Global heating is making complex Earth systems behave in odd ways as they start to wobble towards complete breakdown. Some involve a clear direction of change, including rising sea-levels that expose coastal lands and island aquifers to salt intrusion, and multi-year droughts that reveal the long-term desiccation of whole territories and sub-continents. Others are turbulent and inflict chaotic impacts in the form of killing heat-waves, wild-fires, disease outbreaks, floods and the increasingly savage storms that slam into unprotected coastlines. They all feed off each other and also from the degradation of coastal and catchment ecosystems that should be helping to protect human settlements, but have been damaged and are no longer able to.
These calamities are linked directly or indirectly to water: too much too quickly, or too little too late, or water with salts or poisons or germs in it. Why this matters is that all life on Earth has always depended on water, and it is an essential part of all ecosystems. The adequate supply of clean, fresh water is very much a human need as well, and one that is becoming increasingly hard to meet in many places. This has many dimensions. As one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 6), the United Nations focus tends to be on ensuring access to water and keeping it clean, with an emphasis on reliable piped services and systems for keeping disease out of the pipes. But ecologists tend to focus on where the water comes from in the first place, how it is kept clean, fresh and arriving at adequate but not excessive rates of flow, and where human wastes go to, how they are processed by ecosystems, and what happens next.
From this more ecological point of view, we ask about where, how often and how hard the rain falls, how do the soils and vegetation of the catchment react to being hit by raindrops, how well does the water soak into the ground, and where does it flow to and through what? These questions are important, considering that a tropical storm can have the energy of a hydrogen bomb, that water can easily strip away unprotected topsoil and even pull rocks apart, and that it can dissolve and pick up many things that we would rather not drink. As well as climate change, which tends to make the rain fall harder when it falls at all, our chief preoccupation is often to do with the health of plant root systems that protect the soil and allow water to soak in rather than run off. So we worry about vegetation cover in the catchment: who controls, uses and protects it, and why should they manage it properly? If the people who depend on the water flowing off it don’t control it, how can they persuade the people in charge to protect it?
These practical questions go right to the heart of water security, which is among the most important issues in a water-stressed and changing world. They imply that there must be some kind of shared governance between catchment and downstream water users. This is why ‘payment for ecosystem services’ arrangements are such an important tool, in which water users pay catchment managers for protective services. These deals can be very effective, especially when local governments facilitate them and use water taxes to pay for them, but there is always a reluctance to pay for water, and often a temptation to privatise the water supply which can fatally change its ecological logic.
In many cases catchments and rivers are shared between countries, making water diplomacy a vital skill. But can be hard going if legacies of distrust or conflicting water interests are involved. The Swiss government’s ‘Blue Peace’ diplomatic initiative aims to help countries overcome such difficulties in Central Asia, the Middle East, West Africa and also in global forums. It promotes water cooperation across borders, sectors and generations, enhancing dialogue, using technical exchanges to leverage high-level discussion, and building capacity in the long-term. This is ambitious and demanding, but as global problems escalate Blue Peace may be one of the best models we have for dealing with life-threatening complexity at extreme scales.
Ecological insight can help people find practical ways to safeguard their water security. Our needs for water are met in the context of rainfall that flows through catchment, river, aquifer, farm, urban, wetland and marine ecosystems. The whole sequence must be understood and managed sustainably if water security is to be obtained anywhere. But these flows and ecosystems are often under different managers or jurisdictions, requiring co-management to be negotiated and agreed. The nexus of ecology, governance and diplomacy is thus where the keys to success in sustainable water resources management usually lie. This raises the stakes for any water and sanitation project, and those stakes are also becoming higher as climate change alters the ecological context for all efforts, decisions and negotiations. The implications of all this are worth considering on this World Water Day of 2023.
© Julian Caldecott