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FRESHWATER: WILL THE WORLD'S
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Hales says that not only is water a serious and critical component of
sustainable development, in many instances it is the most critical
limiting factor. Hales was interviewed by Jim Fuller.
Question: Would you discuss the attention being given by USAID and other
organizations to managing whole watersheds or river basins in an
integrated manner -- a strategy referred to as Integrated Water Resources
Management?
Hales: In the United States and many other countries the concept of
watershed management is not particularly new or controversial. It's an
effort to understand the role water plays as part of a natural system,
and then finding ways to get water to play a more effective role.
Instead of withdrawing more water from the system, the idea is to get
more out of the water that's in the system. Since water can be reused
many times, the availability of water for human use depends mainly on how
it is used and how the water resource system is managed.
We look at water not only as a serious and critical component of
sustainable development -- in many instances it is the most critical
limiting factor. So as we look at economic growth, environmental
sustainability, biodiversity, food security, and health and child
survival issues, ultimately we come back to the question: how much water
is there? And the effort that we make as an agency -- and I think that
natural resources agencies in most countries are now making -- is to
understand the limits of what can be done with available water. And
there are real limits. And anticipating those, and trying to find ways
to change the way we use water so that we create more flexibility in the
freshwater system is what we mean by Integrated Water Resources
Management.
Q: Can you give an example of improving the efficiency of water use?
A: By far the greatest use of water, worldwide, is irrigation.
Agriculture is responsible for some 70 percent of global water use and
most of that is for irrigation. Probably half of that amount is wasted
before it reaches the intended crop due to inefficient, outdated
irrigation systems. To shift to more efficient technologies, such as
drip irrigation, lining of irrigation canals, or precision sprinkling, is
one way you can create more water in the system -- because you're wasting
less. And you can do that without sacrificing food production.
According to current projections, 3,500 million to 4,000 million people
will live in countries that cannot produce their own food by 2025. If we
can find ways to manage water more effectively for industry and
agriculture, and for basic needs such as drinking water, then we create
more sustainability in that system, which is certainly in our national
interest.
Q: Are we succeeding in finding ways to manage water more effectively?
A: I wish I could give you a straight forward answer to that question. I
think -- through a confluence of partnerships with industry and private
sector and non-governmental organizations in other countries -- we are
succeeding in raising the salience of the issue. But if you had asked me
that 10 years ago, I would have given the same answer. I thought we were
succeeding 10 years ago. And yet I still see inefficient agricultural
systems; I still see us building large dams -- none of which, in my
opinion, could ever pass a positive cost benefit test. They are almost
always going to be subsidized. At the same time, we're not investing in
efficient irrigation systems -- every one of which would pass the cost
benefit test in terms of jobs, economic benefit, and increased food
security. So we're not succeeding in matching up resources to the
problem. I think we are succeeding in getting people to understand
potentially how severe the problem is, but we haven't taken the next step
that goes from believing something to doing something about it.
Q: Can you give a few examples of how USAID is working to improve the
quality or quantity of water resources in other countries?
A: In South Africa, where the government is really struggling to take a
strategic approach to water problems, we are doing a lot of work to
better understand the hydrology of the watersheds, providing models, and
making that information available to the South Africans. They can then
make management decisions based on how the water is used and how much
water there is in the watershed. The Famine Early Warning System in
place throughout southern Africa is another effort we're making to help
farmers predict or anticipate when it's likely to rain and how much rain
they're likely to have. In other countries, like Egypt, we're working
with water measurement and modeling systems that help determine river
flow.
We're also working on water quality issues. Cities and industries poison
water. That's what pollution is. Whenever we dump stuff into the water
that's not good for humans and other living creatures we're poisoning
that water. So we have programs around the world that are helping cities
learn how to both reduce the amount of pollution and also finance water
treatment systems that will purify the water, similar to the kind of
systems we have in North America.
We also promote the preservation of forests upstream in the watershed,
which helps to regulate the water and keep it clean. If you destroy a
watershed in its upper reaches everything will change, including the
availability of fish, all the way down to where the water reaches the
ocean. We also have programs in countries that emphasize the value of
protecting wetlands along rivers -- because the wetlands are not only an
incredible source of life and richness, they are also the cheapest way to
purify water and the cheapest form of water retention to help avoid
floods.
So when water is taken out of a river, we work with countries on how to
most effectively use the water for irrigation systems, use the water for
industrial purposes, use the water for human consumption, and how to
clean it up when its put back into the system. Literally at every one of
those stages the U.S. government has projects overseas, investing about
$300 million a year to increase the effectiveness of water management and
reduce pollution.
Q: What would you say are the most severe problems facing freshwater
resources in the developing world right now?
A: I'd say one of the biggest problems centers on the building of large
dams and large engineering projects that change the course of rivers for
the purpose of navigation and sometimes for flood control. With dams you
lose fisheries above and below the dam -- fisheries that provide
livelihood and food for a lot of people. Currently a third of the
freshwater species in the world are endangered -- that's a fairly
staggering figure. In most instances, countries also lose transportation
and a tremendous amount of the best agricultural land in the world. Dams
also displace cities and people, because many people choose to live near
rivers. The dams themselves provide substantial benefits for a very
limited period of time. No dam is permanent. They all silt up at some
point. Egypt's Aswan Dam provides hydroelectric power. At the same
time, as a result of the dam changing the freshwater flow upstream, we've
seen a tremendous die-off of fisheries along the Nile River and an 80
percent reduction in the sardine population of the Mediterranean Sea.
Another major problem in many countries is uncontrolled agricultural
runoff, along with the overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, and
siltation due to bad land-use practices that cause erosion. And from a
pure human perspective, the biggest problem is probably industrial
pollution. An incredibly tiny amount of something as simple as gasoline
can pollute an incredibly large amount of water. In many instances,
awareness of the kinds of poisons that are going into the water and what
those poisons do to human beings is not as great in developing countries
as it is in Europe or the United States.
Q: According to a report by The Johns Hopkins University School of Public
Health, 48 countries will be affected by water scarcity by 2025. Do you
think it may already be too late for some water-short countries with
rapid population growth to avoid a water supply crisis?
A: Most people tend to think that water is free, and grow up thinking
that there is a lot of it. Both are myths. Water is not free and there
is not very much of it. If you look at the globe from outer space it
looks like a water planet. However, while 70 percent of the globe is
covered with water, only 3 percent of that is freshwater. Twenty percent
of that freshwater is in the U.S. Great Lakes alone. Only 1 percent of
the land surface of the entire world is made up of freshwater ecosystems.
And probably half the world's population live near those freshwater
ecosystems. Try to think of a city that's not built on a river. It's
hard to imagine a place where we have not changed the nature of
freshwater systems. And we now use, in one form or another --
agriculture, industry -- more than half of all the annually available
freshwater in the world. So with the world population increasing at
about 90 million people a year, the crunch is coming. Water is going to
be a serious limitation.
Certainly, by the middle of the next century, there will be only three or
four countries that have not experienced a major crisis due to water
scarcity. The United States will be one of those that is affected -- one
of those countries that will have to deal with a major water scarcity
problem. It is not too late for us to take action to more effectively
and efficiently use water resources so that we can avoid the worst
impacts of that scarcity. Scarcity will exist, but scarcity is a
relative term. Depending on what freshwater systems are involved,
possibly we could work through the scarcity with relatively little pain.
Or it could be the kind of scarcity that forces people to move off the
land as they did during the "dust bowl" that took hold in the south
central United States in the 1930s.
Q: Is there anything specific we can do to avoid these water scarcity
crises?
A: I think there's a lot we can do to avoid the worst aspects of water
scarcity. But it's going to require much more investment than we're now
putting into it, and it's going to require substantially more courage on
the part of political leaders than has been demonstrated for some time.
The first thing we need to do is educate the public and corporations to
make sure they understand the value of water. We also need to educate
government officials so that they truly understand the consequences of
allowing a plant to be built without appropriate pollution controls or
the real cost of building a massive dam. We also need to invest in the
capacity to do several things -- to manage water, to understand what's
happening in water systems, and to anticipate increases and decreases as
a result of climate change -- investing in these things in the developing
world and even in the United States is probably the most important
investment that we could be making
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