UN Chronicle | Thinking Aloud - No One Can Say We Were Not Warned

Thinking Aloud
No One Can Say We Were Not Warned
By David B. Brooks

Article

Shortages of fresh water are nothing new. Arid and semi-arid regions have always been short of water, and much of the rest of the world suffers periodically when expected rainfall is either inadequate or irregular. What is new is the extent of the problem. Already, one third of the world's population suffers from inadequate access to clean, fresh water. Within a couple of decades, that proportion will double to two thirds.

Two aspects of the old problem are also new. First, no one can say that we were not warned. The world's water problems have been documented in report after report. A recent study from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is probably the best, which emphasizes the difficulty of providing water to grow food that, in the long run, is a greater problem than drinking water. Second, the traditional approach to solve water problems-tapping new sources of supply-is running dry. From Roman times and even before, engineering works have brought water to towns and fields. However, this approach was never cheap and is getting ever more expensive. The cost to deliver another litre of water is doubling every decade or so.

Worse yet, in many areas, notably the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and Eastern Europe, there are few new sources to tap (on the surface or underground). The cost to desalinate salt water is dropping, but only to the extent that it can be considered for potable uses in the home. It is (and seems likely to remain) way above what farmers can pay. Other supply options, such as cloud seeding, inter-basin pipelines, movements by sea, etc., are technically feasible but not cheap; most have environmental problems and all are politically complex.

Analysis of the dilemma of inadequate fresh water leads to some strong conclusions:

Both international organizations and national governments must shift emphasis from expanding the water supply to limiting demand.

Both richer and poorer nations must learn how to get along with less water in total, and much less water per capita.

Nations that have been water-rich must become water-efficient. Those that have always been water-poor must become even more efficient.

Most current work on water demand focuses on efficiency-getting prices right and finding better technologies. These approaches will pay off; just as we found with energy some thirty years ago, the cheapest new "source of water supply" will be in conservation of water demand.

Experiments demonstrate that in almost every sector, cost-effective savings of 20 to 50 per cent of water use are readily available—sometimes as simple as tightening valves—mostly with only minor changes in technology. For favoured water-rich countries, efficiency-oriented policies may be sufficient, at least for many years. However, at some point most and perhaps all countries will have to shift their attention further to policies designed not just to resolve more efficiently supply-demand gaps for water, but to create new options and new levels of efficiency. How can we identify these options? Very likely what is called soft path analysis—an alternative analytical approach that emerged in the years following the energy (really oil) crises of the 1970s. It is worth looking at soft energy paths to see what might be said about water soft paths.

Soft energy path methods were developed by an environmental non-governmental organization called Friends of the Earth.This new approach was conceived by Amory Lovins and first published in the October 1976 issue of Foreign Affairs, hardly your typical environmental journal. Though many Governments and corporations continue to ignore the results, soft energy path analysis showed that policies focussing on conservation in demand and decentralized renewable sources of supply could not merely satisfy our demands for energy, but do so at vastly less political and environmental risk than conventional techniques. Though complex in actual cases, the essence of soft path analysis can be reduced to three principles, each of which turns conventional analysis on its head and corresponds in a general way to the three laws of thermodynamics:

The first principle is to resolve supply-demand gaps in natural resources as much as possible from the demand side. Soft path analysis begins from the real demands—for warmth, food, transportation, etc.—and goes on to review the many ways to satisfy them. Each way has its unique energy requirements, but the energy itself is just a means, not an end. By starting from human demand, instead of from energy supply, many more options for conservation become apparent. You can be just as comfortable in a well-insulated structure with a small furnace as in a leaky one with a big furnace.

The second principle is to match the quality of the resource supplied to the quality required by the end use. Higher quality natural resources (as in energy at high temperature or water at great elevations) can serve many more human purposes than lower quality natural resources. Therefore, it is just as important to conserve the quality of water as to conserve quantity.

It makes neither economic nor physical sense to use high-quality resources to perform simple tasks, such as with electricity to heat homes or clean water to flush toilets. Happily, we need much larger amounts of widely available low-quality resources than high-quality resources.

The third principle is to turn typical planning practices around—backcasting instead of forecasting. Rather than starting from today and projecting forward to see where we are going, start from some defined and desirable future point and work backwards to find a feasible and desirable scenario ("a soft path") that can link that desired future to the present reality. If current trends are moving in the wrong direction, simply adjusting them will not help very much. Instead, we have to find a new equilibrium. If one is worried about future supplies of petroleum, it makes more sense to think of how to design urban areas that will be less dependent upon automobiles than to assume that cities will continue to expand outward and urge more efficient automobiles.

The shift from conventional approaches to soft paths implies a shift from technical and economic adjustments toward social, political and cultural ones. It is one thing, for example, to urge the manufacture of more fuel-efficient vehicles, and quite another to promote the development of communities that are less dependent upon automobiles; and it is one thing to urge more efficient industrial processes and quite another to design them to use entirely recycled inputs. Are the same principles that worked so well for energy applicable to water? Can water soft paths be developed in sufficient detail to challenge, if not guide, conventional policies? The answer is "yes, but …". Water soft paths are promising indeed, but it will be much tougher to reduce water use than energy use.

The 50-per-cent savings mentioned above is only a doubling of water efficiency, or what is coming to be called a Factor-2 improvement. Compare that with the Factor-4 improvement in energy efficiency that Ernst von Weizsaecker recently described in the UN Chronicle (Issue 3, 2002), or the Factor-10 improvements that Lovins says is feasible.

How would the three principles of soft paths apply to water?

Starting with demand: Roughly 50 litres of water per person daily are needed for drinking, cooking and basic sanitation. After these are satisfied, there exist a myriad of ways to satisfy human demands. Take food, for example. The biggest water use in most countries is for irrigation, and a great deal of research has gone toward more efficient irrigation. Water soft paths would go further and investigate ways to grow food with rain-fed techniques, or to shift the regional economy away from agriculture altogether or, better yet, to encourage a shift away from diets heavy in meat. (It takes 1,000 times more water to get a kilogram of meat than a kilogram of wheat.)

Matching quality: The need to conserve quality is just as important for water as for energy, but more complex to apply. Energy quality can be uniquely defined with physical principles, but water quality has many dimensions and their importance varies by end use. (Muddy water may ruin the fishing but not bother the fish; water with lots of organic content may be bad for drinking but ideal for irrigation.) Still, it remains true that high-quality water can be used for many purposes, but low-quality water for only a few, and that fortunately we need only small quantities of potable (high-quality) water, but vast amounts of irrigation and cooling (low-quality) water.

Backcasting: The third principle can be illustrated by the World Water Vision, which was released at the World Water Forum in The Hague in March 2000. The Vision is based on three scenarios:

"Business-as-Usual" represents the scenario if policy makers ignore the crisis and fail to promote major changes.

"Economics, Technology and Private Sector" is a scenario that depends upon market-oriented policies and wide adoption of cost-effective technological solutions.

"Values and Lifestyles" is a true backcasting scenario that indicates what could be achieved through changes in lifestyles and behaviour, greater international cooperation, and emphasis on education and international mechanism for sharing and dispute resolution.

Despite rather different methodologies, the "values and lifestyles" scenario and water soft path analysis come to remarkably similar conclusions. The resulting policies extend to efforts to change individual human behaviour, on the one hand, and to refocus the type and scale of societal development, on the other. Ultimately, they seem to be the only ways to assure sustainable use of water resources and create real opportunities to share water equitably among and within nations.

It is time that we applied soft path analysis to water. Just as soft energy path analysis was designed to create a decentralized, democratic and non-nuclear energy future, so could water soft paths demonstrate the feasibility of decentralized, democratic and non-dammed water futures. Once one looks at water scarcity through soft path glasses, measurement problems and possible interpretations multiply, but so too do opportunities for alternative forms of public policy.

The United Nations and its specialized agencies face unparalleled challenges in securing adequate quantities of fresh water for a growing world population. Happily, they also have unparalleled opportunities. However much efficiency of water use is increased, water management should also be designed to achieve greater equity in water use and more democracy in water decisions. Only water soft paths, or the "values and lifestyle" scenario, are able to accomplish these goals.

Notes

The IFPRI study is most accessible as a 26-page report: Mark W. Rosegrant, Ximing Cai and Sarah A. Cline, Global Water Outlook to 2025: Averting an Impending Crisis (Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, 2002). Amory Lovins' work on energy is fully developed in his 1977 book: Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger/Friends of the Earth).

Material on water soft paths can be found in the article by Gary Wolff and Peter Gleick in the 2002 edition: The World's Water: 2002-2003: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources (Washington, DC: Island Press). A short summary appears in an article by Gleick: Soft Water Paths, Nature, 418, 25 July 2002. Less easily accessible but more closely linked to energy soft paths is my article, Planning for a Different Future: Soft Water Paths, in Marwan Haddad and Eran Feitelson (eds.), Joint Management of Shared Aquifers: The Second Workshop (Jerusalem: Truman Research Institute of Hebrew University, and East Jerusalem: Palestine Consultancy Group, 1994).

The World Water Vision is described by Frank R. Rijsberman and William J. Cosgrove in World Water Vision: Making Water Everybody's Business (London: Earthscan Publications, 2000). The scenarios are described by Gilberto C. Gallopin and Frank Rijsberman, Three Global Water Scenarios, Water Resources Journal, 211, 1-14 (2000). Factor-10 gains in energy efficiency are described in Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1999).

Biography

David B. Brooks is Director of Research for Friends of the Earth-Canada (part-time) and an economist who recently retired after 14 years with the International Development Research Centre. He was founding Director of Canada's Office of Energy Conservation and Director of the Ottawa Office of Energy Probe. Mr. Brooks was elected to The International Water Academy, based in Oslo, Norway.

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