agreed approach. Deals frequently stall or collapse under the weight of uncertainty around the benefits to be derived and shared. However, the expectation of quantifying benefits and costs with precision will always be a challenge and perhaps even an unrealistic goal. What matters most is that an agreed framework or principles of engagement for quantifying benefits is put in place to give the riparian countries sufficient guidance and latitude in reaching a mutual agreement. This process must be transparent at all times. In the end, the process of reaching an agreement will never be expeditious given the intricate, multi-dimensional nature of water, the complexity of the hydrologic system, and the often difficult socio-political environments. However, as is evidenced from the experience on the Senegal river basin, these cooperative efficiency gains can far outweigh (whether perceived or in real terms) the transaction costs and the decades of concerted engagement required.

Benefit sharing to achieve equity

the idea of broad-based economic growth benefiting the poorest segments of society may be more fiction than reality. A well structured benefit sharing arrangement can be a tool to ensure this redistribution and to promote societal equity goals. Benefit sharing can be a force for inclusive growth. Significant economic rents and public benefits can be generated, particularly for large infrastructure water projects. On ethical

Senegal’s president Abdoulaye Wade (above centre) talks to Mali’s president Amadou Toumani Touré (left) and Mauritania’s head of state Ely Ould Mohamed Vall at the 2006 summit of their river basin organization, OMVS.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

and development grounds, these rents should be shared with the populations affected by these projects. This is a classic resource revenue management problem and is typified by the extensive literature on how rents from the extractive industries such as natural and mineral resources (e.g. gold or oil) can be shared to catalyse more inclusive growth. This is not a trivial exercise and speaks to the heart of many of the pressing economic development issues faced today. For hydropower investments, previous examples

In the absence of formal direct mechanisms, the idea of broad-based economic growth benefiting the poorest segments of society may be more fiction than reality.

Photo: Gettyimages

Perhaps an even greater challenge than using benefit sharing mechanisms to promote economic efficiency and achieve growth, is how benefit

sharing can be used to promote equity and inclusivity in water management and development. This is particularly relevant to cooperative agreements that lead to the development of large infrastructure, as is typically the case. Whatever balance may eventually be achieved between the economic benefits and the costs of development, it is important to consider the distribution of these costs and benefits, particularly for those most affected in both the positive and negative sense. In the absence of formal direct mechanisms to transfer generated wealth to local communities,

have consisted of arrangements for revenue sharing, local development funds, equity sharing, property taxes and preferential electricity rates. The experience with these approaches has been mixed. One primary challenge is determining, in the context of the existing political economy, the most appropriate mix of policy and institutional instruments needed to ensure the direct monetary redistribution of project-related rents to project-affected populations. These challenges are best illustrated through some examples. The joint development of the Columbia river basin under the Columbia River Treaty between the United States and Canada resulted in positive cooperative economic gains to each nation in terms of increased power generation and improved flood control. Over a decade of analysis and negotiations was required before an acceptable division of benefits (in this case, a 50/50 split of all gross benefits) could be mutually agreed upon. Although direct inferences were made in the treaty documents to maintaining (not improving) the welfare of those immediately affected by the treaty infrastructure, it later became clear that the primary beneficiaries were located in the major urban centres and that these benefits were at some cost to

Photo: The Media Bank/africanpictures.net

BENEFIT SHARING

The Drakensberg in Lesotho (above), a lush wetland region whose waters now flow into South Africa.

communities (e.g. First Nation tribes) near the infrastructure. To include more people in these gains and restore the negative impacts on project-affected communities, the Columbia Basin Trust was established. Financed partially from the provincial British Columbia budget and partially from the Canadian portion of the treaty benefits, the Trust supports social, economic and environmental development of the basin community and makes the community a partner in new development projects (e.g. local hydropower) in the basin. It is recognized that greater involvement of local stakeholders in ex-ante planning and cooperative development is an opportunity for broader, more transparent and equitable benefit sharing. Structuring a benefit sharing arrangement of this type early in the process can save an enormous amount of future time and resources. Flexibility, though, is needed in these instruments (and institutions) to redistribute and/or transfer wealth as continued satisfaction by all parties will always be a challenge. For example, under the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) Treaty, Lesotho agreed to divert a portion of the water to Gauteng Province in the Republic of South Africa in exchange for royalty payments. Early on in the process, Lesotho aimed to channel a portion of the revenues from the LHWP into a dedicated fund for rural development (initially mostly for rural access

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roads, footbridges, water supply systems, and soil and catchment conservation). This was consistent with the vision of the Lesotho Highlands Development Authority, the entity entrusted with the implementation of the treaty. Although significant resources were made available from the LHWP royalties and some community infrastructure was built, the use of this fund to redistribute wealth has not been entirely satisfactory and has not improved the poverty situation in the Lesotho Highlands to the degree originally thought possible. Some common problems included weak and politicised implementation of the fund, a non-transparent project selection process, weak technical designs, low capacity of communities to technically manage projects, weaknesses in financial control and monitoring, and community projects that were not entirely demand driven. The World Bank, in fact, concluded that, given the

prevailing socio-economic conditions, perceived economic gains by all parties, and strong political support. Patience and perseverance are needed as this process can take decades, largely because of the technical complexity of regional projects, the difficulty in establishing benefits and reaching an equitable division of gains, differing policy and political environments, and the time needed to define roles and responsibilities among project, national and regional institutions. Despite this, history demonstrates that efficiency gains can be significant. With regards to achieving equity aims, benefit sharing can be used as a tool to structure deals to specifically redistribute (or share) cooperative gains with project-impacted populations, basin-wide populations or other target groups. This can be critical to ensure sustained support for cooperative agreements and to ensure that efficiency gains are not won at the cost of equity. The institutions

Structuring a benefit sharing arrangement of this type early in the process can save an enormous amount of future time and resources. existing sound allocation framework in the Lesotho government, off-budget support in this context may not have been the most appropriate mechanism for redistributing project revenues towards rural development.

Conclusion Overall, the construct of benefit sharing provides riparians – at the national or local levels – with the flexibility to separate the physical distribution of river development from the economic distribution of benefits. This allows nations and competing national users to focus, firstly, on generating the maximum basin-wide benefits possible (i.e. efficiency objectives) and, secondly, on sharing those benefits in a manner that is agreed as fair (i.e. equity objectives). Achieving both can be an enormous challenge, as is evidenced by early examples that exist. With regards to achieving equity, reaching a solution that generates cooperative benefits will be dependent on the development context,

established to help manage these transfers and the richness of stakeholder involvement matter immensely for long-term success. Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the institution for which they work.

References: Yu, W. ‘Benefit Sharing in International Rivers: Findings from the Senegal River Basin, the Columbia River Basin, and the Lesotho Highlands Project, Africa Region’. Water Resources Unit Working Paper, World Bank. (2008.) 2 Sadoff, C and Grey, D. ‘Beyond the River: The Benefits of Cooperation on International Rivers’. Water Policy 4. (Elsevier Science, 2002.) 3 Hamner, J and Wolf, A. ‘Patterns in International Water Resource Treaties: The Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database’. Colorado Journal of International Environmental Law and Policy 1997 Yearbook. (1998.) 1

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RISK MANAGEMENT

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Strategies for climate change adaptation

The Aral Sea in Central Asia (above) was once the fourth largest inland body of saline water on Earth, but has shrunk to less than a tenth of its size due to the diverting of the rivers which fed it, the Amudarya and Syrdarya.

Managing climate risks for water resources in a changing environment By Upmanu Lall

Given the current limitations of our ability to accurately predict the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change, how can we confront the risks that await us?

lobal climate is now understood to vary in a systematic way across seasons, years, decades and centuries. These systematic variations are due in part to natural processes, such as ocean-atmosphere interactions that lead to inter-annual and decadal oscillations, and, in part, due to anthropogenic forcing of the global atmosphere and changes in watershed processes. Consequently, the risk faced in designing and operating water systems and allocating available supplies varies systematically in time.

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So what are the prospects for predicting and managing such dynamic risks? It can be argued that to inform adaptation strategies, there is a need to redirect some effort from the modelling of anthropogenic climate change towards improvements in near term (i.e. one season to one decade) hydroclimatic prediction to inform strategies for adaptation to a variable climate. These strategies may include a combination of infrastructure (or structural) measures and financial or social risk management instruments.

The discussion on climate change adaptation and mitigation invariably comes to recognize that many of the potential impacts (e.g. related to food security, flood and drought hazards, ecological functioning) of climate on society are felt through potential changes in the regional water resources. Proposed climate change mitigation efforts focus on the reduction of greenhouse gases, through carbon capture and removal from the atmosphere, through substitution of carbon fuels by alternate sources (e.g. solar, wind, nuclear), the use of biofuels that promote carbon recycling, or by planetary engineering to modify albedo or radiation. Many of these mitigation schemes are expected to have significant, but as yet unquantified, impacts on the global and regional water cycles. There is also a concern that proposed mitigation efforts may not succeed in averting significant and potentially irreversible climate changes in the 21st Century. Consequently, it is important to explore strategies for climate change adaptation for the management and development of water resources. Anthropogenic changes in global climate may lead to changes in regional average precipitation and evaporation, and hence in the average stream flow or groundwater recharge in a region, or in increased variability in these attributes. The change in variability may be manifest as a change in the intermittency (or frequency and intensity) of rainfall events, in a shift or extension of the dominant wet/warm/cold season(s), or in the inter-annual frequency and persistence of wet and drought years. The relation of changes in global temperature to greenhouse gases emissions, deforestation and other changes in land surface attributes (e.g. widespread irrigation or desertification) has been well established through data-based and physics-based model investigations. This is the basis of the concern for climate change in the 21st Century. Unfortunately, the ability to predict the associated changes in the average hydrologic cycle and its intra- and inter-annual variability with some regional specificity is still rather limited. The General Circulation

WATER SCARCITY

Models (GCMs) of ocean-atmosphere circulation exhibit significant spatial and temporal biases in reproducing the basic statistics of precipitation, even when averaged over relatively large scales. Investigations of these biases have largely been limited to comparisons of average seasonal rainfall and the number of rainy days in the season. Only a few investigations have compared intra- and inter-annual variance and autocorrelation or dependence structures. Biases identified in these statistics at regional scales continue to be often much higher than even the uncertainty estimated through variability across ensemble simulations across multiple models. Statistical and dynamic ‘downscaling’ methods are often

Risk and its quantification Uncertain information as to precipitation, stream flow, groundwater recharge and aquifer properties, or as to water demand and quality requirements, has always been an issue in hydrology and hence in water resource management. These uncertainties translate into the risk that any system design or operating policy will fail to deliver the quantities of water needed or to attenuate floods for which it is designed. Risk has traditionally been assessed as either a probability of an adverse condition (e. g. system or component failure, a certain flood or drought magnitude), or as the potential loss from a particular event, or the expected value (i.e. sum of probability of each potential loss) of the loss.

proposed to ‘correct’ such biases and to apply these corrections to future projections. Most consider a correction of seasonal statistics, while some (e.g. using Nonhomogeneous Hidden Markov Models) also consider the simulation of daily rainfall attributes. Few indeed have considered the simultaneous relation between winds, temperature, precipitation and evaporation – the key components of the regional hydrologic cycle as forced by the atmosphere. However, it is not clear that such ‘corrections’ are reliable under extrapolation to a future climate using nonlinear models that are not generating the correct statistics in the controlled historical simulations. Consequently, in most parts of the world today, considerable uncertainty is associated with future projections of water availability. This uncertainty is due to both the natural variability of climate, and to the inability to properly model key aspects of the global hydrological cycle. Addressing climate variability as part of water development is key for stabilising and improving the economies of developing countries1.

Traditionally, a static risk paradigm has dominated hydrologic analyses and hence water resources management and planning. A specific set of conditions superposed over a finite, historical climate record is considered to derive the probabilities (including perhaps the consideration of some modelling and sampling uncertainties) and the potential losses associated with system failure. Considering the rapid pace of global change and its impact on hydrologic systems, such an approach is no longer tenable. It has been argued2 that anthropogenic climate change voids the assumption of stationarity that underlies the traditional static risk analysis. However, Jain and Lall3 note that decadal to centennial to millennial quasi-cyclical modes of natural climate variability render the traditional assumption of stationarity void in any case. Moreover, the exponential growth rates of population, per capita use and settlement in marginal lands collectively increases exposure to drought, flood and pollution hazards, even if the climate were not changing4. At this point it is difficult to assess the relative contributions of climate, land management

Photo: Panos

The risk faced in designing and operating water systems and allocating available supplies varies systematically in time.

In Chad (above), women demonstrate by displaying their empty water bottles and food containers as symbols of their lack of resources and the failure of the international community to provide adequate aid.

and infrastructure development on flood risk or on groundwater quality. However, there is reason to believe that hydrologic non-stationarity may be dominated by human influences in the watershed rather than global climate changes at this point. The consensus from assessments of potential global climate change signatures on floods and droughts is that, while there is evidence for systematic trends in the frequency of incidence of both types of extremes, these trends were typically not spatially consistent, even in the same region. The global trends in stream flow or hydrologic drought are qualitatively consistent with what is expected under the climate change scenarios, yet the differences prevent clear attribution. Further, decadal climate variability

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Photo: Panos

RISK MANAGEMENT

In Bihar, India in 2007, villagers were forced to travel by boat (above) after particularly heavy monsoon rains in the region led to severe flash floods which displaced more than 12 million residents and killed many others.

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may be more prominent than secular trends, and the ability of the current generation of GCMs to properly replicate the statistics of the hydrologic cycle in space and time is not sufficient to attribute the trends to climatic factors or to project them towards the end of the 21st Century. Still, one has to consider the risk posed by GCM scenarios that portend dramatic increases in drought and flood frequency in most places by the end of the century (typically increasing floods in higher latitudes and increasing drought in the tropics and subtropics). Recognising the role of structured quasi-oscillatory climate phenomena at inter-annual and longer time scales (e.g. El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation), along with anthropogenic changes in global climate and watershed hydrology, a dynamic risk paradigm – where the risk exposure of water systems is assessed in a time-varying manner conditional on analyses of factors that lead to either cyclical or monotonic change, and factor in changes in exposure to risk given adaptation and mitigation actions – is needed. The recent emphasis on adaptive management as a vehicle for integrated water resources management essentially necessitates a dynamic risk paradigm.

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A natural first step towards an approach for estimating dynamic hydrologic risk is to consider the use of quantitative physicsbased, spatially distributed models of the related systems (surface and groundwater hydrology, soil evolution, vegetation, agriculture, climate, economics, population demographics and institutional social choice/ decision-making). After all, aspects of such an approach, anchored by high resolution data, have been the sine qua non of hydrologic analysis for the last several decades, and methods for model calibration, uncertainty analysis and parameter regionalisation have been developed. There have been large initiatives for the Prediction of Ungauged Basins and for modelling Global Energy and Water Exchanges that could provide the needed technologies. Unfortunately, as observed by Koutsoyiannis5, even for climate modelling, where greater effort has been invested in global modelling, verification and improvement, the statistics of precipitation and temperature from these models are not reliable even for 30-year averaging periods and at a variety of spatial scales. Indeed, the tradition in applied hydrology has been to use statistical or stochastic process models directly for risk assessment where the timescale of interest is longer than a month or so. Since these models were typically

formulated under stationarity assumptions, an open question is how to modify them (directly or using deterministic models for certain components with uncertainty analysis) under cyclically or monotonically evolving climate, landscape and use conditions. Based on the experience with climate change modelling and with the long term models of socio-economic systems, both of which need to be integrated to make credible forecasts of dynamic hydrologic risk, it is unlikely that a large scale, spatially distributed coupled model of the component systems (using existing component models) replete with multi-scale nonlinear feedbacks and time delays will lead to credible dynamic risk estimates at any of the scales of interest for adaptive water management. Specifically, it is unlikely that credible, numerical forecasts of season-ahead, decadal or multi-decadal risks of water supply/demand imbalance, flood or drought can be made today through a direct application of existing deterministic GCMs of the ocean-atmosphere, linked to existing deterministic hydrologic models. In this context, ‘credible’ refers to both the assessment of the probability of a loss or adverse outcome and the associated uncertainty, such that a formal decision analysis process that requires this information can be informed. Rather, even in this problem domain, currently significant efforts at intermediate model bias correction, ‘statistical downscaling’ and the like is expended to generate acceptable numbers for the average response. Addressing spatio-temporal biases in extreme event frequency and magnitude, and changes in inter-annual variability of the hydro-climatic system, is still difficult in this modelling framework. Scenario analysis, where a ‘softer’ analysis of the possible outcomes is done, has emerged as the vogue in the climate change impact analysis community. These approaches do not claim to formally assess the probability of the impacts. Rather, a limited uncertainty analysis of the climate variables is used together with domain impact analysis models and the ability of existing systems and policies to perform under the ‘change

RISK MANAGEMENT

scenario’ is assessed. In the water resource management context, it may be useful to consider such exercises and to develop portable tools that could be used in different physical and social settings, but with goals that constrain the risk analysis to rather specific questions: for example, changes in exposure to flood risk for the coming monsoon season. Given a clear definition of such ‘problem statements’, our existing technologies and data could be useful building blocks for new problem-focused, integrative stochastic and physics-based analytic modelling systems that permit exploration of non-stationary dynamics through an implicit consideration of the factors that appropriately change the boundary conditions (e.g. climate or landscape or use) and consider relevant interactions across systems. A dynamic global risk assessment and modelling approach could then emerge as the integration of local and regional modelling of pertinent issues at those scales, consistent with the nature of the global water crisis and the need to adaptively address it where it matters. As one considers dynamic risk prediction related to climate for the near term (season to decade) to inform adaptive water management at the local and regional level, the following gaps need to be addressed:

extreme rainfall) and the associated hydrologic variables (stream flow and recharge) at lead times of one season would provide the ability to adapt existing water allocation, flood control and crop selection rules to anticipated conditions, thus facilitating improved system operation as well as decisions on financial risk management. Today, this capacity is available only in a limited way in a few places in the world. Developing the data

In the water resource management context, it may be useful to develop portable tools that could be used in different physical and social settings. attribution to known climate mechanisms, and to then use this information to structure dynamic climate risk scenarios that are consistent across scenarios. An influence diagram or Bayesian Network conceptual structure would be very helpful in both quantifying risk in this manner and communicating it to potential users. • Seasonal rainfall and water resource prediction: The ability to predict rainfall statistics (daily rainfall properties, seasonal total, wet/dry spell durations,

base and the statistically verifiable modelling capability to make probabilistic forecasts available at this lead time is important for both water management and near-term planning as a core piece of a climate risk management strategy for both human and ecological uses of water. The associated data base and its investigation as to the sources of predictability would also provide a strong basis for an evaluation of longer term climate change scenarios. • Inter-annual to decadal scenarios: Many water resource projects have a physical or economic life that is between a decade and a century. Where time discounting of economic values is used, the first decade is usually the most significant contributor to the benefit/cost analysis. Given that many long regional climate time series exhibit both a response to the episodic ENSO events and regime-like behaviour at decadal and longer scales (e.g. Asian monsoon systems, Sahel rainfall, Mediterranean rainfall), it would be very useful to develop insights from long climate records and retrospective GCM simulations that can provide quantitative scenarios for regional hydrologic statistics at operationally useful

Photo: Panos

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• Structured climate risk characterisation approach: Climate varies at many time scales, yet most of the recent concerns with climate risk management and adaptation in the water resources community has been excited by the projections of anthropogenic climate change. Given the preferred organization of climate variability at seasonal, inter-annual, decadal and century scales, there is a need to systematically identify these structures in regional climate, including their

With the shrinking of the Aral Sea (above), the desert has spread and is destroying the ecosystem. Robbed of their livelihoods, residents of the former fishing towns endure colder winters, hotter summers and frequent dust storms.

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Figure 1: An illustration of potential components of a climate risk management system. Climate changes due to natural and anthropogenic factors are recognised as smooth (i.e. slowly varying from season to century) or abrupt (i.e. too fast relative to the ability to adapt to that type of change). These changes translate into the risk of drought or flood or supply deficits that varies with time. Some of this risk is predictable by using a combination of statistical and dynamical tools and long historical data sets. Predictability of the long term statistics (i.e. inter-annual to decadal and longer) is potentially useful for infrastructure design and water allocation rule development. The ability to make near term (i.e. seasonal) forecasts then permits the efficient application of these operating rules. Since most forecasts will be probabilistic, there is a residual risk to this infrastructure and policy system design and operation. This residual risk and the unpredictable elements of dynamics risk (e.g. related to abrupt changes or intrinsic randomness) are then managed by financial and social instruments, including insurance, catastrophe bonds and welfare. The water allocation instruments

predictable manner and, moreover, the analysis of financial and social risk management instruments is made integral to the analysis. Thus, the division between structural and non-structural approaches to risk management (e.g. in flood control literature) are bridged in an integrated water resource management framework. The issue of hydroclimatic predictability is appropriately dealt with in this setting, since the scenarios and forecasts developed are intended to inform a process where decisions are made with a recognition of the uncertainty and its potential sources, and statistical verification and estimation of these uncertainties (e.g. using Bayesian methods and multiple data sources) is an integral part of the approach. Research has already illustrated how seasonal forecasts can be used to improve reservoir operation and water allocation in a multi-use system. However, the integration across instruments and across timescales has not yet been demonstrated, even at the research level. The development of such analyses is needed to explore how a science-based operational framework can be advanced for adaptive water resources management aimed at assessing and managing climate risk.

may include the use of trading and sectoral re-allocation contingent on forecast.

time/space resolution for the region of interest. Consistency between these scenarios and the seasonal forecasts would be extremely useful from a methodological perspective, and would enhance the utility of the products, even though they are aimed at different timescales. For instance, if a specific decadal regime has high probability, and it is anticipated that this regime will be marked by a number of El Niño events, then the prediction of wet season attributes during El Niño events is very useful to communicate even at the decadal timescale.

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• Prediction of changes in water demand conditional on climate conditions: So far, much of the work on assessing the climate sensitivity of water resource systems has

focused on water supply. However, agricultural and other water use can change dramatically depending on the climate state (precipitation, temperature and wind). Research into the formal assessment of such changes is critical for dynamic risk assessment since it would directly inform the probability of potential supply/demand imbalances.

AdApTATIoN ANd RISK MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES A potential strategy for the adaptive management of climate risk is illustrated in Figure 1 (see above). The concept is that the traditional estimation of static climate risk using historical at-site data, and its use in infrastructure design and allocation rule development, could be replaced by a procedure that updates these rules and decisions as conditions change in a

REfERENcES Brown, C and Lall, U. ‘Water and development: The role of variability and a framework for resilience’. Natural Resources Forum 30. (2006.) 2 Milly, PCD, Betancourt, J, Falkenmark, M, Hirsch, RM, Kundzewicz, ZW, Lettenmaier, DP and Stouffer, RJ. ‘Stationarity is dead: Whither water management?’ Science 319(5863). (2008.) 3 Jain, S, and Lall, U. ‘Floods in a Changing Climate: Does the Past Represent the Future?’ Water Resour. Res., 37(12). (2001.) 4 Falkenmark, M. ‘Dilemma when entering the 21st Century – rapid change but lack of a sense of urgency’. Water Policy 1. (1998.) 5 Koutsoyiannis, D, Efstratiadis, A, Mamassis, N and Christofides, A. ‘On the credibility of climate predictions’. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 53(4). (August 2008.) 1

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WATER RECYCLING

Making an asset out of wastewater By Pay Drechsel and Liqa Raschid-Sally

In much of the developed world, recycled wastewater is an essential component of agricultural irrigation. But is it safe to use?

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In Myanmar, a woman filters seawater through sand (above), one of many interesting examples to learn from.

Spain, France, Israel and Jordan, wastewater is effectively treated before application to agricultural fields. This treated wastewater (sometimes referred to as reclaimed water) is considered an important supplement to available water resources and water recycling has become an essential component of the water balance equation. Australia and the US recycle approximately out 30% of their

wastewater; in Tunisia, reclaimed water could reach 11% by 2030, while in Israel it could reach 20% by 2010. In all these countries, agricultural wastewater is considered an asset and its use is formal, well regulated and controlled by well-established agencies4,5. Common challenges in these cases are linked to planning (including legislation for use), engineering (maintaining treated water

Photo: Panos

s demand on limited water resources increases from competing sectors of world economies, it is inevitable that the sustainable utilisation of urban wastewater will become a critical issue in overcoming water scarcity. The issue is not a new one. Wastewater use in agriculture is a widespread practice with a long tradition around the world. In many European and North American cities, before the introduction of suitable treatment technologies, wastewater was disposed of in agricultural fields instead of into water bodies. This was to prevent pollution of water bodies where the assimilation capacity of receiving water was exceeded. In developing countries such as China, Mexico, Peru, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, India and Vietnam, wastewater has been used as a source of crop nutrients for decades and the agricultural use of untreated wastewater has been associated with environmental protection and crop production for centuries. Over the years, there have been significant technological advances in wastewater treatment and our knowledge of health risks from untreated wastewater has increased. This has led to the development of international guidelines and national standards for safe use of wastewater in agriculture, which has significantly reduced untreated wastewater irrigation, especially in developed countries1,2,3. In many developed and middle-income countries, such as the United States, Tunisia,

WATER SECURITY

Source: Jimenez and Asano3

Region

Water Availability Index in 2006: m3/capita/year

Water Intensity Use Index in 2000: %

Middle East and North Africa

1,383

62.8

Asia (excluding Middle East)

3,990

19.3

Mexico, Central America & the Caribbean

6,740

8.5

United States and Canada

19,649

9.3

Europe

10,680

6.4

Sub-Saharan Africa

7,209

3.1

Oceania

53,290

1.6

South America

45,400

1.3

Developed Countries

11,392

Developing Countries

7,693

8.9

High Income Countries

10,554

10.1

Middle Income Countries

10,171

6.9

Low Income Countries

5,894

12.1

World

8,462

8.9

Figure 1: A table contrasting water availability and water use intensity in different regions of the world.

quality), economics (costs and benefits) and social acceptability for reuse. More recently, a paradigm shift to design treatment facilities not for waste disposal but as providers of resources with economic value – for example, by conserving nutrients for agriculture – is being more actively promoted.

close to 20 million hectares of arable land or even higher are currently being irrigated with the help of untreated, partially treated and diluted wastewater3,6, which is equal to approximately half of the area continuously irrigated worldwide or 10% of the world’s irrigated land surface7.

consumption. Or, in other words, where market incentives favour the production of cash crops exactly where water sources are usually heavily polluted and farmers do not find cheaper, equally reliable or safer alternatives. This type of informal wastewater use is easily imaginable in the developing world, given the lack of capacities for adequate or comprehensive wastewater treatment6. Estimates show that, in Asia, only 35% of wastewater generated is treated; in Latin America, the figure is 22%; in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the figure is even lower. This treatment is, more often than not, minimal, and the results are mixed with large amounts of untreated wastewater in the urban drainage systems and other natural waterways. Several billion people still live in conditions where domestic wastewater is discharged untreated into local water bodies. In and around three out of four cities in the developing world, this water, which ranges in quality from raw to diluted wastewater, is used by market-oriented farmers specialising in growing perishable vegetables and other

Treated wastewater has become an essential component of the water balance equation. Where is the challenge? Water scarcity – as we perceive it from looking at the dwindling amounts of available water – is not the only reason for wastewater use. A recent study for the Comprehensive Assessment on Water and Food concluded that there are additional reasons, with water pollution (or the scarcity of quality water) being the most important. Wastewater use is – and without any planning – a widespread reality throughout the developing world where, in the vicinity of cities, urban food demand meets the trade-offs of urban

Photo: Panos

In all these examples, the reuse or recycling of wastewater is considered important as water scarcity implies the need for intensive water use (see Figure 1 above). The regions likely to suffer the most will be North and South Africa, western Asia, the North China Plain, western and southern India, Pakistan, central and southern Mexico, the western coast of the United States, the Mediterranean region and a large part of Australia. Reuse of wastewater already figures prominently in all these countries, although in many of the cases such use is unplanned and therefore the quality of water used is questionable. Available data suggest that, worldwide,

A child walks next to an open sewer in the Ajegunle slum in Lagos (above), the former capital of Nigeria.

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WATER RECYCLING

crops that have a high urban demand8. The current use of these polluted water sources is by far exceeding the agricultural use of treated wastewater (see Figure 2, at right), with significant agronomic and economic benefits (The challenge of defining planned and unplanned, treated and untreated wastewater use â&#x20AC;&#x201C; especially as treated wastewater in many developing countries might still be called untreated wastewater elsewhere â&#x20AC;&#x201C; was taken up by Van der Hoek in 2004). Over the last 10 years, our growing understanding of untreated wastewater use has produced a large amount of information regarding the livelihoods and food supply benefits. It has also been made abundantly clear that the approach of banning this largely informal practice will not work. So the key challenge in this situation is, firstly, to maximise the benefits of wastewater use while protecting public health and the environment. That is to say, how to make a safe asset out of wastewater, as called for in the Hyderabad Declaration on Wastewater Use in Agriculture9. At risk are two groups: farmers and consumers. In most cases, each has varying levels of information and knowledge about the potential hazards they face. As far as they perceive them, farmers usually accept their occupational health risks as part of their livelihood strategy, whereas consumers are often unaware of the original source of their purchase and are therefore less knowledgeable about risks. The key threat is from excreta-related pathogens, although chemical contamination increasingly becomes an issue in emerging economies.

Source: Jimenez and Asano3; Keraita et al13 Area irrigated with treated and untreated wastewater

Untreated wastewater

China data: 4 million ha; Out of proportion

Treated wastewater

Area ( â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;000 ha )

Figure 2: A chart of countries with the highest irrigated areas showing untreated and treated wastewater use.

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Risk mitigation options strongly depend on local opportunities and needs, and should be correspondingly adapted and upgraded when opportunities improve or needs change. In particular, this applies to developing countries where wastewater collection and/or treatment are, in most instances, far behind wastewater generation, and where investments in treatment are a patchwork and barely

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Photo: Panos

Health risk mitigation

Uzbeks in the village of Yulduzqoq in Tajikistan (above) are forced to draw water from a polluted irrigation canal.

WATER SECURITY

cost-effective. In the case of Ghana, for example, of the 70 largely decentralised wastewater treatment plants, only around 8 of them are functioning at the levels originally planned. Even if all were effectively operational, less than 10% of the generated wastewater would be treated10. The resulting environmental burden is immense. Thus, in such countries, the priority is not how to design a safe wastewater irrigation scheme via appropriate treatment, but how to reduce the already accruing risks from thousands of informal plots or micro-schemes under irrigation along the urban and peri-urban water bodies that feed millions of people. Looking at the overwhelming statistics of diarrheal diseases, the main task ahead in those regions at the bottom of the sanitation ladder is, in simple terms, damage control. In this regard, the FAO and UNEP supported 2006 edition of The WHO Guidelines for Safe Wastewater Irrigation offers a variety of mutually non-exclusive options for risk reduction, from wastewater treatment to safer irrigation measures and post-harvest cleaning of crops (see Figure 3, at right). The guidelines are a major step forward, as they acknowledge that, in most low-income countries, authorities have little means to achieve, maintain or enforce water quality thresholds, making these useless as a management option to prevent diseases. As an alternative, achieving health-based targets is the approach adopted by WHO, with the bottom-line being that some risk reduction is better than none at all and that a combination of measures can actually achieve a significant contribution to public health. In those countries where wastewater treatment has a higher coverage and farmers can be provided with treated wastewater, the guidelines go beyond simple damage control to assist with the development of national standards and regulations.

Moving sanitation out of isolation The challenges ahead for research and development are many. A key task is to move ‘sanitation’ out of its technical isolation by

Source: Keraita et al13

THERMOTOLERANT COLIFORMS (LOG UNITS)**

THERMOTOLERANT COLIFORMS (LOG UNITS)***

Intervention*

Initial

Final

Removal

Initial

Final

Removal

1. On-farm ponds for 3 days sedimentation period

8.18+0.53

6.76+0.33

1.42

6.0+0.5

1.2+0.4

4.8

2. Slow sand filters, 60 days after installation

7.31+0.18

4.87+0.13

2.44

5.7+0.5

0.7+0.1

5.0

3. Drip irrigation kits during dry season

6.53+0.11

0.47+0.24

6.06

0.6+0.4

0.6

4. Cessation before harvesting for 4 days during the dry season

6.32+0.40

3.97+0.44

2.35

2.3+0.5

0.8+0.5

1.5

5. Vegetable washing in running tap water for 2 min

6.10+0.10

3.90+0.80

2.20

8.7+3.2

0.7+0.6

8.0

6. Vegetable washing with vinegar (6800 ppm) for 2 min

6.10+0.10

5.10+1.50

1.00

8.7+3.2

2.3+1.5

6.4

7. Vegetable washing with ‘eau de javel’ (bleach 100 ppm) for 5 min

6.39+0.20

4.02+0.46

2.37

Not determined

Figure 3: Examples of low-cost non-treatment options for wastewater-related health risk reduction. * Irrigation water was analysed for intervention 1 and 2; crop samples (lettuce) for intervention 3 to 7. ** Units for water samples 1 and 2 is log of MPN/100 ml; crop samples 3 to 7 is log of MPN/100 g. *** Units for water samples 1 and 2 is No./litre; crop samples 3 to 7 is No./100 g.

improving networking at the agriculture/ sanitation/health interface. For example, the process of looking at sanitation from the public health perspective should result in the isolation and/or destruction of pathogenic material derived from human waste and result in a break in the transmission pathway back to humans. Public health – particularly in an increasingly congested urban world – is based on this service being provided by the sanitation sector.

Wastewater treatment is not the only way to break the pathogen cycle. There are many more options along the food chain, where innovative institutional solutions are required to outsource health risk reduction from the often failing sanitation sector to actors along the food chain (i.e. farmers, food vendors, kitchens etc). This is what is referred to in the WHO guidelines as ‘non-treatment options’. For example, improved networking in the interface between agriculture and sanitation

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Photo: Panos

WATER RECYCLING

In Jalandhar in India, a woman washes fresh vegetables in her kitchen (above). Many urban dwellers around the world are unaware that there are effective ways to clean food produced with highly polluted water.

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would bring principles of wastewater treatment on-farm. Many farmers in SSA irrigate with watering cans and use small dugouts or cemented storage ponds scattered across their plots to store water close to the beds, thereby reducing the walking/carrying distance. Often we observe whole cascades of interlinked ponds, a fantastic playground where the principles of natural treatment systems can be applied at very little additional cost. Agricultural and sanitation engineers could meet to discuss modifications with farmers, which would enhance water quality and ultimately food safety. This interface between sanitation, health and agriculture is still poorly developed, despite efforts by groups such as the SuSanA alliance11. Too often the sanitation sector in developing countries still aims at sophistication and high standards, whereas the health sector often has its back to the wall regarding any effective and sustainable steps towards risk reduction. Meanwhile, the agricultural sector is aiming at simple and affordable technologies that reduce the risk, but maintain land and labour productivity. This is not automatically the case with additional safety practices. Where these cannot be enforced through regulations, incentives will be required to support their adoption. These could include better marketing for safer produce, access to credit, or improved land tenure security, which are

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common bottlenecks for on-farm improvements, especially on many informal urban farms. Social marketing will be the key to institutionalizing many of the ‘non-treatment options’ suggested in the WHO guidelines. We should be ready to open these doors to make progress. A further challenge is that most of these ‘non-treatment options’ usually only address pathogen-based threats, while options for addressing the inflow of industrial or chemically polluted wastewater remain limited. These and other research challenges to make the use of wastewater and excreta in agriculture safe, productive and sustainable were recently discussed by an expert group from 28 international, national and regional research institutes, multilateral and bilateral bodies, and universities based in 17 countries, leading to the Accra Consensus12. A key issue was the need to make the new WHO guidelines understandable to those who will be using them. Providing technical support to make the guidelines comprehensible is an immediate need, with accompanying measures to governments to adapt and institutionalise them.

References: Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report. (WHO and UNICEF, 2000.) 1 Shuval, HI, Adin, A, Fattal, B, Rawitz, E and Yekutiel, P. ‘Wastewater Irrigation in Developing

Countries: Health Effects and Technical Solutions’. World Bank Technical Paper No. 51. (1986.) 2 Guidelines of the Safe Use of Wastewater, Excreta and Grey Water Vol. 2: Wastewater Use in Agriculture. (WHO, 2006.) 3 Jimenez, B and Asano, T. ‘Water reclamation and re-use around the world’. Water Reuse - An International Survey: Contrasts, issues and needs around the world. (IWA Publishing, 2008.) 4 McCornick, PG, Hijazi, A and Sheikh, B. ‘From Wastewater Reuse to Water Reclamation: Progression of Water Reuse Standards in Jordan’. Wastewater Use in Irrigated Agriculture: Confronting the Livelihood and Environmental Realities. (CABI Publishing, 2004.) 5 Qadir, M, Wichelns, D, Raschid-Sally, L, Singh Minhas, P, Drechsel, P, Bahri, A and McCornick, P. ‘Agricultural use of marginalquality water - opportunities and challenges’. Water for Food, Water for Life. A Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. (Earthscan, 2007.) 6 Scott, CA, Faruqui, NI and Raschid-Sally, L. ‘Wastewater use in irrigated agriculture: management challenges in developing countries’. Wastewater Use in Irrigated Agriculture: Confronting the Livelihood and Environmental Realities. (CABI, 2004.) 7 Thenkabail, PS, Biradar, CM, Turral, H, Noojipady, P, Li, YJ, Vithanage, J, Dheeravath, V, Velpuri, M, Schull, M, Cai, XL and Dutta, R. ‘An Irrigated Area Map of the World (1999) Derived from Remote Sensing’. IWMI Research Report 105. (2006.) 8 Raschid-Sally, L. and Jayakody, P. ‘Drivers and Characteristics of Wastewater Agriculture in Developing Countries: Results from a Global Assessment’. IWMI RR 127. (forthcoming 2009.) 9 http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/health/wastew/ hyderabad_declaration.htm 10 IWMI (unpublished) 11 http://www.susana.org 12 http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/research_impacts/ Research_Themes/Theme_3/Accra_Consensus.aspx 13 Keraita, B, Jimenez, B and Drechsel, P. (2008). ‘Extent and implications of agricultural reuse of untreated, partly treated, and diluted wastewater in developing countries’. CAB Reviews: Perspectives in Agriculture, Veterinary Science, Nutrition and Natural Resources, 2008, 3, No 58. (2008)

FOCUS ON AUSTRALIA

The Australian Experience: Reforming water management in times of scarcity By Ken Matthews

112

Photo: Ozimages

How an ambitious and challenging water reform agenda is helping Australia cope with drought, water scarcity, water security and environmental degradation.

With much of Australia caught in a drought, an emu (above) steals a drink from a water tap on an outback farm.

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anaging water more effectively is one of the most important and urgent challenges facing Australia. Historically, the country’s rainfall is highly variable and droughts are common. However, the recent protracted drought over the most developed parts of the country has challenged our water management and governance arrangements. Reduced rainfall and runoff and increasing temperatures resulting from climate change are expected to have a substantial impact on regional water availability in the future, especially in the southwest and southeast of the country. Many rivers and groundwater systems in those areas are already used heavily, resulting in an adverse effect on the environment. All levels of government are enacting a major program of regulatory, planning and market water reform to improve the efficiency and sustainability of Australia’s water management. Whilst Australia uses about 24% of its potentially divertible water resources, this figure masks the variation in distribution of use. About 65% of Australia’s runoff occurs in the three drainage divisions located in the sparsely populated, tropical north. Most large cities are situated in the south, while 40% of Australia’s agricultural production is concentrated in the Murray-Darling Basin where only 6% of national runoff occurs. Because many rivers don’t act as reliable water sources, Australia depends on water storage and stores four million litres of water per head of population – around 12 times the annual average household consumption. Yet there are relatively few sites for efficient water storage dams. The Australian continent is characterised by a lack of high sea mountains and many storages are inefficient, shallow and wide. Despite these high levels of water storage, prolonged and severe drought, such as that recently experienced, has the capacity to severely deplete the resource. For the three years ending October 2008, Murray system inflows were 6,100 GL, which is almost half the previous three-year minimum prior to the current drought (11,300 GL in 1942-45) and

Photo: AP Photo

WATER MANAGEMENT

In Kinglake, northeast of Melbourne, a local church (above) was razed to the ground by bushfires in February 2009.

less than a quarter of the long term average. This dry period is part of an (at least) seven-year period of rainfall deficit in much of the Murray-Darling Basin. Nor have the dry times been confined to the southeast of the country. Perth, the capital of Western Australia, has experienced a steep change in inflows to water supply dams that commenced in the 1970s.

The Policy Response Under Australia’s federated system of government, water management is vested in the six state and two territory governments, which allow other parties to access and use water. In the mid 1990s, jurisdictions that shared the resources of the Murray-Darling Basin agreed to cap their water allocations for consumptive use from the system at 1994 levels. This decision recognised that the limits of sustainability had been overreached and was one of the most important water policy decisions in Australia’s history. Experience demonstrates, however, that when regulators place a cap on surface water, demand transfers to groundwater. A lesson to be learnt from the Australian water reform experience is to include as many significant

water uses and diversions within the planning and regulatory framework as is feasible. The cap drew an historic line in the sand. Both it and the consensus-based governance arrangements for the Basin, which brought all relevant states and territories to the table, have

groundwater systems across the Basin, with those limits approved solely by the Minister for Climate Change and Water. State water-sharing plans are required to become consistent upon their renewal, with the diversion limits set by the Basin-wide planning process. The new arrangements are based on a combination of Commonwealth constitutional powers and the referral of certain powers from the Basin States to the Commonwealth. The referral of powers is major step and clear recognition of the importance of taking a Basin-wide approach to water management. These new policy settings are supported by unprecedented levels of government investment. The Australian government has developed ‘Water for the Future’, a ten-year, AU$12.9 billion plan to guide and support the changes needed to secure water resources and to restore rivers and other waterdependant ecosystems. Buying back water to restore the environment is one of the priorities of ‘Water for the Future’. The Government is investing AU$3.1 billion in buying back water in the Murray-Darling Basin over 10 years. The water will be used to protect and restore environmental assets such

All levels of government are enacting a major program of regulatory, planning and market water reform to improve the efficiency and sustainability of Australia’s water management. been of great importance in moving water reform forward, but they have not proved adequate for the magnitude of the current and emerging challenges to water security. On 15 December, 2008, a new Murray-Darling Basin Authority absorbed all the functions of the former Murray-Darling Basin Commission, which ceased to exist. The creation of the new, independent authority means that, for the first time, a single agency will be responsible for planning the integrated management of water resources in the Basin. The authority will be responsible for determining sustainable limits on water that can be taken from surface and

as wetlands of international importance and areas which support listed migratory and threatened species. Another key plank of the program is the investment of AU$5.8 billion in key rural water projects that save water by upgrading outdated, leaky irrigation systems across the country.

The National Water Initiative The need to move the management of Australia’s water resources to a more efficient and sustainable footing was first reflected at the national level in the 1994 Council of Australian Government water reforms.

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for rural and urban use that optimises economic, social and environmental outcomes from water management. The creation of the National Water Commission arose out of the NWI, with the Commission being given a mandate to independently and publicly assess and report on progress to the highest levels of government, and to assist the implementation of reform.

Australians have long recognised the potential benefits of water trading (within hydrologically connected systems) to ensure that increasingly scarce water resources are allocated to their most productive uses. Water trading, within and between states, is proving very effective in reallocating scarce water supplies. Although it is difficult to untangle the

Recognition of the need for a more integrated and coordinated national approach to water management led to the development of the National Water Initiative.

Photo: fairfaxphotos.com

The key elements of Australia’s new reform agenda include:

Water overflows down the spillway of the Fairbairn Dam in Queensland (above). The dam holds back the waters of Lake Maraboon, which remains one of the largest artifical lakes in the whole of Australia.

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Satisfactorily implementing the agreed reform framework became a crucial condition for state and territory governments to receive substantial payments. However, it was largely left to the individual jurisdictions to decide exactly how to implement these reforms and progress was variable. Recognition of the need for a more integrated and coordinated national approach to water management led to the development of the National Water Initiative (NWI). Agreed in 2004, the NWI represents a shared commitment by the Australian government and state and territory governments to achieve a nationally compatible market, regulatory and planning based system of managing surface and groundwater resources

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• Sophisticated, transparent and comprehensive water planning that deals with key issues such as the major interception of water by uses not captured within the entitlement regime, the interaction between surface and groundwater systems, and the provision of water to achieve specific environmental outcomes. Effective water planning is fundamental to the reforms being driven by the NWI. Water planning assists governments and the community in the adaptive management of surface and groundwater systems in order to meet productive, environmental and other public benefit outcomes. Settling the trade-offs between these competing demands should involve judgements informed by the best available science, socio-economic analysis and community input. Accordingly, the NWI requires that statutory-based water plans are prepared for surface water and groundwater management units in which entitlements are issued. • Expansion of markets in water entitlements and allocations, to bring about more profitable use of water resources and more cost-effective and flexible recovery of water to achieve environmental outcomes.

effects of trade from a background of drought, commodity markets and rural adjustment, trade has clearly assisted existing industries to manage change, and has been critical to new, large-scale agricultural development. Without water trading, many existing enterprises would not have survived the current drought. • More confidence for those investing in the water industry due to more secure water entitlements (which are stipulated as a right to access a share of the water available for consumption in a given year), more compatible registry arrangements, improved public access to information, and better monitoring, reporting and accounting. A key objective of the NWI is to enhance the security and certainty of water access entitlements by clearly specifying the legal nature of those entitlements and ensuring that they possess clear and nationally-compatible characteristics. This includes ensuring that entitlements clearly assign the risks arising from future changes to the water available for consumption. A recent major investment by the Australian government in this area is a new role for the Bureau of Meteorology, which is now authorised to collect and publish high-quality water information. The publications will include a National Water Account and periodic reports on water

WATER MANAGEMENT

resource use and availability. The Bureau will also be empowered to set and implement national standards for water information. A major outcome of this work will be increased transparency, confidence and understanding of water information. • Appropriate pricing of water and water-related services, which plays a key role in providing signals to users on using the resource efficiently, as well as ensuring that services and resource management activities are adequately funded. The expected outcome from the implementation of the water pricing actions of the NWI is to provide states with water pricing and institutional arrangements that promote economically efficient and sustainable use of water resources, water infrastructure assets and government resources devoted to the management of water; to ensure sufficient revenue streams to allow efficient delivery of the required services; to give effect to the principle of ‘user-pays’ and achieve pricing transparency in respect of water storage and delivery in irrigation systems, along with cost recovery for water planning and management; and to avoid perverse or unintended pricing outcomes.

understanding of water. Significant progress continues to be made across a broad range of areas of water reform. Much of this progress can be attributed to the shared commitment by the Australian government and the various state and territory governments under the NWI.

It is evident that the implementation of water reform in Australia is delivering real improvements in the management, use and understanding of water. However, despite the good overall progress being made towards the efficient and sustainable management of Australia’s water resources, there are areas where sufficient progress has not been made, or where progress has been slow. Over-allocation of water resources remains a serious impediment to sustainable water use. The environmental health of too many of our river systems is

under stress and the contest for access to water is continually increasing. Since the NWI was signed in 2004, one area in which the context for water management has changed markedly is urban water. While reasonable progress is being made to implement the various urban reforms called for under the NWI, the challenge of urban water management has intensified significantly at a time of declining inflows into traditional storages. The scale of current and emerging water challenges facing Australia’s major cities has overshadowed the more limited actions agreed in the NWI to advance urban water reform. Major supply augmentation programmes, including desalination plants, are currently under way in almost all of Australia’s major coastal cites, as water utilities seek to develop a portfolio of less climate-dependent water supply options.

Science and water The most prominent example of science engaging with our water challenge is the recent Murray-Darling Basin Sustainable Yields Project (MDBSY). In a world first for rigorous and detailed basin-scale assessment, the MDBSY has brought together skills from

Photo: AP Photo

The outcome for integrated management of water under the NWI is to identify the environmental and other public benefit outcomes being sought for water systems, and to develop and implement management practices and institutional arrangements that will achieve those outcomes. This includes adopting and implementing the recovery of water in over-allocated or overused systems and return to sustainable levels of extraction, and the establishment of accountable environmental water managers equipped with the necessary authority and resources to provide sufficient water at the right times and places to achieve identified outcomes, working across state boundaries where relevant. It is evident that the implementation of water reform in Australia is delivering real improvements in the management, use and Firefighters struggle to control the flames from a bushfire in the Bunyip State Forest (above) near the township of Tonimbuk, 125 kilometers west of Melbourne, during Australia’s worst ever fire disaster in February 2009.

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appreciation. In aggregate, these reports present for the first time a comprehensive, quantitative picture of an immensely complex system, how it has changed with development, and how it may change into the future. The development of this model of the Basin means water management agencies can now assess the potential consequences of their policies and decisions under dry, moderate or wet future climatic scenarios, at the level of each catchment, or across the entire region. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority now has a more complete and agreed platform on which to base future planning, including the new sustainable diversion limit. Regions now being studied as a part of this expansion are northern Australia, southwest Western Australia and Tasmania. The expansion into Northern Australia is a part of a larger plan being undertaken

to critically examine development opportunities and water availability in the lightly developed north, so that any future development in that region is sustainable and based on a sound understanding of the water resource.

The future Australia’s water challenges are ongoing, as is the laborious effort to find solutions. The NWI is a ten-year programme of reform, but it is not a static document. In November 2008, the Council of Australian Governments agreed to a number of initiatives to improve water markets and trade, water information and research, and an enhanced urban water reform framework. These initiatives are designed to enhance and build on the NWI, and their success is essential for Australia’s future wellbeing.

Photo: Gettyimages

across Australia to investigate the current and future availability of surface and groundwater resources of the Murray–Darling Basin. It represents the most comprehensive hydrologic modelling ever undertaken for the entire Basin. The project, led by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s ‘Water for a Healthy Country’ Flagship, involves contributions from more than 150 scientists and technicians from 12 organizations, including state water departments and the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, supported by the National Water Commission and the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. Reports from all 18 regions of the MurrayDarling Basin have now been presented to government and key stakeholders, and have been met with widespread acceptance and

Rescue workers attempt to tow a four-wheel drive vehicle to dry ground (above) after it was caught in a flash flood following violent storms in Queensland in November 2008.

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Brisbane City Council, a member of the IWC Champions Group, is committed to creating Australiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most sustainable and livable WaterSmart city. We wish all the World Water Conference delegates the best in all their water endeavours.

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Photo: Nestlé

FOOD INDUSTRY INITIATIVES

In Shuangcheng in China, a group of local farmers who deliver milk to Nestlé are invited to tour the factory, including a visit to the waste water treatment facility (above).

Water and the Food Industry By Peter Brabeck-Letmathe

The water and food industries both rely upon and nurture each other. Here the Chairman of Nestlé explains why this relationship is critical for the future.

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t the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland in 2008, water was a top priority on the agenda for the first time. A long series of discussions1 finally succeeded in bringing the knowledge and warnings of water specialists to the attention of people from many different sectors of industry, sections of governments that usually are not concerned about water management, and a number of other societal groups of different orientations. Back in 2003, Frank Rijsberman, then director general of the International Water Management Institute, had already expressed his concern thus: “If present trends continue, the livelihoods of one-third of the world’s

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population will be affected by water scarcity by 2025. We could be facing annual losses equivalent to the entire grain crops of India and the US combined.” Rijsberman’s message was unusual in several respects. Normally, ‘water scarcity’ is associated with tap water. Rijsberman, however, was talking about its impact on crops. Additionally, he highlighted the vastness of the problem, as the combined grain production in India and the US accounts for approximately 30% of global cereal consumption. Trends have not improved since then. Huge programmes for so-called biofuels – heavily subsidised and supported by a number of other political measures – are

absorbing scarce land and even scarcer water resources to an increasing extent. In one of the early discussions about water at Davos, Ismael Serageldin gave us one simple rule of thumb: one litre of water is required per calorie grown – and it does not matter whether the calorie is ultimately for the nutrition of humans or for biofuel to run a car (interestingly, it does not make a significant difference whether these plants are being grown for first or second generation biofuels). So there are water withdrawals for farming food, growing fast with world population and a changing diet. And there is a rapidly soaring additional requirement for water to grow plants for biofuels – more than

WATER MANAGEMENT

15 countries, including the United States, the EU, China and India, have announced increasingly ambitious targets. To provide an order of magnitude: measured in calories, the global energy market is about 20 times the size of the world food market, therefore a target of 5-6% of energy to be supplied as biofuels would double water withdrawals for farming at a stroke. Volumes were not that big in 2008, but speculators understood what was coming, putting expectations into market prices. The dramatic price hike of 2008 and the subsequent food crisis were the consequence. In this sense, this crisis was only a warning of something much worse to come.

• allocating water in a way that ensures its best use for society as a whole, including special rules for water for the poor • dispute resolution embedded in the rule of law once a crisis erupts In addition, there is a need for businesses and other stakeholders to increase the awareness of the risks related to water. While there is little we can tell the genuine water specialists about water scarcity and water efficiency, we can help with absorbing the knowledge of these experts and bringing it to the attention of decision-makers, opinion leaders and the broader, non-specialised public.

One litre of water is required per calorie grown and it does not matter whether the calorie is for the nutrition of humans or for biofuel to run a car. For a food company such as Nestlé, water and the risk of water shortage is an issue of strategic importance. Actually, we are not producing food, we are transforming (through preservation, convenience, value added towards nutrition, health and wellness) the food grown by farmers, and a supply of the products from farms that is not interrupted by water scarcity is our major concern. We also depend on the reliability and quality of the water supply for our own processes. Though we are relatively small users, we cannot function without water. And many of our products require water for preparation, so a safe water supply for our consumers is also of vital importance. These are all reasons why we are actively participating in the public policy dialogue on water. If developments such as biofuels are moving in the wrong direction, they need to be corrected. But there is, beyond just correcting errors, need for policy dialogue on:

And we will have to act. Ad hoc and piecemeal measures will not work; current challenges and the outlook related to water are far too serious for merely symbolic action. To be effective, individual action needs to be embedded in an overall strategy. We are therefore participating, together with the IFC and a number of other companies, in a McKinsey Global Institute research project that has three goals:

• To estimate the technical potential and cost of a wide range of interventions along the water chain associated with water scarcity by region, with clearly defined areas to act and equally clearly assigned responsibilities. Technical potential and costs will include technological feasibility and will strive to be independent, as far as possible, of specific policy choices. It will then be possible to compare the impact of the various interventions in a relevant and relatively comprehensive way. • To estimate the aggregate technical cost of specific approaches to water management in order to close the gap between actual and expected water availability. This broad, coherent and comprehensive basis is urgently needed to address the water issue seriously, and its development is currently under way.

Planning ahead But at Nestlé we are not waiting for the results of research to take action. We have taken water seriously for a long time.

Photo: Nestlé

Food for thought

• To establish a clear and consistent way of communicating the water scarcity challenge to businesses and the decisionmaking audience.

• better governance overall for all types of water usage – with incentives that help achieve sustainability Farmers from Shuangcheng in China visit the Nestlé experimental farm (above), which is attached to the milk factory, and are told about the advantages of installing biogesters to convert manure into gas and fertiliser.

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Photo: Nestlé

FOOD INDUSTRY INITIATIVES

A milk delivery is logged in at the Nestlé dairy factory in the Hailar district of Inner Mongolia in China (above).

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The first water treatment plant of the Nestlé Group was set up in Switzerland in the 1930s. We have made huge efforts around the world to return water back to rivers and aquifers in an impeccable state. Today, all our factories have water treatment plants, even under difficult conditions – in Northern China, for instance, where the treatment plant requires heating in order to function properly. In addition, there have been continuous and successful efforts to reduce water withdrawals. Over the last 10 years, water withdrawals by Nestlé per USD of sales (including withdrawals for bottled water) have decreased from 5 litres to less than 1.8 litres, i.e. a decrease of 64%. Successful efforts continued through 2008, and targets for the coming years have already been set. We do this also as part of our commitment within the UN Global Compact’s CEO Water Mandate – another initiative that has, at least partly, its origins in discussions at Davos with the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. But it is important to see things in the right perspective. Nestlé have never been large

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industrial water users, contrary to a popularly held view. When it comes to water efficiency, we are among the leaders in our sector, and the sector itself – food – has relatively low water intensity. For comparative purposes, here are some numbers on water withdrawals:

We cannot talk farmers into doing something that does not make economic sense to them. Major companies of the food industry 1.5–2.8 litres of water/USD sales2 Chemical, mining, oil, pulp/paper industries 120–370 litres of water/USD sales3 After the significant improvements in the efficiency of water usage over the last ten to twenty years, total withdrawals of the Nestlé group amount to only 157 million m3 water per year. A relatively small part of our water

withdrawals – about 10% – is used for bottled water, which amounts to approximately 40 million m3 per year (this may sound like a huge amount, but it actually represents only 0.0009% of total freshwater withdrawn globally for various uses; calculated per capita of world population, this is about 1.5 cl per day or less than a thimbleful). In this area we have improved efficiency immensely. Obviously, it is not only about filling bottles; we also need water for cleaning, as impeccable hygiene is one of the key success factors of a responsible bottled water business. Nestlé Waters USA sets a benchmark internally and for the industry overall with 1.27 litres of freshwater withdrawn per litre delivered. This means that 73% of the water withdrawn actually gets to the consumer in top drinking quality – a higher share than in some of the increasingly leaky municipal water distributions across the world. Additionally, it is a significantly higher share than with any other beverage, particularly sweetened beverages or beer4. In addition, there are a number of health benefits linked to the minerals present in water withdrawn from some of the major sources of the Nestlé Group, resulting in effective prevention of osteoporosis, and effective and balanced re-hydration without unnecessary calories. I mentioned farmers as being a key element in the water cycle as major withdrawers/users/polluters, and I mentioned the importance of water quality. In several of the regions where Nestlé bottle water, we help farmers with production methods and farming infrastructure (for example, retainers of manure) that protect the aquifers from pollution. One example is Agrivair in north-eastern France5, but there are others too – including a project around the historical Panna sources in the Italian Apennine, reforestation projects around Santa Maria in Mexico, groundwater protection at the Andean foothills near Tunuyán in Argentina, and watershed protection in and around Henniez, Switzerland. What is important in a story such as Agrivair is that, by protecting a watershed, we are creating value not only for those who buy and drink the bottled water

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of the source we are responsible for, but for all citizens living in that area. One of the major new initiatives that accelerated in 2008 is also related to farms, but in context of a different interest of the company: sustainable milk production in areas where we buy fresh milk directly from small farmers. Here, Nestlé has helped build biogesters on individual farms that transform liquid manure into gas for cooking and dry fertiliser, instead of allowing this manure to pollute rivers and aquifers. In China, for example, Nestlé has promoted, with the strong support of the country’s local authorities, the construction of more than 4000 of these biogesters. Similar projects are now under way in East Java in Indonesia.

People have to eat and the food must be produced on the farms whether there is a food industry or not.

Photo: Nestlé

FOOD INDUSTRY INITIATIVES

The head office of Nestlé (above) in Vevey, Switzerland.

In developing countries, milk is transported from the farm to the households of consumers through traditional networks on oxcarts, bicycles for short distances, and on motorcycles for longer distances. When a company like Nestlé comes in with more modern logistics, milk will first be cooled down at collection points and then transported in cooled trucks to the milk

factory, where it will be prepared and packed for safe consumption. A brief illustration of the impact of this type of modernisation is that, in the traditional networks, losses of milk are in the order of 16-27% (this is based on FAO figures referring to 16-25% losses of milk between the farm and consumer household in Tanzania – according to season – and of 27% in Uganda)6. Nestlé, with its system of collecting directly from farmers, has succeeded in bringing these losses down to less than 0.6%. Based on the total amount of directly purchased milk per year by the Nestlé Group (in countries such as Pakistan, India, China and others, all of which afford relatively difficult climatic conditions), and further based on the average water requirement for producing milk on a farm, this reduction in waste means savings to the order of 815-1,375 million m3 of water per year (with an estimated loss reduction of 0.83-1.4 million tons of milk per year). The total water savings on our directly purchased milk alone – thanks to our logistics, processing and packaging – outweighs our total annual water withdrawals (157 million m3 water/year) by five to eight times; it is an

It is difficult to measure the actual impact of these projects on overall water availability. What is important is that these biogesters, if analysed with the method of the McKinsey project, clearly offer a positive return for the individual farmers (energy and fertiliser) in addition to the required positive externalities (water protection). This is important because we cannot talk farmers into doing something that does not make economic sense to them. We have to be aware of the often very difficult living conditions of farmers in the developing world, and the fact that their priority is often short term survival. But our biggest ongoing contribution to saving water is in doing more of what we know best, which relates to the supply chain for milk.

The milk chain Photo: Nestlé

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There is an important starting point: people have to eat and the food must be produced on the farms whether there is a food industry or not. This general rule applies also to milk. The water treatment facility (above) at the Nestlé factory in Shuangcheng in China has been designed to return the water used for food preparation back to local rivers and aquifers in as impeccable a condition as possible.

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Forty percent of the world population are without access to safe and sustainable sanitation. In most countries of our earth, considerable health threats for humans and animals arise, due to the contamination of ecosystems and drinking water by untreated sewage. Such impurities are mainly caused by, non existing, time-worn or corroded pipe networks. In transition and developing countries, for instance 50% of the registered diseases are caused by this contamination. The ongoing population growth, urbanisation and industrialisation as well as the consequences of the global climate change, pose already today and in future, additional challenges to humanity and its water infrastructures.

For attaining the Millennium Development Goals, while considering the future challenges, sustainable, long-term watertight and cost-effective water infrastructures are needed – because drinking water always gets sanitation. In order to meet these complex challenges in a consistent and efficient manner, DROSSBACH, as one of the leading know-how companies, offers extensive corrugated pipe systems for sewage, rainwater, drainage and cable protection applications. Through the combination of decades of experience in the production of reliable corrugated pipe systems, high-tech mechanical engineering of corrugators as well as worldwide joint ventures, DROSSBACH combines its know-how uniquely in the holistic and sustainable approach, named Corrugated Pipe Solutions – CPS®.

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Photo: Nestlé

FOOD INDUSTRY INITIATIVES

The Nestlé dairy factory in the Hailar district of Inner Mongolia in China (above), which was opened in July 2007.

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even higher multiple of water withdrawn for bottling. And what is most notable is that this positive impact of our efficient supply chain for milk happens to be the greatest in countries where the water situation is most dire. The right supply chain (along with processing and packaging) is probably by far the most important – and probably most underestimated – contribution of the food industry to water efficiency. The potential is huge. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, losses of food along the chain from the field to consumers’ households in traditional structures are to the order of 30-50%, and they can be reduced to 2-3% with more efficiently organised packaging, supply chain and storage7. Actual and potential water savings from efficient food logistics, if extrapolated to total water withdrawals by agriculture worldwide, could significantly exceed 1500 km3.8 Finally, there is another possible role for food companies. There are still huge areas of rained land either not used at all or under-utilised with below-average perhectare returns, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America9. Bringing food grown there to countries that suffer increasingly from water shortage would make a major contribution towards an overall solution. But of course, this would not work if some organizations insist on

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writing so-called ‘food miles’ on the label, and if negotiators at the WTO are unable to make any progress in liberalising agriculture. The food industry has to accept its share of responsibility and act – as even a very small water user such as Nestlé has been doing for more than 70 years. Our water withdrawals have been significantly reduced, and wastewater is being treated and returned

Piecemeal efforts will not work in the long term, and symbolic measures designed to be bold statements on the problem may be counterproductive. in good shape to aquifers and rivers. But we should remain very modest – saving another litre inside our factories is but a drop in the ocean. Piecemeal efforts, even if well meant, will not work in the long term, and symbolic measures mainly designed to be bold statements on the problem may turn out to be counterproductive. Our most significant contribution as an industry will be doing more of what we do well, and doing it even better: which is tosay, reducing waste in

the supply chain all the way along from the farm to the consumer. But let me return to the starting point: what has World Economic Forum contributed to a solution of the water problems? No doubt it has helped us working in industry – particularly the food industry – gain a better understanding of the underlying issues. Dialogues have been started at different levels among companies about best practices, and with governments and stakeholders about the best way to address the problems associated with water security. I mentioned several times the importance of farmers in the context of water, and the dialogue with the International Federation of Agricultural Producers turned out to be particularly constructive in this context. The water specialists have also become an active group within the Forum: water security is now a key topic in the WEF Global Agenda Council. These dialogues are conducted at different levels, but the main conclusion is that the global water crisis can be avoided and the underlying problems solved. But success cannot be guaranteed unless we keep an open mind, and are prepared to co-operate and co-ordinate with all concerned, with everybody focusing on what they know best.

References: http://www.the-world-around-water.net Watching Water. JP Morgan company annual report. (New York, 2008.) 3 http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_ id=10994&page=67 4 See EU Environmental Agency for leakage losses in municipal water, and www.environment-agency.gov.uk and www.tnpcb.gov.in for water withdrawals for various beverages. 5 http://www.novethic.fr/novethic/v3/article. jsp?id=107848 6 http://www.fao.org/docrep/004/AC301E/ AC301e00.HTM 7 http://www.fao.org/docrep/004/AC301E/ AC301e00.HTM 8 Shiklomanov, I. 1999. 9 IIASA and FAO. 2001. 1 2

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Empty rain gauges (above) tell one part of the story, but water scarcity is not simply a result of extreme drought.

Safe to Drink? By Antoine Frérot

The CEO of Veolia Water discusses how to ensure safe drinking water and sanitation services in a world of scarce resources and increasing demographic growth.

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he International Year of Sanitation has drawn to a close, yet poor water management still continues, with urban growth increasing the pressure on already scarce resources that have been affected by pollution and over-exploitation. Water is a highly sensitive element and is a responsibility to be shared by multiple stakeholders, local public authorities and water companies alike. Indeed, water is the equivalent of a ‘mutual benefit society’: everyone living in the same watershed is interdependent, for the better or worse, on water. These mutual benefit societies have to be managed carefully in order to avoid the depletion of nature’s resources. We cannot control the climate, but we can manage water by making it sustainable.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Protecting existing resources Around the world, sanitation has to become the priority of priorities. While the mass of water remains constant, the same cannot be said of its quality. There are so many people without access to drinking water, but there are even more without access to sanitation. Coverage rates are extremely low: only 1 person in 3 in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia has access to sanitation; in eastern Asia, the figure is just one in two. And of the cities that do collect their wastewater, how many have the facilities to treat them and effectively reduce pollution before returning them to nature? In developing countries, 90% of wastewater is discharged untreated.

In so-called megacities overwhelmed by demographic growth, urban inflation is generating unbearable levels of pollution. The destructive power of wastewater that has been neither collected nor treated is explosive. These health bombs are well primed, ready for a serial explosion. They threaten not just the cities that create them, but also the downstream regions to which they are exported by rivers. It is also essential that we fight against chronic types of pollution other than those caused by wastewater. Today, Europe uses 10 times more fertilizer than in the 1950s. In western Europe, pollution caused by wastewater and industrial wastewater is on the way to being brought under control. This is not the case for chronic pollution of agricultural origin. Against this background, the European Union Water Framework Directive of 2000 is forcing the member states out of the spiral of “treating more and more a resource that is more and more polluted.” As the effects of pollution on freshwater and seawater are cumulative, they are the ‘ultimate judges’ of local authorities’ efforts in terms of wastewater treatment and combating chronic pollution.

Ensuring the highest quality of water The water business, which involves producing and distributing drinking water and treating wastewater, is becoming increasingly complex in an evolving context. It now includes the protection of raw water resources, as well as complying with new health standards. Responding to expectations regarding water quality is all the more difficult due to water supply systems being extremely vulnerable to local environments both upstream and downstream. Health risks fall into two major categories: microbiological contamination by bacteria, viruses or parasites, and chemical contamination related to the presence of chemical substances in water resources (nitrates, pesticides etc). It is for these reasons that improving health safety through a risk assessment and management approach is necessary.

WATER SECURITY

For example, since 1853, Veolia Water has had a strict policy of control over the sanitary quality of the water it produces and distributes. The company has developed a pioneering approach to water quality to comply and anticipate increasingly stringent standards and regulations. The companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s approach relies on four guiding principles: anticipating, monitoring, proposing solutions and technologies, and providing information. Monitoring the quality of water constitutes the key element of any sanitary control policy. It allows pollutants to be detected and action to be taken to remove them. Each year, Veolia Water performs several million analyses on water around the world with state-of-the-art equipment in a highly accredited network of

laboratories. The company has also launched an advanced research program focusing on new parameters on water quality, and its research arm, Anjou Recherche, is a member of the Global Water Research Coalition, which defines the major directions for research in the area of water. The fight against chronic types of pollution in water calls for the identification of all hazards, and the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) method and the ISO 22000 standard are used by Veolia Water to reinforce health safety. Indeed, an integrated system of risk management from the water resource to the tap is vital in forming a systematic assessment of agents harmful to health, in the evaluation and analysis of all health hazards, and in the adaptation of monitoring systems to potential risks. And this should be applicable anywhere in the world. In destitute areas, innovative and intelligent partnerships help bring safe water to the poor. This is the case of the joint venture set up by Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank and Veolia Water to supply drinking water to the

Photo: Gettyimages

The destructive power of wastewater that has been neither collected nor treated is explosive.

The Ashkelon Desalination Plant (above), just south of Tel Aviv in Israel, which is the largest reverse osmosis desalination plant in the world and converts more than 26 billion gallons of Mediterranean seawater each year.

poorest rural people of Bangladesh. Here, several water treatment and production plants will be operated in the poorest villages in the country, which has abundant groundwater resources that, due to geological reasons, are contaminated by high levels of arsenic. Today, more than 30 million Bangladeshis are exposed to the often fatal consequences of chronic arsenic poisoning. The alliance between the precepts of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;social businessâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; pioneered by Professor Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2006, and the expertise of Veolia Water, which already supplies drinking water to

almost 6.5 million people in Africa and India, will enable Grameen-Veolia Water Ltd to bring drinking water to more than 100,000 people. This unique and exemplary partnership will bring people into the economic mainstream by providing an immediately operational and highly effective solution to a fundamental need.

The development of alternative resources The 20th Century saw major changes in the notion of scarcity: new shortages appeared, old ones faded from the scene. But new

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Water recycling Where there is too little water, the solution lies not so much in ‘sharing scarcity’, but in resorting to alternative resources. Recycling wastewater is a tried and tested way of producing water for industrial, agricultural and domestic purposes. The local closing of the water cycle, which creates numerous urban mini-cycles, avoids the premature returning of water to nature after a single use. What’s more, recycling reduces the amount of treated wastewater discharged into the natural environment. In so doing, it contributes to breaking the all-too-frequently observed link between urban growth and the pollution of aquatic environments.

Photo: Veolia

shortages call for the invention of new resources. Just as things that we once thought abundant have become scarce, what we once considered waste has been transformed into a resource. Wastewater, that so-called ‘hostile water’, is now deemed to be useful. A good operator of public services should save rare resources and at the same time create new resources. Water is too valuable a resource to be used just once before being returned to nature.

Construction underway on a major 250,000m3 per day seawater reverse osmosis desalination plant (above) that is being built in Sydney, Australia as part of a joint venture between Veolia Water and the Sydney Water Corporation.

Recycling wastewater is undoubtedly a promising approach, capable of supplying large quantities of water. Especially given that wastewater is the only resource that expands along with increasing needs and is located

Seawater is the most abundant water resource on the planet. Yet only 1% of drinking water is produced by desalination.

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Today, it is Israel that most uses this technique: three-quarters of its wastewater is reused for irrigation. But Windhoek in Namibia has gone further in terms of the quality of its recycled water. Since 1969, this city has been recycling wastewater on a large scale to directly produce drinking water for its inhabitants. Namibia has the unenviable privilege of being the driest country in southern Africa. The nearest permanent river to Windhoek is 600 km away. In 2001, the city built a new wastewater reclamation plant and called in Veolia Water and its partners to manage it. Had it not taken this path, its water supply would have been 35% short of meeting demand.

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exactly where it is needed. Hardly surprisingly, the world’s installed capacity for recycling it is expected to quadruple over the course of the next decade. Yet, in many countries, a psychological reluctance will have to be overcome before treated wastewater is accepted. And this battle is far from being won. Seawater Desalination Seawater is the other major alternative. Available in unlimited quantities, it enables coastal towns to escape the gloomy arithmetic of water.

Seawater is the most abundant water resource on the planet. Yet only 1% of drinking water is produced by desalination. Bearing in mind that 40% of the world’s population lives less than 70 km from the coast, we can see that this technique is set for strong growth. Increasing numbers of plants will ‘drink’ the sea in order to meet consumer demand. On many islands, in many coastal regions and in many cities of the Middle East, life would be impossible without the desalination of seawater. By 2015, the worldwide capacity for the production of desalinated seawater is expected to double. At a time when a number of nations are rediscovering the benefits of energy selfsufficiency, it is perhaps no bad thing to recall the advantages of water self-sufficiency. Desalination of seawater, just like wastewater recycling, enhances a country’s autonomy as regards its water supply and allows the importing of water from abroad to be reduced or avoided. It reduces the sort of international tensions that can be kindled by a scarcity of resources. It gives access to a secure source of supply, not dependent on unpredictable

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rainfall, and is located on home territory and thus not subject to international constraints. That said, energy remains an ecological and financial challenge when it comes to using non-conventional resources, particularly as regards seawater. Even though great progress has been made, it remains essential to make sure the process is energy-efficient, whatever the technique used. In order to make membrane-based desalination energetically more competitive, research at Veolia Water aims to further reduce energy consumption.

The application of measures to demand

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Photo: Veolia

The protection of water first means limiting withdrawals of raw water. Managing demand is another way of saving water. We have to recognize that the predominant culture to date was one of supply rather than one of managing demand. The challenge is to involve consumers so that they act as managers of their consumption and protectors of the environment. This may

be through more widespread installation of individual meters, remote meter reading or SMS information systems. If it’s essential that we save water in the city, it is even more essential that we save water in the countryside. Agriculture is the world’s single biggest consumer of water and also wastes the most, accounting for almost two thirds of total water usage. Too often, the regulation of water stops at the city boundary. Why? Because agricultural policies, like the Green Revolution that enabled India to achieve food self-sufficiency, have often been based on more productive varieties and on plentiful water being available at a ridiculously low price. In the long term, however, such hidden subsidies create shortages because they encourage waste. How can agriculture be made less watergreedy? I would like to make two key points. It will not be possible to build a coherent strategy without first getting rid of the existing incoherences, and without first

Although many areas of Bangladesh (above) have abundant groundwater supplies, much of the water is tainted by arsenic.

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abandoning policies that reward waste (i.e. the perverse subsidies that encourage overuse of groundwater). At the same time, there should be an increase in the use of trickle or drip irrigation. In Jordan, this has reduced water consumption by a third. Yet Jordan remains an exception: worldwide, this technique is used for only 1% of irrigated land. I’m not recommending a policy of reducing irrigation, but rather of making irrigation less profligate in its use of water. Without artificial irrigation systems, global harvests would decrease by 40%. Another, less obvious, issue lies in increasing water productivity. Virtual water is the quantity of water used to produce a good or a service. Living in a world of scarce resources means we have a moral obligation to use each cubic meter of water as efficiently as possible. Recycling wastewater is one way to increase water productivity. By unlinking uses from withdrawals, it maximizes the number of uses of a given quantity of initial resource. Similarly, recharging aquifers, as is done in Adelaide, Australia – a city in the driest state of the driest continent on the planet – makes them more productive and boosts their natural potential. Efficient management of demand, therefore, involves sending a clear price message to users about the real value of the water they use. Although water is only available in a finite quantity, its price does not reflect its scarcity. There is widespread under-pricing of water. There’s an acknowledged inequality in the way governments measure their financial assets and their natural assets such as water. The application on a broad scale of the concept of ‘free water’ – or its sale at a symbolic price – has generated huge waste in water resources because it takes away the consumer’s responsibility. Although it is desirable to ask people to pay for water and better express its scarcity in its price, that doesn’t mean cutting back on solidarity so that everyone, even poor people, have access to this essential service. Social tariffs for basic needs can be introduced. In Chile, direct aid mechanisms are combined

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implement, with its link between the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. In extreme cases, however, saving water, storing it, transporting it over long distances, and producing it from alternative resources may not be enough if the roots of the problem are not addressed.

Photo: Veolia

A scarcity of financing and good governance

One of the world’s largest seawater desalination plants, located in the Gulf state of Bahrain (above). The plant utilises a thermal process known as ‘multiple effect distillation’ to produce 273,000m3 of drinking water per day.

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with seasonal water prices to better reflect the scarcity of the resource. In the end, scarcity is the result of supply and demand. But both parts of the equation are the result of political decisions. The link between supply and demand is set by the price of water or by withdrawal ceilings that, all around the world, are decided by public authorities. If we want to achieve true sustainability in water, we must recognize its scarcity and introduce mechanisms for managing it. But do we really want to? In this field, there are many believers, but not everyone practices what they preach. We know that water is a field where all interests converge. Public authorities, when they set the price of water or a limit to its use, have to combine numerous and legitimately contradictory interests: protecting the environment, maintaining the financial equilibrium of providing the service as well as the country’s economic growth, upholding public health, and ensuring solidarity so that the poor have access to the service. Supplying water is a complex business – and so is managing it sustainably!

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Strengthening the security of water supplies Extreme climate events – whether they be droughts or floods – are predicted to increase over the coming years. More irregular hydrological cycles will force municipalities to strengthen the security of drinking water supplies.

In the field of water sustainability, there are many believers, but not everyone practices what they preach. ‘Security through diversity’ is the motto for Sydney, capital of a country facing its eighth consecutive year of drought. The city’s seawater desalination program aims to build a water supply system that is independent of erratic rainfall. Other countries, however, are opting for transferring water between river basins by redesigning their hydrological maps. This is the solution that India is planning to

Achieving sustainability in water is one of the key issues of the water world, but it’s not the only one. It is just as imperative to make water drinkable and accessible to everyone. But as water resources become scarcer, it will be more difficult to resolve the equation and achieve the Millennium Goals. The right to water can be made a reality. It has been achieved in various places, whether by introducing a socially acceptable price per cubic metre or connection, or by broadening financial solidarity between all stakeholders. The limiting factor to improving water and wastewater services is more a matter of governance than money. Water crises may appear to be environmental, but they are more often attributable to a crisis in governance. Without good governance, there can be no good technique, no good management of water services, nor can there be long-term protection of resources. Faced with dwindling resources and local vulnerabilities, it should be emphasised that neither mankind nor nature has had the last word. The technical and financial solutions exist, provided the realities on the ground are taken into account and accompanied by genuine political will. The paths toward friendship with water are known. All we have to do is follow them with determination. Antoine Frérot is the author of a new book, entitled Water, Towards a Culture of Responsibility, to be published in March 2009 by Editions Autrement, Paris. It will also be available in French under the title L’eau, pour une culture de la responsabilité.

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www.actaris.com

It is time to manage water more effectively The accurate measurement of natural resources is a major challenge for the future. Around the world, demands for water continue to increase, making it essential to manage this vital resource more effectively in the long term. The ability to address this issue requires access to more frequent, accurate and integrated information about how water is used. As a world leader in advanced metering technologies, Actaris helps utilities to overcome their ever-increasing operational, regulatory and environmental challenges. Effective management of resources is at your fingertips.

DATA ANALYSIS

Women in Nigeria (above) drawing water from the wells in one of the small gardens developed in the region to help poorer families to grow food during the lean season.

Water: Improving the flow of information By Karen Frenken

With water scarcity reaching crisis point for many countries, there is a thirst for information about water security. AQUASTAT was created to satisfy that thirst.

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urrent figures estimate that, around the world, more than 850 million people are undernourished, almost 1 billion people have no access to clean water to meet their basic needs, and 2.5 billion people have no access to improved sanitation. Targeted commitments and actions were agreed upon at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 and outlined in the

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Millennium Development Goals. However, in order to achieve those goals, there is a need for comprehensive, reliable and systematic information on the state of water resources and people’s access to and use of water. This has been highly recognised by governments as well as national, regional and international institutions as a tool for improving food security and access to water and sanitation.

Decision- and policymaking bodies need to have access to reliable water information upon which to formulate strategies and monitor implementation. Of particular importance is the need to design allocation mechanisms for water resources that recognise the limited and transient nature of those resources and which have specific instruments for regulating allocation under periodic conditions of scarcity. National and international water legislation needs to be informed by the nature and scale of scarcity, to not only make sure that local allocation mechanisms are adequately flexible but also that they are adequately enforced in times of water scarcity. It is within the mandate of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), as stated in Article 1 of its constitution, to “collect, analyse, interpret and disseminate information related to nutrition, food and agriculture”. Thus, in 1993, FAO initiated AQUASTAT, the organization’s global information system on water and agriculture.

WATER SECURITY

What is AQUASTAT? AQUASTAT collects, analyzes, and disseminates data and information on water recourses and water use on a country-by-country basis, with emphasis on agriculture, targeted at users in international institutions, national governments and development agencies. Its goal is to support agricultural and rural development by sustainable use of water and land. It does this by providing the most accurate information presented in a consistent and standard way.

Decision- and policymaking bodies need to have access to reliable water information upon which to formulate strategies and monitor implementation. • Up-to-date and reliable data by country

Some of the key questions that AQUASTAT seeks to address are: Is there enough water to feed the world in the near future (given water balance and competition with other sectors)? What are the performances of the irrigation sector and how do they change with time? How does irrigation contribute to food security? What is the impact of irrigation on the environment? What impact do challenges such as climate change and biofuels have on water availability? The information provided by AQUASTAT relies to a great extent on national capacities and expertise. Its information management process (see Figure 1, above) comprises:

• Systematic descriptions of the state of agricultural water management by country

• A review of literature and information at country and sub-country level

• Methodologies and definitions for information on the water resources and irrigation sector

• Country surveys, through national resource persons, consisting of data collection and country description by means of a detailed questionnaire where the source reference and comments are associated with each value

More specifically, AQUASTAT provides:

• Predictions of future agricultural water use and irrigation developments

• Contributions to major international journals and publications

• Critical analysis of information and data processing, with preference given to national sources and expert knowledge. The data validation and processing is supported by the AQUASTAT database management system

• Responses to requests from governments, research institutes, non-governmental organizations, universities and individuals

• Modelling of data by means of Geographic Information System (GIS) and water balance models for estimating unavailable data and

• In-depth analysis through thematic studies

for providing spatial data. GIS and remote sensing data are important input data together with data acquired through country surveys, which are also used for calibration • Standardisation of information and data tables • Responding to requests for feedback and approval from various national authorities and institutions • Dissemination of information through the AQUASTAT website, as published reports and/or as CD-ROMs • Voluntary feedback from users and through cooperation with other institutions

135 A young woman pauses for a drink of clean water from a pipe in the troubled region of Sudan (above).

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DATA ANALYSIS

For acquiring reliable data and information, the importance of cooperating with national resource persons working in the field of water and agriculture, with good networking capabilities and a sense of responsibility, has been shown to be vital. Experience and lessons learned in global water information management show the importance of national capacities, systematic data and information collection, harmonised definitions, metadata, support for data

highlight problems encountered in rural water management and irrigation, and to summarise the perspectives in agricultural water management. Standardised tables holding key data are included in all country profiles. Regional overviews provide analysis by a grouping of countries that have similarities in terms of geographic and socio-economic conditions, including tables and maps. In addition to the above country database, several other databases exist in AQUASTAT:

Irrigated agriculture is responsible for approximately 70% of all the freshwater withdrawn in the world, and up to 95% in several developing countries. handling in the database management system, and website properties. Around 75 variables by country can be accessed online on the AQUASTAT database query system and this data can be downloaded. They are classified in the following categories: geography and population (11), climate and water resources (16), water use (20), irrigation and drainage (27), environment and health (4). In addition, country profiles are prepared to describe the particularities in each country, to

• A geo-referenced database on African dams by country, holding information on the year of completion, height, capacity, rate of sedimentation, and purpose of use • A database of areas equipped for irrigation by country at sub-national level • Detailed calculations of renewable water resources by country, including an inventory of reference sources

• An institutions database, containing around 300 institutions in the field of agricultural water management, presented by country • A glossary containing definitions of around 400 terms in the field of water resources and agricultural water management, including terminology, sources, comments and typology in English, French and Spanish • A database containing data on annual sediment yields in rivers and reservoirs around the world, searchable by river, by country and by continent • A database containing information on irrigation investment costs for 248 irrigation projects around the world • Downloadable publications prepared within the framework of AQUASTAT Several spatial datasets of AQUASTAT can easily be imported to a GIS and be downloaded in PDF format from the website, such as the global map of irrigation areas, the atlas of water resources and irrigation for Africa, and a selection of global maps. The global digital map of irrigation areas shows the percentage of areas equipped for irrigation around 20001. The map has been created in cooperation with the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The methodology for mapping irrigated areas was developed by the University of Kassel around 19992 and improved in cooperation with AQUASTAT. It includes a variety of steps depending on the type of data available for the respective country and includes tools to allow for inclusion of new information and quick updates of the global map.

Water and food security Irrigated agriculture is responsible for approximately 70% of all the freshwater withdrawn in the world, and up to 95% in several developing countries, while industrial and domestic withdrawal represent approximately 20% and 10% respectively.

136 A new irrigation canal flowing through rice paddies in Bangladesh (above). These canals were constructed as part of a project initiated by the Food and Agriculture Organization in collaboration with farmers from the region.

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HOW DO WE ADAPT TO CLIMATE CHANGE? 5TH WORLDWATERFORUM

ISTANBUL 2009

The Netherlands have a long history when it comes to living and working with water. Dutch water expertise is in demand worldwide. To adapt to climate change, new solutions and new ways of thinking are needed. We would like to share our views with experts from around the world. Visit the Dutch pavilion at the expo during the World Water Forum in Istanbul and pick up a copy of ‘Change magazine’: an insight into water management and adaptation. An overview of all Dutch sessions and presentations at the World Water Forum is also available.

WWW.NWP.NL/ADAPTNOW

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Pressure from industrial and domestic water usage is increasing, as is the need to sustain water for ecosystems. Global totals and averages mask reality, and national total and averages still hide enormous differences within the countries. It should also be noted that the access to water varies at different times, due to seasonal variations and extreme periods with droughts and floods, which are not indicated in these long-term national averages. Water is already scarce in many countries. A number of countries are pumping more water than is recharged. In addition, conflicts between upstream and downstream users within and between countries are arising because of increased demand for water. However, physical water scarcity is not necessarily linked to food security â&#x20AC;&#x201C; for example, Near East and North Africa are nutritionally relatively well off. FAO has a long history of global and regional perspective studies for agriculture3,4,5,6,7,8. These studies describe prospective developments in food demand and consumption, implications for nutrition and undernourishment, changes in agricultural production and trade, and developments in the use of natural resources for agriculture. Today, irrigation covers about 20% of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cropland and contributes 40% of total food production. On the basis of AQUASTAT data, FAO estimated that, without accounting for climate change and the production of biofuel, the irrigated production in developing countries would rise by 36% in 2030 compared to the reference situation around 19987. This increase would be possible both through yield increases and an increase in irrigated area of 20%. Furthermore, it was expected that, through improved irrigation efficiencies and changes in cropping patterns, the extra amount of water needed would be around 14%. Even though, in large areas of the developing world, agriculture is facing its limits through either lack of water or lack of land, the result of the assessment was that globally there would still be enough untapped potential to cope with the projected increased demand resulting from population growth and changing diets due to economic growth. However, figures might change dramatically depending on the extent to which

climate change might take place and if largescale production of biofuel enters into the equation, which will amplify the already complex relationship between sustainable development and water demand.

The challenge of climate change In a recent perspective study9, FAO and AQUASTAT made the first attempt to quantify the combined effect of increased agricultural production and climate change on water availability and use. Irrigation water withdrawal for the Near East in 2003/05 was estimated to account for 62% of total renewable water resources in the region. Of the 15 countries included in the region, 14 of

these used more than 20% of their water resources, a threshold sometimes used to indicate impending water scarcity. Of these 14 countries, 10 used more than 40% of their renewable water resources for irrigation in the base year (2003/05), a situation that can be considered critical. And of these 10 countries, three of them (Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Saudi Arabia and Yemen) used volumes of water for irrigation larger than their annual renewable water resources. If one adds to this the expected additional water withdrawals needed for non-agricultural use, the picture will not be much different since agriculture represents the bulk of water withdrawal. Taking into account the expected impact of climate change by 2050 through the effect

Workers watering fields of lettuce and cabbage (above) on a farm in Kamilombe, near Lubumbashi in the Congo.

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of changes in precipitation and in evapotranspiration, overall the availability of renewable water resources for the 15 countries included in the region is expected to decrease from the current 420 km63 per year to 400 km3 per year in 2050, which is approximately 5%. At the same time, irrigation water withdrawal could increase by some 36%, from the current 269 km3 per year to 366 km3 per year in 2050. The increase in the harvested irrigated area is projected to be more than 50%. The larger percentage increase in harvested irrigated area compared to the percentage increase in water withdrawal will result from the expected improvement in irrigation efficiency, leading to a reduction in irrigation water

withdrawal per irrigated hectare. On average, it is estimated that irrigation efficiency, estimated at about 52% in 2003/05, could increase to 68% by 2050. In addition to these modelled consequences of climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns against a broad spectrum of potential effects10. Speaking generally, precipitation is expected to increase in the northern hemisphere and decrease in the southern hemisphere. The IPCC predicts an increase in rainfall variability as well, which may worsen flood/drought events. Rising sea levels may salinate groundwater aquifers near the coast. Changing precipitation patterns could also change recharge to glaciers, potentially altering the renewable runoff generated by glacial zones. These are but a few of the potential interactions stressing the relationship between the economy and the environment. AQUASTAT is currently in the process of drafting a document to increase awareness at country level on the importance of consistent and high quality data, since, in

Deliveries of sugar cane arriving at the Sao Martinho ethanol distillery in Limeira, Sao Paolo, Brazil (above).

and water resources that can be used for agricultural production is limited, there is now a widespread fear that the production of biofuel will have a severe impact on natural resources and food security. It is expected that, in the next ten years, first generation biofuel produced with conventional technology from crops that also can also be used in the human food chain will remain much more important than second generation biofuel produced through processes that

Climate change and biofuels will amplify the already complex relationship between sustainable development and water demand. the light of climatic uncertainty, it is of paramount importance to continue gathering country-level information, to continue fine tuning models, and to determine the future direction of the global water cycle.

The challenge of biofuels Production of bio-ethanol tripled between 2000 and 2007, with the United States and Brazil accounting for the majority of this growth. The demand for biofuel has increased due to rising oil prices and policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Growing biomass for the production of either food or bio-energy requires a substantial use of natural resources. The sun provides free energy, but the process of producing biomass requires a large amount of land and water. Since the amount of land

convert lignocellulosic biomass (from crop residues, grasses and trees grown on marginal land) to produce â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;cellulosicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; ethanol. This technology is currently under development and not yet commercially viable, but it is expected that, in the future, it may contribute to mitigate eventual pressures on natural resources that can be used to produce food8. Based on biofuel production projections for 2008 and 2017, it has been estimated that currently around 1% of all water withdrawn for irrigation is used for the production of bio-ethanol, mainly produced from irrigated sugar cane and maize. In 2017, the amount of water to be withdrawn for biofuel production would likely increase by 74% if agricultural practices remain the same11. In 10 years, however, it is likely that the increase will be

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less, if second generation biofuel production becomes more important, irrigation efficiencies increase, and rained crops such as cassava or sweet sorghum are used for the production of bio-ethanol. Even though the amount of water withdrawn globally for biofuel production is modest, local water scarcity problems may worsen due to irrigation of bio-ethanol feedstock. In this context there is reason for concern in countries with fast developing economies such as India, China, Thailand and South Africa, where the

There is a widespread fear that the production of biofuel will have a severe impact on natural resources and food security. growing demand for food and energy will result in increased competition for already scarce water resources. This situation will be aggravated if the projected bio-ethanol production comes from irrigated sugar cane12.

information has been shown to be one of the requisites for the work of AQUASTAT. In addition to the dissemination and sharing of data and tools, it provides decision-makers, the media, researchers and non-governmental organizations with information resources for improved water management. As the Internet is still not yet accessible to all, other media such as printed material is of key importance, along with the strengthening of information and knowledge management capacities. Further information is available at: www.fao.org/nr/aquastat Photographs for this article courtesy of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

References: Siebert, S, Döll, P, Feick, S, Hoogeveen, J and Frenken, K. Global map of irrigation areas version 4.0.1. (Johann Wolfgang Goethe University/FAO. 2007.) 2 Döll. P and Siebert, S. ‘A digital global map of irrigated areas – an update for Latin America and Europe’. Kassel World Water Series, Report Number 4. (Center for Environmental Systems Research, University of Kassel. 2001.) 1

FAO. Provisional indicative world plan for agriculture. (FAO. 1970.) 4 FAO. Agriculture: Towards 2000. (FAO. 1981.) 5 Alexandratos, N (editor). World Agriculture: Towards 2000, an FAO Study. (Belhaven Press/New York University Press. 1988.) 6 Alexandratos, N (editor). World Agriculture: Towards 2010, an FAO Study. (John Wiley/FAO. 1995.) 7 Bruinsma, J (editor). World Agriculture: towards 2015/2030, an FAO Perspective. (Earthscan/FAO. 2003.) 8 FAO. World agriculture: towards 2030/2050. Interim report. (FAO. 2006.) 9 FAO. ‘Near East agriculture towards 2050: prospects and challenges’. Conference document prepared for the twenty-ninth FAO regional conference for the Near East. (FAO. 2008.) 10 Bates, BC, Kundzewicz, ZW, Wu, S and Palutikof, JP (editors). ‘Climate change and water’. Technical Paper VI of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (IPCC. 2008.) 11 OECD and FAO. Agricultural outlook 2008-2017 – Highlights. (OECD/FAO. 2008.) 12 Hoogeveen, J, Faurès, J-M and van de Giessen, N. ‘Increased biofuel production in the coming decade: to what extent will it affect global fresh water resources?’ Journal of Irrigation and Drainage. (forthcoming 2009.) 3

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Agriculture will continue to be the main user of water, which means that investments will be necessary to ensure people’s access to water for food, health, and hygiene. FAO is devoting considerable efforts to providing access to information on the state of world agriculture, fisheries, forestry, nutrition for agricultural and rural development, and the environment, along with work on development assistance, advice to governments, and providing a neutral forum. Although access to information itself will not solve the goal of equitable and sustainable development, reliable and standardised information on key indicators is necessary to raise awareness and to support investments and cooperation for integrated water resources management. In doing so, the importance of quality check, metadata, standardised information, and the sharing of A local garden in Tarwada, Nigeria (above), which was set up as part of a project funded by the European Union in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization to improve the food security of vulnerable households.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

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ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

From Environmental Flows to Negotiated Flows: The future of rivers in the era of rapid global change By Julia Marton-Lefèvre

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fter warning for decades about greenhouse gas emissions, Al Gore just changed his mind. No, the Nobel laureate didn’t join the shrinking ranks of so-called ‘climate sceptics’ who doubt the science or severity of the risks we face. Indeed, he still maintains that governments, citizens and industry – especially those of us in the developed world – must dramatically reduce our carbon footprint. What has changed is his long-standing argument that, to “avoid the unmanageable”, efforts must go exclusively toward prevention and mitigation. That’s no longer enough. Recent scientific data shows the Global Warming Era dawning earlier, faster and hotter than anticipated, with severe events already taking place. And the consequences of industrialised growth are falling disproportionately on the poorest and the marginalised – the billions on the brink who are least prepared to cope with it. While climate science remains imperfect, we can expect growing extremes: hotter and drier droughts punctuated by more sudden and wetter floods. Each year, spring emerges earlier,

blurs with summer and eats into autumn. Even if countries stopped all man-made emissions overnight, the world would continue to warm thanks to two centuries of accumulation. This reality led Mr Gore, along with other respected experts in climate change, to conclude that, while continuing to scale back emissions, in order to “manage the unavoidable” we must also now learn to adapt. Adaptation conjures up a titanic confrontation with nature’s wrath: hurricanes, wildfires, melting ice caps and rising sea levels which generate fear among low-lying coastal cities from Louisiana to the Netherlands to Bangladesh. Yet for all the attention garnered by TV-friendly catastrophic hazards, the more costly and deadly forces remain silent and invisible: droughts, thirst, heatwaves, famine and flood-borne disease. In short, when we say ‘climate adaptation,’ we mostly mean ‘water adaptation’. Water adaptation begins with rivers and river basins, the starting point for the flows of water on which we rely for life and our livelihoods. To safeguard our wellbeing, as well as to ensure that development reaches the impoverished,

Photo: Gettyimages

As a result of climate change and human development, many of the world’s greatest rivers have been reduced to a trickle. That situation needs to be reversed.

The Hoover Dam in Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Arizona (above), which, in 2007, dropped to its lowest levels since the 1960s due to drought and increased water demand.

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rivers will need to be resilient in the coming era of rapid global change. Nature brings resilience and one of the great opportunities for adaptation is to use nature’s services to help us cope with shifting climatic extremes. For rivers, this means restoring aquatic ecosystems made brittle by decades of infrastructure development and pollution. Our challenge is to achieve this in the midst of an unfolding global water crisis.

Climate crisis exacerbates water crisis The contours of our global water crisis are familiar and suggest little room for adaptation. Due to demographic and climate shifts – measured in legal, physical and per capita terms – rivers are over-allocated and a third of the world is confronting some form of water scarcity. To be sure, water is not our only crisis. We are also now confronting a succession of other critical resource flow shortages, such as food, energy and credit. Yet water scarcity remains a unique driver. It is the underlying basis for all food and economic growth. Fossil fuel has alternatives; water has no substitute. Rising fuel prices can counteract demand for peak oil, but peak water is inelastic: without a secure basic supply, at any price, life is lost.

The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed warming of 0.24°C per decade over the last three decades. Perhaps the biggest impact of these higher temperatures has been on the Earth’s natural water infrastructure: liquidated glaciers and snow packs literally can’t hold water, while the compound stress from heat and aridity sucks the moisture from the ground, further desiccating what might have been arable soils or wetlands. The IPCC concluded that we should expect a net increase in drought-affected areas, and studies of impacts in the arid, densely populated tropics noted how a 5-10% reduction in rainfall could translate into 50-80% less flow in rivers. Such scarcities worsen inequities: those with means can secure easier access to more abundant supplies of clean water, while the thirst of marginalised people and of nature itself goes unmet.

Inequity plus inefficiency For more than a century, our response to water scarcity has been simple: pour more concrete across more currents. Around the world, more than 45,000 large dams (and 850,000 smaller ones) were erected on rivers to capture and

Even if countries stopped all man-made emissions overnight, the world would continue to warm thanks to two centuries of accumulation. Rivers would be cracking even without global warming, thanks to human thirst. The Earth’s inhabitants have, over the course of two centuries, grown six fold and will, within decades, reach nine billion. More acutely, an economically prosperous planet is a thirstier planet: each African uses an average of 20 litres per day, while an American uses almost 500; and the growing ranks of affluent meat-eaters require thousands of litres more water to grow daily meals than does the diet of a vegetarian. These demographics mean that each human can only access a fraction of the water that was available to us a generation earlier. Now, climate change shrinks our portion even further.

boost water supply. These engineering feats cost $2 trillion, displaced 40-80 million people and fragmented 60% of the world’s largest currents so severely that there are now once-great rivers that no longer reach the sea. To keep up with escalating hunger and thirst, some are calling for another wave of dam building or even ‘river moving’. This ‘hard infrastructure’ approach is facing an uphill political struggle for reasons that have little to do with the environment as such. Yes, riparian species are threatened, but the real problems arise not as a result of pressure from environmentalists to save fish habitats or preserve aquatic ecosystems. Conventional

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approaches to infrastructure development are often simply too impractical and too inflexible in an age of rapid and dynamic change. The reasons are numerous. The best sites have already been dammed. Litre for litre, groundwater pumping is far more efficient. Free people resist relocation from river valleys. Government budgets are tight or deeply in debt. The return on investment is low. And now, in our warming world, scientists are showing where, how and why certain dams and diversions may even run counterproductive to their stated aims. Power supplies can crash during droughts as runoff declines too much to turn turbines. As precipitation cycles grow severe and unpredictable, dam operators must store less water year round to absorb the potential impact of a sudden deluge. Irrigation dams that help boost grain-fed livestock may sacrifice as much or more protein from lost fisheries in the degraded river. As rivers degrade and groundwater can’t recharge, livelihood options diminish and poverty tightens. The ‘hard infrastructure’ approach risks eroding the resilience for which communities and nations will have increasingly urgent need in the turbulent and uncertain years ahead. There is, however, a better way. A way that restores life to moribund rivers and vitality to

stagnant economies. Paradoxically, the most effective way to improve the performance and value of dams involves the decision to ‘pull their plugs’.

Restoring rivers through environmental flows Introducing environmental flows is an intricate process of restoring life to damaged and degraded rivers. It means changing the way ‘hard infrastructure’ is operated in ways that help restore the quantity, quality and rhythm of regulated rivers back toward a more desirable and dynamic condition. The benefits include not only restoring natural habitats, but also building resilience back into human communities as well. The first cases of restorative flows may have emerged as a result of accident or anger. In some cases, static currents regained something of their seasonal pulse and pressure by default, whenever raging seasonal floodwaters burst through ageing dams. Later, in the United States, Californian farmers, Idaho fishermen and New England boaters illegally blew up or tore down government dams and diversions that had been imposed on them by outsiders and which threatened local livelihoods. Over time the legal jargon of court settlements managed to avoid or resolve potentially deadly and expensive conflicts; judicial decrees compelled owners to

re-design dams for increasingly sophisticated flow management. They were required to allocate water to the environment, to ensure there was sufficient ‘environmental water’ to sustain the ecological benefits of rivers. The ultimate goal behind this fundamentally new approach – to secure and restore ‘in-stream’ flows – is proving its worth on three fronts. For starters, a degraded river is bad for nature and for all those who depend on it, while a healthy river integrates aquatic ecosystems and people for the mutual benefit of all. As we build elasticity back into watersheds, we create an ecological buffer and broaden the scope of human resilience. Opportunities to cope with the menace of climate change are expanded. Secondly, the science continues to improve as it matures. Early flow regimes in North America and Europe may initially have been established for the sake of a single species of salmon beneath a dam. However, later methodologies linked headwaters to estuaries, or included multiple species – not just fish but snails, mussels, insects and plants – in the master plan. Thus restoring flows acts as a buttress against biodiversity loss Finally, methodologies are becoming more and more collaborative and having a greater impact. The latest methods help to build river flow and river health scenarios for the decision-maker. There are databases, software tools and approaches supporting application of environmental flows globally, in river basins from the Limpopo and the Mekong to the Colorado and the Murray-Darling.

Negotiating democratic flows

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Environmental flows hold great promise for the future of rivers. Yet, despite the progress made, the approach stands at a critical juncture. It is science-based, but technically intricate. It can be hard to fathom for non-specialists and its apparent complexity can alienate the very same leaders and stakeholders it is intended to help. This presents a challenge to advocates of environmental flows. Instead of concentrating on ever more precise definitions of flows and river models, the focus needs to shift. A hydro-electric dam in Tanzania (above), one of the countries which has learnt that the key to efficient water management is to engage all stakeholders in the process, from local farmers to international industrialists.

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ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Without this shift, we risk losing something vital. We have dissected the river into a false dichotomy. We are painting ourselves into a corner and asking decision-makers to divide currents between either ‘environmental’ or ‘development’ functions. To fuse the science and economics of rivers management, we are left with a fundamental problem: who makes these vital flow decisions, and on whose behalf? Lest we forget, restorative flows are not – or at least should never be – aimed merely at improving nature for its own sake. Rather, flows must expand the range of benefits, uses and options that rivers yield to people. Where

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a primary river use is for hydropower or farming or fishing or tourism, restorative flows aim to share benefits of the river among users. The environmental key is that to succeed, the river must be healthy. In this sense, the shorthand we use for managing river flows has, in fact, become rather misleading. In reality, ‘environmental flow regimes’ may be better described as ‘developmental flow regimes’. But that’s just a start. Tangible economic benefits are never born in isolation, but realised through a messy process of negotiation. For rivers, this requires a deliberate democratisation of decision-making authority. Right now, though, many rivers are still managed through traditional ‘command and control’ engineering, with just a few dozen people holding almost exclusive power over the fate of a river on which millions depend. Not only is this situation unfair, it is also ineffective and unnecessary. Aquatic scientists, engineers and water managers

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Photo: Still Pictures

Where a primary river use is for hydropower or farming or fishing or tourism, restorative flows aim to share benefits of the river among users.

A gardener tending the public parks in Phoenix, Arizona (above), using precious water drawn from the Colorado river.

have great strengths, but they can no more discern a nation’s most efficient hydrology than the best economists can dictate a centralised economy. Specialists cannot anticipate all the thousands of diverse and fluctuating economic drivers in each unique basin, nor should we expect them to. Fortunately – for them, for us, and for the rivers – they don’t have to.

From environmental flows to negotiated flows As rivers grow more unpredictable and currents become erratic, a handful of regulators simply cannot meet the complex supply and demand of water. Change is too fast, too sudden, too extreme and too dynamic for any centralised expert to monitor or allocate from on high,

whether for people or for nature. But if we empower users – the people who fish and swim in the river itself – these stakeholders can negotiate with one another in a constant feedback loop that refines and adjusts. These common people can best determine the give and take from their rivers and, in return, achieve uncommon results. Democratisation of flow regimes is not an either/or zero sum game that pits a technical elite against the grass roots. Demand for aquatic expertise in every river will only grow more intense, given the unpredictable aspects of climate change. But that specialist role should rise in collaboration with, rather than against or over, the needs of other vested interests in the river. Imagine the adaptive capacity and resilience that would emerge from negotiation

Photo: Still Pictures

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Tanzanian farmers from Kighare near Kilimanjaro (above), a region under stress from disruption to the Pangani river.

among specialists and fishermen, farmers, herders and shopkeepers during a protracted drought or unexpected deluge on the river. This bottom-up tactic has already begun to yield conservation benefits. In the past, a ‘fortress approach’ fenced people out and excluded them from the benefits of protected terrestrial ecosystems. Today, just as community-based ownership more effectively conserves parks and

Actually, negotiated flows are working already – and not only in rich countries with huge public bureaucracies and a trained cadre of sophisticated experts. Negotiated flows are working in some of the poorest, most stressed and least educated watersheds of the world, wherever necessity has become the mother of invention and empowered some of those billions on the brink to reclaim control over their currents.

Comfort is a luxury few can enjoy when collective security depends on the involvement of all. reserves, so too must we restore rivers through inclusive and participatory flow regimes. Dam operators and water managers may feel more comfortable working with a few exclusive colleagues who graduated together or speak the same jargon. But comfort is a luxury few can enjoy when collective security depends on the involvement of all. Global warming accelerates the urgency of this outward and downward shift: from environmental flow regimes toward democratic, negotiated flow regimes.

Providing proof

148

Negotiated flow regimes may sound very nice in theory and on paper, but some sceptics may understandably still harbour doubts that this approach can ever be made to work in practice in the near future.

5th World Water Forum Istanbul 2009

Consider Nigeria, which, decades ago, built two dams and other diversions on the KomaduguYobe river basin that flows through the country’s arid northeast, drying up before reaching Lake Chad. Water won by irrigators eroded the resource-based livelihoods of millions and this man-made scarcity bred explosive stress in an impoverished and ethnically splintered region. Conflict turned into collaboration as a result of a bottom-up approach in which downstream farmers, herders, and fishermen throughout the basin demanded – and negotiated – a democratic voice in how restorative flows would be planned and managed from below. Or witness Guatemala. In the San Marcos Department, more than 2,350 metres above sea level on the Tacaná volcano, residents reclaimed ownership over their high altitude tributaries.

Ownership led them to augment the resource with tree planting and terracing of the steep, easily-eroded slopes. Then communities democratically allocated flows based on which citizens demonstrated the greater need from the currents, whether it be for greenhouse horticulture, tourism concessions, coffee plantations or vegetable farming. A similar story emerges in Tanzania, in the shadow of Kilimanjaro. A changing climate was disrupting and stressing flows on the Pangani river’s 500 km course to the sea, and centralised government officials could not match the rising demand with a shrinking supply. Conflict was growing as a result. Now, those officials are empowering water users – hydropower operators, subsistence farmers, commercial plantations, thirsty cities, estuary fishermen – to use data about current and future water-use scenarios. In a collaborative watershed approach, all parties are learning the value of integrating development and the environment into the management of the river and helping define more authoritative water allocations, based on transparency and negotiated priorities. These examples come from more than a dozen river basins and more than 25 countries where the International Union for Conservation of Nature works with its members and partners on securing the future of rivers. More examples are emerging each day and, with them, are new lessons in how to rebuild the health of rivers and how to adapt to changing climates by “managing the unavoidable”. Science has taught us that, to succeed, river flows need to accommodate the needs of both people and nature. From experience, we have come to understand that, in instances where flow regimes are democratic and where negotiation over water has become a catalyst for development that is equitable and adaptive, then rivers will become a source of resilience for those economies and societies. In this era of global change, it will not just be rivers and the nature they sustain that benefit from heeding these lessons. It will also be people, those vulnerable and dependent billions on the brink, who grow increasingly resilient the more they can negotiate the vitality and integrity and health of their river.

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