Water for Food in a Changing World

Alberto Garrido, Helen Ingram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136808159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

There is not enough water globally for all the things humans need and want water to do for us. Water supply bubbles are bursting in China, the Middle East and India with potentially serious implications for the global economy and for political stability. Even the United States is depleting groundwater on average 25% faster than it is being replenished. Our thirst for water grows with our population, but the amount of fresh water available on Earth is fixed. If we assume "business as usual" by 2050 about 40% of the projected global population of 9.4 billion is expected to be facing water stress or scarcity. With increasing climate variability being predicted by global climate models, we are likely also to have more people without adequate water more of the time, even in water-rich regions.

Irrigation productivity rose dramatically over the past 40 years as a result of the Green Revolution. However, even if we disregard the environmental impacts caused by that revolution, we are no nearer to achieving global food security than we were 40 years ago, as every time we come close to filling the food production gap population growth and ecosystem decline associated with water diversions to human purposes set us back. Our natural and agricultural ecosystems are trying to tell us something.

This book pursues these overarching themes connecting to water and food production at global and regional scales. The collection offers a comprehensive discussion of all relevant issues, and offers a wide-ranging discussion with the aim of contributing to the global debate about water and food crises.

Part I

Introduction

1 Converging global food and water trade-offs

Robert Sandford

The global fresh water supply picture is not rosy

An understanding of the current state of our civilization can be derived from the condition of the planet’s fresh water resources. In developing countries – where the bulk of the population of the world lives – more than 90 percent of all sewage and 70 percent of industrial wastewater is dumped untreated into surface water.

Even if we were able to keep it clean, however, there is not enough water globally for all the things humans need and want water to do for us. Water supply bubbles are bursting in China, the Middle East and India with potentially serious implications for the global economy and for political stability. Even the United States is depleting groundwater on an average of 25 percent faster than it is being replenished.

Our thirst for water grows with our population, but the amount of fresh water available on Earth is fixed. If we assume “business as usual,” by 2050 about 40 percent of the projected global population of 9.4 billion is expected to be facing water stress or scarcity.

With increasing climate variability being predicted by global climate models, we are likely also to have more people without adequate water more of the time, even in water-rich regions.

The amount of water we have will limit the amount of food we can grow

Abundant water is not only essential to the photosynthetic process by which plants manufacture the carbohydrates that are the foundation of our food supply, it is also an important structural element in our food products. There is a lot of water in the food we consume. It has been estimated that we eat 70 times more water than we drink. World water demand is directly influenced by how many of us there are and what we want to eat.

Increasingly, the response to global water scarcity will not be defined by direct transfers of liquid water between regions and countries, but by how much water is traded among nations in the form of water embodied in food.

Unfortunately, there are now so many of us, and our dietary expectations have risen so dramatically in the past 50 years, that we are approaching the limits of the water available to grow all the food we want. We should not worry just about running out of oil. We may not make it to the projected global population of 9.4 billion by 2050. There may not be enough water.

Cities are now competing with agriculture and nature for water

Currently, global human population growth is the highest in places where there is the least water, although recent findings show that many countries are experiencing more reductions of birth rates than expected (The Economist 2009). About 40 percent of the surface of the solid earth receives so little precipitation that natural ecosystem function is limited by water availability. Thus, we find that globally a third of humanity is now competing directly with nature for water. More water resource development, especially in semi-arid and arid regions of the globe, will lead to greater damage to both freshwater and non-aquatic ecosystems, which will lead directly to the decline of our global life-support capacity and ultimately to diminishment of human well-being. That, however, is the direction in which we appear to be headed.

It is estimated that to meet the food demands that are projected to exist in the world in 2025, we will need to put an additional 2,000 km³ of water into irrigation. This amount is roughly equivalent to 24 times the average flow of the Nile. Given current water-use patterns, the population that is projected to exist on the planet in 2050 will require 3,800 km³ of water per year, which is nearly all of the freshwater that can presently be withdrawn from the surface of the Earth.

This would mean that the world would lose most of the important environmental services that aquatic ecosystems presently provide on our behalf. Clearly, that is just not going to happen. Something would give first – either the environment itself or, perhaps more likely, our social order. Both are already under stress.

We are already beginning to observe that rapidly expanding urban centers have begun to compete with agriculture for both land and water on a global basis. Agriculture has, in turn, begun to compete with nature for land and water. We are increasingly concerned that we cannot meet both agricultural and urban needs while at the same time providing enough water to ensure the perpetuation of natural ecosystem functions central to the maintenance of our planetary life-support system.

Humanity is converging upon the need globally to make uncommonly difficult public policy trade-offs

As a consequence of growing populations and increased competition for land and water, humanity is converging upon the need to make uncommonly difficult public policy trade-offs. These are trade-offs that have never had to be made on a global scale before.

We are already putting a great deal of faith globally in a stressed and demonstratively non-sustainable agriculture. If we provide to nature the water it needs to perpetuate our planetary life-support system, then much of that water will have to come at the expense of agriculture, which means that many people will have to starve to meet ecosystem protection goals.

If, on the other hand, we provide agriculture all the water it needs to have any hope of feeding the populations that are projected to exist even in 2025, then we must expect ongoing deterioration of the biodiversity-based ecosystem function that has generated Earth’s conditions upon which our society depends both for its stability and sustainability.

Our hope of preventing the convergence of these dangerous circumstances has resided in our faith in innovation, science and technology. But in the dry regions of the world, such as the Middle East, Africa, Spain, and Mexico, and in new regions made permanently drought-prone, such as Australia and parts of the American West, engineering and technology have only been successful in creating short-term stop-gap solutions that often lead to greater ultimate vulnerability as populations continue to grow and material expectations rise.

Confronting nature’s need for water

Irrigation productivity rose dramatically over the past 40 years as a result of the Green Revolution. But, even if we disregard the environmental impacts caused by that revolution, we are no nearer to achieving global food security than we were 40 years ago because, every time we come close to filling the food production gap, population growth and ecosystem decline associated with water diversions to human purposes set us back. Our natural and agricultural ecosystems are trying to tell us something.

Nature has survival value to people and much of that survival value is defined by the fact that nature is our only provider of water. In order to provide water and other critical benefits to people, nature, however, needs water, too. We need water to prime the pump – so to speak – and the hydrological cycle is a very large pump. It is clear that if we want it to continue to receive valuable ecosystem services on a free basis, nature must be regarded in the context of water resources management decision-making as a legitimate water customer in its own right. But in many places it isn’t.

Taking nature’s need for water seriously as a means for making more water available for people

A recent study of the estimated value of 17 ecosystem services provided by 16 worldwide ecosystem types was estimated at an average of US$33 trillion a year, which is nearly twice the global gross national product that is currently estimated at $18 trillion per year (Safriel, Chapter 8 this volume).

It is interesting to note that the highest value of ecosystem service provided by nature was nutrient cycling (ibid.). The overall planetary value of nutrient cycling was estimated at about $17 trillion a year, nearly half of the total value of all the services provided free to us by our planet’s functioning ecosystems. Nutrient cycling is largely a service provided by water.

From this it becomes evident that, while all services are essential, water-regulating functions are more valuable than other regulating services. While one might not agree with the value attached to these services or even with dollar accounting for what nature does in service of making life on this planet possible, an important point is put into relief through this kind of audit.

Despite their small area globally, aquatic ecosystems are found to be of extraordinary actual and relative value. Coastal estuaries were deemed the most productive of all freshwater ecosystems followed by inland wetlands. More striking, perhaps, is the comparative value of global freshwater ecosystems to terrestrial ecosystems (see the seminal work of Costanza et al. 1997, and Safriel, Chapter 8 this volume).

Current eco-hydrological research underscores much of what humans have known intuitively for generations. Healthy aquatic ecosystems contribute far more than we ever understood to the production of water through the hydrological cycle as well as to the self-purifying power of healthy wetlands, lakes, and rivers. Intact aquatic ecosystems function synergistically with neighboring terrestrial complexes to provide regulating services such as those that control rainwater capture, enhance the storage of water in ecosystems, and facilitate the gradual release of the water that perpetuates stream flow throughout the year.

While all freshwater ecosystems together comprise 2.4 percent of all non-marine ecosystems, they provide 40 percent of the value of all of these ecosystems combined. Natural ecosystem function is also the foundation of the ecological diversity that makes agricultural food production for our growing populations possible. But natural systems are not the only ones capable of contributing to planetary life-support function. To a lesser but not unimportant extent, human-altered systems can do this, too.

Researchers in the Middle East have demonstrated that managing natural and human-altered ecosystems in tandem can create more water for both people and nature. In Israel in 1993, scientists calculated that the potential water yield of that country’s natural Mediterranean scrubland – that is to say the volume of rain falling during a given year on a given surface minus the volume of water returned to the atmosphere from the same area in the same year – is about 1,590 km³ a year.

In little more than a decade, scientists experimenting with diverse arrays of agricultural plant species were able to increase the potential water yield of this region by some 16 percent, to 1,846 km³ a year, by transforming it into an optimally diverse cultivated ecosystem. This improvement was accomplished by enhancing the water provision function of the “natural” Mediterranean scrubland ecosystem so as to reduce the amount of soil moisture that was evaporating. This demonstrates that human landscape transformations undertaken with the aim of enhancing the water regulation function of a given ecosystem can result in increased soil water content being available for both agriculture and nature.

The great breakthrough here is that millennium definitions of “ecosystem” include both cultivated and urban ecosystems. Agricultural and urban ecosystems suddenly become part of a global ecological whole.

The new construct recognizes that actively managed ecosystems now constitute more than half of the ice-free Earth, and that 11 percent of these are cultivated. It recognizes that it is not just pristine ecosystems that provide marketable goods and generate priceless services such as water purification, aquifer recharge, soil development and – until recently – relative climatic stability.

Beyond engineering: an eco-hydrological frontier

It is important to pay attention to the fact that natural systems perform many functions, and when natural ecosystems are diminished or lost these functions must be reproduced or enhanced elsewhere if our planetary life-support system is to continue functioning in the manner in which we have come to rely. If eco-hydrological research tells us anything, it is that that is clearly not happening.

Historically, it has been a given that when humans impair the provision of goods and services by either natural or passively managed ecosystems, these must be replaced by artificial means. What we have discovered, however, is that artificial technology replacements for naturally or passively managed ecosystem function invariably turn out to be expensive and inferior to goods and services provided by “natural” systems. This is a fact we need to explore if we want to solve the global water availability problem.

All over the world, complex natural systems are being simplified in order to concentrate specific benefits in human hands. The cumulative effects of our global engineering efforts on our planet’s life support function are becoming increasingly measurable.

This should not be seen as a criticism of engineering. The point that evolving eco-hydrological perspectives put into relief is not that we should stop relying on engineering solutions. We can’t go back now. If anything, we need solid engineering solutions more than ever. But we do need to know more about how urban and agricultural ecosystems can contribute more to both water supply and quality. We need to improve our understanding not just of fundamental eco-hydrological function, but of the expanded services that our natural, agricultural and urban ecosystems might together be able to provide in the future and engineer toward the realization of that potential.

But here’s the kicker. We then have to reserve enough water through our management mechanisms to make sure these ecosystems have the water they need to perform these functions under current circumstances and in the altered circumstances in which we may have to live as a consequence of higher mean global temperatures. We may not be able to do this if our population continues to mock our every technological advance and undermine our best efforts to achieve sustainability.

What we learn from these examples is that while engineering and technological innovation will always be important, the area in which we may need to concentrate most in the management of our water resources is on sustainability of use. Our central focus should be on governance for it is in this broad and universal domain that our collective ineffectiveness is likely to produce the greatest potential for conflict which can only occur at the cost of achieving sustainability in the future.

Failures of governance

As many water policy scholars have pointed out, there are many exciting new ideas in the field of water management but we are unfortunately failing to act upon them. This failure takes a number of forms.

Shortcomings in contemporary water politics globally are marked by the failure to properly contextualize water issues in ways that take into account local history, culture and relationship to place. This is in part at least connected to an unwillingness to address deep-seated inequities in the way water is allocated and managed in many places in the world.

This unwillingness to address equity injustices makes it difficult to frame issues in ways that will attract and sustain public attention, which in turn makes it difficult to recruit and inspire leaders capable of the sustained effort required to bring about long-term water policy reform.

Without forceful leadership, it is impossible to create, foster and cultivate the level of political will over the duration of time required to ensure proper and lasting implementation of improved policy, leading to changed practices and different results.

What is needed is a new global water ethic. That ethic could have its origin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• PART I. Introduction
• PART II. Innovations in the agricultural response to the sustainability challenge
• PART III. Counting the drops and the mouths to feed
• PART IV. Water for the environment
• PART V. Revitalized water governance
• PART VI. Conclusions
• Index