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February 10, 2014

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Home » Opinion » Foreign Views

Global water supply crisis poses enormous challenges

By Giulio Boccaletti | February 10, 2014, Monday | Print Edition

SINCE 2000, when the UN Millennium Development Goals were adopted, the global community has rightly focused  attention on providing access to basic water and sanitation services.

From 1990 to 2010, more than 2 billion people gained access to improved water sources. As the UN prepares to adopt so-called Sustainable Development Goals as the post-2015 successor to the millenium goals, the high-stakes business of large-scale water infrastructure should be placed front and center.

The conventional wisdom has been that improved access to water depends on digging wells, adopting community-based solutions, and focusing aid programs on reaching more people.

But these measures are only one part of a larger — and more capital-intensive — strategy.

According to a recent report by UNICEF and the World Health Organization on their joint monitoring program for water supply and sanitation, more than 1.2 billion of those who gained access to water from 1990 to 2008 had it piped to their premises.

This number dwarfs the impact of the “small-scale” sources — from dug wells to rainwater harvesting — that many believe have done the most to solve the problem.

In fact, the number of those who gained access to water was higher in the decade preceding adoption of the millenium goals.

India and China accounted for the vast majority of those gains, as both countries enjoyed rapid economic growth in the 1990s and were able to lift large numbers of people out of poverty.

As these examples suggest, countries have been most successful at delivering water services when they can rely on their own economic growth to bridge the gap in water-infrastructure costs. But the gap is widening. The 2013 World Economic Forum Global Risks report identified “water supply crises” as the biggest “societal risk” to global prosperity.

According to some estimates, meeting the needs of a growing global economy will require the world to begin devoting at least US$1 trillion annually to water infrastructure within the next 20 years — roughly double the level of annual spending today.

New thinking

Addressing this development challenge will require new thinking, innovation, and action in areas such as sustainable hydropower, efficient agriculture, and access to safe drinking water for cities.

The first step should be ensuring that the natural infrastructure — the rivers, aquifers, and wetlands that determine the quantity, reliability, and quality of our water — can continue to function. In many cases, this is by far the most cost-effective option to ensure long-term water sustainability.

Several countries — from Colombia and Mexico to China and the United States — have begun investing along these lines. They are showing that we can improve outcomes by planning our engineered infrastructure in a way that is compatible with the survival and health of river basins and watersheds.

Of course, even if only 10 percent of total investment in water resources were committed to cost-effective natural infrastructure — the same proportion that, for example, New York City devotes to protecting its own natural infrastructure, the reservoirs of the Catskills — we would still need to find about US$100 billion per year.

Sufficient capital

The key to scaling up investment in natural infrastructure will be to ensure that at every successive stage of growth, there is a sufficient amount of capital available to support the risks involved.

Achieving this goal will require the right blend of public, private, and philanthropic capital.

While small-scale solutions, such as dug wells, will remain an important part of efforts to ensure water security, a truly sustainable water-management path will require hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure investment.

Giulio Boccaletti is managing director for global water at The Nature Conservancy. Copyright: Project Syndicate 1995-2014. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.

 

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