Save a little water for tomorrow

Save a little water for tomorrow - Print Version - International Herald Tribune

Kevin Watkins International Herald Tribune

FRIDAY, MARCH 17, 2006


One hundred years ago, William Mulholland introduced the citizens of California to ... the water grab. Charged with securing water supplies for a small, thirsty town in a desert, the baron of the Los Angeles Department of Water hit on an imaginative response. He quietly bought up water rights in the Owens Valley, 230 miles to the north, built an aquifer across the blistering Mojave Desert, and took the water to downtown Los Angeles. When local ranchers protested by dynamiting his aquifer, Mulholland declared war, responding with a massive show of armed force.

Nowadays southern Californians fight over water in courts of law. Angelenos [are]... piping in water from hundreds of miles away and draining a Colorado River so depleted that it barely reaches the sea. ...it means disputing every drop of the Colorado with Arizona. The Mulholland model represents a brutish form of what has been a global approach to water management. Want to urbanize and industrialize at breakneck speed? Then dam and divert your rivers to meet the demand. Want to expand the agricultural frontier? Then mine your aquifers and groundwaters. ...

Water is being pumped out of the aquifer on which Mexico City stands at twice the rate of replenishment. The result: the city is subsiding at the rate of about half a meter every decade... The mining of groundwaters for irrigation has lowered the water table in parts of India and Pakistan by 30 meters in the past three decades. As water goes down, the cost of pumping goes up, undermining the livelihoods of poor farmers. Meanwhile, a lethal combination of water shortages, soil salination, and waterlogging threatens the breadbaskets of both countries. In India, about one quarter of grain production is based on unsustainable groundwater use. In China, urbanization and rapid growth has ... left a water crisis of epic proportions. The Hai-Huai-Yellow river basin tells its own story. More than 80 percent of river lengths are chronically polluted...

What is driving the global water crisis? Physical availability is part of the problem. ... With water use increasing at twice the rate of population growth, the amount available per person is shrinking - especially in some of the poorest countries. Over the next 25 years, the number of people living in countries with water crises will increase from 700 million to 2.2 billion, with more than half of the populations of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa affected. Factor in global warming, which could reduce rainfall in parts of sub-Saharan Africa by up to a quarter over the next century, and this is starting to look like a crisis in the making...

Growing scarcity means more competition. And as William Mulholland taught us all those years ago, competition without good governance can turn ugly - especially for those without power. ... The danger is that the poorest farmers with the weakest voice in water management will lose out, with devastating consequences for global poverty reduction efforts. Challenging as physical scarcity may be in some countries, the real problems in water go deeper. The 20th-century model for water management was based on a simple idea: that water is an infinitely available free resource to be exploited, dammed or diverted without reference to scarcity or sustainability.

Forty years ago, the Aral Sea covered an area the size of Belgium. Thanks to Soviet-era planners who diverted the ... rivers into cotton irrigation, it has been reduced to a couple of small, lifeless hypersaline lakes. In the United States, farmers on the High Plains are pumping water from the Ogallala aquifer ... at eight times the recharge rate. ...

Across the world, water-based ecological systems - rivers, lakes and watersheds - have been taken beyond ... ecological sustainability by policy makers who have turned a blind eye to the consequences of over- exploitation. We need a new model of water management for the 21st century. What does that mean? For starters, ... that means using it more efficiently at levels that do not destroy our environment. ... it means is that governments need to manage the private demand of different users and manage this precious resource in the public interest.

There is another, equally profound challenge. In an era of intensifying competition, we have to ensure that the world's poor do not suffer... That means strengthening the rights and the voice of the poor - and it means putting social justice at the center of water management.