By Aromar Revi
It’s taken the world over four decades to come together and discuss water again. Forty-six years after the first global meet on water at Mar del Plata in 1977, a UN water conference was held in New York last week. The key goals of the 1977 conference—providing adequate and good quality water to meet all socio-economic needs and avoiding global water crisis by 2000—have stayed out of our grasp. Around 2 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water and around 3.6 billion lack access to improved sanitation.
For the first time in history, our collective actions and mismanagement have pushed the global hydrological cycle out of balance. We are altering the source of all freshwater—precipitation. We have also breached safe limits of blue water consumption by drawing too much and polluting surface water in rivers and lakes and via unsustainable groundwater depletion.
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We may now face a 40% shortfall in global freshwater supply by 2030. Business-as-usual will push another 1.3 billion people into food insecurity due to heat stress, water scarcity, and loss of ecosystems by 2050. Under two different climate change projections due to blue water and heat stress, India’s food supply is projected to decrease by 7-16%, and people affected by food insecurity could increase by 34-51% by 2050.
The growing global water crisis is systemic. It is also dangerously intertwined with climate change and biodiversity loss. The many direct and indirect impacts of the water crisis—from water scarcity, floods and pollution to increased hunger, food inflation, poor health, economic and livelihood losses, displacement, and conflicts—threaten to derail every Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) and the goals of the Paris climate agreement. It is time to pivot and make a transformational change in the way we value, govern and interact with the global water cycle.
Conventional economics and governance of water has failed to deal with the crisis so far. One of the major reasons for this is that decisionmakers have not considered the water cycle in its entirety—to see how water is embedded in the biosphere and connects across sectors and the 17 SDGs. That water cycle interlinks the economy, livelihoods and trade, and is a critical input for food, energy, and industry.
We have also failed to account for the different colours of water—blue (white, grey, black) and green (soil moisture, flowing as evaporation and transpiration in plants)—and non-market values of water (ecological and socio-cultural). For instance, blue water use for intensive crops like paddy and sugarcane is prioritised even in water stressed regions based solely on its market value at the cost of ecological degradation and depletion of water tables. Thus, our responses to systemic challenges of too much, too little, and too dirty water have been short-sighted. A sustainable future rests on us reimagining the economics and governance of water through a new framework in which water is an organising principle and driver of just economic, social, and environmental change. We can address the crisis by valuing and governing the global water cycle as a global common good by protecting it collectively and restoring its balance.
Shaping our economics and governance around common goods approach calls for an overhaul of our pricing, financing, accounting of water; framing of our regulatory, policy frameworks, and multilateral agreements; and structuring our investments, institutional capacities, and partnerships. Clear goals can mobilise collective action across nations and help underpin a new social contract between governments, citizens, youth, and businesses to achieve the aim of water as a global common good.
The Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW) proposes ten transformational goals across three broad clusters, all centered around water, to enable system transitions to accelerate the 2030 development goals, climate action agenda, and biodiversity conservation. These clusters include economic and social systems; natural systems and cross-cutting missions focused on financing and institutional capacity; and innovation and technology transfer.
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For instance, within the economic and social systems, the food systems transition can lead us to safe, sustainable nutrition for all by 2050. This is enabled through reforms including timely access to adequate and affordable water, climate smart agriculture, resilient water-food-energy trade policy, water consumption limits incentivising increased agriculture productivity, bio diversity conservation, appropriate diets, and so on. This transition can help us meet SDG 1 (ending hunger), SDG 2 (ending poverty), SDG 6 (access to clean water and sanitation), SDG13 (climate action), and SDG 15 (protecting life on land). A sustainable cities transition can help us achieve safe and climate resilient cities through universal access to affordable water, sanitation, hygiene; recycling and reusing blue, grey, and black water; and climate adaptation by integrating green and blue water infrastructure. This is no easy task, and yet, the challenges of the Anthropocene leave us with no choice but to make transformational changes. The shift to a safe and just 2050 for human wellbeing and ecosystem health must begin today.
(Based on The What, Why and How of the World Water Crisis: Global Commission on the Economics of Water Phase I Review and Findings, published on March 16, 2023)
The writer is director, Indian Institute for Human Settlements