TOWARD A BLUE REVOLUTION
By Don Hinrichsen, Bryant Robey, and Ushma D. Upadhyay

Excerpt reprinted from Population Reports, September 1998

Making Needed Investments.   Turning principles into practice will be difficult. Most countries need massive investments in sanitation and water supply infrastructure. In the developed world, for example, the United Kingdom must spend close to $60,000 million building wastewater treatment plants over the next decade in order to meet new European water quality standards. This amounts to about $1,000 for every person in the country. Hungary faces similar problems. One-fifth of the country's population is not connected to a functioning sewer system. Hungary will need to invest about $3,500 million over the next two decades to connect all of its citizens to wastewater treatment plants.

In developing countries, one of the most pressing problems is the overwhelming need to invest heavily in sanitation facilities and the provision of clean water. The World Bank has estimated that over the next decade, between $600,000 million and $800,000 million will be required to meet the total demand for freshwater, including for sanitation, irrigation, and power generation. Of this huge amount, the World Bank will be able to lend only $35,000 million to $40,000 million at most. The remainder will have to come from a combination of public funding and private investment. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for most developing countries to finance the remainder, however. In Latin America alone, for instance, it is estimated that investments in water resources management and infrastructure will require $100,000 million over the course of the next two decades.

Avoiding International Conflicts.   An important part of any international water management strategy is to help countries that share river basins fashion workable policies to manage water resources more equitably. A water-short world is an inherently unstable world. Nearly 100 countries share just 13 major rivers and lakes. More than 200 river systems cross international borders. Conflicts can arise, especially where countries with rapidly growing populations and limited arable land collide over access to shared freshwater resources.

The case of India and Bangladesh demonstrates how international river basins can be managed to meet demand in the face of scarce water supplies. The Ganges, the subcontinent's largest and most important river, rises in Nepal and flows 2,240 kilometers through three densely populated Indian states -- Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal -- before entering Bangladesh and flowing into the Bay of Bengal. The river affects the lives of 500 million people, many of whom depend on the river for subsistence agriculture and fishing. After half a century of bitter rivalry over access to the waters of the Ganges, India and Bangladesh signed a 30-year water-sharing agreement in December 1996. Both countries have proclaimed a new era of water management.

The agreement, if implemented fully, will provide Bangladesh with a guaranteed minimum amount of water during the dry season, especially the three driest months of March, April, and May. The new treaty sets 10-day periods during these three months when India and Bangladesh will alternately have access to an agreed-upon amount of the water reaching the Farakka Barrage, a huge dam built by India in 1974 in an effort to claim as much of the water for its own use as possible before the Ganges enters Bangladesh. In order to insure implementation of the agreement, a team of inspectors from the two countries will monitor the flow rate at the Farakka Barrage during the dry months.

Critics argue that, if the agreement is to work over the long term, India must begin to manage the Ganges watershed much better than it does now. Deforestation in Nepal and northern India has greatly increased the amount of sediment washed from the hills into the river during the monsoon season, clogging waterways and increasing the incidence of damaging floods. Unless ways can be found to capture more stable runoff during the wet season for use during the dry season, Indian farmers might be tempted to take all the water they can get from the river during the driest months, putting the agreement in jeopardy.

Despite such caveats, the fact that two neighboring countries have successfully negotiated and reached a comprehensive agreement over such a contentious issue is a positive sign. It promises to permit downstream Bangladesh a more equitable supply of water from the Ganges and to foster better water management practices in upstream India.

National Responses

In water-short countries, national governments need to give water resources management their highest priority. Crafting and implementing a national water strategy is essential to sustainable development. Such a strategy should include four elements:

• Adopting a watershed or river basin management perspective, especially in water-short regions (also appropriate as an international response, since watersheds frequently cross national boundaries);

• Instituting a workable water infrastructure so that national, regional, and local water needs can be met within the context of a national water policy;

• Enacting and enforcing water legislation and regulations that conserve water and value the resource properly according to type of use; and,

• Connecting water management to the needs of agriculture, industry, and municipalities, and meeting public health requirements for proper sanitation and disease prevention.

The United States defines a watershed as the entire area drained by a river system or one of its major tributaries. The United Kingdom defines a watershed as the divide between river basins, a potentially much larger area. No matter how it is defined, "we need to see a river or lake, along with its entire watershed and all its physical, chemical, and biological elements, as part of a complex, integrated system," according to Janet Abramovitz of the Worldwatch Institute.

Everyone has a watershed address: we all live in basins that drain rainwater into streams and rivers that eventually send the water back to the sea or into inland lakes. The people living in most of these addresses have radically altered the natural drainage systems around them. Tampering with watersheds has proved ruinous for many developing countries, where hillsides denuded of vegetation empty tons of soil into water courses every year, causing floods during the wet seasons and suffocating aquatic life during the dry seasons.

Deforestation has ruined land and altered climates, causing less rain to fall in some areas. In others, rainwater runs off so fast that little can be collected for use. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the albedo effect -- the drying of the landscape as a result of the wholesale clearance of tropical forests and poor farming practices -- has resulted in below-average rainfall over the past 40 years compared with the century as a whole.

Watershed or river basin management pays multiple benefits. The economic value of ecosystem maintenance is high. The value of an intact floodplain, for instance -- including its fisheries, wildlife, recreation, and natural flood control effects -- has been calculated at close to $5,000 per hectare. Another estimate puts the value of one hectare of wetland at $15,000.

Ideally, a comprehensive watershed management plan mobilizes communities and individuals and gains broad public acceptance at the national level. Watershed management is not easy to accomplish, however. It is a complex and contentious process that involves many stakeholders with competing views about water use. Not many countries have been able to initiate workable watershed management strategies. The Chesapeake Bay, the largest brackish water estuary in North America, has one of the few comprehensive watershed management plans in operation anywhere in the world.

A number of other countries also have instituted river basin management schemes or are in the process of doing so. The Murray-Darling River Basin Commission in Australia, for instance, is an intergovernmental organization whose main aim is to coordinate the management of water resources across state borders within the Murray-Darling River Basin, the country's largest river system. The commission's technical abilities are comprehensive, covering river management and ecology, environmental impacts, finance and administration, and communication. All development activities within the river basin fall under the jurisdiction of the commission, and all government agencies connected to water management and its uses must collaborate.

In India, as a result of the 1987 National Water Policy Act, the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat are setting up a committee to regulate and control water use in the Sabarmati River Basin, which encompasses parts of both states. The average amount of water available in the Sabarmati River Basin amounts to no more than 360 cubic meters per person per year, making it one of the most water-stressed regions in the country. Water is not only a very limited resource, but it is also increasingly polluted by irrigated agriculture.

To deal with these problems, the committee will regulate and manage water resources in the entire river basin, with a structure that gives a voice to representatives from each major water user group. The committee hopes to establish broad popular and institutional support and a structure capable of ensuring that polluters are fined and that major users pay a fair price for water. If the system works, it may be extended to other water-short areas of India with high population densities.

Freshwater supplies that originate in mountainous areas also can be better protected and managed at their source, observes Mountain Agenda, a nongovernmental organization interested in sustainable mountain development. According to the organization, in humid areas the proportion of water generated in mountains can comprise as much as 60 percent of the total freshwater available in the watershed areas, and as much as 95 percent in arid areas.

Building Institutional Capacity.   Managing watersheds and river basins sustainably means building institutional capacity, including the creation of cross-sectoral data collection and monitoring systems. Capacity-building is a key theme of international organizations promoting change, including the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, and the Global Water Partnership. To build capacity, the following measures are needed:

Assessing national capacity-building requirements. It is vital for governments to know the capacities of their water sector agencies as a first step toward improvements.

Creating competent administrative and legal structures. The technical and administrative competence of national, regional, and local agencies responsible for water management must be strengthened before progress can be made in water management.

Making institutions more responsive and effective. Water management agencies, both public and private, must also be able to respond to changing situations (political and social as well as environmental). Static organizations and outmoded procedures need to be overhauled, especially as countries enter the water-stressed or water-scarcity categories.

Training senior water managers. Few hydrologists have been trained to consider water resources broadly. As well as an engineering approach to water management that considers supply needs and how to satisfy them, a demand-oriented approach is increasingly needed.

Establishing closer ties to universities and research institutes. Since water issues embrace societal concerns and cultural values, water agencies should reach beyond the usual government channels and draw on a wide spectrum of opinion and expertise in order to assess freshwater issues and find solutions.

There are several good examples of how water can be valued more appropriately than is the usual case. Chile established a water market in the mid-1980s that not only has saved water but also has enabled farmers to meet their needs by trading water rights among neighboring farms. A World Bank study of the water market system concluded that it contributed greatly to better management and fairer pricing.

Similarly, in southern California, chronically one of the most water-short regions in a water-short U.S. state, the San Diego County Water Authority has reached an agreement with farmers in the Imperial Valley area east of the city of San Diego. The agreement encourages farmers to conserve up to 200,000 acre-feet of water a year and sell it to the county, which would finance the conservation measures and pay farmers cash incentives to participate. San Diego County would benefit from the guarantee of cheaper water, and the farmers would, in effect, be paid to conserve the resource. This approach to water management could change the dynamics of water use throughout California.

In S�� Paulo, Brazil's most populous state, where water resources already are stretched thin, increasing demands from municipalities, industries, and agriculture threaten to cripple the state's capacity to manage scarce supplies. In 1997 a draft Water Pricing Law was sent to the state legislature that could form the basis for an entirely new water management policy. Under the proposal, the price of water will be determined by the source of supply, type of use (whether municipal, industrial, or agricultural), and the availability of water. The fees collected under the policy are to be re-invested in the water management infrastructure.

Managing Water for Sectoral Needs.   A workable water management system requires the institutional capacity to balance sectoral needs for the good of society as a whole and also to consider ecosystem needs. Water allocation, rather than absolute scarcity of water, often lies at the heart of national water problems. Without policies that link the supply of freshwater to competing sectoral uses, local and regional water shortages often result, and competition becomes increasingly bitter.

In developing countries, meeting sectoral demands is challenging because most lack efficient water management systems and equitable pricing policies that are based on how water resources are used. For example, although China passed a national water law in 1988, there is little coordination of sectoral water use between the Ministry of Water Resources, the river basin commissions, and the various provincial and local authorities.

Local Responses

Locally led initiatives are showing that water can be used much more efficiently even in water-short areas, both urban and rural. Furthermore, when communities manage freshwater resources better, they also manage soils and forests better, increase crop production, and reduce the incidence of illness and disease. Even where municipal governments have failed to finance a potable water supply or to provide proper sanitation, grassroots efforts have sometimes succeeded. Consider the following examples.

• In Burkina Faso's main agricultural area, the Mossi Plateau, a group called the "Six S's" (Se Servir de la Saison Seche en Savanne et au Sahel) has been promoting an integrated approach to water management since the late 1970s. The group encourages small-scale irrigation systems along with re-forestation and erosion control. It teaches village leaders new techniques for saving water and growing crops, provides basic hygiene education, and helps with financing for water conservation.

• Balinese rice growers have used small-scale irrigation techniques for the past 500 years. Their system is not technically advanced but instead relies on loose stone dams and weirs to collect water, which is then distributed to terraced fields using the hollowed-out trunks of coconut trees for piping. Accompanying this traditional system of water distribution is a social structure that regulates water among different communities, apportioning it according to the size of each rice paddy. The system works partly because women, the main source of paddy labor, have a hand in its management.

• In Pakistan, the Orangi Pilot Project, carried out in one of the worst slums in Karachi, was able to provide 600,000 people with a sewer system and with covered latrines. The project, which was carried out with a small amount of external funding, worked because of progressive local leadership and strong community support. But the benefits did not end with piped water. The project also increased access to better reproductive health and family planning services, which will help reduce future demand for water.

• In Honduras, six poor communities in the country's capital city of Tegucigalpa pooled limited resources to make a deal with the water utility to provide them with piped water. This scheme is notable because the price that households paid for water actually dropped as a result of the piped water connections, since residents no longer had to buy water from street vendors, and the average household connection rate in each of the six communities was 85 percent, and the consumers themselves paid for the connections.

Taking Action. ;  Local communities should take an active part in planning and implementing water management schemes if they are to be sustainable. Poor communities, in particular, have had notable success in introducing autonomous local distribution of water, either through special arrangements with the water authority or with private vendors. Communities also have set up community-managed vending kiosks or operated small, autonomous water supply systems.

Accessibility of clean water, as has been noted, promotes better household hygiene and improves health and well-being. Access to the water supply should be as close to homes as possible and should be reliable. Plans for piping water to poor households should consider the amount of water needed, choose the appropriate level of technology, and price the water according to the ability to pay. Water supply and public health programs both should emphasize preventive health care education and encourage the use of clean water for personal and domestic hygiene.

Time to Change Direction

The world needs sustainable water management, but we are not headed in the right direction fast enough. A Chinese proverb holds that, "If we don't change course, we may end up where we are heading." Without moving in a new direction, many more areas will face water shortages, many more people will suffer, more conflicts over water will occur, and more precious wetland ecosystems will be destroyed.

While a freshwater crisis appears inevitable in many water-short regions, in others the problem could be managed if appropriate policies and strategies were formulated, agreed to, and acted on soon. The international community is paying increasing attention to the world's water problems, and a number of organizations are providing funding and assistance to help manage water supply and demand. Increasingly, mechanisms are being put in place that permit more equitable water management. Countries in water-stressed regions are introducing better pricing mechanisms, fostering community-based water management schemes, and moving toward watershed and river basin management regimes. Both the number and scale of these activities need to increase substantially.

Also, population growth has slowed, reflecting international and national attention to family planning programs, together with rising popular demand for contraception. To meet people's needs, national governments and international donors need to increase their commitment to family planning, to improving sanitary conditions, to curbing pollution, and to reducing the scourge of water-related diseases.

A vital part of a long-term solution is worldwide recognition of the links between rapidly growing populations and shrinking freshwater supplies. Recognition, knowledge, and concern can help build the political will to avert a crisis and develop the commitment needed to assure that humanity's apparently unquenchable thirst for freshwater does not exhaust the world's finite water supply.