Half of all cities with populations >100,000 are located in water basins in which more than half of available water supplies are being depleted during some portion of the year.

Today, global demands for food, energy, and shelter are putting unprecedented pressure on the resources of the planet. Water is at the heart of this crisis.

In fact, more than half of the world’s cities are already experiencing water shortages on a recurring basis – based on findings from a study that I published, along with 13 of my colleagues, this week in the Water Policy journal. These water-stressed cities are finding it extremely difficult and expensive to secure the additional water supplies needed to support their growth.

Our study, “Tapped Out: How Can Cities Secure Their Water Future?” highlights the reality that many growing cities are badly in need of new, low-cost, and reliable sources of water. We found that a key strategy cities should consider is to form partnerships with agricultural producers to conserve water use on farms, thereby freeing up water that can be used in the city.

Even a modest level of reduction (15-20 percent) in agricultural water consumption, globally, could make more water available than all the water consumed in cities and industries today.

Where Did all the Water Go?

In conducting the study, we identified cities around the world that are situated in water-scarce regions, and then assessed how water is being used in those regions.

It was not difficult to see why so many cities got into trouble with water.

The water sources they depend upon – rivers, lakes, and aquifers – have for decades been heavily used for irrigated agriculture.  Since 1950, the consumption of water globally for irrigation has tripled in volume, a trend that played a large role in enabling food production to more than double over the same period.

The result:  Water-stressed cities are trying to expand in places where most of the water is already being consumed by irrigated agriculture. In fact, more than 90% of the water being consumed from those shared water sources is going to growing crops.

In particular, we closely examined the challenges and responses of four cities: Adelaide, located just outside but dependent upon the Murray–Darling River Basin of Australia; and three cities in the U.S.: Phoenix, located in the Gila River Basin in Arizona; San Antonio, dependent on the Edwards Aquifer in Texas; and San Diego, which relies upon the San Diego, Colorado, and Sacramento River Basins in California.

The Unsustainable Pursuit of More Water

Looking at the investments that these cities have made – and plan to make in the future – to access more water, we found similar patterns in their water development: 1) They began by exhausting their local surface and groundwater supplies; then 2) imported water from other rivers and aquifers; and finally 3) turned to recycling of wastewater or stormwater, or desalination of either seawater or brackish groundwater.  We found that water conservation efforts did help mitigate, to varying degrees, the timing of water-system expansions and the extent to which cities had to rely on new sources of supply.

Trends in water supply sources for the Phoenix metro area.

We found this typical water development pattern to pose significant problems from a sustainability perspective – as it is usually associated with serious negative ecological and social impacts – and lacking cost effectiveness.

The heavy exploitation of freshwater sources – a result of growing urban demands on top of heavy agricultural use – has caused severe damage to freshwater ecosystems, impaired the ability of ecosystems to provide services to people, and created health problems in many regions. In addition, groundwater depletion (lowering of underground water levels) has led to increased electricity costs for pumping the water from ever-increasing depths.  When cities extend their reach into other rivers or aquifers to access water supplies, they spread negative impacts over great distances. Energy-intensive technologies such as recycling and desalination are expensive, resulting in higher water bills for consumers as well as increased carbon emissions that accelerate climate change.

Water flows in the lower Colorado River have been heavily depleted by agricultural irrigation and urban water consumption, resulting in considerable damage to the river ecosystem and its species. This has in turn led to severe impacts on indigenous cultures dependent on fish and other resources in the delta.

So, what can be done?

Place Your Bets on Water Conservation

Far and away, water conservation is the most cost-effective, immediate, and environmentally desirable means for addressing water shortages.  But few cities have maximized their conservation potential.

This comparison of the costs of future water supply options for San Diego illustrates the impressive cost-effectiveness of both urban and agricultural water conservation.

In addition to investing in urban water conservation – e.g., by installing low-water plumbing fixtures, fixing leaks in water distribution lines, or reducing landscape watering – considerable potential exists to make more water available locally by reducing water consumption in irrigated agriculture.

Promising opportunities exist to free up the water presently used in agriculture through techniques such as reducing unproductive water consumption (e.g., stopping canal leakage, reducing soil and reservoir evaporation), changing crop types, introducing rotational fallowing, temporary fallowing during droughts, or the elimination of low-value farming.

In our recommendations for water sharing going forward, we advocate for ‘urban–rural partnerships.’ While there are formidable hurdles to forming urban–rural partnerships to share water (these challenges are detailed in our paper), the payoff is too big to ignore.

In many basins, a reduction of agricultural water consumption of just 15–20% can yield massive volumes of water that can be saved for other uses. For example, if adopted globally, this level of reduction in agricultural water consumption would make more water available than all the water consumed in cities and industries today.

A Role for Markets?

Our paper also highlights the role of water markets in facilitating water sharing and transfers of water rights among cities, farmers, and environmental interests.  For example, my organization, The Nature Conservancy, is exploring how to expand water markets more broadly. In places where water markets exist, such as the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia or in the Edwards Aquifer of Texas, we see the potential for multi-win benefits to farmers, cities, and the environment. Just as a farmer can sell “saved” water to other farmers, or cities, we can serve as the buyer or help facilitate the purchasing of a water right, and allow the water to remain in the river or aquifer to support ecological health and water availability for other uses.

In addition to the Murray-Darling and Edwards Aquifer, we are looking at opportunities to buy water for conservation purposes in the Guadalupe River in Texas, the Colorado River Delta, and other places.  We are also working with local governments and water users in the U.S. and abroad to create new water markets, or to improve the functioning of existing markets, so that water is available to those that need it most.

But perhaps most important of all, we are also working with governments to help them understand the hazards of overusing a water source.  When too much water is being taken from a river, lake or aquifer, everyone is at risk!

Rafting the Grand Canyon. Photo: Brian Richter

Just days before Christmas, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released the results of a comprehensive study of the Colorado River basin’s water situation.  The “Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study” assessed a Christmas tree of more than 150 different proposals for balancing the water budget of the Colorado River.

One of those proposals grabbed headlines across the country: a scheme to build a 600-mile long water pipeline from the Missouri River to Denver.

Pipeline boosters have argued that the water import project could fill the gap in overdrawn watersheds and aquifers all along the pipeline’s path, and relieve the pressure on the Colorado River by providing an alternate supply to cities like Denver that depend heavily on trans-mountain exports of water out of the Colorado’s watershed.

For many though, the proposal conjured memories of the North American Water and Power Alliance or “NAWAPA.” That project – conceived by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s – envisioned diverting water from rivers in Alaska and then moving the water south through Canada in a complex water transport and storage system involving 369 separate construction projects. The water would enter the U.S. in northern Montana, and from there it would be diverted to the Colorado River and into other watersheds.  According to its proponents, the project would double the total amount of freshwater available to the lower 48 states, “solving the water shortage problems of the western U.S.”

Thankfully, NAWAPA died on the bookshelves.

Because here’s the thing about water importation projects: they spread the malaise of water scarcity to other places.

A case in point:  By the turn of the 20^th century, Los Angeles had fully consumed both its namesake river and local aquifers.  It turned next to the Owens River on the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada and built a 300-mile long pipeline that sucked numerous Sierran streams dry and dangerously lowered Mono Lake (and did so in a rather deceitful way – see the movie Chinatown for Hollywood’s adaptation of the story).  After maxing out those water sources, the city stuck its long straw into the Colorado River to the east, and into the Central Valley rivers far up north, increasing the strain on those rivers.

While many of my colleagues and friends have decried the Bureau’s new report for its inclusion of water importation (stealing water), desalination (energy guzzler), and even weather modification (good luck with that), we should not miss the forest for the trees: the report is quite extraordinary for the open and transparent process that was employed in its formulation.

Sure, anytime you run a democratic process you’re going to get some goofball ideas.  But the fair and objective manner in which the Bureau evaluated the more than 150 proposed ideas marks a bellwether for water governance in the 21^st century.

Moving Away From Top-Down Decision Making

Not so long ago, such as in NAWAPA’s heyday but continuing to the turn of the century, big decisions about water were made in the offices of technocrats and behind the closed doors of political deal-makers.

As Dan McCool writes with brutal clarity in his new book River Republic, “It did not take long for both the (Corps of Engineers) and the Congress to realize that some form of Corps project, paid for by the taxpayers of America, could generate a lot of votes and contributions for a legislator’s next campaign.  Water projects would help a lot of legislators get elected – again and again and again.  Projects became a kind of political currency, to be traded in the halls of Congress for favors and votes.  That, in a nutshell, is why we have so many dams, levees, channels, and waterways.  The projects were sometimes in the national interest, occasionally in accord with sound economic principles, but rarely built in an environmentally sound manner, and sometimes a gross waste of money.”

In contrast, the Bureau’s new study of the Colorado basin reveals that the cream can still rise to the top when exposed to the open air.  By inviting input from all interested parties and prioritizing those ideas using a fair and objective review, the Bureau is helping to set a new standard for water planning.

The Colorado River winds through the Grand Canyon. Photo: Brian Richter

The Key:  Spreading Less Water on Farms

Agricultural water conservation is a clear winner in the Bureau’s study, not just for the fact that it is by far and away the most cost-effective measure among the finalist options, but also because it can yield a lot of water.  Irrigated agriculture is responsible for more than 70% of all water consumption within the basin, so any reduction in that volume adds up quickly.  By the Bureau’s own estimates, one million acre-feet could be saved in agriculture every year – enough to flood a million acres a foot deep.

Those water savings, while highly cost-effective, won’t come easily.  It will take a lot of hard work on the ground, in the farm fields.  It will require thousands of actions to be undertaken on hundreds of farms throughout the basin.  Leaky earthen canals and ditches will be lined with concrete or piped instead; water will be applied to crops more efficiently; farmers will shift to less water-intensive crops.  Some farmers will decide to “grow water” instead of crops by voluntarily fallowing their fields – either temporarily or permanently – and getting paid to do so.

Such a massive effort to reduce agricultural water consumption will work only if it is done in partnership, and only if farmers are financially supported in their efforts.  As Laura Huffman, the Nature Conservancy’s director in Texas, has said in response to her own state’s water crisis, “we first need to stop behaving like a ‘circular firing squad,’ meaning that laying blame on each other or pitting cities, farmers, energy producers and environmentalists against each other is fatally unproductive.”

If agricultural water conservation is undertaken in a proper manner – by which I mean with full respect of and in voluntary collaboration with farmers, such as is being done in the Flint River basin of Georgia – it holds great promise for alleviating water scarcity in the Colorado River basin.

If that saved water were allowed to trickle into the Gulf of California again instead of being sent via pipeline to L.A. or Denver, it could go a long ways toward restoring life to the river’s desiccated delta.

Reducing overall water consumption is an imperative for this basin.  Recent studies predict that the average yield of the Colorado River could be reduced by as much as 20 percent due to climate change in coming decades.  By lightening our demands of the river we can lighten the pain when the river has less to give.

Weaning Cities Off the River

Urban water conservation also ranks very highly in the Bureau’s study, as it should.  In many cities, saving water inside the home does little to relieve water scarcity because virtually all of that water flows down our drains and back to the river from which it came.  But most of the 40 million people drinking from the Colorado’s tap live outside of the basin – it comes into their cities through inter-basin pipelines – and so every drop that doesn’t have to leave the basin is a drop saved for the river.

The most promising place to save water in cities is on the lawn.  In the West, half of all water used in cities is poured onto outdoor landscapes, and unlike water used in our homes, that water used outdoors does not return to a local water source but is instead evaporated to the sky.

Turning to the Ocean?

I have long held serious reservations about ocean desalination – i.e., the removal of salts from seawater, thereby turning it into fresh water – but the American Southwest may very well be an appropriate place for it.

The huge problem with desalination is its energy appetite.  It takes massive quantities of electricity to push salty water through a membrane that traps salt molecules but not H₂O.  That makes desalination nearly ten times as expensive as most other sources of freshwater. It also has big implications for carbon emissions when the electricity is generated using fossil fuels.

There are also very serious challenges with disposing the “brine” left behind after desalination.  In the desalting process, about half of the volume of seawater is transformed into freshness, but half is left behind as an intensely salty brew.  That brine must be disposed of carefully, and responsibly, and that can be both difficult and costly.

But maybe – just maybe – coastal cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego, dependent on imports of water from the Colorado, could someday become appropriate candidates for desalination?  Alternate sources of water for these cities have become rather expensive, so the cost difference between desalination and other options may not be as appalling for Southern Californians as it is elsewhere.

The Bureau estimates that nearly half a million acre feet of freshwater could be cooked up each year with ocean desalination.

What if desalination for coastal cities could be done entirely with renewable energy, such as was done for Adelaide in Australia?  What if an agreement could be struck with those coastal cities, providing them with funding support for building carbon-free desalination plants, with the understanding that they would cut their water imports from the Colorado by an equal amount, leaving the saved water to flow to the delta?

Think of it:  a Colorado River unshackled from big city water exports and a lightened draw from agriculture.  Now that would be a nice Christmas present for the river.

My head has been unusually full of water lately, to the point of distraction.  Over the holidays I worked through two chapters of a new water book and set the course for a few more.  Water has been at the front of my mind almost constantly in recent weeks.  My attentions have been flitting from place to place in search of new ways to tell old water stories, with the hope of happier endings.

Like the family dog working the untended hors d’oeuvres of our holiday party guests, I too became a nuisance in my own house, a most boring cocktail conversationalist.  I, for one, am happy to be done with holiday distractions.  Time to start anew!

The author in a rather celebratory mood.

Obsessing Over Water Scarcity

I’ve become rather morbidly allured to stories of people that are running out of water.  I’ve traveled the world from Texas to the Tana River of Kenya to study the consequences of water scarcity firsthand.  I want to know how people get trapped by water shortage, and how they might fight their way out.

I’d like to share a few New Year’s thoughts about the water challenges that many communities and countries will be facing in coming years, and what we will need to do to secure our water future.

First, a bit of context.  At the global scale, we are in no danger of running out of water.  We are presently using only about 4% of the water flowing through and into the rivers, lakes and aquifers of the planet.  However, not all of that water is readily available to us, and from the perspective of any individual community, only a small portion is affordably within reach.

That means that when thinking about water shortages, we need to view them as very localized in nature – not a global water crisis but a “multi-local” crisis.

Water shortages emerge when the users of a particular water source – a local river, lake, or aquifer – are consuming water at a rate faster than the source is being replenished.

That explains the physical cause of water scarcity.  Trying to explain why we don’t control our depletion of our water sources is much, much more complicated.

The Promise of Water Democracy

In most regions of the world, governments have asserted the authority to regulate water use, and local communities have acquiesced.  But most governments are failing miserably in their water duties.

Water agencies at state and national levels have proven incapable or unwilling to expend the time, resources, and care required to effectively manage a resource that is inherently highly localized in its distribution and virtually impossible to regulate from any distance.

Governments are absentee water owners.

As a result, the water supermarkets of the world – our watersheds and aquifers – are being operated without any cashiers or stocking clerks.  The store shelves are being emptied faster than they can be restocked.

I am not yet giving up on the possibility that governments will someday provide adequate water governance.  But that governance needs to be fundamentally restructured.  We need to move from state-run technocracies to local community-based water democracies.

Some really interesting experiments in water democracy are already underway.  The national water act passed in South Africa in 1998 called for the formation of local “catchment management agencies.”  Kenya’s recent water reforms have given local communities a bigger role in water decision-making through “water resource user associations.”  In Texas, state legislation passed in 1997 called for the creation of sixteen “regional water planning groups” that conduct assessments of their water situation on a five-year planning cycle.

None of these experiments in local water democracy is working perfectly.  Which is exactly how democracy is supposed to work.  It is supposed to be inclusive, experimental, adaptive.  That means messy, slow, and often quite inefficient.

But here’s the magic of local water governance: people are talking to each other about water, people are watching how water is being used and who is using it, and everybody cares a great deal.  Participants in local water forums realize that their water future is now in their hands.

Only in this manner can our water sources be managed with the caring and sharing necessary to avoid, or resolve, scarcity.

Building Water Literacy

These community-based water democracy experiments are exciting and fresh. But it has already become quite clear that too many participants suffer from a basic water illiteracy.

Just as with managing family bank accounts, local citizens need to understand the water budgets of their local water sources: the rate at which their water sources are being replenished, how much is being removed and not returned after use, who is responsible for the greatest depletions, and what measures will likely be most effective in reducing consumption or increasing supply.

Many of us can make important contributions to advancing water literacy in our local communities.  In that spirit, I am hopeful that my forthcoming book will help explain the basic arithmetic of water budgets, and illustrate how that water math can point communities toward management approaches that will be most effective.

But many of you can help foster water literacy as well.  Here I’ll offer four ideas for your consideration, posed as suggested resolutions for the New Year.

Resolutions for Our Water Future

Resolution #1: If you are a teacher, please commit or redouble your efforts to advance learning about water cycles, watersheds and aquifers in your educational curriculum.

There are many excellent teaching resources now available.  It’s never too early or too late to teach water, and we have a lot of catching up to do.  A recent poll by The Nature Conservancy found that more than three-quarters of Americans cannot identify the natural source of the water that they use in their homes. More than half of those that thought they knew were wrong.  We cannot even begin to help solve water problems if we don’t even know which water source(s) we rely upon!

Resolution #2: If you are a media reporter, learn the difference between “water use” and “water consumption.”

Trust me, it matters a great deal when discussing water shortages, and if you keep getting it wrong then you are perpetuating water illiteracy in our society.  Water shortages are not caused simply by using (i.e., withdrawing) water from a river, lake or aquifer. Water shortages result from the fact that some portion of the water that is withdrawn and used is not returned to the original water source after use (i.e., water is consumed from the local water source, thereby depleting it).

A power plant might use a lot of water, but 95-98% of the water is typically returned to the local source after it is used to cool the plant.  Similarly, virtually all of the water used in our homes might go back to the original source after it runs down our drains.  In contrast, less than 50% of the water used in irrigated agriculture and everything we spray on our lawns fails to make it back to the original source.

Water use is not the cause of water scarcity, but water consumption is!

Why does this matter?  Because you cannot effectively resolve water shortages unless you focus on the biggest sources of water consumption.  As a reporter, you can help citizens understand where the greatest volumes of water are being consumed.  For example, power plants account for 41% of all water used in the U.S., but they are responsible for less than 5% of all water consumption.  In contrast, irrigated agriculture accounts for 37% of all water use but 85% of all water consumed!

Resolution #3:  If you are a government official, stop authorizing funding for large water storage reservoirs unless proven to be the optimum solution after comprehensive and objective analysis.

We have been taught that building reservoirs is the answer to water shortages.  This is like being taught that the answer to bankruptcy in your checking account is to open up another account.  Reservoirs don’t create more water – they simply help spend it.

Reservoirs can be helpful in temporarily storing water to facilitate its use in irrigation, or as urban water supply.  But they should never be assumed as panaceas, and they should always be evaluated objectively against all other options, especially conservation measures.

Reducing water consumption associated with irrigation – both on farms and in urban landscape areas – is by far and away the most cost-effective means of alleviating water shortages.  The potential for water conservation in cities and farms is so huge that it will take most communities decades to exhaust the potential.  Only in rare cases will it be economically – not to mention environmentally – justifiable to continue building large water storage reservoirs.  The smart money will go toward helping farmers and cities reduce the amount of water consumed in irrigation.

Resolution #4:  If you own or work for a water-using corporation, commit to having a net positive water impact on the water sources you profit from.

To become effective water managers, most communities will require considerable help in their efforts to reduce overall water consumption and set a course toward long-term water sustainability.

If your company is operating in (or sourcing materials from) a water-short area, one of the most important ways to “give back” to your local community is to invest in local water education efforts, and to commit your company to a goal of being a “net positive” user of water.  By net positive I mean that you use as little water as practical, and then look for ways to invest in other water-saving efforts in the community that offset your company’s water use.  For examples of corporate commitments to water, check out the goals that both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have adopted.

Happy New Year!

Some entrepreneurs have suggested towing icebergs to places that need freshwater, although challenges remain. Photo: SERPENT Project

In an editorial published this week in Nature, Frederick Kaufman, a journalism professor at the City University of New York, cries out against the perils of a global water futures market. He cautions that “Financial forecasters perceive that much like traditionally traded commodities — precious metals, for example — the useable water of the future will be so scarce as to need to be mined, processed, packaged and, most importantly, moved around the world.”

Kaufman goes on to say that “The reverberations of a global water futures market can hardly be imagined. This much is clear: a water betting game will leave crops thirsting and push the global price of food far beyond the peaks of the past five years.”

Calm down, professor.  It ain’t gonna happen that way.

It is highly unlikely that water will be traded globally – it certainly won’t be shipped around the world — nor will its price exhibit the market volatility of oil or corn, for many reasons.  I’ll highlight three big reasons here.

1)      Water Is Too Heavy to Move

Water weighs 8.34 pounds per gallon.  That makes it very expensive to ship or otherwise transport to distant markets.  We move oil around the world because it has very high monetary value that far exceeds its shipping cost.  Crude oil is selling for more than two dollars a gallon, but it costs only about five cents a gallon to ship it.

The most expensive source of water– desalination of seawater or brackish groundwater – costs less than a penny per gallon to produce.  That’s why we don’t see tanker ships moving bulk water around the world: shipping is expensive, and it doesn’t cost all that much to access water locally, even in the most water-scarce regions of the world.

But investors could build pipelines or canals and move it long distances across land or under sea, right?  Not likely to happen in most places.  Long-distance water importation is the next-most expensive way to supply water.  It takes a helluva lot of energy to push water over long distances.  The California State Water Project – which moves water from northern to southern California – and the Central Arizona Project – which moves water from the Colorado River to Tucson – are the biggest electricity hogs in those two states.

Water will never be bought, sold, and moved around the planet in volumes similar to other market commodities unless its price escalates exponentially.

 2)      When the Price of Water Goes Up, Demand Goes Down

Which leads me to the second reason why water markets won’t behave like commodity markets:  we already waste so much that when someone raises the price, it’s easy for us to simply use less.

Because water conservation is by far the cheapest way to meet growing water demands, cities, farmers and everyday citizens will much prefer to exhaust their potential water savings before paying to import water, desalt it, or ship it from some far-distant country.

Many cities have been able to cut their water use by 20-30% with little pain, and savings of 10% or more can be found on most any farm.  Because so much water is consumed in agriculture, a savings of just 10% on farms would free up as much water as is presently being used in all the cities on Earth.

So, if someone is trying to profit from speculating in water, potential buyers like cities and farmers will respond first by using less.

3)      Exporting Water Will Churn Up Local Resistance

The idea of exporting water from one place to another is a lightning rod for inflaming local opposition.  When communities perceive that their future needs and opportunities could be foreclosed by the export of water from their local freshwater sources, they will not be complacent.

One example: In 1998, when the Ontario government in Canada issued a permit to a company seeking to ship 160 million gallons of Lake Superior water each year to Asia, the resulting public outcry was so strong that it catalyzed an international agreement among eight states and two Canadian provincessharing the Great Lakes.  The Great Lakes Annex will make large-volume exports of water from the Great Lakes highly unlikely in the future and intense scrutiny a certainty.

San Antonio's famous River Walk uses reclaimed water, part of a broader strategy of water conservation that has halved the city's consumption. Photo: Anthony Ortiz/My Shot

Water is Local, Not Global

Despite these realities, water markets are not such a bad idea.  In fact, there are some very good things that can result from well-managed and transparent water market systems.  But water markets and those who profit from them will necessarily be local in nature, not just because water cannot be profitably transported over long distances but also because a successful investor will need to spend considerable time getting to know the nuances of the local water situation before making a smart bet.

I’ll illustrate the benefits and challenges of local water markets with a real case study.  In 1993, a federal court case over endangered species resulted in a cap, or limit, on the total volume of water that could be withdrawn from the Edwards Aquifer in central Texas, the source of water for San Antonio, Austin and other smaller cities.  That’s a key element of a viable water market: limiting the supply.

The Edwards Aquifer Authority was subsequently formed to manage water extractions from the aquifer, which included the issuance of water permits to cities, industries, and agricultural operations that specified the allowable usage of water.  That created another key element of a water market: well-defined property rights that could be bought or sold.

In the first decade of the Edwards Aquifer Authority, the value of water in the Edwards Aquifer climbed six-fold.  If you were smart enough to acquire an aquifer permit from a willing seller during that period, you would have made a nice profit.  But these windows of investment opportunity can be very short-lived.

As the price of water in the Edwards Aquifer started going up, everyone started conserving it.  This is one of the very attractive benefits of water markets:  they can be powerful catalysts for water conservation. The San Antonio Water System (SAWS) has been the biggest buyer of Edwards Aquifer water, but as the price of that water rose, they soon realized that they could do better by getting their customers to use less.  SAWS helped San Antonio residents cut their water use by nearly half.  SAWS also tapped into alternate local sources of water at lesser cost than buying Edwards permits.  Because SAWS has managed and diversified its water supplies so well, its customers enjoy water utility rates that are among the lowest in the country. (See “San Antonio’s Popular River Walk Relies on Recycled Water.”)

The bottom line for investors:  if you got into and out of the Edwards market at the right times, you would have made a pretty profit.  But you might be losing your shirt now that your biggest buyer is going elsewhere.  To understand and profit from these ups and downs, you would need to pay very close attention – not something that an investor on the other side of the world is going to be able to do.

The Sober Realities of Water

Professor Kaufman is not the first person who has raised the alarm over the false bogeyman of water privatization.  Even the chief economist at Citigroup expressed similar prophesies of global water trade in his speech at last year’s World Water Forum in Marseille.

Voicing or publishing such scenarios may grab headlines and alarm the unknowing, but obfuscating the physical, economic, and political realities of water only diverts attention from the real problems posed by water scarcity.

Water scarcity does create investment opportunities, for better or for worse.  But the best way to make money from water is to invest in technologies and programs that enable us to use or waste less of it.

The only way out of water scarcity is to consume less water.  If investors and markets can facilitate or incentivize that, let the games begin.

By Brian Richter with Jason Pearson of TRUTHstudio

Help Us Communicate the Water Story of our Planet!

In a poll taken last year, The Nature Conservancy found that 77% of Americans have absolutely no idea where their water comes from.

This lack of understanding about how water is delivered to our homes is symptomatic of broader water illiteracy – too few understand the basic workings of global or local water cycles, how much water we use in our homes, factories, or farm fields, how water shortages develop, or how our use of water might affect the health of natural ecosystems.

If we don’t understand these basic characteristics of water and its use, we likely won’t understand how we can use water more sustainably, or what we should expect of other water users or managers.

In the past few months I’ve been working with Jason Pearson of TRUTHstudio to develop some graphical illustrations of our water sources and uses.  We sincerely hope that these graphics will be helpful to educators, scientists, and anyone else interested in building awareness and understanding of water.

We’ll be sharing a variety of these graphics with you as part of forthcoming blogs here in Water Currents.  Today we are introducing eight illustrations (see below).  Each of the illustrations is accompanied by a short text caption that explains what is being illustrated in the diagram.  You can click here to download high resolution versions of the illustrations in a PowerPoint presentation with accompanying notes and/or click here to download the presenter script in PDF format.

We need your help to improve our efforts to teach the basics of water!   Please comment on what you like or don’t like about the graphics in our gallery.  If you don’t want your comment to be posted publicly on this site, feel free to write us directly at brichter@tnc.org.  We thank you in advance for your constructive suggestions.

Click on any of the images below to a see a larger version.

Slide 1

 

At the global level, about 104,700 Billion Cubic Meters (or BCM) of rain or snow falls on the land surface of our planet each year. Almost 2/3 of that water is quickly evaporated or used by plants, returning to the atmosphere as vapor. We call this water that is absorbed by the landscape ‘green water.’ This water sustains forests, grasslands, and other natural and cultivated landscapes, and the animals that depend on those habitats.

Another 25% of the rain or snow finds its way into rivers and lakes, before ultimately flowing into estuaries and oceans and then evaporating back up into the atmosphere. We call this water ‘surface water.’ This is the water that sustains freshwater plants and animals, and of course is very important to us as well.

The final 12% of the rain or snow finds its way into underground aquifers, and we call this ‘groundwater.’ This is the water that we pump from wells or emerges from springs to supply our streams. Much of this water, too, finds its way to the ocean, either through rivers or by seeping into the ocean from coastal aquifers.

We call the combined surface water and groundwater ‘blue water’, and it makes up a total of about 37% of all the rain and snow in the global cycle. This blue water is of great value to our lives and our economic production.

So how do we use all this water? And how much of it do we use?

Slide 2

On a global basis, we use about 5% of all the green water flow for rainfed agriculture. We also benefit from green water by harvesting products such as timber from forests, grazing animals that feed on grasslands, etc.

Slide 3

We also extract a significant amount of blue water for our use, both from surface water (rivers and lakes) and groundwater. This is what hydrologists mean by water WITHDRAWALS, i.e., the act of withdrawing water from the annual flows of blue water. If you look to the left side of the diagram, where the pink flows are pulled out from the blue water flows, you can see that we withdraw almost 3,000 BCM of surface water and a little more than 1,000 BCM of groundwater each year. This is equivalent to 4% of the total volume of rain and snow falling each year.

We use that blue water for all kinds of purposes. For irrigation. For cooling our electrical plants. For drinking and sanitation. For industrial processes. Once we’re done using it, one of two things happens to the water. It either evaporates to the atmosphere or it flows back into rivers and lakes, where it is potentially available for other uses before it finds its way to the ocean and evaporates, eventually falling back to earth as rain or snow.

If you look on the right of this diagram, you can see that hydrologists refer to these two different paths that blue water can take after we use it as CONSUMPTION or RETURN flow. Consumption means that we consumed the water by evaporating it to the atmosphere. As a result, it’s no longer available to us in rivers and lakes. RETURNED water goes back to rivers and lakes, so it is still potentially available to us for other uses before it ends up in the ocean. Think of it this way: WITHDRAWALS – RETURNS = CONSUMPTION.

That’s the global water picture. All in all, we make direct use of 9% of annual rain and snow, about half of it in the form of green water used in rainfed agriculture, and about half in the form of blue water that we withdraw from rivers, lakes, and aquifers. Of all the blue water that we withdraw, about one quarter is CONSUMED through evaporation to the atmosphere, and the remaining three quarters or so is RETURNED to rivers and lakes. 36% of all the water falling from the sky onto the land surface eventually flows back to the ocean.

It’s worth noting that we usually don’t return water in the same condition, and sometimes not even at the same location, that we withdrew it. Sometimes we return it at a higher temperature, or with added chemicals or nutrients. All of these changes can affect the health of the rivers and lakes to which this water is returned, and its potential to be used again downstream.

Slide 4

If we now look at blue water exclusively, we see that we WITHDRAW about 10% of all available blue water but CONSUME only 3%.

Slide 5

We can categorize our blue water use by major types of human activity. Irrigated agriculture withdraws and consumes the most blue water (both surface and groundwater), followed by electricity, domestic water supply, and industrial uses.

If we zoom in on each, we can see more detail on the relative amounts that they withdraw, return, and consume. In the case of agricultural irrigation, a total of 1,700 BCM of blue water is withdrawn from surface and groundwater sources. Of this water, nearly half is returned and more than half is consumed. That is, it evaporates from the soil or is transpired by plants.

In the case of electricity, about 1,471 BCM of blue water is withdrawn for cooling purposes in thermoelectric power plants, almost entirely from surface water. Almost all of this water is returned to rivers and lakes, though often at a higher temperature than when it was withdrawn.

In the case of domestic water supply used in our homes and businesses, a total of 563 BCM of water is withdrawn from rivers, lakes, and groundwater sources. Of this, about 20% is consumed through evaporation to the atmosphere. The rest—about 80%—is returned to rivers, lakes, and groundwater, typically with some level of increased pollution.

In the case of industrial uses, about 285 BCM of water is withdrawn from rivers, lakes, and groundwater. About 85% of this water is returned to these sources, though often with some level of pollution.

Slide 6

Just as we can look at the global water cycle in this way, we can look at the annual cycle of water in a single river basin, such as the Colorado River Basin in the American West.

Every year, 65 Billion Cubic Meters (BCM) of rain and snow falls in the Colorado River Basin. In the absence of human use, nearly two-thirds of that water is absorbed by soil and taken up by plants as green water before being evaporated or transpired up into the atmosphere. Another 31% finds its way into rivers and lakes as surface water, and another 6% finds its way into underground rivers and aquifers as groundwater. Just as with the global water cycle, that blue water would have historically found its way into the oceans and evaporated back up into the atmosphere.

Slide 7

If we add human uses into the picture, things look MUCH different in the Colorado River Basin than they did for the global situation. In the Colorado River Basin, we withdraw all of the 24.1 BCM of blue water that flows into rivers, lakes and aquifers each year. In addition, we reuse another 6.2 BCM of water that is returned to rivers and streams after being used. What this means is that in most years, the Colorado River no longer reaches the ocean. We withdraw and consume all of the water before it gets there. This has had great consequences for freshwater plants and animals, and people that depend for their survival on fisheries in river’s delta.

Slide 8

If we focus only on our use of blue water in the Colorado River Basin, we see that irrigated agriculture withdraws and consumes by far the most blue water in this basin, accounting for 60% of all withdrawals and 53% of all consumption. Urban uses such as domestic water supply, industrial uses, and electricity account for a smaller portion, but they still collectively consume about 20% of all blue water. About 25% of water consumed goes to exports out of the river basin to cities such as Denver and Los Angeles. Evaporation from large reservoirs such as Lake Powell and Lake Mead is responsible for 13% of all consumption in the basin.

As the previous diagram showed, the total withdrawals of over 30 BCM is considerably more than the annual blue water flow of around 24 BCM, and this diagram makes clear how that is possible. Almost three quarters of all the surface water is withdrawn by agriculture, but about a third of that is returned to rivers and lakes. It may be polluted by fertilizers, pesticides, and salts, but it is still available in the system for use by other activities like domestic use or electrical plant cooling.

The Colorado River Basin is an extreme case, and it demonstrates well the importance of concepts like WITHDRAWALS and CONSUMPTION. The Colorado is a “water scarce” river basin because we consume so much of the available water.

One of our greatest challenges is finding ways to deliver the same quality of goods and services in the world’s water-scarce river basins without consuming so much of the valuable blue water. Thankfully, there is plenty of technology and sound approaches available to help us reduce our consumption. We can make improvements in every way that we use water, but because of the volume of water consumed in agriculture, we need to pay particular attention to ‘growing more crops with less drops.”

Watering the pavement, just one of many ways we waste water. Photo: Di Bédard, Flickr

When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.
- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1746

The problem with water, many economists say, is the fact that it is essentially free.

That may come as a surprise to you if you receive a monthly bill from your local water utility.  But the economists are technically correct.  In most places in the world, we pay only for the cost of delivering the water to our homes or businesses, i.e., the cost of electricity to push it through distribution pipes, clean out impurities, or to construct a reservoir to store water.  The water itself is free. (See Ireland’s shift to charge at least something for water.)

Because the water itself doesn’t cost anything, its price doesn’t go up when water supplies become scarce, such as during the wicked droughts that are now wreaking havoc in the bread baskets of the U.S. and Russia, in the heart of Africa centered around Zaire and Uganda, or across India.  In the language of economists, water lacks a “price signal.” (See surprising photos of the drought.)

As a result, our use of water is free of one of the most powerful constraints on human behavior:  its expense.

We’ve all witnessed the power of a price signal when the cost of gasoline rises at the local filling station.  Gasoline consumption drops sharply.  High gasoline prices are so powerful that they can drive up sales of hybrid and other gas-efficient cars.

It’s really painful to pay more for anything these days, but when it causes us to use less it can help everyone get through a shortage.

Lacking a price restraint, water use has spiraled out of control in many parts of the world.  In water we are witnessing the “tragedy of the commons” that ecologist Garrett Hardin so presciently foretold in the journal Science in 1968.  The tragedy of the commons, wrote Hardin, is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally in their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen.

The result:  Once-mighty rivers like the Colorado, the Yellow, the Murray-Darling, and the Ganges are now regularly running dry, and vast aquifers like the Ogallala of the U.S. and the Arabian in Saudi Arabia are being drained rapidly. (See eight mighty rivers run dry.)

Coke’s Hard Lesson

The Coca-Cola Company knows the perils of the tragedy of the commons.  It bit the company in the bum in 2004.

That year, local officials in Kerala, India shut down a $16 million Coke bottling plant blamed for groundwater declines that dried up the wells of many poor farmers.  In a case that has risen to the High Court of Kerala, the company has argued through extensive documentation, computer modeling, and expert testimony that its use of water played only a small part in the aquifer’s depletion.  Regardless of the legal outcomes in this case, anti-Coke protests that spread from India across U.S. and European university campuses certainly tarnished the company’s brand.  In response, the company has become one of the world’s most water-mindful companies today, investing heavily in water-protective measures in the watersheds where it operates.

In India and many other countries including the U.S., government subsidies have further weakened any cost constraints on water use.  The Indian government heavily subsidizes electricity costs that would otherwise restrain farmers from pumping groundwater unnecessarily. The federal government in the U.S. has subsidized the cost of dams and canals that supply water to western farms, amounting to a subsidy of $440 per hectare per year.

The subsidies on urban and agricultural water are in most cases well intended.  We should do everything possible to hold down the price of food and water, particularly for those that can ill afford it.  Our water pricing structures should subsidize water costs for those that most need the help.

But we have to do something to arrest the tragedy of the commons in water, and in the absence of other controls we need to better use the one effective lever we’ve got.  We need to create new pricing structures for water.

The costs of cheap water are far too high.  It has allowed for severe dewatering of the planet’s freshwater sources and caused sea level rise to accelerate.  Twenty percent of irrigated food production is at risk due to groundwater overdraft. Water shortages have pushed millions of hectares of farms out of production, and placed a significant chunk of global GDP at risk.  Because urban water utilities have not been charging enough to cover long-term maintenance costs, we are facing a trillion dollar debt to repair water infrastructure.

When the well goes dry, the fact that the water was free to begin with does no good for the farmer. Nor the rest of us.

Irrigation sprinklers in Utah. NGS Stock photo by James P. Blair

Water Solutions

If you ask an economist for a solution to a problem, you can bet that the answer will have money in it.  In his new book on The End of Abundance, economist David Zetland argues for the imposition of a scarcity premium on water pricing – a sliding scale that causes water to become more expensive as it becomes more scarce — as a way to prevent future water shortages.

There are other ways to manage water responsibly and sustainably other than to raise its cost, of course.  Governments could manage the allocation of water use such that our use does not exceed its natural replenishment.  Your bank doesn’t allow you to spend more money than you deposit.  But to date no government in the world has succeeded in controlling its water bankruptcy.

We could ask corporations to offset their water use in their local catchments by helping other water users use less.  After all, at least two-thirds of all water use globally flows through corporate supply chains.  But to date, very few companies are committing to offset their water use in any way, and even fewer are acting on their commitments.

We could go on enjoying the gift of free water.  But you can damn well bet that you won’t be smiling when the debts of unsustainable water use finally come due.

That may sound like prophesy, but it’s as certain as scientific predictions get these days, particularly in matters of ecological restoration.

Yesterday, demolition of the Great Works Dam began on the Penobscot River in Maine.  Another dam, the Veazie, will come down next summer.  With the removal of those two dams and the construction of new fish passage structures at two other dams, salmon and ten other migratory fish species will regain access to more than 1,000 miles of river habitat.

Fish biologists are betting on a spectacular revival.  They are predicting that by 2020 the salmon populations will grow from 2,000 to 12,000.  Even more impressive, American Shad are expected to increase from a couple of thousand to more than two million.

Most importantly, the Penobscot Indian Nation will be rejoined with their relatives, the salmon.

The Gift of Salmon

“Today is a day that will be remembered as a most significant event in reuniting our long-lost fisheries resources with their historic homeland,” said Penobscot Chief Kirk Francis. “Bringing back these lost relatives continues the restoration of ancient natural cycles of creation in a river we have been connected to for thousands of years, and makes us who we are as a people.”

The Penobscot River has been the tribe’s ancestral home for more than 10,000 years, and they view the salmon as their relatives in the great web of life.  At one time they shared the river with more than 100,000 salmon.

The river’s fish have long been revered by sport and commercial fishermen as well.  Many American presidents have received the first-caught salmon of each year as a gift from river fishermen, a tradition started in 1912 with a gift to President William Howard Taft.

Sadly, President George HW Bush was the last American president to receive a gift of Penobscot salmon in 1992.  The salmon population had dwindled to less than 2,000 fish at that point.  The Penobscot salmon were finally listed under the federal Endangered Species Act in 2009.

For nearly two centuries, a series of dams along the Penobscot have blocked salmon and other migratory fish from moving upstream to their ancestral spawning grounds.  The fish populations began to plummet almost immediately after the first dams were built.  When Veazie Dam was constructed on the river in 1835, the Commissioners of Fisheries in Maine reported that “a great many shad and alewives lingered about the dam and died there, until the air was loaded with the stench.”

The Power of Partnership

The dam removal had its genesis in a federal dam re-licensing process overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, more popularly known by its easily pronounced acronym: FERC.  This commission regulates all private hydropower dams in the U.S., including those on the Penobscot.  FERC issues licenses to private hydro dam operators for a term ranging from 30 to 50 years.  When the term of a license is about to expire, the dam owners need to apply for re-licensing, a process that requires FERC to invite public input.

According to the Federal Power Act, FERC is supposed to give “equal consideration” to conservation and recreational uses of rivers alongside hydropower production.  FERC’s success in attaining such balance between conservation and hydropower production has been mixed at best.  A major frustration of conservation interests has been the fact that FERC typically re-licenses one dam at a time, even when multiple dams exist within the same river basin, owing to the fact that each dam might be owned by a different company and each dam’s license expires at a different time.  That makes it very difficult to address the cumulative impacts of multiple dams on the same river, and very hard to prescribe operating restrictions that provide for coordinated management of rivers as integrated natural systems.

But the Penobscot got a big break when PPL Corporation bought all of the dams in the lower Penobscot basin in 1999-2000.  PPL immediately began discussions with the Penobscot Tribe, subsequently joined by conservation groups and state and federal agencies, to consider the possibility of looking at all of the company’s dams at the same time so that hydropower production could be better balanced with fisheries restoration.

By 2003 the groups had reached a monumental agreement for the river’s future.  Under the agreement, PPL offered the Penobscot River Restoration Trust a five-year option to purchase three dams (Veazie, Great Works, and Howland). The trust was a newly formed non-profit organization represented by the Penobscot Nation and six conservation groups: American Rivers; the Atlantic Salmon Federation; Maine Audubon; Natural Resources Council of Maine; The Nature Conservancy; and Trout Unlimited.

The Trust had gained a critically important agreement from PPL, but immediately faced a huge new obstacle: raising $24 million to purchase the dams, along with tens of millions more needed for engineering studies, dam removal, and ecological monitoring.

At today’s celebration marking the beginning of the end for the lowermost two dams on the river, the Trust proudly announced that it is very close to raising the $62 million necessary to complete the project.  Half has come from the federal government, and half from private contributions.

The Balance of Power

Remarkably, the restoration of the Penobscot will not result in loss of hydropower.  The FERC relicensing of PPL’s remaining six dams in the basin allowed for PPL to increase hydropower generation at these dams, resulting in a net increase in total energy generation.  The increases in electricity generation will be achieved by rehabilitating Orono Dam on a tributary to the Penobscot, and raising reservoir levels at three other dams to enable greater hydropower potential.

Perhaps U.S. Senator Olympia Stowe of Maine said it best: “By working collaboratively to restore Atlantic salmon while simultaneously maintaining current levels of clean energy production, the Penobscot Project has established itself as a national and international model for river restoration.”

Maybe we’ve finally found a way to make our relatives happy.

Dennis Doherty of Plymouth, Massachusetts is one of 15,000 volunteers nationally that measure daily precipitation as part of the CoCoRaHS network. Photo: Henry Reges

My father used to say that if you want a reliable weather forecast you should step outside and see if you get wet.

There’s a lot of wisdom and truth in that advice.  For all the amazing technology we’ve developed for detecting and predicting the weather, there is absolutely no substitute for real-world, on-the-ground measurements. Even the most sophisticated technologies for mapping weather patterns — such as radar systems or weather satellites — ultimately depend upon ground measurements for their calibration.  And the greater the number of those measurements, the more accurate the weather estimates, maps, and predictions will be.

As we all know, the weather can vary greatly from one place to another.  You might get a deluge of rain one day and your friends a few miles away may get nothing.  That’s why weather scientists dream of a planet covered by a grid of weather monitoring stations spaced at regular distances, enabling accurate mapping of day-to-day changes in weather.

Our National Weather Service keeps track of more than 12,000 climate stations across the U.S.  More than 11,000 of these stations are run by volunteers as part of a “Cooperative Observer Network” that began way back in 1890.  These volunteers are the unsung heroes that continuously feed data into the weather reports on your TV news or into your smart phone apps.

But even with that admirable effort by the NWS and its volunteer network, many large gaps still exist between monitoring stations.  In these times of economic austerity, the prospects for filling those gaps would appear bleak.

This is where you come in.

Photo: Henry Reges

Beginning in 1998, my friend and former colleague Nolan Doesken at Colorado State University came up with a new idea for filling the gaps in precipitation monitoring.  He formed a new volunteer network called CoCoRaHS, the “Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network” (Nolan never was any good at marketing!).

Basically, it works like this.  You sign up to become a volunteer by filling out a form, purchase a rain gauge for less than $30, install it in your backyard, and take an easy training course that will teach you how to collect and submit your data.

If you act quickly you can get your father signed up to become a Weather Man by Father’s Day!

More than 15,000 volunteers are participating in CoCoRaHS, from all 50 states.  Each day, their data is published online for the world to see.  Perhaps most importantly, participating in CoCoRaHS will tune you into what’s happening in your own backyard.

Dad, your Father’s Day gift is in the mail.

With the eyes of a trained landscape architect, David peers down from our small plane flying over the Flint River in southwestern Georgia and marvels at the patchwork landscape of forest, farms, and small towns beneath us.  He sees stories in this landscape.

As we fly over Glenn Cox’s corn and peanut fields, David tells us about Glenn’s passion for hunting arrowheads and mastodon teeth in the river bottom whenever he can wrest himself from the farm.

Flying over the Jones Ecological Research Center, he tells us about the day that scientist Steve Golladay was snorkeling in the river to conduct a freshwater mussel survey and came upon a water moccasin staring straight into his dive mask.

As we pass over the University of Georgia’s irrigation research park we reflect on our lunch with Calvin Perry, when he told us of his gratification in sharing his agricultural engineering expertise with farmers trying to use water more efficiently.

With deft sensitivity and countless hours of farm table conversation, David has been seeking ways to bring these people and many others together in common cause: to save the Flint River while enabling the local farm economy to prosper.

The Genesis of a Partnership

David works for The Nature Conservancy as its Flint River project director.  In keeping with the Conservancy’s mission, he hopes to save some highly endangered aquatic animals in the Flint River Basin.  He is working against heavy odds.  Those species have suffered when tributaries of the Flint River go nearly dry during droughts.  As recently as last September, thousands of mussels baked in the summer sun as the river and its tributaries shrunk to their lowest recorded levels.  According to Golladay, this coming summer could be even worse.

During the heat of summer much of the river’s water is diverted or pumped to irrigate farm fields.  In some places you can literally see the river drop when the farm sprinklers are turned on.

Many conservationists would view farmers as a serious threat to a goal of protecting endangered species.  But David sees farmers as the solution.

It appears unlikely that anybody is going to force the farmers to use less water.  At the same time, none of the farmers want to see the river go dry.  Therein, David believes, lies the seed of a solution.

Beginning in 2007, David helped bring farmers, scientists, agricultural extension agents, and government agencies together in a union of strange bedfellows known as the Flint River Basin Partnership.  Along with the Conservancy, the Flint River Soil and Water Conservation District, and the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service have helped coordinate and fund the partnership.  It has provided fertile ground for growing solutions to the Flint’s water problems.

Pushing the Frontiers of Irrigation Efficiency

Through this partnership, the Flint River Basin has become a productive incubator for a new technology called variable rate irrigation, or VRI.  The VRI concept is founded on the simple reality that soil conditions vary greatly across a farm field.  Some soils hold water better than others.  Additionally, farm roads, drainage ditches and even wetlands are commonly embedded within farm fields, and they certainly don’t need to be watered.  It thus makes considerable sense to try to vary the volume of water being applied across the field, but that capability wasn’t previously available when using the center-pivot sprinklers that dot the Flint landscape like alien spaceship landing pads (see photo gallery for pictures of center-pivot sprinklers).

As suggested by the name, a center-pivot sprinkler is a giant, linear, wheeled carriage of sprinklers that pivots from a center point in a long arc – most are longer than a football field — creating a circular farm field that is easily identifiable from the air (see photo gallery).  Zoom into southwest Georgia on Google Earth and you’ll see them everywhere.  More than 6,500 center pivots have been installed in the lower Flint River Basin, virtually all of them since the mid-1970s.

The VRI technology being tested by the Flint partnership enables a farmer to ‘tell’ a computer where to supply more water, less water, or no water at all.  That information is conveyed to the individual sprinkler nozzles arrayed along the center-pivot carriage.  From early trials on more than 50 VRI systems now installed in the lower Flint Basin, the partnership estimates that the systems can enable water savings averaging 17%, without reducing crop yields.

The partnership has also installed new water-saving sprinkler nozzles, remote soil moisture monitors in farm fields, and has been experimenting with alternate crop rotations, all in the name of saving water.  With more than 250,000 acres benefitting from these recent efforts, the partnership estimates that more than 15 billion gallons of water are saved in a dry year.

Let’s put that number in the context of the river.  In the years leading up to the 1970s, the river typically flowed at a rate of 2,000 to 4,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) during the summer.  Last summer it dropped to a record low of 656 cfs.  By saving 15 billion gallons of water during the growing season, the partnership has already restored more than 85 cfs to the river.

Getting to Full Scale

There is very strong interest in the farming community to save a lot more water.  That would go a long way in helping the Gulf sturgeon, the oval pigtoe mussel, and a world-class oyster fishery downstream in Florida’s Apalachicola Bay.

However, typical of many places in the world, the initial cost of installing water-saving measures on farms can be daunting for farmers facing thin profit margins and volatile crop markets.  While the use of technologies such as VRI clearly offers savings in electricity (less water pumped) and higher crop productivity, pay-back periods are still uncomfortably long.

David and his partners are constantly striving to drive down the costs.  In the meantime, they have tapped into federal funding through USDA to help subsidize these measures, and are hopeful for more through federal Farm Bill appropriations.

The State of Georgia has been less helpful, but a massive die-off of endangered species this summer could very well put them in hot water with the federal Endangered Species Act, stimulating greater investment in the Flint.  Alternatively, the state might better acknowledge the fact that restoring flows in the Flint, which flows south into Florida’s Apalachicola River, will play a large role in defusing the long-running water war between Georgia and Florida.

Every one of us – farmers along the Flint, oystermen in Florida, and anyone that eats corn or wears cotton — should be praying for the success of the Flint River Basin Partnership.

Nearly 3 billion people globally are experiencing severe water shortages, affecting their food security and ours, their economies and ours.  More than 90% of water consumed in those water-scarce regions goes to agriculture.

Maybe if we give David and his partnership a chance to save the river, they just might be able to show us a way to save the world.

My colleagues from The Nature Conservancy and I were visiting Ozi Village along the Tana River in southeastern Kenya.  We were exploring opportunities to work with local communities, government officials, and other researchers on a sustainable development plan for the river and its delta.

We knew that the river’s health had been declining. But Omar’s pleas struck us like arrows in the heart.

For nearly thirty years, Omar has been watching his community members struggle to catch or grow food.  For many generations the Tana River had given them plenty of fish and a fertile floodplain for growing crops.

But then five large dams were built upstream in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Those dams capture the rainy season floods, turning the water into much-needed hydropower electricity and drinking water for the capital city of Nairobi.  A river that once supported hundreds of thousands of Pokomo people like Omar, and provided nutritious forage for cattle and camels herded by the nomadic Orma, is now being harnessed to benefit others in a faraway city.

Nature’s Supermarket

In their free-flowing form, large rivers like the Tana are among the most productive, life-giving ecosystems on the planet.  These natural supermarkets continue to feed hundreds of millions of very poor people each and every day.

Many fish species wait for floods to swim out onto a river’s floodplain, where they spawn prolifically.  When a fish spawns on a floodplain, its offspring will have many advantages over other fish born in the river itself. The water spilling onto a floodplain during floods is enriched with nutrients, helping young fish to grow.  The drowned vegetation of the floodplain harbors a bounty of insects to feed upon, and provides places where newborn fish can hide from bigger fish and other predators.  Rivers with large numbers of floodplain-spawning fish produce far more fish for people to eat than those without floods and floodplains.

River and floodplain fisheries are a critical source of food and income for at least a billion people in the developing world, particularly the rural poor.  For example, Mekong River fish are the primary source of protein for 60 million people.

But growing fish isn’t the only way that rivers feed people.

When a river floods onto its floodplain, it leaves behind a free subsidy of water, fresh soil, and nutrients that make for good farming.  Over thousands of years, river cultures have learned to plant an amazing variety of crops on floodplains including rice, sorghum, millet, bananas, mangos and other food and medicinal plants.  Using knowledge passed down from generation to generation, floodplain farmers have learned to match their crops to the diverse mosaic of soil and water conditions left by the floods each year.

I’ve Seen the Rivers and the Damage Done

If floods are the heartbeat of a large river, then a large dam can be as damaging as cardiac arrest to the people and diversity of life supported by the river.

I’ve seen what starvation looks like when a dammed river can no longer feed those whose lives depend upon it.  I saw the desperation when walking around Ozi Village with Omar.  I saw it in the exposed ribcages of children living along the Zambezi River downstream from Kariba Dam.  I saw it in the hollowed eyes of old men and women still trying to catch fish to eat below Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze.

Those experiences turned a lifelong nature conservationist into an angry humanitarian.

Just to be perfectly clear:  my anger and frustrations have not yet turned me into a dogmatic anti-dam activist.  I fully acknowledge that the majority of dams provide very important benefits to societies and economies, including nearly 20% of electricity globally, helping deliver precious water supplies to farms and cities, and offering flood protection.

But the continuing widespread and callous disregard for those that will not benefit but will instead be harmed – usually very poor people whose voices are never heard – still evident in most dam-development projects is patently immoral.  And with some notable exceptions, the response to this humanitarian crisis from development banks and humanitarian foundations has been grossly inadequate.

When I have questioned dam developers and ministers of water and energy about these issues, the uniform justification has been one of political economy:  these projects serve the interests of the greater good for our country.  In simple terms, if a dam project will benefit a million and only inconvenience a few thousand, then the project should go forward.

I actually agree with this philosophy.  It is central to democratic societies.  However, when such ‘inconveniences’ place poor people at great risk without adequate compensation or suitable livelihood alternatives, then the exercise of political economy is inequitable and should not be tolerated.

More than 10 years ago, the World Commission on Dams highlighted these social inequities and called for much greater attention.  But much evidence suggests that things have only gotten worse and the casualties are growing daily.

The common refrain given by dam advocates is that “those (river-dependent) people need to come into the 21^st century,” meaning that they need to adopt more modern agricultural practices or move into the city and get a real job.  Even my conservation colleagues have questioned whether I am harboring some romantic mythology of the noble savage living in harmony with nature, whether those lifestyles are truly desirable, and whether by sustaining them we’re simply prolonging a state of poverty.

My reply is simple and straightforward.  Even if these river-dependent people aspire to a different life, they are going to need a great deal of help, training, and financial support to assist their transition.  Even a bus ticket to Nairobi is beyond their reach.  And the inconvenient truth is that all the money in the coffers of the World Bank and the Gates Foundation combined will not be able to support such a livelihood shift for what may very soon total to more than a billion dam-affected people (a big challenge is the fact that we don’t even have decent accounting for the number of river-dependent people because many are nomadic, and networks of trade in river goods are complex and often based on barter systems).

As a result, dam-affected people are, well, damned.

Last year, Sandra Postel of National Geographic’s Freshwater Initiative and five other researchers joined me in a study that documented the widespread social and environmental impacts of dams.  We conservatively estimated that nearly 500 million people have likely already been impacted by dam-induced changes to river productivity.  That number doesn’t include the additional 40-80 million that have been physically displaced by dam construction.  As part of our research we created a new global database that includes case study findings from more than 120 rivers in 70+ countries.

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

If we cannot effectively help all river-dependent people shift to new livelihoods in the near term then the only responsible thing to do would be to help sustain them where they are.

Abundant, practical guidance and plenty of real-world examples exist to illuminate the way forward.

Dams can be built in places that will have less impact.  They can be operated in ways that better sustain river health and river-dependent communities downstream, such as by releasing controlled floods from the dam.  We’ve shown how to do this in the Sustainable Rivers Project with the Army Corps of Engineers, and written prescriptions for dam operators based only on traditional ecological knowledge from local river people.  Some of the best real-world demonstrations of restoring human livelihoods by releasing controlled floods from dams have been accomplished on the Senegal River in Mauritania and the Logone River in Cameroon.

Tragically, the uptake of these lessons by dam builders has been dismal.

Let’s Create River Parks for People

If the dam industry and governments are not going to help dam-affected people transition to new livelihoods or properly compensate them for the loss of their homes and food security, then we need to stop pretending that sustainable dam development is possible.

Instead, I think it’s time – while preciously little time remains – to go back to what we conservationists do best.  We need to create river parks on undammed rivers that are supporting millions of people.  We need to take those rivers off the drawing boards of dam developers.

But departing from the history of conservation, this time those parks won’t be designed to protect nature from people.  We need them urgently to protect nature for people.