In the backroom of the Barcelona round of negotiations leading up to Copenhagen, a small group convened to discuss the role of freshwater security in addressing climate change. It has been a difficult item to get on the agenda. International climate negotiations are packed with political interests vying for exposure and consideration, and water is as politically sensitive a topic as any. But it is also one of the most important, and linking the two issues is a necessary next step.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/suburbanbloke/

Water strikes a chord with us. More so than global warming and climate change, water security is a conceptually more tangible and alarming challenge to the vast majority of people around the planet. It is immediate. It is health and sanitation, food security, and living with floods and drought. When water is compromised the consequences are far reaching. Whether supplying water for agricultural, industrial, or energy production, balancing rural and urban water demand, transporting and treating supplies, or ensuring water delivery to maintain healthy ecosystem functioning, without water, costs go up across the board.

Framing Water Security

How water security challenges manifest themselves in terms of human water needs range in scope and severity. Water security can be an issue of physical scarcity driven by climatic, geographical, or human consumption, or it can be economic, and a result of poor access to the freshwater resources that are available. Sometimes there is too little water (see drought), but other times, there is too much (see flooding). Hundreds of thousands around the world have died over the last 15 – 20 years as a result of floods, drought, and mudslides. More often than not, it is a quality issue caused by pollution and even natural sources of contamination. Indeed, more than a billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and even more are without basic sanitation. Across the globe, humans are withdrawing far more water than can be naturally replenished through the water cycle.

Many of these risks, much less the deaths they cause, are preventable. Environmental drivers do compromise our water security, but most challenges they create are compounded by human factors. Mismanagement and poor infrastructure (see institutional capacity) inhibits people and governments from addressing the problems in a manner that balances the hydrological and ecological constraints of natural water availability with human demand. This makes the sustainable use and management of freshwater resources an enormous priority, regardless of whether you factor climate change into the dynamic. As population continues to increase across the planet, water consumption will keep growing with it. An equal expansion of our freshwater supplies, however, will not accompany that growth.

Global Water Withdrawal and Consumption

The Water Data

Freshwater availability comes with a few huge caveats. While there is roughly 1.4 billion km3 of water on the planet, the vast majority, or 97.5%, is in the oceans in the form of salt water that is unfit for human consumption without first taking the salt out of it, a costly, environmentally intensive method called desalination.

Freshwater, the remaining 2.5%, is what humans (and other land based organisms) depend on for survival. Freshwater is not evenly distributed across the planet, it varies in both quantity and quality where it is found. Roughly 70% of freshwater is found in glaciers, snow, and ice, but most in areas largely inaccessible to the vast majority of us, like Antarctica and Greenland. Another 30% is groundwater – the greatest source of available freshwater for human consumption.

Source: UN Water

Only .3% of the freshwater on the planet, an estimated 105,000 km3, is the water that we find in rivers, streams and lakes. Combining these surface and groundwater sources, there is about 200,000 km3 of freshwater supplies available for human and ecosystem consumption. This is still less than 1% of all freshwater resources. Increases in melt flow and precipitation still need to be captured and stored – which is currently not the case in most places. Of concern is that groundwater supplies are not easily replenished, and if the hydrological cycle is disrupted enough, aquifers can be exhausted. Freshwater is finite, and with continued (see projected) global increases in population, hyper-water stress is likely in many regions.

Now, back to climate change

The overwhelming focus in addressing climate change and the build-up of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere has been on the energy implications. How our energy consumption and sources have driven the problem, what alternatives will best alleviate it, and how do we transition toward these alternatives in a cost-effective and sustainable manner. This is an essential and enormous part of the challenge – without an aggressive strategy to reduce GHG and transition toward a carbon-less economy, there is no seriousness to the effort and the task at hand.

But if transforming the dynamics of our energy supplies and consumption is the primary challenge of mitigating climate change, effectively managing our freshwater resources in a manner that balances both ecological and human needs is a principal challenge in efforts to adapt to climate change’s impacts. Water is the medium through which many of the consequences of climate change will be most acutely felt. Increasing variation in flood and drought cycles, changing precipitation patterns, more extreme weather events, vulnerability to sea level rise and saltwater intrusion, and of course vanquished glaciers, are the realities of a changing global climate (see IPCC Fourth Technical Assessment and the Technical Paper on Water and Climate Change here).

These changes will have dramatic impacts on livelihoods. The consequences will be greatest in the areas that are most vulnerable, many of which currently lack the resources to take steps toward climate resilience on their own. There is the prospect of mass migrations of people from regions where water resources are increasingly compromised to others where there is less stress. Asia is a case in point. The Himalayas provide freshwater resources for roughly a billion people – if these sources were to significantly retreat across the span of several decades, there could be dire repercussions. All these scenarios have very real costs and consequences – economic, environmental, and human.

Copenhagen and beyond

Which is why it makes sense to prioritize sustainable water resources management as a pillar of global adaptation efforts. More than ever, we have an opportunity to make water the priority it deserves to be. A first step would to more accurately assess the situation at hand. Water consumption data should be as good as energy data (water data is notoriously bad and highly variable across different regions). Groundwater resources need to be monitored much more carefully, and new techniques for conserving supplies deployed where they are needed. By focusing on the challenges of each respective region, and at a watershed and basin level, we can prioritize the sort of interventions and projects that will be necessary where they are needed most. Improving water storage and transportation infrastructure is only going to be more and more important as supplies decrease and demand continues to grow. At a micro level, enhancing community level programs to improve local water conditions can pay huge dividends, especially for the women and children who are most directly affected by water stress.

Adaptation should not be seen as just building sea walls, there is a whole suite of strategies that we need to consider and then deploy. Many of them are linked to water use. Evidence suggests that water stress is also more likely to facilitate transnational cooperation. And cooperation is the only way we are going to get anywhere these days.

Sources:

UN Water Statistics Division: http://www.unwater.org/statistics.html

UNEP Vital Water Statistics: http://www.unep.org/dewa/vitalwater/index.html

Circle of Blue Waternews: http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/

The Pacific Institute: http://www.pacinst.org/

IPCC: http://www.ipcc.ch/