In this TEDx talk, Dr. Kaveh Madani shares his approach to the global water crisis
“Water. It’s the most essential and pervasive element of life. Yet, nearly half of humanity will face water scarcity by 2030 due to climate change and population growth. What can be done about the looming crisis of a global drought? Could water scarcity spark war as world leaders have already predicted?”
Dr. Kaveh Madani is a systems analyst, game theorist, and engineering and policy educator who investigates the dynamic complexities of coupled human-natural systems and is a featured expert across prominent media and a professor at Imperial College of London. Dr. Madani has connections to California having received his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Davis, later returning to conduct his post-doctoral research in Environmental Economics and Policy at the Water Science and Policy Center at the University of California, Riverside. In this TEDx talk recorded in Kish Island, Iran, in April of 2015, Kaveh Madani shares his approach to the water crisis.
Here’s what he had to say …
When was the first time you thought about the importance of water?
During the ongoing Californian and Middle Eastern droughts? The famous Australian drought? 1850s? Before Christ? When? Indeed, we were very smart. We got it from the very beginning, as we developed our major civilizations around big rivers, rivers like the Tigress and Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Yellow.
Water is the most essential element of life. We need it for drinking, and sanitation, we need it to produce food, we need it to produce power and cool our power plants, and we need it for maintaining our ecosystem services.
So what’s going to happen with a growing population?
We already have problems with water. Not everyone has enough access to water. 15% of the world population lack access to clean water. That number is 50% in sub-Saharan Africa.
The modern people, the developed ones, are also changing their diet. Ironically, they prefer meat to vegetable, the unhealthy diet. That means 15,000 liters of water instead of 2000 liters per kilogram of food. So to feed the 2 billion extra people joining us on this planet, we need to raise 60% more water. We are already bankrupt. We don’t have that much water. We have to increase the water withdrawal by 50% in the developing world and 18% in the rest of the world.
The planet is getting dry. Water is becoming scarcer. Two billion people are expected to live in dry areas of the planet with extreme water scarcity. Add to this the pressure of climate change which is going to reduce the rainfall and increase evaporation. We have already exhausted our surface water resources – lakes are going dry, rivers are going dry, and now we are tapping the groundwater. The fossil resources which are not going to get replenished. And things, like recycling and redrinking our urine won’t help much.
You think that’s the end of this story?
Actually not. The situation is more complex, because water has no respect for our political boundaries. We set the political boundaries without paying attention to the water basin boundaries and watersheds, but water drops move freely within the basin from one location to another, along the river, and toward the drainage area. They are not like us; they don’t have passports so we can’t ask them for visas when they want to pass the border.
So what happens is that we have 148 countries sharing 276 international river basins. What does that mean? 45% of the earth land area and 40% of the population lives in these areas and 60% of the water flows at the global level are provided in this area.
Imagine what happens when you have more than one country managing water. It doesn’t matter if you’re upstream or downstream, how powerful you are; it’s probably in your best interest to maximize your use, minimize the outflow, or beg for more water because even if you don’t need it today, tomorrow you will need it.
So what happens is a lot of competition. Even if you need to do it superficially, you are going to maximize your use. Build a lot of dams. Transfer water from one location to another and waste it. At least you can establish some right to that water. That creates chaos, competition, and as water becomes scarcer, there’s more chance of water conflicts, and that’s a scary situation.
Some people think it’s beyond conflicts and that we might have wars over water. Former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan thinks that the fierce competition over water might end up in a war. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, another UN Secretary General, said he thinks that water can become more important and more significant than oil and that Middle East might experience a war over water. The former vice president of WorldThink thought that the 21st century wars would be fought over water.
Huh. Water war. That’s interesting. It was interesting when I heard it, and I really wanted to know if there will be any water war. Have we ever had any war over water?
Why was I interested in water war? Because I was always dreaming about playing it since childhood.
Now water and war are two important things for me. I’ll tell you more. The real story. Why water? I was passionate about water. I think I had no choice about being passionate about water. Because I was the only child of the parents who were working for the water sector. In fact they dated and got married when they were working for the water sector, so I’m thankful to water for giving me great parents, so studying water was the least I could do to thank it.
Besides that, I was interested in war. Why should I be interested in war? I grew up in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. I have a clear crystal picture of the first missile attack to Tehran. 29th of February, 1988. I was only 6. Big explosion a few meters away; nothing happened to me, but I remember my mom injured and she was in blood. I was confused. Today, I still panic about it and I have nightmares of planes attacking our neighborhood. That confusion, that explosion, I didn’t know what was going on. So war would be the last thing I would be interested in. On the contrary, I like peace like many of you. I want to find ways to prevent conflicts and make the world a more peaceful place.
So I have to find a way to study things, to study water conflicts. I was an engineer interested in politics and social sciences, so … I used game theory. Game theory is a mathematical study of cooperation and conflicts. I used game theory to understand why people might behave in different ways in different situations. I want to understand their incentives, why they do certain things. When they are in conflict with other people, they have a range of options to pick from. They have preferences over the possible outcomes, and they have to think about all moves and countermoves of all players in the game if they want to make a good decision. It’s like playing chess or poker with others.
Now this field is a very growing field. It’s becoming more and more popular and lots of people are using it. We have been using it for water resources modeling and understanding conflicts. … So we ended up modeling a lot of conflicts around the world. Conflicts in the Jordan River basin, Nile River basin, conflicts in Iran, conflicts in California, all over water.
The other thing I do is a lot of gaming. Remember, I told you I was the only child. So I didn’t have a lot of gaming experience, so I do it with my students in class. We play a lot of water games, and I try to collect behavior information from them, the information which is really hard for me to get if I go the field and do experience in the field. I collect the information and they have fun, but to ensure that they show their real behavior, what I do is that I tell them that their grade in the assignment would be their performance in the game. So they play a lot of games during the course and I collect a lot of information and use that information to develop water management institutions which are less vulnerable to conflicts.
So let me tell you what I’ve gained my experience out of ten years of modeling and gaming. Water conflicts, yes, they exist, and as water becomes scarcer, we will see more world water conflicts and more water tensions, especially at lower levels – between farmers, between provinces and states.
But one thing is important – water conflicts are never only about water. Because water is tied to so many other things, food, energy, the independence of your nation, the economy, politics, identity, dignity, and so many other things – so even if countries claim they are only bargaining over water, it’s much more than that. It’s beyond that. So water will be used as a weapon to threaten the neighbors.
This will go on forever, but once you realize there are so many connections between water and other resources, you realize there are a lot of opportunities for trade; you can trade water for food, trade water for energy, trade water for a better reputation at the international level, so there are so many opportunities, and fortunately, history shows that the cases of cooperation have been much more than conflicts. That’s promising, because human beings might become more efficient when things get scarce. Of course, that’s an optimistic hope, but it might happen if we want to discover these opportunities.
History shows that water has never been the only cause of conflicts, and to be specific, a water war. We never only go on a war only for water, but water can catalyze war, it can catalyze conflicts, and it can catalyze cooperation.
In the beginning, I was modeling and I was excited about these things, and as part of a project I had named Hydrosolidarity, I got a chance to visit Africa. We wanted to bring peace to the Nile with a bunch of theologists, engineers, lawyers, and health experts. We went there and I was so excited, I had a lot of questions to get responses for. I wanted to collect field data, so when we go there, I realize all these people spending so much time getting their water, drinking water, filling up their buckets, for hours, school hours, work hours spent in line for water, so I always thought, based on the theory that there will be fighting. I was expecting them to be fighting, because if you spend so much time, at some point you get exhausted, and if you see someone crossing the line, you might have a fight. It was obvious to me that they would fight a lot.
So I had asked our host, the tall guy in the middle, who had lost all his family in the genocide of the 90s in Rwanda. I asked him to ask the villagers how often they fight over water. Guess what the response was. The translation took a bit longer than usual and I was realizing that I just asked a short question and it is taking so long; they are going back and forth, I knew something was going on. He turned back to me with a smile and an answer which really embarrassed me and my knowledge. ‘They never fight, they never understood my question.’ These guys never fight over water.
And that made me think, why not? Indeed they do that to be stronger as a community, they are cooperative. They cooperate to be stronger, to be able to stand in tough situations and back up each other, during food shortage, during water shortage, loss of families, and even genocide.
What is the other option? A western option maybe. To be competitive – to kill so as to not to be killed over water. So it’s just a matter of perception. It depends on how we want to see these games.
We are playing these games, every day in our life, no matter where in the planet you are. We are playing virtual games over water, over food, over energy, over emissions, over air, virtually or actually. So not matter where you are in the world, you are a contributing to conflict or peace. Now we have to choose if we want to play it competitively or as Rwandans started doing.
In the first case, you see this game, you perceive it as a Wall Street game as a competitive game in which you do anything to win the game. And in the other one, you realize that to be happier, if you care about the rest of the planet, you have to sacrifice a little. You need to conserve. We need to conserve. We need to reduce our footprint. We need to do less harm to the environment to make the globe happy, and care about the future generations.
And I hope we all remember Sa’adi’s advice:
“Human beings are members of a whole, in creation of one essence and soul;
if one member is afflicted with pain, others uneasy will remain.
If you have no sympathy for human pain,
the name of human, you cannot retain.”Thank you.”
Click here to watch Dr. Kaveh Madani’s presentation on YouTube.
Get the Notebook blog by email and never miss a post!
Sign up for daily emails and get all the Notebook’s aggregated and original water news content delivered to your email box by 9AM. Breaking news alerts, too. Sign me up!
