Wet Dreams?

Solving The Global Water Crisis

By Daniel Simpson

“Water is the earth’s eye, looking into which
the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”
– Henry David Thoreau

“When the well runs dry, we know the worth of water.”
– Benjamin Franklin

LONDON, 13 February 2008 – Of all the clichés du jour, few resonate quite like the one about water. According to the effusive chief executive of Dow Chemical, and countless others before him and since, it’s “the oil of the 21st century.” Only it isn’t, except in terms of the scramble for access.

Our dependence on water is involuntary, it can’t be substituted or offset, and there won’t be a rush before the droughts. This isn’t to suggest that no one gets rich, but our fixation on getting richer is part of the problem, perhaps even more so than demographics, diet and climate change. The poor will bear the brunt of future turmoil, but hardship is likely to hit most people, whether in the stomach or the pocket. As with energy, the price of food keeps rising, and in some places staples are already scarce. That’s partly down to water shortages, and technology can’t just conjure up unlimited cheap supplies. We have to use less, in the farming that guzzles most of it, in the industries that ship its hidden costs around the world, and in our homes and lifestyle choices. Without radical changes over the next couple of decades, it won’t just be Africans brandishing machetes over a water pump.

And yet, with better stewardship, there’s probably enough to go around. Unfiltered by human interference, the hydrological cycle yields the ultimate renewable resource. Even today, as sprawling cities and irrigation pipes suck river beds and aquifers dry, a combination of cutbacks, recycling and more integrated planning could still stave off the Biblical devastation envisaged by the United Nations. Barely three percent of the earth’s water is fit for human consumption (and most of that’s ice), perhaps parching or poisoning up to three billion people by 2025. But if the richest countries in particular consume less, and invest in membranes to make sewage thirst-quenching, they could reuse more of what they have, while promoting wetland conservation. Captured rainfall could replenish groundwater as part of plans to keep rivers hydrated. And if, as seems inevitable (but costly), we also strip salt from the sea, people might even stop misquoting the Ancient Mariner, and instead find plenty more drops to drink.

“Water has been taken for granted,” laments Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General. While some countries toy with austerity, others build desalinated oases, complete with golf courses and a hardcore fossil fuel habit. “The notion of water sustainability in a broad sense has not been seriously examined,” Ban told a roomful of executives and policymakers at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos. “No one really owns the problem. Therefore, no one really owns the solution.” That’s led to comparisons with global warming, many of which are spurious, given the geographical variations in water scarcity compared to the atmospheric commons. There are nonetheless common policy responses, particularly when it comes to pricing in environmental cost. For the past couple of decades, international organisations have promoted local action, tailored to individual river basins. This is now being supplemented by a focus on quantifying and curbing worldwide wastage, perhaps using tradable footprint permits to encourage more holistic thinking about water embedded in supply chains.

The most logical sequence of policies is to start by slashing demand, most simply by jacking up prices. But this raises the question of water rights, a term with complex implications when referring to exploitation licenses, especially in the United States, where there’s booming speculative trade. More broadly, the right of humans to a fundamental necessity is only flimsily established, and even more weakly enforced. That will have to change, even if there’s little hope of delivering on UN promises to halve the number of people lacking access to safe drinking water by 2015. Tiered tariffs are an obvious compromise, and more nations are likely to emulate South Africa’s provision of a free (or nominal fee) subsistence minimum, defined by the World Health Organisation as 20 litres per person per day. If that sounds substantial, try filling a bath with it, then consider that we “eat” around 5,000 litres daily, depending on how much goes into producing our favourite foods – or their feed. More than half that volume is needed to make a simple cotton T-shirt, and even greater quantities to wring a single litre of ethanol from maize. So much for the biofuel revolution: it’s not only pushing up grain prices, and eating up arable land; it’s drinking the very water we need to grow crops.

“We are making a big mistake,” Nestle’s chief executive, Peter Brabeck, told peers at Davos: “trying to solve the energy problem by making the nutrition problem worse.” Even oil eats water, he stresses. Some 2.5 litres go into processing a litre of petrol, and dozens of times that much gets pumped into tar sands as steam to extract each litre of oily goo. Neville Isdell, Brabeck’s counterpart at Coca Cola, agrees that joined-up thinking is vital. The water industry is projected to suck up a third more electricity within two decades, while worldwide energy consumption doubles – if the resources still exist to keep pace with it. What’s more, the U.S. already uses 40 percent of its ever scarcer water to generate power. “Unless we raise the issue as being a holistic issue, we’re going to get simple solutions,” Isdell warns. The consequences couldn’t be starker, particularly if we keep heating up the planet by burning carbon. “Unless we put limits on that at much lower levels than today’s,” says Fred Krupp, of the lobbying group Environmental Defense, “then we are walking into hell for water shortages.”

Just how bad might it get? Assuming the global population keeps growing as forecast, with ever more urban residents on rising incomes, demand for food will roughly double by the middle of the century, while water use might even triple. A generation before that, half the people on earth could be living on arid land, struggling to cultivate it and scavenging for drinking water, as one in five have to today. Conflict seems as inevitable as it has been for millennia. From Darfur to Damascus and beyond, water (or the lack of it) bubbles under hotspots like magma, erupting into wars that could engulf dozens of contested regions within decades. The crisis is multidimensional, from its ecological roots to the implications for democracy and human rights, depending on who profits and who pays.

The causes are no less complex, though in essence they’re relatively simple. More and more people are using more and more resources as industrialised affluence spreads. Inadequate oversight worsens the impact of overconsumption, leaving ever more have nots in its wake. The land doesn’t just fail to provide, it turns from a sponge to a stone. Here in the UK, rain that fell in catchment areas 50 years ago took weeks to enter the water supply. Nowadays, with uplands and farmlands drained, and a plethora of concrete and tarmac, a droplet hits the Pennines and shoots off to Leeds within days. Before long it’s back in the sea, not quenching barren soils that seem more prone to floods each year. Circumstances vary, but all around the world there are similar stories of human mismanagement distorting the water cycle.

Solutions, then, depend on more integrated policies. That means managing river basins better and respecting nature’s right to water as well as ours. It also means conservation, recycling wherever possible and diversifying supply. In place of worldwide blueprints, communities need to devise their own answers, with partnerships scaling them up where that makes sense. Interconnectivity is the buzzword, whether among regions, along rivers or on the trade routes carrying water “embedded” in products. None of this is news, and it’s all been widely discussed of late at an acronym soup of different talking shops. What’s changing, however, is the willingness of corporate heavyweights to get involved, as much because they’re frightened of the risks as they are of missing out on cashing in. “Business cannot survive in a society that thirsts,” warns a wake-up briefing from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). “You don’t have to be in the water business to have a water crisis.”

Apart from minimising costs, there’s another reason to act early: the chance to influence policy. That’s what brought the bosses of Coke and Pepsi onto the same Davos platform, pledging “water neutrality” and other green-tinted platitudes, which could soon have more substance than spin (even if there’s no way to nullify water use – it’s present in pretty much everything). The WBCSD envisages a future in which it’s mandatory to calculate water footprints, with a “cap and trade”-style market setting the price of heavy usage. According to Dominic Waughray, who coordinated the Davos water sessions, it all adds up to a recipe for preemption. “We can do this before we have a catastrophe,” he says. As well as a model for disclosing water consumption, which could take two years to agree, the assembled VIPs, CEOs and NGOs decided they needed an Al Gore figure, someone to focus attention on “water heroes, or the new water champions, whether they’re in government or business.”

It’s debatable whether these measures will do much to defuse the resentments festering among the world’s least well off, who pay more for their water than the rich, fuelling anger against farmers, corporations, and even industrialised capitalism. “Many governments are either slow or unwilling to recognise these new power struggles,” the WBCSD warns, “or feel unable to respond effectively.” Despite their apparent engagement, elites don’t seem to be doing much, at least not until necessity bites. In the meantime, the media hype up doom and desalination, while investors see the former being most profitably averted by the latter. The result? “The optimists can look to technology,” says the WBCSD, “the pessimists feel justified in giving up, and the apathetic can remain comfortably uninvolved.” Despite the can-do spirit at Davos, academics are no more sanguine about the outlook. According to Bruce Lankford, a development specialist at the University of East Anglia, “the problems will define the responses instead of policymakers and scientists being ahead of the curve.”

In the end, it’s all a question of priorities, and the capacity to make secure changes. For the developing world in particular, and the rest of us too by extension, much will depend on which takes precedence: the poor or the private sector. Either way, austerity’s essential, unless we want to consume ourselves to death. So how does this manifest as policy?

1: CURB DEMAND

As the WBCSD stresses, “technology is only part of the solution” and “business cannot buy its way out of water problems”. Above all, “a new level of accountability and governance is required”, with the regulatory clout to cut consumption. It’s impossible to predict (or generalise about) the forms this might ultimately take, but it’s clear from rich countries facing shortages that there’s plenty of fat to trim. As with gasoline, prices for water in the U.S. are a fraction of those in Europe, yet Americans use significantly more per person. Efficient appliances and toilets are rare, while leaks and evaporations are common in a system starved of funds. “We’ve got thick pipes from the 19th century becoming obsolete at the same time as thinner ones laid after World War II,” says Peter Cook, executive director of the National Association of Water Companies. “If we don’t invest more, we’re going to face a real crisis.”

The rest of the world’s little different. The 20 million Chinese who migrate to cities each year are putting enormous strain on water infrastructure. In the countryside, meanwhile, overexploitation, particularly of “fossil” water accumulated over thousands of years, can’t be replenished by rain. The same is true in Africa and India, where unregulated irrigation is rife, and like elsewhere effectively subsidised. In England, barely a third of homes are metered, although this is the norm in most other countries, and estimated to cut usage by up to a fifth. Citizens of Dubai, a byword for expensively desalinated excess, aren’t even billed directly. Wherever you turn, this vital resource is undervalued, so the obvious response is a price hike.

That’s much easier said than delivered, however, with resistance from multiple quarters. Consumers already think utilities charge too much, especially when privatised. The companies counter that they have a hefty fixed cost to shoulder in supplying potable water, regardless of the premium you pay for using it. “Even if the country were to drastically reduce its usage, that cost wouldn’t fall,” says Fred Holliday, the former chairman of Northumbrian Water. “You’re not paying for the water as it falls from the sky,” he continues: it has to be treated to meet hygiene standards. Then there’s the question of pricing consumption in blocks to ensure a minimum supply to everyone, which is needed to stop contamination creeping into the system as untreated waste, though it’s no less controversial for that. “You don’t have stepped tariffs for bread,” Holliday says, “no matter how poor you are.”

There’s not much consensus among academics on the utility of prices in curbing usage. “No country – not Israel, not the U.S., not Australia, not the UK – uses pricing to achieve a balance between supply and demand,” says Chris Perry, a British professor of irrigation economics. “All countries with successful and sustainable water management systems use volumetric allocation.” One notable recent example is the Australian state of Queensland, where a five-year-long drought has been especially acute. Officials in Brisbane have set a target consumption of 140 litres per person per day, roughly double what the World Health Organisation calls a medium-term maintenance allowance, but less than half what residents were using at the turn of the millennium. Today, the average daily figure is 120 litres – on a par with Israel, which Perry calls “a leader in the productive management and use of water.” Though prices have gone up, they’ve not changed much. What seems to have made the difference is a mix of restrictions, fines and incentives.

“It’s been relatively painless,” says Stuart Khan, an environmental engineering specialist at the University of New South Wales’ Centre for Water and Waste Technology. “Compared to gas, electricity and telephone bills, water is still by far the cheapest.” He estimates that 80 percent of the reduction was voluntary, with the rest coerced by penalties, including fines of up to £500 for domestic customers, and the threat of having your supply turned down to a trickle. Under the “Level 6″ guidelines currently in force, households that use more than 800 litres a day are sent warning letters and an efficiency handbook, while businesses are told to lop 25 percent off their total usage, and install sub-meters on equipment, or pay up to £60,000. Inspectors can demand as much as £1,500 on the spot if they raid your offices and catch you wasting water without measuring it.

It’s all a far cry from Dubai, where residential users are urged (with no payback) to cover unused swimming pools by day, and “only water when your lawn is thirsty”. Abu Dhabi might have pledged to spend $15 billion on alternative energy, while irrigating with recycled sewage, but the Gulf has yet to take retrenchment to heart. In California, however, the pressure to conserve is mounting, as the illusory nature of lushness starts to dawn on people. It’s been difficult to escape since last year’s court-ordered cut of a third of supplies to the San Joaquin delta. “This crisis isn’t coming; it is here and now,” says Timothy Quinn, the director of the Association of California Water Agencies, a confusing web of hundreds of rival authorities.

That overlapping regulatory sprawl is one of the biggest obstacles to more decisive action, argues Dorothy Green, a campaigner on water issues, who’s using lawsuits to try and implement a string of unenforced environmental laws. “I’m looking for the money to begin to organise the state,” she quips, semi-seriously: activists are the principal challengers to a water policy skewed in favour of agribusiness, which has infamously hogged resources down the years. Around half of the water used in farming goes to massive subsidised plantations of corn, cotton, rice and alfalfa, or to irrigated pasture for livestock.

Despite this drain, says Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, “total human use of water in California could decline by as much as 20 percent while still satisfying a growing population, maintaining a healthy agricultural sector and supporting a vibrant economy.” He calls, among other things, for higher prices, an end to subsidies on water-intensive crops (and development of hardier strains), efficiency standards for appliances (and rebates for using them), water-use disclosure and more integrated planning. “If California put as much time, money and effort into water-efficiency programmes as has gone into traditional water supply development,” Gleick says, “a high-efficiency future could be readily achieved.” No new inventions or major hardships are required, but the state has yet to embrace the same 2030 vision. Instead there’s talk of dozens of energy-guzzling desalination plants and reviving a controversial “conveyance” to divert river flow.

At some point restrictions will have to bite, but until then xeriscaping (from the Greek for “dry scene”) will remain a minority pursuit. In contrast to the splurging on sprinklers and swimming pools, the cultivation of native plants is rooted in sustainable water use. Contrary to its reputation for “zeroscaping” lawns into dust, rocks and cacti, the practice is more about uprooting the thirstiest imported plants and using drip irrigation, which aims water at roots and recaptures the run-off. This technology is also touted as the big hope for farmers, who’ve generally seen it as uneconomic, except for high-value cultivation like market gardening. But as prices rise, for food as much as water, it will soon make more sense for other applications.

Indians already use a cheap imitation. Branded Pepsee, it’s a small disposable plastic tube designed for lollies, and sold in long rolls of perforated strips. At some point around a decade ago, someone realised these were ideal conduits for water – all you had to do was lay down a strip, and line up plants with the perforations. “It spread among farmers like wildfire,” says Shilp Verma of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). Before long, the makers launched a black version, which not only solved an algae problem, but retailed even cheaper. “No wonder it took off,” marvels the environmental writer Fred Pearce. “A kilogram roll of the stuff can be bought for 50 rupees.” Even with the price of plumbing factored in, at $50 a hectare, the cost is less than a tenth of conventional systems.

It’s just one of the many changes needed to stave off nutritional disaster. Worldwide, farming accounts for 70 percent of water usage, or more than 90 percent in some developing countries. Rice is an obvious target for the mission to get “more crop per drop”, sucking up a third of the water used in Asia, with half of it grown in scarcity-threatened India and China. Avoiding transplantation makes the plants drink less, but they still need thousands of litres per kilo. Further work is essential to refine growing techniques, and possibly crop strains too. At the IWMI, deputy Director-General David Molden jokes that grains will some day have to mutate into something like a cactus, but genetic modification of some kind is very much on the agenda. “With existing technology we can go a long way,” Molden says, “but there’s scope for more innovative technologies too – combined with better management, that’s where the big gains are to be made.”

At present no one really knows how big, though educated guesses are possible. “Irrigation efficiency is much higher than what you read,” says Bruce Lankford at the University of East Anglia. “Easy savings within five to ten percent are achievable in the next five years, but beyond that it gets increasingly more difficult.” Again, we need better data to help us. Instead of measuring yield per acre, or hectare, it would make more sense to calculate it in terms of cubic metres of irrigation, and make policy decisions accordingly. “No one would need any desalination or reuse if they just managed demand better,” says Christopher Gasson, the publisher of a trade magazine called Global Water Intelligence. The question, as ever, is how?

2: ENHANCE SUPPLY

Measured per head, the world’s available water has already halved since 1960 and it’s due to shrink another quarter in the coming two decades. Yet for the next generation of Africans to eat, irrigation for farming will have to grow fivefold, fed by fresh water from somewhere. With the effective evaporation of rivers, lakes and groundwater, and desalination largely out of the question, the heavens are the only hope. “We need individual farmers to catch the rain,” says David Molden. No other sources exist.

In India the story is similar, despite the innovations with irrigation. Since the end of a craze for dams and canals that did more for factories than the peasants they were meant to help, many fields are fed from unregulated bore holes, which farmers drill themselves and mount with cheap rigs and electric pumps. Around $12 billion has been spent on this technology over the past 20 years, forcing people to sink ever deeper shafts in search of underground water. “The farmers are certainly destroying their children’s future, if not their own,” says Fred Pearce, citing a Gujarati dairy rancher who pumps out twice as much water a year as falls in rain. Amazingly, he’s regarded as a model of efficiency, but that’s largely down to the excesses of peers. “It’s a colossal anarchy,” says Tushaar Shah, director of the IMWI groundwater research station in Gujarat. Farmers have even stopped growing crops and started harvesting the contents of aquifers, selling on the flow to local industries.

The same tragedy of the commons is played out all over the world, but with slightly more intrusion from the rule of law. In the western U.S., there’s a booming trade in rights to exploit underground reserves, which are needed to develop new property. Sometimes they’re only on paper, existing in theory though not free to tap. Wherever licences are contested, there’s an incentive to pump competitively before adjudication, emptying the pool that’s shared with others. As in Australia, these permits were overallocated, with the result that there’s not enough to go around among the claimants, never mind everyone else. The Australian authorities are imposing caps, pegging back entitlements to below a third of their maximum. Now they want to open a market, so rights can be sold on to users downstream. This poses a problem for farming, as Stuart Khan notes. “The ultimate winners will be the commodities that produce high value crops for minimum water consumption,” he says. That’s not necessarily what people want to eat, but before long we’ll have to make choices. Eating meat, for example, is getting ever more difficult to justify, given the water that goes into animal feeds. But at the same time it’s ever more popular, especially among Asia’s nouveaux riches.

However we try to curb it, demand for more water exists. So how might it feasibly be met? David Molden’s suggestion of looking to the skies is entirely serious: “rainwater harvesting” is of vital importance. As with irrigation, it’s a low-return investment in financial terms, but one that offers benefits to countless millions of smallholders, which ultimately translates into human survival, provided it’s properly managed. Otherwise, warns Molden, “it’s kind of a short-term boom then bust scenario.” The key seems to be what one does with captured rainfall, which arrives in abundance at the moment it’s least needed. The problem is where to store it. India’s response sounds obvious in hindsight, but it’s proved to be inspired: pour it all back down the wells. As a western Indian guru called Dada put it to his followers: “If you quench Mother Nature’s thirst, she will quench yours.” This is more than spiritual ecobabble, says Fred Pearce. “We have to give up the idea that water has to be extracted from nature or put inside metal or behind concrete before it can be used,” he argues. “We have to treat nature as the ultimate provider of water, rather than its wasteful withholder.”

In California, this also means restocking groundwater. “We used to have floods,” recalls Dorothy Green, “but then the Army Corps of Engineers built concrete channels to deal with storm water and now all we see is runoff into the ocean.” Drinking water is less the priority, as in Australia, where only Perth and Adelaide draw it from groundwater. When it comes to slaking thirsts, the big thing of the future is sewage. Recycling waste takes a fraction of the energy used for desalination and it’s now the fastest growing sector of the industry. According to Global Water Intelligence, capacity will triple within a decade, on investment of £25 billion. The market for ultrafiltration is forecast to quadruple over the same timeframe. This low-pressure technology has multiple applications, serving industry and sanitation needs as well as replenishing rivers and reservoirs. “Drinking water tends to be driven by demand,” says GWI’s publisher, Christopher Gasson. “Wastewater’s more driven by regulation.”

Concerns about population density, and industrial pollution, have led China to start retrofitting treatment plants, emulating the growth seen in Japan in the 1990s. Other Asian nations could soon follow suit, with Korea already investing heavily in membrane filters. India’s still too focused on potable supplies to spend much money on treatment and sewers, though “they’ll have to do that if they’re going to have middle classes,” Gasson says. It’s also a simple function of urbanisation. “If people in the countryside are shitting in a stream, it’s pretty good at breaking down the bacteria,” he adds, obviating the need for wastewater plants. “But if you have people trying to do that in the city then you get serious public health worries.”

Demand for filtration membranes will force the price down, Gasson says, while expansion of the market will lead to standardised cartridges and fittings. That’s a particular focus of Dow Chemical, which has entered the business in a big way. “Clean water doesn’t just fall from the sky,” declares its latest ad. “You have to make it.” The big bucks, however, are in boring old distribution. “It’s all in the pipes, or at least 70 percent,” Gasson says, and the cost of pumping limits geographical range, especially if you have to go uphill. That means reservoirs need to be near cities, but land prices can be prohibitive, as is the case around London. In Saudi Arabia, you’d have to build sewers as well as treatment plants and pipelines, assuming there aren’t religious edicts against reprocessed wastewater. “For Saudis to get into reuse costs $2 a cubic meter,” Gasson estimates, “but here it’s more like 40 cents.”

Even though the membranes make “water so clean it’s corrosive”, to quote one campaigner, and do so for relatively little energy, they’re not all that easy to sell. Despite the worst drought in recorded Australian history, the voters of Toowoomba last year resoundingly turned down a proposal to recycle purified sewage. Scientific evidence was no match for the “yuck” factor that gets activists railing against “toilet-to-tap” technology. They’ve since been overruled by Queensland’s Premier, who’s made the process mandatory. It’s also been imposed on Californians, to the delight of the head of Orange County water district. “It’s been a labour of love for a long time,” he tells TV cameras. “As long as there’s people, there’ll be this water supply for them to use.” After quaffing a glass, he pronounces it “tasty, very tasty.” Londoners could have told him that – they’ve been drinking processed effluent for years. “Even wastewater is at least 99 percent water,” says Bruce Durham, an alternative-resources manager at the French utility Veolia. “What matters isn’t its history but its quality.

“The same applies in some senses to water for desalination, which is increasing pre-treated with filtration membranes before the thermal and reverse osmosis processes that get rid of salt. Like water reuse, desalination is booming, with capacity forecast to double over the next decade. Both Israel and Singapore, widely touted as water management innovators, have recently switched on new facilities. GWI says $64 billion will be spent on additional plants by 2016, despite entrenched opposition on grounds of cost, energy use and environmental impact. Although “we’ve done a lot to address those questions in recent years,” cautions Lisa Henthorne, the president of the International Desalination Association, “the last thing you need to be doing is desalting your water.”

Lest you wonder whether turkeys have started voting for Christmas, Henthorne’s just reflecting consensus. We should be “looking at every drop of waste water as a resource,” she says, and only afterwards considering desalination – and even then in a way that “complements the planet and not detracts from it.” One of her group’s members, a manager at the American firm Poseidon, is far less diplomatic. After years of struggling to get a plant up and running in Florida, he’s just published a broadside in the IDA newsletter, aimed at critics of his plans for building more in California. This is hardly surprising, counters Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, who co-wrote a report that gets trashed as “immature” and “subjective” for concluding, as Henthorne implies, that it’s inappropriate to push the technology when viable alternatives exist. “Many plants are overly expensive, inaccurately promoted, poorly designed, inappropriately sited, and ultimately useless,” Gleick’s study found. “Most of the recent seawater desalination proposals in California appear to be premature.”

Even water industry insiders have doubts. “Applied globally, desalination would solve the entire world’s water problems, but the energy bill would be enormous,” says Fred Holliday, the retired Northumbrian Water boss. “You can’t talk about water without talking about energy,” he continues. “To get clean water you have to have power, even if it’s leg power on an African elephant pump.” Desalination needs rather more oomph, even if you don’t use thermal processes, which often generate power as a sideline. They’ve been the norm in Saudi Arabia, where fossil fuels are still valued cheaply, but “even in the UAE we’re short of gas and power plants,” says Henthorne, who’s based in Dubai. As for the U.S., “we all kind of keep holding our breath and hoping it will take off.”

Much is being made of proposals to use renewable energy, but as one American activist puts it, most of these would “just use solar to power the lightbulbs, while the power for the plant comes from the grid.” That’s effectively what happens in Australia, where the sole facility in Perth has offset electricity consumption by opening a windfarm to produce power for other consumers. “In theory I guess it stacks up,” says Stuart Khan in New South Wales, “but it’s not the optimum use of renewable energy. If you’re going to build a windfarm, then maybe you should be building it to reduce the current reliance on fossil fuels, rather than to be able to maintain the current reliance as well as use other inefficient methods for producing water.

“Other concerns focus on threats to marine life, both from pumping its habitat into a plant, and pumping brine discharge back out to sea. According to Sabine Lattemann, a marine biologist at the University of Oldenburg, and member of the IDA newsletter’s editorial board, “reverse osmosis technology is environmentally sound,” provided “the salinity discharge is sufficiently diluted,” among other precautions. Filter backwash also needs treating, and has to be disposed of on land, which can add 10 percent to the water price. There are even freestanding plants these days that produce their own energy from wind, making them suitable for remote off-grid communities with lower consumption. Nevertheless, desalination remains controversial.

3: THINK LOCAL, ACT GLOBAL

There’s still plenty of fresh water in the world, even if it’s not where we need it. So why not just move it around? The primary obstacle is cost, whether you pipe it or send it by vehicle. Then there’s the energy you’d need to pump it, or power the vessel that carries it. That doesn’t stop people doing this, however, from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea. A company called World Water Ways even makes 20-gallon bags that can be dropped from a plane. “Target clients are relief organizations, armed forces and public utility companies,” it says.

Still, transport seems to be a limited market. “As desalination and reuse have come down in price, the costs of huge engineering projects to move water hundreds of miles are much less attractive,” says GWI’s Christopher Gasson. Libya’s now investing in desalination, despite having blown billions on its “Great Man-Made River”, an underground monument to mismanagement that was meant to irrigate the coast from desert aquifers, but has yet to deliver. “It is madness to use this water for agriculture,” says Tony Allan, a London university professor who coined the phrase “virtual water” to warn people off these kinds of projects. He says water-scarce countries should import goods they find hard to produce from countries that make them easily, avoiding wholesale wastage of precious resources.

Other arguments against large-scale transfer include the damage done to the “donor” ecosystem and the incompatibility of waters with different pH levels. “If you were to take the acid water from Kielder,” says Fred Holliday, referring to his old company’s flagship reservoir, “and transport it to Derbyshire, which is full of limestone, it would just fizz up.” Mobile desalination is an option, touring the seas for occasional demand, but even that’s a niche market. Instead of these sorts of schemes, what’s needed is better governance.

Since dams fell out of favour (although they’re still popular in Asia), the focus of most international organisations has been “integrated water resource management”. This phrase has lots of implications, from the holistic stewardship of river basins to cross-border cooperation, both of which are cornerstones of the European Union’s pioneering Water Framework Directive. It could even be applied to transport, where that’s part of a diversified policy. This is the case in South-East Queensland, where a water grid now links half a dozen reservoirs. The state’s response over the past few years has been dynamic, building new dams despite opposition, raising walls on others, commissioning a huge recycling project and even a desalination plant, along with a surprisingly effective demand management strategy. The combination bears comparison with Singapore, which pioneered this sort of approach.

In the future, no option should be ruled out, except perhaps the reflex instinct to call in cement mixers. In Africa, the Middle East and Asia, traditional land management strategies have proven far more effective than dams in keeping river waters flowing, and natural systems intact. Either way, there tend to be floods, but in the latter case they tend to cover predictable plains, allowing for sustainable irrigation. Other examples of ancient technology include hilltop pyramids to harvest dew, and rainwater cisterns in Chinese cellars. If there’s a unifying principle here, it’s to foster local solutions, broadening them out where appropriate. “You have to divide this up into a lot smaller pieces than a big dam,” says David Molden at the IWMI. “For the World Bank, this means investing much more in capacity on the ground.”

A worldwide umbrella is vital, however, when it comes to the question of trade. Even if Tony Allan’s virtual water thesis isn’t a global panacea, it’s certainly become the basis for thinking about footprints, and the need to reflect hidden costs. Campaigners seem as into the idea as business leaders, or at least the few who discussed it at Davos. The Canadian activist Maude Barlow says she wants to drive flower companies “out of Africa” before they turn Lake Naivasha into a “putrid puddle” by feeding flowers with its precious contents so Europeans can spare their own resources.

Water and trade have to be considered in tandem, says Arjen Hoekstra, a professor at the University of Twente, who’s developed the water footprint concept. “When your sink’s overflowing, you can try to mop up the spillage, but it won’t make much difference if you leave the tap on,” he says, using a Dutch proverb to illustrate the importance of indirect costs. “Consumption is the driving force behind water use,” Hoekstra stresses, and much of that’s embedded. His model includes usage in production, in the supply chain and by the consumer. The objective is to give policymakers new tools for pricing in scarcity. “Given that water is a common pool resource,” he says, and farmers use most of it to feed us, “you will never have a normal water market, so you’ll never have a normal water price.” The only way round this is to promote a global approach, or an international framework to manage consumption.

“Theoretically it’s quite fair to give everyone an individual right to basic resources but it’s too complex to implement,” Hoekstra says. That’s mainly because most of us don’t make our own food, which is where the virtual water comes in. It’s the only way to reflect underlying cost, so a system for trading water permits is the logical consequence of trying to regulate overuse. That’s certainly how some in the industry see it. “One of the ways of solving the growing crisis of water shortages is to treat fresh water as a commodity,” says Stein Soyland, the chief executive of World Water Ways. “First of all we will make a market for it, there will be profit in dealing with it and people will be able to put a value on the commodity.”

This sounds like a step too far to campaigners, who see many international policies as a front for controlling resources in the interests of rich nations. “The most powerful argument against commodification is this notion of bulk transfer of water,” says Maude Barlow. “If it is commercially owned by large corporations they are going to sell that water to the places and people and industries that can afford it, not to El Alto, Bolivia, not to the places that need it.” That’s been the upshot of many developing world privatisations, though they’ve strictly been service contracts rather than sales of assets, with management of the whole process botched. This is part of the problem, since without adequate regulation, which depends on rule of law, no one really gets what they want. As a former executive at a French utility describes his African experiences: “We used to have this sick joke that we could provide fantastic water at a lower price than people had to pay otherwise and we still couldn’t make a profit.” That wasn’t quite the fate of the most recent failure, a British firm kicked out of Tanzania for making the water supply worse and cutting off customers. The company counters that the terms of its contract weren’t honoured by the government in Dar es Salaam.

The big winners are usually street vendors, who drive around charging the poor way over the odds for tiny quantities of the water they can’t afford to have piped into homes. “Poverty determines water poverty,” says Tony Allan, but “water poverty does not determine poverty.” It may well be that the only viable option is for the rich to subsidise developing world supply, since someone always has to pay somewhere. “Those who advocate free water are wrong,” says the boss of France’s Suez, Jean-Louis Chaussade. “We need to charge for water to avoid waste and deterioration of our natural resources. But this doesn’t mean that everyone should pay the same price.” Arjen Hoekstra agrees. “The price should be diversified based on the local scarcity situation,” he says, but he doesn’t think farmers will wear it. “Precisely what should happen won’t.”

That’s only going to change with multinational action, which may be difficult to mobilise until the crises get more acute. “The only answer is to consume less, but that’s not what our culture’s geared towards,” says Maj Fiil, from the campaign group Food & Water Watch. “We’re told we have to keep spending for the sake of the economy.” Even in the worst-case scenario, many consumers would opt to pay more before cutting back. “People would accept triple the price of water before they would accept restricting their access to 20 litres per person per day,” the WHO survival level, says Stuart Khan. “If the situation really became that dire, all the major coastal cities in Australia would supply their water purely by desalination if they really had to,” and they could do that for just three times today’s cost.

Not that this would do much for the bulk of the world’s population, which the UN expects to peak this century, around the 9 billion mark. But then again, as the environmental commentator George Monbiot observed this week, “global supplies of political courage appear, unfortunately, to have peaked some time ago.” That doesn’t necessarily equate to Malthusian die-off, Monbiot says, even if does become “50 percent harder to stop runaway climate change, 50 percent harder to feed the world.” The global economy is forecast to keep growing by three percent a year – a 16-fold increase by 2100. That’s 32 times as big a problem as the number of people, Monbiot argues, because of the resources it eats.

Whatever the merits of his case, one thing seems absolutely clear: without concerted curbs on consumption, there’s little effective hope of solving water crises. In the places where they’re already acute, there aren’t a lot of options remaining. “We’re pushing the boundaries of technological solutions here,” says Stuart Khan. “It’s hard to see what more could be done in South-Eastern Queensland beyond limiting population growth.”

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UPDATE:

I’ve amended a reference to residents of Dubai not being billed for energy use. This isn’t the case for the U.A.E.’s numerous foreign residents.

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NOTE ON SOURCES:

In addition to the interviews quoted above, the following were indispensable in preparing this report:

Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry: What Happens When Our Water Runs Out? (Eden Project Books, 2006)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Rivers-Run-Dry-Happens/dp/1903919576

International Water Management Institute, Water for Food, Water for Life:  A Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management (Earthscan, 2007)
http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/assessment/Synthesis/index.htm

True Vision Productions, A World Without Water (Channel 4, 2006)
http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/A/a_world_without_water/

UNESCO, The 2nd United Nations World Water Development Report: “Water, a shared responsibility” (UN, 2006)
http://www.unesco.org/water/wwap/wwdr2/

World Business Council For Sustainable Development, Business in the world of water: WBCSD Water Scenarios to 2025 (WBCSD, 2006)
http://www.wbcsd.org/plugins/DocSearch/details.asp?type=DocDet&ObjectId=MTk2MzY

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