As IIASA Director and Chief Executive Officer Professor Dr. Pavel Kabat told Nature this winter: “Actually, water is much more valuable than oil. There are alternatives to oil, but there are no alternatives to water.”
“If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water—unless we change our approach to managing this precious and vital resource,” said Ismail Serageldin, then Vice President of the World Bank, in 1995.
Since then water has climbed the global agenda, with the creation of global bodies such as the World Water Council and Global Water Partnership, the World Commission on Water, and the Water Vision Scenarios.
But water experts say much more needs to be done.
On 4–5 February 2012, a diverse group of high-level representatives from all stakeholder groups gathered at IIASA to discuss a new initiative which aims to produce a systematic worldwide analysis of water issues. The Water Futures and Solutions: World Water Scenarios initiative will forge a broad institutional partnership bringing together the scientific community, governments, decision makers, as well as civil society, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector. Started by a partnership of IIASA, UNESCO, the Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs of the Republic of Korea, the World Water Council, and the International Water Association, the initiative will test a range of solutions against scenarios for socio-economic change, and bring together decision makers to discuss a common vision for the future of water on our planet.
Water is a resource at the epicenter of sustainable development and peace and is vital for life, human health, food and nutrition, energy, biodiversity, and ecosystems. It has social, cultural, economic and environmental values that are interconnected and mutually supportive, especially in the quest for building sustainable green societies.
“Currently approximately 3 billion people live without water at home or in their vicinity; 4 billion lack continuous access to water, 4.5 billion have no sewage system, and 5.5 billion have no water treatment,” says Glen Daigger, president of the International Water Association. With world population expected to reach 9 billion in 2050, demand for water will dramatically increase. Population growth is just one of many factors that will influence water needs; climate change and erratic weather events, including floods, droughts, and storms all add to the vulnerability and uncertainty of global water resources.
Current projections say that by 2025 an estimated 60 percent of world population will live in water stressed conditions and a similar proportion will be without adequate sanitation. Water scarcity is closely associated with poverty, food and security and malnutrition.
“One of the big things that is needed in water research is a greater integration of the social sciences with the physical sciences and hydrological sciences, in particular I think we need to have a much better handle on the economic costs and benefits of different courses of action,” says Anthony Cox, head of Economy and Environment Integration Division of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Fritz Holzwarth, federal minister for the environment, nature conservation and nuclear safety of Germany, says, “I think that the Water Scenarios and Water Futures initiative could become a real basis for the next 10–15 years in water because the scenario approach would overcome the very traditional and classical approach which follows a business as usual line. Water scenarios are able to set new options, new possibilities, new foundations also for political decisions, and they can also review the business as usual approach. However, it is very important to make clear that the business as usual approach is not valid any longer.”
Managing water resources both at the national and international levels has grown more complex because of the unique physical, geographic, and political characteristics of water. Water affects the entire spectrum of socio?economic development.
“There is an urgent need to develop appropriate water management frameworks, infrastructure, and knowledge sharing that works for sound and sustainable corporation between people whose lives depend upon shared water resources,” says UNESCO’s Hans D’Orville. “The provision and sharing of data and information
as well as the support for water resource assessment frameworks at global, regional, national and basin scales are essential elements for sound water resources management.”
In addition to the consensus among participants during the launch meeting that the project was important there was also strong interest in participation and agreement on steps moving forward. The initial governing board met prior to the kick?off meeting of the 7th World Water Forum in May, and the board will be established by the Budapest World Water Summit in October. The initiative will include two stakeholder groups to ensure the usefulness and feasibility of the process and outcomes; The Scenario Focus Group and the Sector Actors group, who will hold their first meetings in June.
A full report of the meeting is now available.
“Why are World Water Scenarios important?”
Click the button below to read what people are saying about the World Water Scenarios initiative.
Anthony Cox, OECD: "One of the big things that is needed in water research is a greater integration of the social sciences with the physical sciences and hydrological sciences, in particular I think we need to have a much better handle on the economic costs and benefits of different courses of action. Last year the OECD published our outlook for water to 2050 and we are looking to build on that, and in particular looking at how we can better integrate water into our economic models. Being part of the Water futures and solutions initiative will give us good access into the expertise that this initiative is gathering. I hope that we can make a contribution as well as gaining from the insights and expertise the initiative has bought together."
Elisabeth Kruegar, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ): "The World Water Scenarios Initiative can help raise awareness about where our behavior is leading to, and can also help to compare trends and different aspects of global change, like the drivers that they identified have an effect on water, and also how water has an effect on the drivers, the feedback between both the drivers and impacts are important. Water research needs to get down to the management scale; for basic research that means they need to scale up and for global research that means they need to scale down, because we need to get to a scale where things are relevant to people and to management – the regional, national and global scenarios of this initiative will help with this if they concentrate on not just sticking to the global scale, but really getting down to the people."
Flavia Nabugere, Minister for the Environment, Uganda: "There is currently an information gap between water distribution and water resource protection. The World Water Scenarios Initiative is very relevant given the fact that people are preoccupied with distributing water and making sure people have access to water and they are not paying attention to whether the water resources will be available in the future for distribution. The mindset of those who are charged with making water available for the population also has to be adjusted to accommodate environmental conservation, ecosystem protection etc. This initiative will go a long way to influence policy makers but we also need to think about whether it will have inroads in the mindsets of the grass root communities, what is it that the grass root communities are used to experiencing and what new features will be introduced, and will they be acceptable. As a minister and policy maker and also an environmental researcher I have links with both the government and the grass root community."
Fritz Holzwarth, Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety of Germany: "Water research is a very complex situation, and we have to distinguish between the part of research that has to be done to formulate and improve the fundamentals of water in the whole system. The other part is how can we focus more water research on the adaptive parts of what we need, in certain areas we need very practical advice from the water research side so that we are able to operationalize things and to be able to implement various measures in the water field so there has to be a balance.
The third thing that I think has to change in water research is the communication from research and science to policy, researchers are used to speaking in their own language and do not realize that water research is area that can influence the priority setting of politics.
So it is a kind of adjustment in the fundamentals of water, it is a question that water research understands that there are a lot of very practical and operational requirements and last but not least the way how to communicate and ensure that a proper science policy interface is possible.
I think that the Water Scenarios and Water Futures initiative could become a real basis for the next 10-15 years in water because the scenario approach in water would overcome the very traditional and classical approach which follows a business as usual line. Water scenarios are able to set new options, new possibilities, new foundations also for political decisions and - they can also review the business as usual approach but it is very important to make clear that the business as usual approach is not valid any longer. To formulate the consequences, the impacts and the financial implications if we follow the simple business as usual approach, it means very simply to connect water with water related sectors’, so if we had less water or no water, we would have no food, we would have no energy, and this is not only in the case of hydropower, it is also relevant to very traditional power generation where water is required for cooling and so on, so these inter-linkages should be made more obvious with this scenario approach."
Ismail Serageldin, Bibliotheca Alexandria (BA): "Water research has tended to be highly segmented, there are people doing water research on agriculture, municipal, industrial or energy and we are not integrating enough water quality and quantity issues and the uncertainties that are increasingly associated with such issues such as climate change, shifting of the rainfall patterns, increasing atmospheric events such as storms, or the rise of sea levels. We need a broader perspective that pulls all of those pieces together, brings all these sectors into one perspective together because at the end of the day we are talking about water.
I think that this initiative is trying to fill that gap and it has to take a long term perspective as well as give us some benchmarks as we go along that we keep looking at and hopefully it will be able to look at the drivers that impact on the scenarios and give us some prioritization of the actions required. My organization is involved in both research and outreach and I think the material from this project will be extremely useful for Egypt - for a country that has been considered the gift of the Nile and very much dependent on the issue of water and we are likely to suffer some serious negative impacts from the rise of sea levels, of water intrusion, impact on food security etc and at a time when we are the number one world importer of wheat. So it is an enormously important thing in terms of what happens to our agriculture and that is of course very dependent on water and water management and how we do it in the future."
Jack Moss, Aqua Fed: "We all know how complicated water is, and it is complicated, because of the multitude of different stakeholders in our own cells when we regard water, so the complexity is in the relationships and not the water itself, and of course managing relationships is the most complicated things that we can imagine to do. If the World Water Scenarios Initiative can help to enlighten a few of the complexities of those relationships it will be a big help, I am also quite intrigued about the approach using systems thinking."
Julia Bucknall, The World Bank: "There needs to be more water research, and there needs to be more that we can use to explain to people who don’t know about water what it means. I would like to be able to tell the president of the World Bank or the president of a country how much it matters that we are not managing water properly and we at the moment can’t really do that. We are beginning to be able to, but only for certain parts of the problem. For hydrology we don’t have the science, and we want to be able to say how much it matters at a scale at which the decision makers take the decisions, whether it’s a city or a country or something global.
This initiative is different because I think there is an effort to find out what the stakeholders want, and the partners are investing in process, the process of the dissemination and the process of turning a book into something that we know about and can be used."
