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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.

The next afternoon, I duly pop in after another fantastic day riding Squaw. Wow. His photos are incredible and I wander around open-mouthed at his images and how they’re presented – bonded straight onto a high-quality perspex that gives them an incredible pop. ‘High Definition for photos’ is how he describes it. Over the course of our chat, I reveal that I enjoy a bit of photography too and he asks me the question that has prompted this blog – ‘what subject do you shoot?’.

I stumbled over some incoherent answer and have been thinking about it ever since. What do I shoot? Well I guess it’s what I see, which is often travel-related, but sometimes landscapes, sometimes abstracts, sometimes black and white, light/form. Hmm. I have tried to define my approach before, but somehow felt that I haven’t really got it straight yet. I like the element of chance, uncertainty and spontaneity and I’d love to be a street photographer (particularly after watching a clip about the rediscovery of Vivian Maier’s work), but I feel uncomfortable literally taking someone’s picture. It feels invasive. So instead I try to be present, to pick out little details, things that speak to me about a place and time. So does that make me a sort of inanimate street photographer? Or documentary self-portrait? I dunno really and I guess it doesn’t matter, but I’d like to be able to answer that question in a more self-assured way next time.

Returning to San Francisco, the only natural thing to do was to take my camera out and go and take some photos. See what you think.

According to Wikipedia:

The coffee production in Ethiopia is critical to the Ethiopian economy with about 25% of the population depending directly or indirectly on coffee for its livelihood. In 2006 coffee exports accounted some $350 million, equivalent to 34% of that year’s total exports…
Ethiopia is the world’s 7th largest producer of coffee, and Africa’s top producer, with 260,000 metric tonnes in 2006

And I’ve just come back from San Francisco, where you can’t walk more than 10 metres without a coffee shop of some sort. The US consumes more than 400 million cups per day – around 4.2kg per capita per year or 1,290,720 metric tonnes per year in total.

Ethiopians (or more precisely the Oromo) argue strenuously that they were the first to discover coffee, so I thought I’d buy some beans while I was there. One of our local WaterAid staff took me to a supermarket and proudly showed me the shelves of ground coffee – wanting to be a bit more authentic, I asked him if I could get some beans. He was a bit confused, and after a while responded with “ah, yes, raw coffee” and hustled me back into the car. After driving around for a while, he abruptly stopped outside a tiny shack and shouted over at the man behind a set of rusty scales. A brief haggling exchange resulted in a 500g bag of beans for about £3. Great! Except for the teeny tiny fact that they were green, unroasted beans. Too embarrassed and guilty to reject them, I sheepishly paid and smiled gratefully wondering what the hell to do with them.

Returning home, a quick Google search turned up lots of home-roasting pages. Turns out there’s quite an industry in it. Always game for a from-first-principles product, I gave it a crack. Dispensing with the technology (roasters, temperature gauges, roasting profiles, etc) that is apparently vital to a good roast, I whipped out my faithful wok. I’m pretty sure Ethiopians don’t need all that gubbins. Here’s how it went:

I love trees

Cruising out of the city on the Interstate 80, rain lashing down, which means snow in the mountains! Epic drive, with 100 mph winds and driving snow over the donner pass. A 3 hour trip end up taking more like 5, plus breaks to calm my rattled nerves and fire up my caffeine levels. Eventually roll into Squaw at 1am, crawl into the back of the van and fall asleep.

Next morning I’m woken by the sounds of ski patrol blasting avalanches with dynamite at around 6. Excitedly chucking on my snow gear, I throw back the door.

Well, I try to.

In just a few hours the snow has reached door level on the van and I’m stuck! My genius, free spirited car danchi adventure hadn’t factored in the reality of several feet of snow in a few hours. Fortunately the sliding door opens and I shovel my way out. After a bit of cursing and digging, I eventually free the car and drive round the corner to the lifts… which are pretty much all shut. 82 inches of snow in two days with strong winds has totally overwhelmed the staff and hiked up the avalanche risk astronomically. Turns out the I80 has been shut and I has missed the Caltrans advice not to travel. Oops. So now I’m stuck in Squaw no way in or out until the winds stop. Ordinarily this might be cause for concern, but I have time on my side.

Fortunately some of the lower lifts open a few hours later and I eagerly scramble onto one, unload, strap in and hungrily eat up the thigh deep powder. Now riding powder is one of those things where if you have to ask why it’s so great, you wouldn’t understand! Slashing through a turn, a perfect arc of snow cascading behind you like magic sparkles; punching through pillows, your snow covered face cackling insanely; looking down, trying to remember what your knees look like. Trust me, it’s good!

Such brings me to now, beer in hand, exhausted, happy, a little lonely without my friends and M, but full of the beauty of life, perfectly encapsulated by tiny little unique crystals of water falling freely from the heavens.

Brixton reflection

Brixton underground station, London.
This is the wonderful part of South London that I am proud to call home. It’s the morning rush hour and a torrent of humanity pours through the mass of morning activity – market traders setting up for the day, incense sellers outside Iceland and fluorescent jacketed newspaper distributors. It snakes along Brixton High Street, flowing into the great yawning mouth of the station.

Nestled at the end of the Victoria underground line, Brixton enjoys the luxury of always having at least one train waiting at the bottom of the grubby escalator that looks permanently in a state of repair. People rush through, grabbing a ubiquitous free paper, shaking off leaflet touts and queuing like sheep to beep their Oyster cards against the yellow pad, awaiting their judgement. Occasionally some poor soul drops their pass or has run out of credit causing an almost irrevocable blockage. Smartly suited men and power dressing women mutter angrily or tut loudly – such is their thirst to get to work. The whole scene is offset by the tranquil overtones of Bach or Vivaldi, soothing frayed tempers and zombie sheep.

After the commuter equivalent of a waterfall, the survivors scurry down the escalator pausing only to examine both trains and decide which is leaving first. Looks like left wins today. Reaching the bottom, I turn right.

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…