FACING FUTURE FRESHWATER DEMANDS

Torkild Carstens

Apt 14 Rocamare C, 71 rue G Clemenceau, 06400 Cannes, France

Tel: 334 93 99 50 98, fax 334 92 98 66 32

E-mail tcarstens@wtc-sophia.com 

Abstract: The decision process leading from awareness to action is discussed and used as a backdrop for the special problem of managing water resources without waiting for the demand to increase the supply and thus have a crisis-driven management. Today even this sensible goal requires much more media attention than before to get on the agenda. The problem will be considerably reduced if water could be seen as other commodities and traded in water markets. Trading and transfer modes are summarily described, and in the context of securing water supply the concept of virtual water is briefly reviewed. The main problem is under all circumstances the hydropolitical one of obtaining approval for projects that become more and more complex. The solution is to establish broad and well-informed support teams for the decision-makers. These teams must be able to identify and communicate with all stakeholders, and the author shares the view that their contribution to society is maximised if they pay close attention to undesired consequences. To this end hydroinformatics is our most powerful tool.

Keywords: freshwater shortage, decision process, water use, water market, water transport

1    THE RECORD

Understandably, the management of freshwater to meet growing demands has been a top priority challenge throughout history, as witnessed by Persian tunnels, Egyptian canals and Roman aquaducts. The best engineers at the time were involved in these impressive civic works, many of which have lasted until this day. The creation of infrastructure was for a long time associated with peace-time military engineering, but developed into civilian government branches of travaux publiques that have performed admirably in many countries, and still do. The fountains of Rome and the gardens in Versailles testify both to the sophistication of earlier epochs and to the skills of the contemporary hydraulic engineers. They also reveal the shortcomings, which were mainly a lack of knowledge of medical hygiene. While water was delivered in quantities which exceeded present day per capita consumption many times, the water quality was often inferior and sometimes unsafe, due to  intruding wastewater.  Epidemics of diseases like cholera took the population in London and many other cities by surprise before it was recognised that they are water-borne. (Among the many theories for the decline of The Roman Empire one is the possibility that because the water pipes made of lead, Rome's population was suffering from lead poisoning).

The inherited top-down water management still prevails and delivers, in most cities, water of acceptable quality in the quantities demanded to their supply grids, proving that the engineers in charge of water supply to cities of just about any size are still competent, although the glamour of their profession is lost. However, all is not well, as we are reminded of every 22 March, the World Water Day, and frequently through news items such as today's random example (Le Monde, 12 Oct 00: The city of Toulouse has only 24 hours of reserve in case of a serious pollution of the principal river supplying that city). The sad fact is that more than a billion people, made up of the marginalised population in the urban slums, and overpopulated rural areas, do not have access to a safe municipal grid for drinking water. The squatters in their shacks surrounding most mega-cities do not show up on any plans and are virtually neglected by all authorities, including the water ones. And rural water supply is in a sad state in many countries.

2    LIMITS TO GROWTH

So far the supply of freshwater has been sufficient to meet the growing needs. Concern over the fraction of freshwater that can be harnessed in the hydrologic cycle, is a recent topic, and a  a very disturbing one. As late as in 1976 none of Kahn's many scenarios in "The next 200 years" mentions water shortage as a possibility, although he is worried about the effect of water pollution on the environment. Freshwater was for all practical purposes unlimited, or so we thought until a few years ago. The disturbing news that it is not, became widely known through the inventory by Postel et al (1996). They demonstrated that the present world population of six billion is already using more than half of the useable fraction of the total annual runoff, which is 40 000 km³. From the gross total they deducted flood runoff and runoff in thinly inhabited regions such as the Arctic and the Amazonas, which are also too remote for transfer, to arrive at the available global freshwater resource. Their deductions reduced the reserve from comfortable 4.9 to a mere 0.8 times the present consumption of       6 780 km³/yr. Evidently, since a linear extrapolation of the demand based on today's per capita consumption meets the available freshwater runoff within 25 - 30 years, something has to be done with the demand as well as the supply before the world runs out of naturally recycled freshwater.

Table 1    Annual freshwater runoff (after Postel et al., 1996)

It didn’t take long for this result to sink in and change our priorities. On their list of problems facing us in the next 25 years, a UN panel of futurologists in 1998 ranked freshwater second, after population control. With the new insight provided by a simple, but long overdue inventory, freshwater shortage is now considered a greater threat than nuclear war, epidemics, food or energy shortage, and climate change.

The gross figures in Table 1 are supplemented by the joint distribution of runoff and population in Table 2, but in order to map the risk areas, it is necessary to get down to the regional and local levels.

Table 2    Joint distribution of runoff and population (after Postel et al., 1996)

3    GOALS AND ANTIGOALS

An interesting alternative to the prevailing philosophy of maximum happiness has been proposed by sociologists and political scientists concerned with the planning of community development, which is a highly unpredictable process towards noble, but misty ideological goals (Brox 1995). Since consensus on ideological goals is all but ruled out, the reverse concept of antigoals is introduced: Even if we disagree on where to go from here, it should be feasible to agree on where we don't want to end up. Instead of maximum happiness we should perhaps strive to achieve minimum unhappiness.

The metaphor is the state ship with a captain who doesn't know which port he is to call. Forced to sail without a destination, the captain must avoid immediate disaster by steering away from shoals and rocks and shorelines. Avoiding these antigoals is a strategy with which everybody on board agrees, and the voyage can continue forever if the ship doesn't hit any antigoal.

The classical problems of our profession are nothing but antigoals and need only to be redefined as such: Lack of freshwater, loss of freshwater quality, loss of biotopes and biodiversity, no more environmental and human catastrophes like the Aral Sea, no more tragic  resettlements like Sardar Sarovar, etc etc.

4    DECARTES' ERROR

Why is it then that these consensus antigoals are often so hard to obtain support for? An intriguing answer is suggested by Seip and Wenstøp (2000) in a recent study of decision-making. They have tested some of the most important water management decisions in Norway recently according to two criteria: The legitimacy of the decision-makers, and the emotional content of the decision. While the first criterion is obvious and in line with all present trends towards more transparency and democracy, the second criterion is somewhat suspect: What have emotions to do in a rational process? Shouldn't they be banned?

The answer appears to be that its emotional content is essential for a so-called rational decision. Without stirring the right emotions, any issue, no matter how important, may go wrong. Accordingly, a wise decision, securing support and spawning action, has a positive emotional content. Convincing evidence has come from neurologists that have acquired new knowledge about our neural network and our brains. Their findings undermine Decartes' long-lived concept of our pure spirit which is capable of reason as long as it is uncontaminated by the emotions that rule our bodies. An excellent reference is the book "Decartes' Error" by Damasio (1994).

5    GETTING ON THE AGENDA

It is not sufficient to define societal antigoals that are easy to agree on, because they define advance with a minimum of risk towards the uncertain future. The difficult part is to get the antigoal on the political agenda before it develops into a dramatic crisis, and here we are in the hands of the practitioners of two metiers: journalism and public relations.

The recipe of the journalists is given by Aubenas and Benasayag (1999) in “La Fabrication de l'Information”. The book's subtitle is Les journalistes et l'ideologie de la communication, and it reveals how the mechanics of this ideology creates the news we are served. “The work of the journalist”, the authors state, “does not often any more consist of reporting the realities of the world, but to select among them what should be presented... Everybody knows today that the newspapers reflect less the reality than the representation they have created”. And what they select, follows from their code and its hierarchy of criteria. The normal media focus on the nearby (the law of proximity) is only overruled by the spectacular, the dramatic, the extraordinary. An obsession with transparency, easily understood from the point of view of investigative journalism, is not always effective: "If it doesn’t tolerate grey zones, the press is condemned to support less and less the realities".

These constraints on access to the media are quite severe. If a problem is distant in space or time, or complicated, it is not interesting. The preferred agenda is local, simple and dramatic.

Alas, the journalists do not run the media alone. They must comply with economic imperatives and accept on one hand paid advertisements, and on the other hand ready made stories and news items that do not require further expensive processing to satisfy the rules. The task of the public relations expert is to translate his client's thoughts into the language of the journalist, making them fit for presentation in the media.

A classical challenge is the pedagogical one of presenting the matter in a way that engages the audience. Here the Sesame Street educational TV series has had a lasting effect, successfully competing with commercial TV entertainment and pioneering edu-tainment, the modern, or perhaps post-modern, version of learning through play. There is a close resemblance between the journalistic prerequisite of drama and the educational use of puppets to convey a message. In general, however, the pedagogical tricks are well known and accepted, while those of the media are less well known. Three educational examples may illustrate the points made above.

The convention on the non-navigable uses of international watercourses

This convention was adopted by the UN in 1997, after a gestation period of more than twenty years. To become law it must be ratified by 35 nations, however, as of today only 12 nations have done so, and it is an open question whether it will ever achieve the status of a binding law. The legitimacy of the decision-makers is unquestionable, but the emotional content of the decision is bewildering.

The treaty on banning of land mines

By contrast, this treaty, adopted in 1995, was ratified by a record 110 countries after two years. Clearly its uncontroversial emotional content, dramatically as well as gracefully exposed by Lady Diana, unified the world and secured the law. An interesting detail is the fact that although none of the large producers of mines (China, India, Iraq, Russia and the US)  has ratified, they were powerless in resisting the law.

The world water vision

When an entire profession, such as the water engineers and scientists, makes an effort to impose freshwater on the world agenda in order to forestall a wide-spread water crisis, this is something unheard of previously. With a massive input generated by some 15 000 enthusiastic water experts world-wide, the Vision's message that was presented in the Hague in March 2000, is far from satisfying the basic journalistic rules referred to above. It is global instead of local and complex instead of simple, but it does contain extremely dramatic elements. To make the Vision palatable for the media, an enormous PR campaign was staged. Judged by the criteria of the PR profession, which is counting the number of articles, TV showings, interviews etc, the campaign was a great success. However, its real impact is not measurable, and one can only hope that the vast information diffused world-wide by the 1 000 journalists and media technicians present, was not wasted. The Forum itself attracted more than 5 000 water experts, but only about 100 politicians attended, almost all ministers of water resources. Thus the meeting was essentially a gathering of the water community. Clearly, much work needs to be done before the next World Water Forum if the freshwater problem is to be taken seriously by everybody and not just by the experts.

6    HYDROTECHNOLOGY OR HYDROPOLITICS?

If we want to avoid a crisis, it is necessary, but not sufficient, to do our hydrotechnical homework. No matter how good our plans are, they don't convince the decision-makers unless they strike the right sentiments in the community. The world is full of noble causes competing for attention and funding, so a skilful marketing is required as well. The sad reality is that the quality of the presentation is sometimes more important than the technical quality of the project. The easy way out for us hydrotechnicians is to wait for the crossover point in time when the demand exceeds the supply, and the process becomes crisis-driven. But a less cynical and more civilised approach is to work for a pro-active solution, informing, educating and influencing stakeholders as well as decision makers. In short, we must get involved in hydropolitics and hydrodiplomacy. The decision tools we possess, or are developing right now to promote better hydropolitics, belong to the new and exploding field of hydroinformatics. It employs communication and information technology (CIT) to improve the quality of hydrotechnical solutions, but it also addresses the equally important process of project acceptance and approval, which is what hydropolitics is all about. The classical decision support developed from industrial operations research and often referred to as water management science (see Revelle (1999) for a good example), is popular among water authorities and technocrats as it provides a multi-objective optimisation technique based on decision mathematics. The emerging hydroinformatics, on the other hand, uses CIT to encourage stakeholder participation, which may introduce ideas that challenge the authorities. With hydroinformaticians within their ranks, the water engineers have taken a decisive step to include hydropolitics on their agenda, albeit in an advisory role as facilitators for both top-down and bottom-up processes.

CIT makes non-governmental initiatives feasible, whether by professional, commercial or grassroots organisations. It is an equaliser, making water management more democratic, but also more complex and challenging. Naudascher (1996) argued for full compensation to the losers when new reservoirs cause involuntary resettlement, and a voice for all stakeholders in the decision process. Using the same tragic evidence as Naudascher, Abbott (2000) goes a step further, arguing that the water professionals associated with projects which seriously degrade the lives of the losers, are accomplices of what he considers crimes against humanity. He sees the democratisation of the decision making process as the next big challenge for the hydroinformaticians, a task that may also restore the public image of our profession.

7    THE WATER MARKET

Local buy and sell water markets have always existed in many places where there is seasonal water shortage. Predictably, such local water markets will increase in number and size as a result either of increased demand or of decreased supply, and they will include long term opportunities.

For seashore sites the market price is limited by the cost of locally desalinated sea water, which depends heavily on the local energy price. This upper bound defines the water market, which Shuval (2000) has named the economic watershed: That geographical area surrounding a water short area where the cost of imported water is equal to or less than the cost of locally desalinated sea water and/or recycled treated waste water. Together with the concept virtual water coined by Allan (1997) for the water required to produce food and other commodities (Table 3), the boundary conditions for a freshwater market are set.

Table 3    Virtual water. typical water requirement for production of foods in california, (FAO,1989)

This market is facing many constraints, ranging from the religious claim for water as a gift of God and the philosophical claim of the right to water as part of human rights, to the simpler arguments that dependence on water import weakens the national self-sufficiency and the national security.

7.1    Water trading

The term water trading is used both for the water market transactions described above and for barter in which only water quantities and not money are included. Barter may involve more than two countries, often all countries in shared water basins, and sometimes countries in adjacent basins. Before one can start trading, an agreed allocation scheme must exist. Barter can then improve the value of the allocated water by taking advantage of existing hydrotechnical structures such as storage dams, diversion canals and tunnels, or even the construction of new facilities.

An intriguing example of this kind of water trading, which he has given the name ‘wheeling’, is offered by Wolf (1996). He considers a technically simple diversion of water from Syrian and Turkish rivers to Northern Israel, in exchange of increased Syrian and/or Jordanian abstractions from the Yarmuk before it enters Israel from the East. Some of the diverted water coming down the Jordan River may be earmarked for Palestine’s West Bank, and allow West Bank groundwater to be diverted to Gaza.

As Wolf observes, water can be transported in a water grid much as electric energy is transported in an electric grid. The system can be designed to allow inputs and withdrawals at numerous nodes and can be operated with payment in cash or in kind, i.e. barter. The hard part is neither the hardware nor the software of the water conveyance system, but the hydropolitical decision process.

7.2    Technology of transfer

Canals

The Roman aquaducts demonstrate interbasin water transfer as they gracefully span valleys. The energy source to power the transfer was gravity, but water was also lifted up to the aquaducts by pumping. Modern canals frequently cross valleys through tunnels underneath rather than on bridges above the valley floor, making them less visible, but more efficient.

Pipelines

Pipelines are the common carrier of imported water to urban areas. The pipeline can be built through almost any kind of terrain, either on the ground or buried, and the water is better protected against pollution (and pilferage) than in a canal. Submerged pipelines are feasible and sometimes the cheapest solution. Politically a pipeline on the international sea bed may be a feasible, although expensive alternative.

Tankers

Commodity transport by tankers is common, with oil as the prime example. The chief advantage of ships is their flexibility, as they can call on any port for loading and unloading, given a minimum of terminal facilities. While oil is priced so high that it can afford the heavy tanker transport costs, water cannot, except for disaster relief.

Barges

Towed or pushed barges are used for commodity transport in calm waters, mainly, if not exclusively, on rivers and lakes. Essentially a container, the barge incurs costs considerably less than those of a tanker.

Bags

A spinoff from the oil spill combat technology, the plastic bag designed for water transport resembles the barge in that it is towed, but differs in that it is towed only one way. For the return trip it is rolled up on the deck of the tug boat, thus saving fuel and cutting the round trip time.

Icebergs

The idea of towing large icebergs from the Antarctic was investigated in the sixties and first found feasible, but later withdrawn. The second thought was a scenario in which the big iceberg spawned small icebergs during transit, setting the stage for potential "Titanic"- type disasters.

For hauls up to 100 or 200 km, imports with water bags is cheapest and can compete with locally desalinated water. The exact distance depends primarily on the energy costs for the desalination plant and for the tug, respectively.

8    SECURING SUPPLY

Since freshwater is the only indispensable and irreplaceable life supply commodity, its continuous supply must be secured. A scheduled stop in delivery cannot last many days before it has serious consequences for human health and welfare, and the impact of a sudden breakdown may be disastrous. Water contamination, as we have seen, spreads epidemics fast, so water quality must be continuously monitored and maintained. (Moreover, the taste of water is important, as the exploding market for bottled water testifies. The closest thing to water wars at present, as observed by the media last year, is the cut-throat competition between the companies producing bottled water).

8.1    Legal claims

When increased upstream abstraction or storage is the cause of water shortage, litigation may provide a solution, although protection by law of water supply is generally not secured, in spite of the much talked about human right to water. Unfortunately, the 1997 UN Convention on the non-navigational uses of international watercourses is not ratified into law yet, and may in fact never be. Nevertheless, that convention, as well as the 1966 Helsinki rules, are used as guidelines for negotiated agreements. Although they are not legally binding, the de facto power of e.g. the Helsinki rules has proven to be substantial.

8.2    Negotiated agreements

Litigation is in any case a slow process, so temporary import may be necessary even if a verdict may secure the long-term supply. The more fruitful approach has been to negotiate a water sharing agreement directly among the riparians, as has been achieved even in controversial catchments such as the Indus, the Danube and the Rhine. Minimum in-stream flow and maximum allowable concentration of pollutants are typical key items of the eventual agreement, which may also contain the licensing of reservoirs for flood mitigation and hydropower production. However, all these rules cannot secure the safe supply of water in basins with periods of draught, and do not eliminate the need for occasional import during extreme hydrological events.

Given these severe constraints, it is understandable that water import is a tricky business. Ample storage eliminates most of the risk, but there exist ambitious schemes for continuous import with a minimum of storage. Perhaps the most advanced is the water bag system developed by Nordic Water Supply ASA (2000). With three bags one can in principle deliver water continuously: While one bag is being emptied, the next bag is in transit, and the third one is being refilled. (The return voyage is made quickly with the bag on deck). This sounds like a vulnerable, weather-dependent system, but it can readily be made more reliable by adding storage bags. If storage reservoirs exist at the destination, water import may not be more complicated than, say, grain import, with its easily visible storage silos in the harbour area.

Compared with canals and pipelines which can be closed in case a dispute arises, sea transport is less vulnerable because the supplier can be changed, if necessary, to maintain the supply. The analogy to the grain market is obvious and includes the exporter's and importer’s option to subsidise a wanted trade, for political or other reasons.

8.3    Virtual water

The water we drink is a mere 1 % , and all our other domestic and industrial needs are only 10 % or so of the water consumed in producing the food we need (Figure 1). While we are prepared to pay what it costs to deliver domestic and industrial water, the irrigation farmers in dry climates are unable to pay more than a fraction of the actual water cost of their products. Yet for many good reasons irrigation farming is frequently supported with subsidised water in these so-called water- stressed countries (Falkenmark 1989) with less than 1000-2000 m³/p yr. Figure 2 gives an example of the role of virtual water in a water short area.

When the economic value of water becomes higher for other uses than for agriculture, it becomes politically increasingly difficult to maintain traditional agriculture. The response of the farmers has been to improve the efficiency of their irrigation system and to switch to crops with lower water demand, both in terms of quantity and quality. A promising trend is the development of new salt-tolerant plants. These and other trends in agriculture are motivated by the competition from the market for virtual water, illustrated in Table 3 above.

9    CONCLUSIONS

What emerges is a plethora of opportunities for the supply of freshwater, resulting in an ever more complex supply web of real as well as virtual water. The bottleneck is not so  much a global scarcity of water as a scarcity of decision power to choose among so many alternatives, all with numerous unwanted side effects.

Hydrotechnology is continually lowering the energy requirement for upgrading vast if not unlimited sources of used water and sea water to any desired quality, thus securing our future demands. For the short term interbasin transfer, including trade, is made ever more feasible. 

Hydroinformatics has come up with a bag of new decision support tools and is developing object oriented approaches at a rapid rate. In particular, these efforts seem to secure stakeholder participation and enhance bottom-up input. 

Hydroecology continues to educate us on instream water requirements to preserve a desired water and ecotone biological diversity and aestethic quality.

Hydropolitics is aided by a growing acceptance of principles for international water law. However, lacking binding laws, unilateral action in shared basins is still a problem.

References

Abbott, M B (2000): The democratisation of decision making processes in the water sector. Part 1. Accepted for publication in Journal of Hydroinformatics.

Abbott, M B and A Jonoski (2000): Same title as above, Part 2. Also accepted.

Allan, A (1997): 'Virtual' water: a long term solution for water short Middle East economies. Paper at the 1997 British Association Festival of Science, Univ. of Leeds.

Aubenas and Benasayag (1999): La Fabrication de l'Information. La Decouverte, Paris

Brox, O (1995): Dit vi ikke vil (What we don't want. Non-utopian planning for the next century) Exil, Oslo. (In Norwegian).

Damasio, A.R. (1994): Decartes' Error. Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. G.P.Putnam's sons, New York.

Falkenmark, M. (1989): The Massive Water Scarcity now Threatening Africa. Ambio, vol 18, No 2.

Kahn, H, W Brown and L Martel (1976): The Next 200 Years. W Morrow & Co Inc., New York.

Naudascher, E (1996): Securing equitable allocation of projects benefits. Keynote address, International Conference on Aspects of Conflicts in Reservoir Development and Management Nordic Water Supply ASA (2000): Internet www.nws.no

Postel, S, G C Daily and P R Ehrlich (1996): Human Appropriation of Renewable Fresh Water. Science, Vol 271, Feb 3.

Revelle, C (1999) Optimizing Reservoir Resources. J Wiley & Sons.

Shuval, H (2000) Paper presented at the International Workshop: Regional Water Transfers in an Integrated Water Resources Management Perspective. University of Kalmar, Sweden. August 20-23. 

Wenstøp, F and K Seip (2000): Legitimacy and Quality of multi-criteria environmental policy analysis - A meta analysis of five MCE studies in Norway. Accepted for publication in Int. Journ. of Multicriteria Decision Making.

Fig. 1    Individual water use (After Allan, 1997)

Fig. 2    Middle East and North Africa water deficit (After Allan, 1997)