Our Water Problems Are a Crisis of Management

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

a process which promotes the coordinated development and management of water, land and related resources in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems.

In practice, this means bringing the many different ministries and agencies that all supervise a sliver of water in each country together to find ways in which to manage demand, increase efficiency, and move water to higher-value uses: in essence, to do more with less.

The International Water Management Institute developed this approach in agriculture under the mantra "more crop per drop." A 2007 IWMI-led study concluded that there are indeed many avenues open to increasing the productivity of water in agriculture, and, surprisingly, the greatest potential is in the African savannahs, areas that hitherto have been considered unlikely to benefit from this kind of intervention.

The work of Falkenmark and Johan Rockström has contributed significantly to this shift in thinking. In Balancing Water for Humans and Nature, they explore the potential to increase the productivity of the green water. In practice this means developing opportunities for supplemental irrigation (limited irrigation to supplement rainfall during drought spells) through technologies that range from small scale irrigation to rainwater harvesting. While some in the scientific community view their work with skepticism, others see important supporting evidence in the success of Brazilian researchers and farmers who turned the Brazilian savannahs, the cerrados, into highly productive agricultural land in the second half of the twentieth century through active soil and water management as well as targeted plant breeding.

Other promising approaches to increase water productivity include breeding more drought-resistant crops or rice that does not need to be grown in standing water; safely reusing municipal waste water for agriculture; adapting systems to serve multiple uses from drinking to animal husbandry, vegetable production, and fishponds; managing food production in wetlands without damaging ecosystem services; and improving the capacity of water institutions for adaptive management.

Building storage. Generations of water engineers have been educated to solve water problems by developing "new" water resources. This usually involves capturing the water where it is available in nature, storing it to overcome temporal variability, and transporting it through canals or pipes to overcome spatial variability. Of course this water is not new -- all water on earth already serves some purpose, generally producing ecosystem services that are valuable in the aggregate. Water storage -- ranging from cisterns in residences to Lake Volta, formed by the Akosombo dam, the largest man-made lake in the world -- was the twentieth century's primary adaptation to variations in rainfall. Largely in the last century, the governments of the United States and Australia built between 5,000 and 6,000 cubic meters of storage per inhabitant.

These dams have displaced people, reduced and regulated the flow of rivers, and eliminated the natural rhythm that supported riverine ecosystems in general and wetlands and fisheries in particular. For these reasons, dams have become a controversial subject. Environmentalists in the American Northwest, for example, campaign to have dams decommissioned and removed to restore salmon runs. Throughout Europe, North America, and Asia, the most productive dam sites have been essentially used up, and many river basins are closed, or closing, because no more water can be developed without affecting existing human uses downstream.

But the debate should not focus on whether dams in general are bad or good. They need to be assessed in each specific context for their potential benefit as well as their full impact on the environment and the burden they may place on displaced people. Some of the dams built in the past would not pass such a test, though there are areas in which new dams are still worth the difficulties they create. In Ethiopia, for example, the current stock of water infrastructure is so low, less than 50 cubic meters per person (less than 1 percent of that in Australia or the United States), that dams should be considered. In large parts of Africa there are still environmentally viable and reasonably inexpensive opportunities to build even large dams that can offer significant social and economic benefits.

Dams and irrigation projects also acquired a bad reputation in the last few decades of the twentieth century because projected benefits were exaggerated in the planning phases of some high-profile, white-elephant projects built in Africa. But, while extravagant promises should be reined in, we need to stay focused on what truly matters: it is unlikely that water problems will be successfully addressed without new dam projects in some countries that face serious shortfalls.

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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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