Our Water Problems Are a Crisis of Management

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

To support promising developments such as these, Google.org has begun an initiative that aims to improve education and health-related water services through empowered citizens and communities, responsive providers, and informed decision-makers.

* * *

How can the world be induced to act on the water crisis? It took almost thirty years of advocacy by the climate community before the world took the climate crisis seriously. The water community knows that the best time to get people's attention and force action is in the wake of a flood or drought. The recent Australian drought made water the country's political hot button. A California court order to drastically reduce pumping water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta -- the lynchpin of the large-scale water transfer to the southern part of the state -- may trigger a similar emergency. But floods and droughts are local events that allow the large majority of the world population to ignore their own vulnerability until a crisis hits home. In the end it may be Al Gore who opened the door to far-reaching water awareness. As people accept that climate change is real and here to stay, they are likely to realize that while reducing greenhouse gas emissions is all about energy, adapting to climate change will be all about water.

Solutions to the world water crisis will not be technological fixes of the sort attempted in the past. The water-service crisis is most likely to be resolved through a combination of much-improved, cheaper, small-scale, off-the shelf water purification technology, combined with better information; a reformed public water-sector; and large numbers of indigenous, small to medium-scale private water-service providers. People affected by the water-resource crisis and their allies need to increase water productivity in a manner that maintains ecosystem services -- particularly, but not exclusively, through increased green-water productivity in Africa's savannahs -- and buttresses the local capacity to manage climate risk. A tall order, perhaps, but the current world food crisis demonstrates what is at stake. While that crisis appears to have been triggered by the production of cereals-based biofuels, the next food crisis could easily be triggered by water scarcity.

See more stories tagged with: water, drought, dams, privatization, water scarcity, water pollution, desalination, water management

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.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Water! Sign up now »