Peter Gleick: Solutions in a world of peak water limits

For one week each October, Chicago Ideas Week brings together some of the world’s most outstanding speakers to present their ideas and inspire the innovations of tomorrow at 80+ sessions across the city of Chicago. In October of 2013, the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick opened a session on water with this speech, Solutions in a World of Peak Water Limits, where the details the problems and the solutions for solving the world’s water crisis.

Here’s what he had to say:

I’m Peter Gleick, I’m from the Pacific Institute in Oakland California. I’m a scientist by training – a hydroclimatologist. I’m a member of the National Academies of Sciences and this being Chicago, I should mention I am a MacArthur fellow. I’m a water wonk in general. I love water, all aspects of water.

I’m going to start by giving a little bit of an introduction. We live on a water planet. Everything we care about is connected to water – the production of food, the goods and services that we produce and consume. Energy and water are connected very closely together, as are water and natural ecosystems. There’s a human right to water. Water is an economic good. There are many contradictory and challenging issues around water. We’re going to touch on a few of them, and probably not in depth they deserve, but nonetheless.

The Greek poet Pindar said that water is the best of all things and in many ways it is. It’s hard to imagine if we had to without any of the modern conveniences, whether water would be in the top 10 list at all, but the truth is we can’t do without water.

I’m going to do two things. I’m going to talk about why there’s a water crisis at the global and local levels, and I’m going to talk about how we’re going to solve the water crisis in a very short period of time.

So first of all, we have a water crisis. It’s in different forms, in different ways and in different places and at different times, but there is a water crisis. And probably the most significant example of the fact that we have a water crisis is that we have failed in this, the 21^st century, to meet basic needs for water and water services. There are almost a billion people worldwide today that don’t have access to safe drinking water. There are two and a half billion people worldwide who don’t have access to adequate sanitation, and that by itself, is a failure. That by itself is a crisis. That by itself leads to bad things, to water related diseases. Two million or so deaths a year from cholera and dysentery and guinea worm and (another presumably nasty disease) – the things that happen when we don’t have access to water and sanitation, but by itself, that’s inexcusable because we know how to solve that problem and yet we have failed to solve that problem.

The second aspect of the world water crisis is the environmental aspect. The reality is that all of the water that humans take for the things that we want to do comes from the natural environment, and the natural environment depends on those water resources as well, and so we see around the world, locally and aboard, ecosystem destruction and fisheries extinctions and the drying up of river deltas and all of the ecological problems that occur when human take the water that we require for own uses. And so that’s the second aspect of it.

The third aspect is related to water quality. The reality is that we live on a water planet, but much of the water that we depend upon, we also unfortunately contaminate in different places in different ways -with human wastes and with industrial wastes. Much of the debate today about bottled water versus tap water … is partly a debate about water quality. It’s partly because we’re increasingly fearful of our tap water. We have a remarkable tap water system in this country. It could be better than it is; we know how and we have the money to make it even better than it is, but it’s already remarkable. Bottled water and the consumption of bottled water is an indication in part about our fear of water contamination.

The fourth problem is related to water in conflict. We fight over water. I’m from California and in the western United States we have a saying that the two hardest things to keep out of water are salt and politics, and the truth is we’re better at keeping salt out of water than we are at keeping politics out of water. There’s a long history of conflict over water resources. We fight over water. Water’s been used as a weapon; it’s been used as a tool in wars that start for other reasons. One of the things we do at the Pacific Institute is we maintain a chronology, called the Water Conflict Chronology, of conflicts over water going back 5000 years in myths, legends, and history. If you’re interested in history, go look at the Water Conflict Chronology, but the sad fact is we fight over water, and the sad fact is that conflicts over water are growing, not shrinking. Many of these conflicts are sub-national; they are not international, but they are between ethnic groups, they are between upstream users and downstream users, and they are between farmers and cities. Water and politics is a part of the global water crisis.

The fifth issue is climate change. We’re not going to talk much about climate change, except for me to say that climate change is a real problem. We are changing the climate. The climate and the hydrological cycle are intimately connected. As we change the climate, we’re going to see changes in rainfall patterns, storm frequency and intensity, and the demand for water. The truth is climate change means impacts on water resources, and we’ve already see some of those impacts. They are going to get worse, I would say, before they get better, but I don’t even know if they are going to get better. Climate change is a serious challenge for water resources moving forward.

The sixth part of this water crisis is our institutions. We’ve developed a whole set of complex institutions to deal with water resources: water utilities, water companies, community level, global level at the level of the United Nations and international organizations, and at the federal level, we have twenty or so federal agencies that deal with some aspect of water in the United States. The truth is we don’t manage water very well and we don’t manage it for a sustainable future, and that is part of our challenge as well.

So we have a water problem, but we have solutions. So let me simply say, I believe that ultimately and inevitably, we’re going to move towards a sustainable future for water. I think that’s the good news. I think that inevitably, we’re going to figure out how to deal with water sustainably. How to meet ecosystem needs, basic human needs, how to deal with conflicts over water – I think we will learn all of these things in the years to come.

So let me often six solutions to our water problems.

The first is that we have to rethink supply. Traditionally in the 20^th century, supply meant build another dam, drill another groundwater well and tap another aquifer, or build a pipeline from the next river basin over and bring more water in when you’ve used all the water in your local watershed. That was the traditional approach. Find another source of supply.

We’re reaching limits on supply. We have reached in many parts of the world what we call ‘peak water’. We might want more water out of the Colorado River, for example, a renewable river. But we can’t have anymore because we consume the entire flow of the Colorado River. We might want more water out of non-renewable groundwater aquifers, but we can’t. That’s not sustainable.

We have to have new thinking about supply, and new thinking about supply means thinking about different sources of water. Treated wastewater – we collect and treat a huge amount of wastewater worldwide, and then we throw it away. Treated wastewater is an asset, not a liability. It’s a new source of supply. Innovative rainwater harvesting. Desalination, if we can beat the economic and environmental challenges associated with it. There are new sources of supply out there, and that’s the first piece of the puzzle.

The second piece of the puzzle though is demand. We have to rethink what we do with the water we already capture and treat and deliver and use. The reality is we don’t want to use water; we want goods and services. We want to grow food. We want clean clothes. We want to wash our dishes. We want to get rid of human wastes and deal with industrial wastes. Many of the things we want to do require water. But I’d like to argue that almost everything that we want to do requires less water than we spend to do it. And that’s the issue of demand.

Let’s think about how we’re using water, and let’s think about how to use it more productively. Produce more food with the water we’re already using. Produce more goods and services more efficiently with less water. The reality is the potential to manage our demand for water is huge. And it’s cheaper, and it’s more environmentally sound than finding new sources of supply, so that’s the second piece of the puzzle.

The third is quality. We have to treat our water more carefully. We have to stop contaminating water, which we then have to treat at great expense. We have to find new ways of treating water, and we have to find different ways of using different qualities of water. Why are we using potable water to water our lawns? Why, some might ask, do we have lawns? Why, in this 40^th anniversary of the Clean Water Act have we not developed new ways of treating new pollutants? The 40^th anniversary of the Claen Water Act is October 15, and yet, this Congress has not yet stepped up to modify and update that 40 year old law. Protecting our water quality is a third element of this.

The fourth element is smart economics. Water is a human right. The U.N. declared water as a human right just two years ago. But water is also an economic good. Most of us pay far too little for the water that we use. The truth is you probably pay less for your water than you pay for your cell phone, your landline if you still have one, your energy bill, your cable TV – all of these things that are less important to us than water. We pay too little for water. Let’s use smart economics, let’s price water properly, let’s deliver water at the full economic costs that reflects environmental values, and lets’ figure out how to get the power of economics on the side of the power of water sustainability.

The fifth is community participation in water. The way we manage water in the 20^th century was top down. And the smart way to manage water is bottom up. Communities know what they want; the most effective way to deliver water and water services is to work directly with communities and to understand how communities work and what communities want. A new era of community management of water, I think, will help move on this soft path to the future. There are new technologies, SMS technologies, smartphone technologies, and innovative internet technologies that are all going to help the community aspect of management of water.

And finally, institutions. Again as I’ve said, we’ve developed a whole set of institutions, complex institutions to manage water in the 20^th century. We need new institutions or better institutions in the 21^st century.

Darwin said, ‘if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.’ The reality is that great is our sin. Our institutions are largely responsible for the mismanagement of water, and yet there are institutional solutions as well. All of these things put together – rethinking supply, rethinking demand, rethinking quality, smart economics, smart institutions, community management – all of these things together will lead to a soft path to the future and will lead to a sustainable future for water.