Green Earth Africa

Let me introduce you to my friend – a professional schizophrenic – who manages conservation programmes at our local urban water utility.

She’s hardly alone in her mental instability or the predicament that caused it. Using her name would jeopardize her career. But based on 53,000 American water utilities, I estimate at least 100,000 people like her suffer from split personality in the U.S. alone. Her symptoms remain mild – a nervous twitch, sweaty palms and rolling eyes – but worsen as water scarcity puts competing stresses on her utility’s ageing system.

The roots of her disorder are simple. Nearly a decade ago she was hired, given a small staff, budget and discretionary funds to promote ambitious conservation programmes and rebates throughout the service area of her water utility. It was the ideal job to match her ideals, a rare opportunity that pays you to do what you love. But there was, alas, a deep and hidden problem, which gave rise to psychological complications.

Perverse priorities

It soon became clear that, the more she succeeded at a noble cause while saving nature, the more she would wreak havoc on her institution’s foundation, destroy the revenue base of operations, and force herself and her team out on the streets and into the welfare lines. Conversely, if she utterly failed at her job, and proved hopelessly incompetent at the task defined, everyone wins and loves her. She would boost sales, generate high returns on almost no investment, and likely land herself a series of promotions, salary hikes, bigger team, and longer vacations until she ran the show.

The only problem with that route was that she would have to sacrifice her just original soul, sense of pride, and drive endangered species to extinction.

What’s forcing this modern schizophrenia? It’s not a matter of ‘public’ versus ‘private’ water utilities. That’s a red herring. Whether investors or voters own a water district, it remains a natural monopoly. That monopoly needs more money each year just to operate – to pay its staff, invest in repairs, maintain the system, cover health care and pensions etc. Increased funds depend on increased revenues, higher sales, and thus escalating water use by all end users – residential, commercial, industrial or municipal.

In theory, a monopoly should be able to increase revenues by selling ever-less water at ever-higher rates. In reality, that’s politically impossible. Private and public utilities are regulated by officials elected to act on behalf of voters; voters rarely demand the right to pay more for less of something they depend on in every aspect of their lives, especially something many believe they should get for free.

Jordan

Photo: Taco Anema / IUCN

Walking the tightrope

Hence the fine monopolistic line my schizophrenic friend must walk, and the tightrope beneath her is beginning to fray. The current recession makes families and firms consume less water. That’s wonderful for nature, but horrible for her utility’s bottom line. She is, professionally, both pleased and tormented. Her job is to lock in more efficiencies but her boss visits daily with thinly veiled threats if she does. Unless she backs off on conservation, her position, team, and budget will be at risk of being eliminated first as part of austerity. If she saves more water, she slits her own throat. Then her skills become worthless in the marketplace; who hires someone good at eroding the bottom line?

This is the Third Paradox of Water: conserving water destroys revenues; a thriving monopoly must reward waste.

Frugal utilities have less room to negotiate. Those who encourage water saving today must punish it tomorrow with higher rates. These perversions remain true at the household level, the building level, the neighborhood, the municipal district and the river. Perversely, the existence of a water monopoly means that all people involved in it – from the person flushing the toilet to the State Water Board setting targets for water allocations – are left with no choice, no competition, and no incentives to conserve.

Indeed, the Third Paradox ensures that the most frugal, responsive, and equitable users and managers in the vertically integrated water monopoly can only succeed through subterfuge or martyrdom. As this paradox undercuts performance and customer relations it is known throughout the water industry as ‘the death spiral.’ After all, to paraphrase the U.S. soldier hoping to justify his schizophrenic decision against a peaceful village in the Vietnam War, the paradox means we must destroy a monopoly’s water in order to save the utility.

The converse is that we unlock the monopoly in order to save both water and the utility. And that resolution to the Three Paradoxes of Water will come in the next and final contribution.

The ghost of William Stanley Jevons is disrupting efforts to tackle climate change.

Jevons’ specter first haunted hybrid vehicle owners. To get their extra mileage’s worth and display clean and fuel-efficient credentials, they began to drive farther, more often, and at higher speeds than they did before. Jevons then haunted homes that installed compact fluorescent bulbs and ‘green’ appliances, making people switch on more lights and gadgets, more often, and leave them on longer or even continuously.

In short, Jevons makes us frugal misers burn more of the energy we set out to save. If I’m disciplined enough to resist Jevons and still stamp down demand, haunted neighbours offset my savings by using up my spare fuel and electricity.

Economists dismiss ‘spiritual’ forces, and explain human behaviour as rational self-interest. New devices create spare gas or electricity; the increased supply costs less; lower costs jack up demand and new consumers. In some cases this ‘rebound effect’ is so potent that it erases earlier original gains from efficient technology.

This dynamic is bad news for climate mitigation and energy reduction; it is even worse news for climate adaptation and water security. Whether his influence is ‘natural’ or ‘supernatural,’ Jevons now haunts water conservation, where we lack real options.

Less means more

In 1865 the (living) 29-year-old Jevons considered the effect of British steam engines, which improved the efficiency of coal, the finite, geopolitical, carbon-emitting economic resource of its day. Such cheap energy-efficient machines might actually speed up depletion, he wrote, since we then use them more. In “The Coal Question,” Jevons argued (italics his): “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”

Of course, coal has energy alternatives: nuclear, wind, oil, gas, solar, geothermal and so forth. But the steam engine generated energy by consuming another valuable element that Jevons hardly considered rare. Now scarce, water has no substitute.

In the face of global scarcity, water efficiency has become a growth industry, subsidized by governments. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set up a WaterSense partnership that designates and labels certain qualifying technologies that claim to “protect the future of our nation’s water supply by promoting water efficiency and enhancing the market for water-efficient products, programmes, and practices.” Consider toilets, where Americans flush 4.8 billion gallons of water each day. Each year an average citizen flushes 230 gallons of human waste with 9,000 gallons of drinking water.

Efficiency drive

In response to resource depletion, a relentless barrage of education, tips, incentives and technology transfers shifts water toward ever more efficient use. The roar of a five gallon flush is muted to dual-flush high-efficiency toilets. Shower nozzles blast less water at higher velocities. Dishwashers and front-door washing machines use less per load. Pool covers prevent evaporation. Lush lawns are replaced with xeriscaping (gardening for arid regions). The US EPA claims that in a few years, WaterSense has helped consumers save a cumulative 46 billion gallons of water and US$ 343 million in water and sewer bills. Perhaps.

And perhaps agricultural water efficiency takes place around the world: as dirt canals become pipes and flood irrigation is replaced by centre pivot blast sprinklers, which in turn give rise to drip irrigation applied directly to the roots of plants at night.

Perhaps, given the undisputed wonders of widgets, we can make up the 40% shortfall between global demand and supply just by using water efficient technology.

Thailand

Photo: Taco Anema / IUCN

Increased demand

The ghost of Jevons moans: Don’t bet on it. There is scant evidence that conservation technology drives overall reduction of water use, consumption and demand. In fact, empirical studies at the municipal, industrial, agricultural, state and federal level suggest that, as with energy, water efficient technologies may extend supply, lower costs, and increase demand and opportunities to divert, pump, and use even more water.

Saving water in my dual flush toilet means my daughter takes longer showers. Uprooting my front lawn encourages my neighbour to install a pool in his back yard. Our water efficient neighborhood lets the city divert savings into a sprawling new development. Multinational corporations use efficiency technology to reduce the amounts of water per unit throughout the supply chain, but that can help them to sell more overall products containing water. Likewise, river basin authorities in arid lands encourage their farmers to adopt drip irrigation, for ‘more crop per drop.’ But from Texas cotton fields to the orchards of Israel, efficiency gains do not return to the Rio Grande or Jordan River, or West Bank Aquifer, or even, it seems, to Palestinians restricted from pumping water. Rather, efficiencies spread irrigation deeper and farther into ever more marginal lands, letting current farmers grow more water intense crops on more land at the exclusion of other natural and human communities competing for that water.

As interest groups grasp this dynamic, we find the odd situation of social advocates and environmentalists fighting attempts at water efficiency.

Such a perverse and undesired outcome defines the Second Paradox of Water: as long as we rent our resource, water-saving devices increase overall consumption. Water that you and I frugally conserve is lost through new and collective augmented demand.

Tanzania

Photo: Taco Anema / IUCN

Enter H2Ownership

One way to resolve this paradox is through a new (yet timeless) system of what might be called “H2Ownership.” If all stakeholders have clear dominion over an equal amount of water, then whatever we save from our share we can take out of the equation, to be later sold at a premium, donated to charity, or restored directly to nature.

From the Kalahari to Oman and Bali, this system has enabled traditional systems where people compete to conserve. Under a scaled up digital version of this virtuous cycle, urban efficiency gains could be locked in and improved on, helping us to transform water scarcity into natural abundance.

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe chairs Nestlé, the world’s 44th largest company, which last year earned US$ 9.6 billion profits on US$ 100 billion in revenues. He is the consummate international businessman, bargaining hard, overseeing 280,000 employees, outflanking competitors, and at ease with heads of state. Yet he remains incapable of negotiating one simple and irreplaceable ingredient without which his company ceases to exist: water.

He hardly seems a gloomy Malthusian, yet Brabeck foresees “limits to growth” because our global fresh water supply is both finite and being rapidly, stupidly, depleted. The world can sustainably use 4,200 cubic kilometers of water he notes, but it consumes 4,500 even as aquifers plummet and rivers run dry.

Water supply in Guatemala

Photo: IUCN/Claire Warmenbol

Another inconvenient truth

A few years back he called water scarcity “the other inconvenient truth,” one riskier than climate change, and predicted that the cost of staple cereals would rise as the world exhausted its water. Time proved him right. Grain prices spiked 90%, triggering widespread urban food riots like those from Tunisia and Yemen to Egypt and Libya.

Why is this happening? “Put bluntly,” he explains, “water has no price. When we see and treat water as a free good, we waste it.”

Brabeck is the latest victim of the oldest and First Paradox of Water: the matrix of life is both figuratively and literally “priceless.” In 1776 this paradox stumped Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations noted how diamonds are utterly worthless in use yet invaluable in exchange, while the converse was true for water. Without water humans can’t exist, yet our species devalues nature’s precious liquid asset into a vague liability.

The great unknown

This paradox troubles water whether rural farm or urban factory, firm and family. Annual shareholder reports discount water as a negligible ‘cost’ to be ‘managed.’ Accountants consider it a line item to absorb into spreadsheets. Chief Financial Officers regard water as a material risk to avoid. Any country can quickly provide its exact mineral wealth, human resources, arable land, energy potential, gross domestic product, and federal monetary budget; none can tell you the annual water reserves that keep its economy alive. No official knows the full cost of providing water because no individual can know it; water’s value is subjective, varying by time, place, conditions, and seven billion water users, half of whom live in cities.

The First Paradox of Water ensures that what we each intuitively grasp as a priceless asset we must collectively debase into a liability that is inherently worthless.

Why does this paradox of value arise, and how can we resolve it?

The brilliant conservationist Aldo Leopold famously warned urban readers about “two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” As self-interested stewards we value only natural assets we own. We ignore what we can’t.

Irrigation – Water and Nature Initiative (WANI) project area, Azraq, Jordan

Photo: IUCN\Claire Warmenbol

Equal opportunities

Since our food and energy trace their existence to water, our compound danger lies in not owning a well or creek. Instead, we suppose water comes from a faucet, toilet tank, or pipe. We lose interest in water throughout the urban supply chain. Unable to own or trade our share, we produce an urban, deeply tragic, commons.

A few ‘exchanges’ of water occur between neighbours sharing a river or well, but these are rare, rural, informal (perhaps even illegal) and inequitable. For exceptions to become the rule, city dwellers must formally have an equal opportunity to own and trade water. It may seem a logistical nightmare for our urban world to literally “own” a real well and distribute the vital wet stuff. But thanks to the Internet and ubiquitous cell phones, such barriers don’t prevent ownership.

Frequent flier miles let us virtually ‘own’ physical airline seats. Likewise, each of us can now transparently ‘own’ a defined virtual share of water, distributed automatically, daily, digitally, and equally to all by the water monopoly that unites us. We may call this virtual share a right, credit or a privilege, but it now is ours to earn and accumulate, to use and exchange however we choose.

Urban ‘H2Ownership’ leads to investment and care. As we buy and sell our unused shares, water accrues real worth and allows a slum dweller or Nestlé executive to negotiate its relative local price. Thus together we can at last resolve this paradox of water, as its value in exchange can rise to the level of its value in use.

To mark World Water Day with its theme ‘Water for Cities,’ we’re featuring a four-part series of provocative articles by James G. Workman, a writer who has worked with IUCN for a decade. Author of Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought, he is translating the proven system that has sustained indigenous people of the Kalahari Desert into an online, utility-based system that could unleash a widespread, egalitarian race to conserve water and energy in cities worldwide.
‘H2Ownership’ versus the three paradoxes of water

> 1. The paradox of value: Water is priceless in use yet worthless in exchange

Check out the next three articles in the series to be posted this week:

> 2. The paradox of efficiency: Your water-saving device increases our collective thirst (23 March)

> 3. The paradox of monopoly: Thriving urban waterworks must encourage and reward waste (24 March)

> 4. Resolving the paradoxes: Forget about virtue, enduring conservation must tap human vice (25 March)

Coping with the growing water needs of cities is one of the most pressing challenges of this century. Half of the world’s population now lives in cities and it’s estimated that within two decades that will increase to nearly 60% of the population, or 5 billion people. This means that a tremendous amount of water is needed, for drinking, sanitation, industry and to produce food. Ensuring reliable access to safe water supplies will make the cities of the future truly sustainable.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/iucnweb/sets/72157626160543239/show/

For this year’s World Water Day on Tuesday 22 March, IUCN is joining the international community in highlighting the 2011 theme ‘Water for Cities: Responding to the Urban Challenge’.

“Many of the world’s big cities have understood that protecting natural ecosystems to secure their water supplies makes economic sense,” says Julia Marton-Lefèvre, IUCN’s Director General. “Rather than chopping down forests or draining marshlands, keeping water catchments healthy saves billions of dollars by not having to pay for costly urban infrastructure to store water, clean it or bring it from elsewhere.”

Protecting and conserving healthy watersheds is essential for many of the world’s biggest cities and saves billions of dollars. For example, Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, relies on the Guatopo and Macarao rivers for its freshwater provision. Those rivers continue to supply a constant flow of freshwater to the city’s 5 million inhabitants. The forests of China’s Miyun watershed generate water benefits worth US $2 billion a year whilst supplying 70% of Beijing’s drinking water. Healthy wetlands provide natural wastewater treatment services, such as the Nakivubo wetland in Uganda, which saves the capital city Kampala US $2 million a year in terms of sewage and treatment facilities.

Climate change contributes to the increased magnitude and frequency of precipitation-related disasters – floods, droughts, mudslides, typhoons and cyclones

Photo: Taco Anema

“Cities are often dependent on surrounding rivers, upstream wetlands and groundwater aquifers. These forms of natural water infrastrucutre, together with engineered infrastructure, pumping and piping systems, help guarantee water supplies to urban areas as cities grow,” says Mark Smith, Director of IUCN’s Water Programme. “Yet, many cities are losing precious water resources through leakage or pollution. There is also growing evidence that water resources are significantly affected by climate change, particularly through the impact of floods and droughts.”

Worldwide, 70% of the water that is withdrawn for human use is used for agriculture, 22% for industry and 8% is used for domestic services.

Photo: Taco Anema

Coral reefs are home to a quarter of the world’s marine life. But reefs aren’t just good for fish. 450 million people need them for food, jobs and protection of the sea. But climate change, pollution and over-fishing are trashing reefs everywhere. A quarter of the world’s coral reefs are damaged beyond repair. WWF is working to save these extraordinary underwater worlds.

Read more:http://wwf.panda.org/lpr

Conservation is quite literally vital. This is a challenge that calls for serious science, serious action – and serious money

This has been the International Year of Biodiversity and a UN gathering in Nagoya, Japan, is getting under way, charged with launching a 10-year strategy to avert the collapse of fisheries, conserve the Amazon rainforest and check the spread of invasive species.

The auguries are not good. A few weeks ago, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature confirmed the capture and subsequent deathof a rare antelope from the mountains of Vietnam and Laos. This animal – Pseudoryx nghetinhensis – was discovered only in 1992 and last spotted by an automatic camera in 1999. It has, however, never been seen alive by a working zoologist. So, it has been named and pronounced critically endangered by researchers who know almost nothing about it. Researchers know a little more about the crested gibbons that live in south-east Asia. They know that there are seven species in the genus, and that one is now down to 100 individuals, and another to about 20. These species have just been declared the world’s rarest apes.

The story is no happier closer to home. In March IUCN confirmed that 9% of Europe’s 435 butterfly species and 11% of the saproxylic beetles that live in rotting wood are threatened with extinction, for the same reason that the crested gibbons could swing through the trees into oblivion: human pressure on habitat. Likewise, last year more than 1,200 bird species were classified by IUCN as threatened with extinction. Does it matter? Yes: civilisation is built on life’s diversity. We survive only on the bounty of the living world and the rocks beneath, and even coal and oil were once living things. Biodiversity delivers fuel, fibres, fabrics, all food and most medicines: it also hums away unobserved, pollinating crops and recycling the planet’s air, water and nutrients. Without the saproxylic beetles, the forests would be full of dead trees, and soon there would be no forests. So conservation is quite literally vital.

Extinction is a natural companion to evolution, but mass extinction is a dangerous strategy. Yet humans are unthinkingly obliterating the planet’s species at a rate at least 1,000 times faster than normal, unthinking because this obliteration is accompanied by massive ignorance. Around 1.9 million species have been described, but nobody knows whether the world is home to seven million of them, or 70 million. This is a challenge that calls for serious science, serious action, and of course, serious money. Will this challenge be met? Britain once led the world in such science. The word from Whitehall is that scientific research which is “not commercially useful” is at risk in today’s spending review. Such an attitude could hardly be more short-sighted, or more dangerous.