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The world is in the midst of a water crisis. The typical story is that fresh water supplies are running out and that we are bleeding the earth dry.

Water, one of the fundamentals for all life, is getting scarcer so we need to value it more and manage the fresh water resources to ensure that they don’t run out. But the real story goes deeper than that.

There is solid evidence behind concerns over scarcity. The 2030 Water Resources Group suggests the world will face a 40 percent global shortfall between forecast demand and available supply by 2030, and that by then more than a third of the global population will be living in river basins coping with significant water stress.

The negative effects of this water stress can be felt across the world’s ecosystems as rivers silt up, habitats are destroyed and people struggle to farm and grow crops.

Lack of water has a huge impact on food security, and in extreme cases such as we’re currently seeing in the Horn of Africa, a water stressed area can be easily pushed into famine.

This growing scarcity, worsened by demand growth and climate change, means that we need to work out how to fairly share a finite resource as well as how to use water that we have more effectively.

But that is only one part of the crisis – the scarcity challenge is intertwined with a second, less-acknowledged dimension of the global water crisis – the “challenge of access”.

Some 884 million people don’t have access to safe drinking water, for them this is a crisis happening right  now – preventable diarrhoea kills more children in sub-Saharan Africa than AIDS, malaria and measles combined.

This puts a huge disease burden on the health systems in developing countries and holds back overall economic development.

If we are to really tackle the global water crisis, we must realise that scarcity and lack of access are intimately linked. Fairly sharing a finite resource cannot happen without universal access; and universal access is threatened by physical limits to the resource and political attention being diverted by more visible issues.

Solving these interlocking challenges is deeply linked to addressing other major issues, including energy, food and climate change.
Water worlds

Water is used in a wide range of ways, so water means different things to different people – and water issues are talked about separately depending on the context. I have loosely characterised these “water worlds” below:

•    Water stewardship – Focus on management of water resources and ecosystems. Key issues include: efficiency of use; cost-recovery; management and distribution.
•    Water and sanitation poverty – Focus on access to improved water sources by the most marginalised of society. Key issues include: addressing political and power dynamics of access.
In addition, these “worlds” interact with others
•    Food Security – predominantly concerned with agricultural supply, price dynamics, and production efficiency.
•    Millennium Development Goals – particularly nutrition (MDG 1, 4, 5, 6), but also maternal health (MDG 5), child mortality (MDG 4), education (MDG 2) and gender equality (MDG 3).
•    Climate change – the common narrative is that climate change is all about water – too much, too little, the wrong type. This is true for surface water, but much more complicated for groundwater.

Pooling the waters

Tackling the global water crisis means that these ‘water worlds’ need to be linked. Yet, to date the growing number of water security initiatives fails to take into account the human dimension of exclusion. For example, the 2030 Water Resources Group’s ‘Charting our Water Future’ breaks new ground in finding practical ways of meeting growing demand, but is largely irrelevant in the context of the least developed countries, with no mention of access or the debilitating impact of WASH poverty on economies. If decision makers around the world really want to tackle the world’s water crisis, then they need to take action to address both scarcity and access.
Experts from around the world will meet next week in Stockholm – if they can step outside their boundaries and work together with others, it’ll go a long way to turn this crisis into a real opportunity to show how economy, environment and development can be addressed together to unlock green growth.

Zzzzzz...

“Why not?!” I hear you cry. I work on climate change, I’ve been to previous COPs, I know the players, I know the politics. It is precisely because of this that I’ve chosen not to go.

Firstly, the political reality is that Cancun is about two things: mitigation (developed and developing country and MRV, or trust and transparency as normal people would say) and finance (agreeing how to set up a new global fund; and where the money will come from). In short this is about getting the main political agreements from the Copenhagen Accord formally into the UN system.

It’s no secret that there are certain countries that do not want a deal. Often they will manipulate and at time bully others into adopting a line that blocks progress, even if it is against their own interest. The key to an international deal is to break this negative dynamic. As Wangari Maathai sets out, it’s about rebuilding trust in each other and the UN system. As powerful and almighty as I am (*cough, cough*), I’m afraid I can’t really change that.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to go. It’s exciting and buzzy to be there amongst a great community of people – many of whom are my friends. It’s great for networking and building knowledge. But for actually influencing the negotiations, for all the sound and fury, there is very little that signifies anything – to borrow an in-joke, it’s not a Party-driven process, it’s a process-driven party. Having been part of the one of the key Party delegations, I’ve seen how much the outcomes are dictated by broader politics.

So should we abandon hope? No. There is much work to be done – but at a national level. For example, the UK is passing a raft of funding decisions about mitigation, that most climate NGOs are not engaged in. And Bangladesh, Niger and Tajikistan have just received $280m between them to become more climate resilient (by the way, that’s real money, not just pledges – and it’s already leveraged several hundred million more from development banks) and could genuinely help people cope with climate change. The best way to help the international negotiations is not to be there, but to focus on changing national politics and policies around the world, particularly in laggards (no names mentioned!). It’s about demonstrating that low carbon development doesn’t have to mean poor economic performance, in fact, low carbon development can mean riding new markets and investment now saves money – and that some developing countries have a competitive advantage in these fields.

Finally, I chose to leave the negotiations world because even if we stopped all our emissions now, we would still be locked into a certain amount of change. This will impact on the poorest and most vulnerable (incidentally, this is one key issue to watch out for – how do you define vulnerability. G77 will tie themselves in knots over this). I believe that we will find ways to adapt, but it will not necessarily be done equitably. We have a responsibility to work with governments to ensure that the needs of the most vulnerable are addressed. This happens at a national level, not in the halls of the UNFCCC. In some countries this will be highly political and will mean tackling established power relationships – it will not be easy and will demand struggle.

The political and financial attention given to climate change gives us a unique window of opportunity. If we can use climate change to find ways to reduce vulnerability, both concrete on-the-ground interventions and through systemic interventions around governance and power, then we will go some way to address the power inbalances and politics that are at the heart of development and equality.

So instead I will be in Burkina Faso, working with local partners and government to understand how to help local communities manage their water more equitably and sustainably so that they can cope with changes in climate. We don’t have all the answers, but we also don’t have the time to sit around and figure it all out. Therefore we need to find a balance between trying things and developing building blocks – learning-by-doing if you like. In time we will be able to build this knowledge and in turn feed it back into the negotiations.

I don’t pretend that what I’m doing is any more effective than being in Cancun, but if we really want to make a difference to people’s lives, we must look inwards and question what will really drive change and where each of us fits. That’s the change in climate that I want to see.

Well, I’m about to head off on another set of journeys. This time it’s work related. After a short trip to Brussels to take part in the Alliance for Water Stewardship Roundtable, I’ll be heading off to Nigeria for a regional team strategy meeting, supporting their advocacy work. I’m part of WaterAid’s West Africa regional team, one of our regions consisting of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Niger and Nigeria. There’s plenty I could tell you about each of the countries, but here are some snippets:

• The Sahel region includes part of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria. Traditionally, most of the people in the Sahel have been semi-nomadic, grazing livestock in the North during the wet season and migrating south during the dry period. Remember that Barclaycard advert with Rowan Atkinson walking off with a burning carpet saying ‘smell those Touareg campfires’?
• Niger is roughly 2/3 desert and is currently in the grip of a major food crisis. Every year, the country faces food shortages with a ‘hungry season’ from May to July, but this year it started in February. It is the lowest ranked country in the UN’s Human Development Report 2009. WaterAid has just started working in Niger.
• WaterAid has also just started working in the conflict-affected countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia, as a joint programme run from Monrovia.
• Nigeria are playing South Korea in the World Cup while I’m there . Go Super Eagles!

After that, I’m heading straight from Abuja through to Bangladesh (well, as straight as the ridiculous aviation industry will allow), where I’ll be for 3 weeks to work with WaterAid Bangladesh on climate change and disaster risk reduction, a combination of some field visits and advocacy work. Bangladesh suffers floods annually – largely due to increases on rain upstream rather than sea level rises (although storm surges from cyclones drive some floods). Flood season is June to September, during the monsoon. Other water related issues that Bangladesh face include arsenic contamination of wells, and salt-water contamination along the coast, driven by over-use of groundwater.

On the sanitation front, WaterAid’s partner, Village Education Resource Centre (VERC) successfully developed the Community Led Total Sanitation (unfortunately abbreviated as CLTS) approach, where communities work to create ‘open defecation free’ villages through changing attitudes and behaviours rather than just building toilets for individual households.

So there we go, a small taste of what I’ll be doing over the next month and some of the challenges in the countries that we work. More to come…