| |
February 2008— The Blue Planet
Download PDF version
Water is unique, and no other substance is
more important to our survival. Yet we continue to ignore
the fact that clean, fresh water is in increasingly short
supply over much of the world. Are we sunk? Not if we learn
to treat water as a human right as well as a scarce resource….
In 1961 the United
States began work on sending a man to the Moon before the
end of the decade. Environmental considerations played no
part in this decision. National prestige - threatened by the
launch of a Soviet satellite four years before - was the paramount
motive, followed at a considerable distance by the advancement
of scientific knowledge. Public concern about the natural
environment was then in its infancy, and a trip to outer space
seemed to have no environmental consequences anyway. Yet the
space voyages that began in 1969 have stimulated the environmental
movement in a completely unexpected way. They produced the
first photographs of the Earth. Even in a society saturated
with images, the blue and white sphere, luminous against the
blackness of space or rising majestically over the horizon
of the Moon, has stood apart. It has done more to change the
way humans think about the place they inhabit than millions
of words could ever do. We saw that our world has limits,
that it is the only world we have, and that ultimately, we
have no choice but to keep it well and whole. Blue sea and
white cloud have told us, too, something that is easy to forget
in our daily, land-bound lives; we are all living on islands
large or small, on a planet where dry land is the exception
not the rule. It has become something of a cliché that
our world should be called not Earth but Water. And it follows
that the human relationship with water will be crucial, as
we learn to treat our planet with respect.
Water is unique. No other substance matches its qualities,
and for humans and all other forms of life it has no substitutes.
We would all die without it - on average, within three days.
Considered as an experience it is commonplace. We all drink
it, cook with it, and wash with it every day. We only think
about it if it is too hot, too dirty or, worse, not there
at all. At the same time water has dimensions that go well
beyond its practical uses. As a powerful metaphor for life
and salvation, water appears in the sacred texts of many religions.
Springs and rivers have often been considered holy. Even today
people make a wish as they throw coins into fountains, invoking
the power of the water, perhaps unaware that they are following
a tradition thousands of years old. Environmentalists like
to argue that water should be treated as a trust and a value,
not as an economic good like cars or potatoes - which is the
equivalent, in a secular age, of saying that water is holy.
In at least one way they are right. Water came to us, if not
from the gods at least from outer space, when icy comets struck
the newly formed planet some billions of years ago. There
will be no more until we collide with another icy comet, which
will be a heavy price to pay for it. Water also has a permanence
not granted to mere rocks. We can only make it in quantities
that are insignificant relative to the amount we already have.
Outside a laboratory we cannot destroy it. For practical purposes
all we can do is to use it, move it around, pollute it or
clean it up. We do all those things on an ever-growing scale
- and when we have finished there is as much water in the
world as when we started, though we may have made some of
it unusable or inaccessible.
"Humans depend totally on the less
than
3% (of water) that is fresh…"
Water is permanent, and we have a great deal of it - some
1.4 billion cubic kilometres. That should be enough for all
human purposes, with plenty to spare for other forms of life.
Unfortunately over 97% of the total is in the salt sea that
covers almost three-quarters of the planet. Sea water - it
contains about 3.5 % salt by weight - is far from useless
to humans: it provides a major (though dwindling) food source
in its fish, molluscs, plants, and not least, the salt itself.
It carries more freight than any other medium, and it is the
indispensable ingredient in much of modern tourism, in ocean
side resorts and cruise ships. It cannot, however, be drunk
without serious, ultimately fatal results. It cannot be used
for irrigation. Humans depend totally on the less than 3%
that is fresh, and in practical terms much of that is not
available for our use. Two-thirds is locked up (at least until
the present) in the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland and
the world's glaciers. Much of the rest is well out of reach.
Moving water over long distances, in spite of its useful habit
of flowing downhill, is almost always expensive and often
impossible. About one fifth of the liquid fresh water on the
surface of the planet is in the Amazon Basin of South America.
It will not be coming out of North American taps any time
soon. We are left with perhaps no more than 0.3% relative
to the total quantity of water on the Earth.
Even this modest percentage was more than enough for most
of human history. Water shortages could certainly be caused
by climate patterns or in some cases, human mismanagement.
In either case they were local and transitory, although they
could result in horrendous loss of life. As on many other
fronts, it is the changes of the last two hundred years, particularly
the last fifty years, that have put pressure on the water
supply. Developed societies use large quantities, for power
generation, manufacturing and lavish personal use that in
the developed world can reach 600 litres a day per person
- ten or twenty times the average for developing countries.
Feeding a rapidly increasing world population has meant widespread
use of irrigation, by far the largest consumer of water and
all too often, one of the most wasteful. Urbanization and
rising living standards mean that steadily more people have
piped water, baths and flush toilets - all excellent in themselves,
but all using water. Air conditioning has played a part, not
only by using water itself but by making arid regions, once
seen as intolerably hot, desirable homes - desirable, that
is, if equipped with plenty of lawns, swimming pools and golf
courses, all thanks to water brought hundreds of miles or
expensively desalinated from sea water.
"Mediterranean Europe, Southern
Africa and
the West Coast of the United States
are expected to become drier…"
The pressures of social and economic development are being
increased by climate change. Some regions receive growing
amounts of water in the destructive form of floods or hurricane
rains, while others face the prospect of seemingly permanent
drought. Precipitation at high latitudes is expected to increase,
while Mediterranean Europe, Southern Africa and the West Coast
of the United States are expected to become drier, as is Australia,
already the most arid continent. Human decisions, on the other
hand, not only increase water consumption but often illustrate
the law of unintended consequences. The building of dams in
particular offers a striking instance of misguided good intentions
in the management of water. In 1930 Americans built Hoover
Dam on the Colorado, making Las Vegas possible among other
results. Stalin, not to be outdone by capitalism, dammed the
Volga at Rybinsk, drowning 636 villages and severely damaging
the sturgeon fishery in the process. For more than five decades
dams were an unchallengeable symbol of modernity and progress.
Politicians loved them as, in every sense, solid achievements,
impressive backdrops for a photograph. Developing nations
loved them as demonstrations of their rapid strides toward
a better future. Contractors loved them for obvious reasons,
and for aid agencies they combined hydro power, irrigation,
flood control, tourist potential and sometimes even improved
navigation in one unbeatable package.
It was hard to argue with all this and few tried. Dams rose
on all six inhabited continents - over 40,000 of them by one
count, including 102 monsters over 150 metres high. Many countries,
including Canada, are heavily dependent on dams for hydro-electric
power while many millions of farmers around the world depend
on them for a steady supply of irrigation water. Nonetheless,
disillusion with dams has grown and today it is widespread.
Large dams, especially dams in arid areas, can do serious,
sometimes irreversible damage to the environment. They endanger
upstream river life by changing the water's temperature and
salinity, and wipe out downstream fisheries by blocking the
life-giving flow of silt and floodwater. They produce downstream
erosion and upstream landslides. If the reservoirs are clogged
with decaying vegetation, as they sometimes are, they produce
greenhouse gases. Reservoirs can also be breeding grounds
for malaria and other waterborne diseases. Dams can sometimes
drown irreplaceable archaeological sites and wipe out whole
human communities, as the Nubians of Egypt among many others
can testify. If water is suddenly released to keep a dam stable,
downstream communities are flooded, usually without warning.
Nor was the plus side always as rosy as the planners anticipated.
Dams do not always make good use of the water they impound.
Reservoirs lose huge amounts to evaporation, especially, of
course, in arid climates. The power generated and acres irrigated
often fall well short of targets, while cost estimates were
regularly overrun. All dams slowly silt up, reducing their
generating capacity and in a few cases even threatening their
stability. Finally, dams do not always give the people whose
lives they change what they want and need - not surprisingly,
since until recent years the people directly affected were
seldom asked what they thought about it all. Dams are still
being built, notably in China, but aid agencies no longer
fund them and some in the United States are even being demolished.
Perhaps the most significant lesson to be drawn from the story
of dams is the danger of relying solely upon top-down, technocratic
planning. Water management is a prime example of the need
to think locally, weighing each region's unique mix of developmental,
political and environmental factors before taking irreversible
action.
"…irrigation, more often than
not,
is a highly inefficient use of water."
Dams often go together with perennial irrigation. Irrigation
was the basis of the first human civilizations and it plays
a vital role in feeding humanity today. Its appeal is immediate
and elemental. Who does not want to see the desert bloom?
Sterile wastes become fertile fields, providing food and income
for people who have often barely scratched a living. Irrigation
is by far the largest human use of water, outweighing all
the others combined. Yet irrigation, more often than not,
is a highly inefficient use of water. Open, unlined irrigation
canals and channels in arid areas such as Central Asia or
the Southwest of the United States can lose half the water
they carry to evaporation and seepage before it reaches a
single plant. Much of what reaches the fields is unnecessary
for plant growth. It is lost to more evaporation and seepage
or only serves to erode the soil. Worse, in rainless areas,
repeated irrigation without provision for drainage or flushing
will eventually make the soil so saline it becomes sterile.
Too much salt in the soil is an immense and growing problem
in river basins as far apart as the Indus, the Colorado and
Australia's Murray. It is hard to understand why this was
not foreseen, since the dangers of salt accumulation have
been known since ancient Iraq.
Dams and irrigation canals were at least built with good
intentions. It is hard to say as much for another source of
pressure on the water supply, the current boom in bottled
water. Europeans have always drunk large amounts and still
do, while North Americans have come to believe that water
from a "natural" source is healthier, safer and
socially more acceptable than the boring old stuff that comes
out of their kitchen taps. Food companies have both encouraged
this idea and profited from it. Bottled water often has the
word "Spring" in its name, since a premium can be
charged for spring water as opposed to the otherwise identical
water in a river or lake. (It is striking that consumers believe
at one and the same time that bottled water is "pure"
and that their favourite brand has an identifiable taste.
Both cannot be true: any taste in water comes from substances
dissolved in it.) The craze has reached such proportions that
it has seriously depleted groundwater in parts of the United
States. It has also, of course, littered the world with discarded
plastic bottles. In a world where at least two billion people
have to make do with inadequate water supplies, this is an
unattractive phenomenon. The good news is that a number of
local governments, including the municipalities of San Francisco
and Salt Lake City, have banned the purchase of bottled water
for city employees. Likewise, some of the world's leading
restaurants are offering their own filtered water to patrons
in place of bottled water. And a number of corporations have
brought in policies prohibiting the use of bottled water at
meetings where tap water is also available.
"…clean, fresh water is in
increasingly
short supply over much of the world."
Last, but far from least, we have gone a long way towards
making the water we do have unusable. Pollution of water by
chemicals, bacteria and agricultural runoff was the first
dimension of water management to rouse public concern. After
decades of clean-up programmes, some of them successful, pollution
has not gone away. The U.S. and Canada, whose citizens like
to think of themselves as both clean and progressive, still
discharge large amounts of raw sewage into rivers, lakes and
the ocean every day, along with large amounts of pesticides,
fertilizers, and industrial wastes. As a result, there are
100 First Nations communities in Canada that still operate
under a boiled water alert. In much of the developing world
and the former Soviet bloc the situation is far worse. Rivers
become open sewers. Wells in India (if they do not dry up
completely from overuse of ground water) fill with both toxic
man-made chemicals and naturally occurring substances such
as fluoride (poisonous above a certain amount) and even arsenic.
Fear of pollution has been a driver of the move to bottled
water: it remains to be seen what will be needed to translate
this fear into truly effective action.
All these factors together mean that clean, fresh water is
in increasingly short supply over much of the world. The future
looks grim. Pumping groundwater - much increased by the arrival
of electric and diesel pumps - has seriously depleted aquifers
in both developed and developing countries. Groundwater put
into bottles has made lakes disappear in Florida and Wisconsin.
Decades of using groundwater to irrigate the High Plains of
the United States will soon exhaust the huge Ogallala aquifer,
leaving one of the world's most productive agricultural regions
with an uncertain future. To pump groundwater is to live on
capital, since aquifers can take thousands of years to refill,
if they refill at all: many of them are "fossil water",
legacies from climates that no longer exist. As noted wells
are drying up in India, threatening the country's ability
to feed itself. Many once-great rivers, drained for irrigation
and urban use, no longer reach the sea. Australia's Murray
does not, and the Colorado does so only because Mexico, at
its mouth, is guaranteed a share of its flow by treaty. Israel
and Jordan use the river that divides them so thoroughly that
the Dead Sea, into which the Jordan once flowed, is well on
its way to disappearing. Even China's huge Yellow River or
Huang-He, historically better known for catastrophic floods,
fails to reach tidewater in most years. Most spectacularly,
the use of Central Asia's Amu Darya to irrigate cotton fields
has reduced the Aral Sea to a lifeless fragment of its former
size. Even long-established and highly developed communities
like the Spanish region of Catalonia face chronic water shortages.
Less seriously, but still significantly, in Texas the river
of San Antonio's famous River Walk is kept flowing only by
diverting treated sewage effluent, while the municipal government
of Las Vegas is encouraging homeowners to grow lawns of cacti
instead of grass.
Examples could be multiplied, but the lesson is clear: we
are demanding more of our fresh water supply than it can give
us, and there are no painless or universal answers available.
There are no more unexploited resources to rescue us from
the consequences of our actions. Nor are there any world-changing
technological breakthroughs in sight. Desalination of sea
water is expensive in financial, energy and environmental
costs and makes sense only in areas that are both very dry
and very rich, the Persian Gulf states being both the obvious
example and the largest users. The city of Perth, Australia,
faced with a major water crisis, has built a desalination
plant that is partly powered by wind turbines, but relatively
few places have the right conditions for that solution. The
inescapable facts remain: we cannot do without water and we
cannot make it in significant amounts. All we can do is to
use what we have wisely.
"…we cannot do without water
and
we cannot make it in significant amounts."
Water management is a global issue in the sense that it directly
or indirectly affects virtually everyone living on the planet.
Unlike climate change, however, water management is not global
either in its chains of cause and effect or in the strategies
for dealing with any individual region. The only over-arching
challenge is to use the water we have so efficiently that
we can not only meet existing demands (or at least the less
frivolous of them) while preserving the environment and making
adequate water available to the roughly one-third of the human
race who do not have enough of it today.
To call this a challenge is a gross understatement. Achieving
it will mean whole-hearted and lasting co-operation among
the sovereign states that share a river basin, a lake or an
aquifer. It will entail major changes in the domestic politics
of many, perhaps most countries. Water management cuts to
the bone. It affects the way everyone lives and earns a living.
Farmers - perhaps the most powerful of all lobbies in democratic
countries - who have historically paid little or nothing for
vast quantities of water will have to accept economic charges,
physical limits or both. Industries that have had privileged
access to water because they create jobs and wealth will have
to use it as efficiently as any other input. Urban users who
have paid very little will have to learn to think of water
as having a price like anything else. Deeply rooted customs
and expectations will have to change. Not every home can have
a lawn and a swimming pool - or even an herbaceous border
and a rose garden. And everywhere the use and control of water
is enmeshed in a web of legal rights and traditional customs
that have both economic and cultural value to their communities.
There is no clean slate to write on: rather, successful water
management must begin by taking each society as history has
made it.
It is easy to write these things. Unfortunately it is often
true that human beings will choose the sensible alternative,
but only when all the others have failed. It is also true
that different approaches to water management appeal to different
people, for reasons rooted in their whole concept of how human
society should function. For many the idea of charging an
economic price for an essential good like water is repugnant,
especially if the charging is being done (as it often has
been in recent decades) by private water companies. This school
makes the perfectly valid point that world-wide the people
who need water most are usually those least able to pay for
it. Others will reply that people will not take water conservation
seriously until wasting it hurts them in their most sensitive
spot, their wallets. They can also argue that the only alternatives
are exhortations to voluntary change - which usually is least
effective with the worst offenders - or regulation with its
accompanying battery of inspectors, fines, and all too often,
opportunities for favouritism if not corruption.
In reality achieving the sustainable use of water will require
all three policies and more. Educating the public in the crisis
is essential, not only to bring about voluntary change but
to create the political climate in which comprehensive and
permanent change is possible. Realistic pricing is not the
whole answer, but it has a valuable and perfectly legitimate
role to play. Water may be a human right, but that does not
mean it should be a commons, freely available to all. Human
rights, to coin a phrase, fill no bathtubs. Bringing water
to the point of use requires heavy capital investment in distribution
systems and regular spending on filtration, maintenance and
waste disposal. Useable water is not free, and there is no
reason why individuals and businesses who can afford to pay
for it should not do so. Guaranteeing a supply to those who
cannot afford to pay is essential both politically and morally,
but society has an arsenal of public policy tools to achieve
this, without encouraging waste by making water free to all.
"…we must learn to treat water
both
as a human right and as a scarce resource…"
As for regulation, with all its drawbacks it is essential
to prevent "free loading" - benefiting from the
system without contributing to it - and to achieve policy
goals beyond the reach of education or pricing, such as control
over local and international trade in water. Finally, technology,
while unlikely to produce miracles, has a role to play in
making water conservation measures financially viable and
politically acceptable. Efficient showerheads and washing
machines, the Israeli invention of drip irrigation, the lining
of irrigation channels are all examples of how technology
can contribute to change that is incremental but cumulatively
significant. In a word, we must learn to treat water both
as a human right and as a scarce resource, rather than re-enacting
the "tragedy of the commons" by making it the property
of all and the responsibility of none.
To repeat, effective water management is not one challenge
but hundreds of them, large and small, each with a unique
blend of human, physical and financial factors. This means
that a key technique for achieving the delicate balance between
a human right and an economic good will usually prove to be
good governance, the structuring of an effective and legitimate
decision-making process. Technical knowledge and central government
authority are necessary if we are to make the best use of
water, but they are not sufficient. The populations affected
must be involved, especially in developing countries where
their local knowledge and sense of their own needs can make
the difference between failure and success. Transparency is
essential if all the factors involved - environmental, economic,
social - are to be given due weight. In some countries the
political culture and a vigorous media go a long way toward
achieving these things. In many, perhaps most, transparency
and participation will require changes in the behaviour of
both local and international elites.
Canada is richly blessed in many ways, and in none more so
than in our supply of fresh water. The United Nations estimates
that Canada has "Total Annual Renewable Water Resources"
of 2,902 cubic kilometres a year - behind only Brazil and
Russia in the world, and the largest per capita amount of
any sizeable country. And this is the amount renewed each
year, not the total volume of water in Canadian territory:
it is our income, rather than our capital. These figures,
however, if taken at face value can be seriously misleading.
Canada's population is concentrated in a small proportion
of its territory. Much of the water in the thinly inhabited
zone is effectively unavailable for human use, for both cost
and environmental reasons. Even within the populated zone
water is unequally distributed. Much of the Prairies has historically
been subject to drought: in the latest, in 2001-2002, the
South Saskatchewan River ran dry. The Great Lakes region might
seem to be well supplied, but it is important to remember
the difference between capital and income, between water stored
in the Lakes and the amount renewed each year. Since the Great
Lakes have a relatively small drainage basin, they are vulnerable
to withdrawals in excess of the annual intake. The booming
interior of British Columbia, valued for its relatively warm
and dry climate, is a smaller-scale version of the U.S. Southwest,
faced with competing demands for irrigation, tourism, industry
and urban use. Vancouver, believed by those who do not live
there to be permanently awash, has repeatedly experienced
water rationing. Climate change is expected to make these
shortages more acute in southern Canada, while increasing
rain and snow in the Arctic.
"…we are demanding more of
our
fresh water supply than it can give us…"
These pressures are one cause of the intense opposition in
Canada to all plans for the export of Canadian water. Some
fear large-scale projects to replenish the Ogallala or even
to rescue water-starved Arizona and Nevada (where, ironically,
large numbers of Canadians spend their winters). More realistic
are fears of diverting more Great Lakes water into the Mississippi
- more realistic, because large amounts have been diverted
every day ever since the reversal of the Chicago River more
than a hundred years ago. Others fear that the Great Lakes
will suffer the death of a thousand cuts, as American municipal
and county governments nibble away at them, notwithstanding
the opposition of all eight Great Lakes state governments
to further exports from the Great Lakes Basin. Schemes to
export Canadian lake or glacier water by tanker to arid or
drought-ridden areas have surfaced from time to time and doubtless
will surface again. Nor are they technically impossible. The
Greek islands have become tourist meccas by importing water
from Britain. Large polyurethane bags full of fresh water
are towed to Greece by a company appropriately called Aquarius.
Public debate has centred on these plans to export Canadian
water directly. Attention has only recently begun to focus
on a more complex issue, the so-called "virtual"
export of water. This is the export, not of water as such
but as a means of producing other goods. In effect, we are
exporting the use of our abundant water to grow, manufacture
or extract goods that would be difficult or expensive to produce
in countries with less abundant supplies of fresh water than
Canada. Agriculture is the most obvious example, and probably
the least contentious although in its case the water actually
contained in foodstuffs, as distinct from the water used to
grow crops or feed livestock, leaves Canada for good. The
vast quantities of water used in the extraction of natural
resources, however, present issues of growing importance and
great political sensitivity. The water polluted in extracting
resources is a classic example of what economists call a "negative
externality" - a cost incurred in production that is
borne by third parties, not the producer or consumer of the
product. Unless producers are required by law to meet the
costs of the pollution they create, those costs will be borne
by the public either in the form of degraded land and water,
or in the costs of clean-up, or both. Since most natural resources
produced in Canada are exported, Canadians may find themselves
not only exporting the use of their water, but also subsidizing
the export industry by bearing the external costs it creates.
This possibility has already led to environmental laws and
regulations requiring companies to clean up the environments
they pollute. The details vary greatly and the results are
contentious, but it is perhaps fair to describe them as mixed.
Going further down this road will require Canadians to make
difficult decisions, weighing the competitiveness of our exports
and the well-being of industries that generate great wealth
and many jobs, against the growing public belief that, to
put things at their simplest, people should clean up the mess
they make.
Whatever balance is struck on this issue, it is arguable
that Canadians should spend more time planning to use their
much-valued water wisely. Public debate in Canada, when it
leaves the export issue, is almost wholly concerned, first
with the safety of the water supply and next with the effects
of polluted water on the environment. These are obviously
important issues, but they have hitherto left little room
for ordinary, every-day conservation. The federal and provincial
governments recognize the importance of conservation, and
to some degree encourage it, but the issue has little resonance
with the public. More widespread use of water meters, more
realistic water charges, better maintenance of distribution
systems, recycling of water - none of these makes headlines
and some would be unpopular, but they would help to ensure
that future Canadians would be as blessed with water as earlier
generations have been.
In the Negev desert of Israel a traveller to the Eilat Red
Sea resort will pass a ruined city on a flat-topped hill.
Built by the Arab Nabatean people (who also built the famous
city of Petra) in the 3rd century BC, it is called Avdat.
It flourished from long-distance trade and agriculture for
900 years until destroyed by an earthquake. Today it is a
beautiful, peaceful spot, but anyone visiting the well-preserved
ruins must wonder how a city could ever have survived in such
a place. The view is extensive, but it does not include a
drop of water and very little vegetation. Yet Avdat not only
existed, it thrived. Water was available to irrigate fields
and vineyards - six winepresses have been found - to supply
public bathhouses and to justify an elaborate drainage system.
The answer is simple in principle, though incomplete in detail.
The Nabateans dug some wells, but more importantly, they saved
every possible drop of the scanty winter rainfall. Streets
and rooftops drained into cement-lined cisterns which supplied
both fields and houses. Pipes and cisterns were covered to
limit evaporation. We do not know how else the people of Avdat
made sure that none of the precious water was wasted, but
whatever they did was clearly effective. In a region most
people would think fit only for the herds of the Bedouin,
with a rainfall of less than 10 inches in a good year, the
careful use of water supported a sophisticated urban civilization.
The ruins of Avdat are striking proof of what a community
can achieve by adapting to its environment, and should be
an inspiration as humanity comes to terms with our bountiful
but finite planet.
***
Published by RBC Financial Group. All editions from the RBC
Letter collection are available on our web site at www.rbc.com/responsibility/letter.
Our e-mail address is: rbcletter@rbc.com.
Publié aussi en francais.
[ Return to RBC Letter
home page ]
|
|
