Our Water Problems Are a Crisis of Management

By Frank R. Rijsberman, Boston Review. Posted January 21, 2009.

As growing population puts pressure on supplies, the supply-side approach needs to be complemented and ultimately replaced by a demand-side approach that encourages consumers to use water more efficiently. Peter Gleick, a prominent advocate of a demand-side approach to water in the United States, has shown that increased American demand due to population or economic growth can be covered by increased efficiency. However, because the cost of transporting water over distances larger than hundreds of kilometers is prohibitive, more efficient water use in California supports only the local environment -- it does not help provide water for low-income people in Africa.

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Addressing the water crisis -- the service crisis (water to drink) and the resource crisis (water for food and clothing) -- will require both technological and political innovation. Climate change will introduce additional challenges associated with increased climate variability in many parts of a world. But advances in water science in recent decades have led to a better understanding of the key issues that need to be addressed to solve the water crisis, and speedy innovation in water technology during the last decade or so looks promising.

A rapidly growing market for water technology, now estimated at $500 billion annually (compare this to the United Nation's $6 billion annual budget for water and sanitation projects), is producing a flood of new devices. These range from high-tech consumer-oriented ultra-filtration units to off-the-shelf community-level micro-utilities, available on the Internet for as little as $2-3,000 in countries such as the Philippines or Indonesia. This technical innovation facilitates a fast-growing, indigenous, small-scale water industry in many developing countries. The Bloomberg World Water Index has shown average returns of 35 percent per annum since its inception in 2003, outperforming oil and gas. And cutting-edge nanotechnology promises to reduce substantially the cost and energy use of water purification and even desalination. Let's consider these advances, and areas that need improvement, starting with the latter.

Desalination. As a reliable and affordable technology, desalination has come of age in the last two decades. For island cities such as Singapore, or for a new five-star hotel on a Pacific atoll, a desalination plant is now standard technology. The cost of desalination has come down rapidly and now ranges from $0.50-1.00 per cubic meter, depending on the price of energy. This is a reasonable price for drinking water in a developed urban area or hotel where the impact on room prices will be only a few dollars per day. For agriculture purposes, however, the value of water ranges from several cents per cubic meter to grow crops such as corn, wheat, rice, or sugar cane, to half a dollar for intensive flower or vegetable production. Desalination is clearly not an economical option. Desalination is similarly impractical for poor people who live on less than $1 or $2 per day.

Falling prices in membrane filtering technology (reverse osmosis) and advances in ultraviolet and ozone disinfection have led to a wide array of off-the-shelf water technologies. Large companies such as GE, Siemens, and Dow developed these technologies for consumer markets in industrial countries, spurred by the exploding market in bottled water, but they offer interesting spin-offs in developing countries.

As documented in the 2006 Human Development Report, a home-grown water industry is rapidly developing in many urban and peri-urban areas throughout Asia. Companies buy off-the-shelf water purification technology and sell bottled or packaged water in twenty-liter refillable bottles at rates affordable to even low-income groups. A 2005 World Bank paper reported that there were some ten thousand such local water companies, and today that is probably a low estimate given the rapid evolution of the industry. Progress in nanotechnology is leading to specialized membranes grown at molecular level that promise to reduce the financial and energy costs of desalination, water purification, and specialized waste-water treatment by another 3 to 5 times within a few years.

The new indigenous micro–water industry offers a challenge for government regulation as governments are tasked not with providing the service but rather monitoring its quality. Yet, among developments for providing drinking water services for the unserved in urban and peri-urban areas, it is the most promising in the last twenty years. It is demand-driven, locally owned, and therefore more likely to be scalable and sustainable.

More crop per drop. Concerned about the constraints of supply-side solutions and the limited impact of desalination, some water scientists and engineers have turned their attention to a more holistic view of water management. The Global Water Partnership, an international NGO, actively advocates integrated water resources management, which it defines as

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Frank R. Rijsberman is Program Director at Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google Inc. He was previously Director General of the International Water Management Institute.

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