Water is treated as if it is an infinite resource but it is a false perception of abundance
When a reporter asked Elon Musk last year whether the “gigafactory” that Tesla Inc was constructing near Berlin would drain the region’s diminishing water supply, he laughed it off.
“This region has so much water,” he scoffed. “Look around you … It’s like water everywhere here. Does this seem like a desert to you? It’s ridiculous.”
Environmental groups had filed a lawsuit with Brandenburg’s environment authorities, citing their concerns that the factory would drain the water supply in a region where groundwater levels had plummeted for 30 years. In March this year, the factory was officially opened.
“It’s not just Elon Musk,” said Colin Herron, senior water resources management specialist, water solutions for the sustainable development goals at the Global Water Partnership (GWP). “Businesses, in general, and policymakers just consider that water is there to be exploited.”
Using credit as an analogy, he explained: “Imagine, you get given a credit card and you have no idea what your credit limit is and you think you’re never going to actually have to pay for that credit card, well, you’re going to go out and spend money on whatever you want.
“This is a little bit of the attitude that society has had regarding water, of ‘let’s set up this big irrigation district here’, and ‘let’s set up this big industry there’. Water isn’t endless and we really need to plan for where water is available and in some cases, take drastic measures where it isn’t.”
The GWP is a global action network of more than 3 000 partner organisations in 179 countries, which encourages government, civil society and the commercial sector to work with each other to solve water problems.
Water isn’t valued as it should be, Herron said. “It’s a finite resource that’s very limited, and yet we treat it as if it’s bountiful, plentiful and endless, almost.”
Earth is referred to as the blue planet, with the perception that water is everywhere. “Yet, if you actually look at it, 97.5% of the water on Earth is saltwater. Then, of the 2.5% that is freshwater … a lot is locked up in the polar ice caps, in groundwater, which is not necessarily accessible to humans as well.
“The water that is actually available in rivers, lakes and shallow aquifers that we can really get, is somewhere like 0.01% of all water on Earth. We have a false perception of abundance.”
Water rationing could become the ‘new normal’
In Santiago, the Chilean government, has for the first time, announced an unprecedented plan to ration water for the capital as the country enters a record-breaking 13th year of drought, driven by severe climate change.
The GWP regards this as a “worrying development”, and it warns that such water rationing may become the “new normal” for other countries unless international climate policy makers treat water as a priority and if countries manage their water resources in an integrated way.
In 2018, Cape Town averted Day Zero, and now, in drought-hit Nelson Mandela Bay municipality, taps will run dry in parts of the metro within weeks.
According to the GWP, more than one in four people live in countries affected by water stress and, by 2050, more than five billion people may be affected by water scarcity, threatening 45% of the world’s economy.
For cities, the over-allocation of water is one of the biggest stressors, where more water is allocated than is sustainable, leading to a reduction in the “water available in the city’s bank”, Herron explained.
“Cities are growing often in a rather unplanned manner, often outwards, which doesn’t take into account the natural areas that are an essential part of cities’ ‘green infrastructure’, and provide important water-related services,” Herron pointed out.
Often, they end up building over these areas, reducing nature’s ability to provide important water services. “So, as cities grow, they need more water, but at the same time they are less able to provide water to their citizens. Then there’s the question of pollution of water bodies, which makes that way often impracticable to use for most purposes.
“All of this before talking about climate change, which is why I feel it’s easy for water managers to sometimes blame climate change, but all of this has needed to be addressed already for quite some time. Climate change is just making that need more urgent.”
Often, to solve their water crises, cities turn to expensive infrastructure, which either moves water from A to B, “meaning that we continue to be unsustainable but kick the can down the road”, or increasingly they head towards desalination.
“Those other built solutions have a very high energy and financial cost, generating significant greenhouse gas emissions. Since we typically don’t take proper care of our landscapes, which would be the cheapest solution and the one with the most related benefits (including flood risk reduction, increased infiltration, and drought mitigation), that leaves our cities increasingly exposed to the changing climate.”
Long-term solutions
Long-term solutions include investing in early warning and prediction systems that inform drought policies with mitigating actions clearly spelled out. Stakeholder participation, educational programmes and public awareness are critical to planning the institutional responses that protect vulnerable communities, Herron said.
For water scarce and semi-arid South Africa, Herron said it’s important to rationalise the water resources that are available before talking about climate change and its effect on those resources. “We really need to look at what water is available, how it is currently used and how it could then be used more efficiently.”
When water is used in domestic settings, industry or agriculture, the product of that is wastwater. To Herron, even the terminology of “wastewater” is revealing. “That is water that could be reused and it’s not wasted by any means …. It’s a very valuable resource that we should be using much more proactively.”
The logic of dealing in this way with a limited resource is one that is needed in South Africa. “That has to permeate, not just at an individual level, but into policies so that we have financial incentives for people, industry and farmers to take up this sort of approach.”
Preventing a crisis is far more cost-effective than reacting during or after a crisis, Herron added, citing a United Nations study which found that a $6-million investment in Can Tho, a city in southern Vietnam, would prevent an estimated $300-million in flooding damages over the next 30 years.
“The challenge there is that the investment is here and now, and the damages are into the future, and often it’s more difficult for governments and other stakeholders to justify expenditure that won’t give an immediate return on investment, although that implies basically short-changing the next generation,” Herron said. “We strongly believe that we have an intergenerational responsibility to leave a world to our children that they can live in, at least as well as this generation has.”
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