Edited by
Simon J. Dadson, Dustin E. Garrick, Edmund C. Penning‐Rowsell, Jim W. Hall, Rob Hope, and Jocelyne Hughes
This edition first published 2020
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Simon J. Dadson, Dustin E. Garrick, Edmund C. Penning‐Rowsell, Jim W. Hall, Rob Hope, and Jocelyne Hughes to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
Registered Office(s)
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
Editorial Office
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty
While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Name: Dadson, Simon J., editor.
Title: Water science, policy, and management : a global challenge / edited by Simon J. Dadson, University of Oxford [and 5 others].
Description: First edition. | Hoboken, N.J. : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019027165 (print) | LCCN 2019027166 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119520603 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119520597 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119520658 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Water resources development. | Water‐supply–Government policy. | Watershed management.
Classification: LCC TC405.W374 2019 (print) | LCC TC405 (ebook) | DDC 628.1–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027165
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027166
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © Oleh_Slobodeniuk/Getty Images
This book is dedicated to the memory of Mike Edmunds whose vision and leadership, with others, created the Water Science, Policy, and Management MSc programme at the University of Oxford.
Heather Bond
Flood and Coastal Risk Management Directorate
Environment Agency
Wallingford, UK
Edoardo Borgomeo
International Water Management Institute
Colombo, Sri Lanka
David Bradley
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
and
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
London, UK
and
Department of Zoology
University of Oxford
UK
Katrina J. Charles
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Alice Chautard
Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Simon J. Dadson
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Michaela Dolk
Swiss Re
New York, NY, USA
Nassim El Achi
Global Health Institute
American University of Beirut
Lebanon
Tim Foster
University of Technology Sydney
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Stephen Fragaszy
Water Directorate
New Zealand Ministry for the Environment
Wellington, New Zealand
National Drought Mitigation Center School of Natural Resources
University of Nebraska
Lincoln, NE, USA
Dustin E. Garrick
Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
David Grey
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK‐
Jim W. Hall
Environmental Change Institute
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Feyera Hirpa
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Rob Hope
School of Geography and the Environment
and
Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Jocelyne Hughes
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Erin Hylton
Concurrent Technologies Corporation
Washington, DC, USA
David W.M. Johnstone
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Clarke Knight
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA, USA
Johanna Koehler
Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Megan Konar
University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign
Urbana‐Champaign, IL, USA
Michelle Lanzoni
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Rhett Larson
Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law,
Arizona State University,
Arizona, USA
Hannah Leckie
Division of Climate, Biodiversity and Water
Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development
Paris, France
Kelsey Leonard
Department of Political Science McMaster University
Hamilton, ON, Canada
Homero Paltan Lopez
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Rachael McDonnell
Water, Climate Change and Resilience Strategic Program
International Water Management Institute
Colombo, Sri Lanka
International Centre for Biosaline Agriculture
Dubai, UAE
Alex Money
Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Mohammad Mortazavi‐Naeini
Land and Water Division
NSW Department of Primary Industry
Orange, NSW, Australia
Abishek S. Narayan
Aquatic Research
Swiss Federal Institute of Science and Technology (EAWAG)
Zurich, Switzerland
Saskia Nowicki
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Thanti Octavianti
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Joanna Pardoe
London School of Economics
London, UK
Jian Peng
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Edmund C. Penning‐Rowsell
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
and
Flood Hazard Research Centre
Middlesex University
London, UK
Rebecca Peters
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Jonathan Rawlins
OneWorld Sustainable Investments
Cape Town, South Africa
Grace Remmington
Cranfield University
Cranfield, UK
Michael Rouse
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Richard Rushforth
School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems
Northern Arizona University,
Flagstaff, AZ, USA
Julie Self
Government of Alberta
Edmonton, AB, Canada
Ranu Sinha
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Pauline Smedley
British Geological Survey
Keyworth, Nottingham, UK
Heather M. Smith
Cranfield Water Science Institute
Cranfield University
Cranfield, UK
Kieran Stanley
Institute for Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences
Goethe University
Frankfurt, Germany
Troy Sternberg
Environmental Change Institute
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Abi Stone
University of Manchester
Manchester, UK
Patrick Thomson
School of Geography and the Environment
and
Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Swathi Veeravalli
Us Army Corp of Engineers
Alexandria, VA, USA
Shuchi Vora
The Nature Conservancy
Delhi, India
Gareth Walker
Insight Data Science
San Francisco, CA, USA
Kevin Wheeler
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Paul Whitehead
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
I still recall fragments of some of those conversations that subsequently helped to shape my view of the world.
Over 30 years ago, visiting Egypt as Britain’s Development Minister, a young man who worked for an NGO said to me, ‘I don’t understand why everyone is so obsessed with the politics of oil. In time, they will have far more reason to be worried about the politics of water.’
He was right. And it was, of course, a point made sometime in the millennium before the birth of Christ by Job, who had plenty of other things to worry about. ‘But the mountain falls and crumbles away, and the rock is removed from its place; the water washes away the stones; the torrents wash away the soil of the earth; so you destroy the hopes of mortals.’
Hope is not the only casualty. Job could have added that peace and stability are victims too.
A former secretary‐general of the UN opined that the next war in north‐east Africa would be caused by disputes over access to the waters of the Nile. Equally bleak predictions could be made about the Jordan River, and to the east about the Tigris and Euphrates. In central Asia and the Punjab (which means ‘land of five rivers’) there are similar concerns.
Populations increase exponentially even in places where there is severe water stress, and larger populations demand more water to help produce their food. Food shortages and price rises have always been sure‐fire causes of domestic unrest.
Climate change increases stress in areas that are already suffering economically and politically. Migration from arid to more favoured environments is an inevitable result. We know that economic migration – and the movement of people because of political turbulence – have roiled the prosperous northern democracies to which poor, hungry and thirsty people seek to move. This will get worse unless we act.
Water is such a precious resource which, like others, is not fairly distributed around the globe. The rich get more and invariably pay less for it (unless, I suppose, it is bottled!). So the study of how to do the best job of finding, storing, managing and cleaning water, and paying for it too, deserves more political attention and more research funding. This is true in all parts of the world, not least fast‐growing Asia and Africa, where so many cities face imminent water shortages and where so much of the existing supply is polluted.
I hope that the essays in this book will help to stimulate more intense and informed debate about a subject where more international cooperation will be necessary for success. We cannot, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, wait to learn these lessons until the wells and aquifers are dry.
Oxford, December 2018.
The editors and authors are grateful to Heather Viles for supporting this project, and to Nancy Gladstone, Faith Opio and Ailsa Allen for their careful assistance with the preparation of the manuscript and its figures. Thanks are due to Andrew Harrison at Wiley for taking this project on, and to Antony Sami and Vivek Jagadeesan for seeing the manuscript through to production.
Simon J. Dadson1, Edmund C. Penning‐Rowsell1,2, Dustin E. Garrick3, Rob Hope1,3, Jim W. Hall4, and Jocelyne Hughes1
1 School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, UK
2 Flood Hazard Research Centre, Middlesex University, London, UK
3 Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, UK
4 Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, UK
Understanding the risks and opportunities presented by the changing water cycle, and the intensifying demands and competition for freshwater, is one of the most pressing challenges facing scientists, water managers and policy‐makers. In the context of rapid climate, land cover and other environmental changes, the requirement to protect communities against water‐related natural hazards, the stewardship of water resources to provide reliable water quantity and quality, and the provision of clean, safely‐managed drinking water and improved sanitation to a population predicted to exceed 9 billion, constitute a defining challenge for the twenty‐first century. This challenge has inspired the University of Oxford to offer a graduate programme in Water Science Policy and Management since 2004, which to date has seen over 350 students from 57 countries graduate, of which more than half are women. This book is formed from contributions by more than a dozen academics and practitioners who have taught the course, in each case writing in co‐authorship with more than two dozen alumni.
This introductory chapter outlines key drivers of change in the water environment and explains how these drivers may evolve into the future, creating new issues and risks requiring interventions. We then outline what we consider to be key challenges facing those responsible for water and its governance and management, globally, in the context of scientific understandings, policy priorities, and management opportunities. We make reference here to the chapters that follow on particular aspects of water science, policy and management, thereby contextualizing those chapters and enabling the reader to see them in a broader context. The final chapter of this book (Chapter 20) gives our vision for the future role of interdisciplinary water education and research in creating greater understanding of the complexities involved and the opportunities for progress.
The water sector is strongly impacted by the recent, rapid, and widespread effect of economic growth, often exacerbated by weak governance and inequality. Alongside these human drivers, environmental change, including climate change and variability and changes in land cover and land management, exerts impacts which are often felt most acutely in societies least able to adapt. The opportunities and challenges presented by growing and moving populations, in the context of changing water availability, threaten the sustainable, equitable and efficient use of water resources for economic development.
As demonstrated in Chapter 2, the evidence is overwhelmingly in support of anthropogenic global warming, and it is notable that climate science has unequivocally demonstrated that observed historical climate change is due to anthropogenic emission of fossil carbon (Box 1.1). In the presence of overwhelming evidence, the debate has now shifted towards understanding the regional and local consequences of warming, and their impacts on hydroclimatic variability and extremes. Revealing the regional picture adds additional uncertainty and raises the crucial question of how much additional evidence must we wait for before we act, either in mitigation of future change, or in order to adapt to what may constitute a ‘new normal’ range of climatic variability? There are many tools at our disposal to answer such questions. Indeed, the challenge to policy‐makers and their advisors, and to practitioners in the field of water management, is to extract the salient information on which to base decisions from the plethora of data currently available on the subject (see Chapters 2 and 14).
Whilst global attention has quite properly focused on climate change, widespread policy‐driven changes in land cover and management also rank amongst the most striking perturbations to the natural environment that impinge on the water sector. Land cover changes may occur by direct policy intervention; they may also occur as land managers respond individually to market forces and the regulatory environment. Together these changes can also impact land use (tree planting, agricultural practices) by affecting what it is economic to do in the rural environment. The impact, for example, of nitrate on long‐lived groundwater quality is of particular note (Chapters 3 and 4), as is the impact of regulatory practices on water quality as evidenced by the EU Water Framework Directive, which is credited with driving a significant, but small, improvement in aquatic biodiversity (Chapter 5). Policies and economic incentives exert a powerful control over land management and agriculture, with impacts that are often felt more immediately and with greater certainty than climatic variability or change but which also act as threat multipliers or stressors of freshwater ecosystems when combined with climate change (e.g. algal blooms, Chapter 4; invasive species proliferation, Chapter 5).
Demographic drivers of change include the growth of global population centres in Asia and Africa, including ‘mega‐cities’ with populations greater than 10 million. Nonetheless, the reality of population growth, urbanization, and the growth of agriculture to support a growing affluent population in the developing world will have profound consequences for water consumption (Chapter 8) and for water quality. As such it is vital to consider not only the physical and natural consequences but also the potential political responses in the light of projected growth of urban populations (Chapters 12 and 18).
Water plays a crucial role in many sectors of the economy and is frequently analysed as a factor of production or as a public economic good. Connections with the energy and agricultural sectors are often highlighted, not least because agriculture consumes by far the most water of any economic sector, and reliable water supplies are needed for energy production. These linkages serve both to amplify the sensitivities of the water sector to global change, and to mandate broad consideration of water‐related impacts on other economic sectors in policy development and the consequent enactment of management decisions, particularly in relation to water allocation and reallocation in a rapidly changing world (Chapter 8).
The global importance of water in industrialized and developing economies is also recognized via the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which explicitly mandate universal and equitable drinking water supplies and improved sanitation services, sustainable water withdrawals and protection of ecosystems (Box 1.2). Compared with the earlier Millennium Development Goals, the SDGs bring a stronger and broader framing of sustainable management of water resources to meet human and environmental needs. The role of water for development is partly to alleviate acute poverty and to protect vulnerable populations from water‐related risks, especially due to extreme hydrological variability and disease associated with poor sanitation. But there is also a role for water systems to remove the time and effort burden associated with more costly, labour‐intensive means of water service provision, which are borne largely by women in rural Africa and Asia, so that individuals and societies are free to devote more attention to other activities. Whether the SDGs lead to lasting change or whether they present an impossible‐to‐fulfil dream is the subject of discussion in Chapter 17.
Much has been done already by scientists, policy‐makers and water managers to respond to the challenges set out above. Their complexity is overwhelming, and it is essential that we learn from those past experiences in order to refine our understanding of potential responses, which must draw not only on the development of new technology, but on social, political and economic innovation. As Grey highlights in Chapter 19, it is insufficient to consider water infrastructure in isolation. Investment in infrastructure can succeed only if accompanied by investment in information systems and in building strong institutions for managing the resulting systems. Moreover, as with any large investment, it is necessary to consider not just economic efficiency in the comparison of benefits and costs, but also to consider how benefits accrue amongst groups different from those who bear the social, political, and economic costs. A broader view of hydrological infrastructure is that it is ultimately for mitigating the effects of hydrological variability (Chapter 19). This view sees an increasingly important role for distributed storage, and acknowledges the links between water, energy and food, any of which can be stored or traded as a substitute for lacking a reliable supply of the other (Chapter 8).
Wastewater treatment technology has also developed rapidly over the past several decades. As noted in Chapter 16, technology capable of treating water more cheaply brings human and environmental benefits in developing countries. It also generates valuable waste streams, which can dramatically alter the investment case for wastewater treatment in many settings. The funding case for wastewater treatment is strengthened if collecting and treating wastewater becomes an economic opportunity rather than a cost. Indeed, the challenge moves rapidly from being one of technological innovation to one of governance in which the need is to finance deployment of such infrastructure (Chapters 12 and 15) and to operate and maintain it efficiently (Chapter 17) and with equitable access (Chapter 18).
The challenge to strengthen the funding case for investment in the water sector is taken up in Chapter 9 in conjunction with another emerging technology – smart infrastructure and environmental informatics. Monitoring technology built into new infrastructure in order to operate, manage and maintain it effectively yet further enhances its useable benefit. The point that management of the process is as vital as initial capital investment is pressed home in Chapters 16 and 17 in relation to regulation of water supply and treatment technology. New in‐situ environmental sensors also promise to revolutionize water management, including novel biosensors based on designs inspired by nature to trace and prevent emerging organic pollutants, and the use of eDNA to trace and monitor endangered or invasive species (Chapters 5 and 6). Likewise, our understanding of the changing water cycle in the Earth system will be transformed by the results of hydrological Earth observation missions like NASA’s GPM, SMAP and GRACE, the EU Copernicus Sentinel programme, and micro‐satellite technology (see Chapter 7).
The promise of new data and monitoring technologies (see Chapter 7) is particularly compelling if harnessed alongside properly‐maintained existing observation networks, together with new computational methods (Chapter 14). Yet, if the coming decades are characterized by new data streams, the challenge will be to ensure that these ‘big’ datasets yield information that can most helpfully inform the decisions needed both for real‐time management and long‐range planning (see Chapter 7). As Hall and Penning‐Rowsell argue in Chapters 11 and 14, it will not be sufficient simply to collect data: it must be integrated within operational systems and its efficient use governed equitably. ‘Big data’ are expensive to collect and require skills and training to use and interpret – it is necessary to ensure that their benefits accrue equitably and do not lead to unfair information asymmetries, nor become a source through which well‐resourced groups can crowd out the poor (Chapters 18 and 19).
Alongside the emerging technical innovations that stand to propel growth and development in the water sector, there is an acute and growing need for social, political, legal and governance structures to tackle the world’s biggest challenges (Chapter 10). A wider, more general debate concerns the balance between equity and efficiency in water infrastructure investment and allocation decisions (Chapter 8). This debate emerges no more acutely than in discussions of whether there ought to be a human right to water, as expounded by Larson et al. in Chapter 10. It is vital that governance and legal frameworks take account of these developments, both theoretically and in practice. The theme of national vs. private infrastructure is explored by Smith and Walker in Chapter 12, along with the comparison of centralized and decentralized approaches to water supply (Chapters 8 and 9).
The search for solutions has been marked with silver bullets that ignore or underestimate the politics of water. Water policy involves a sequence of decisions in response to evolving challenges and values, yet policy processes rarely follow a linear path. Responding to crises, such as floods and droughts, has produced fragmented policy and legal frameworks, and often perverse incentives that can increase vulnerability to future risks and concentrate their impact on the most marginal. Solutions have proven partial and provisional, where our past efforts lead to lock‐in and path dependency, constraining our capacity to establish new policies, laws and incentives to tackle dynamic water risks and values.
Many of the drivers of change identified above can be partly addressed by technology: improvements in monitoring (Chapter 7), water‐efficient technologies for agriculture, industry and wastewater treatment (Chapters 13 and 16), and smart infrastructure (Chapter 9) capable of being used in support of allocation decisions. But technology is not the only adaptive mechanism available for human societies to deploy. Without an understanding of the political and societal context within which water challenges emerge, it is impossible to appreciate how the intertwined trajectories of historical contingency have led us to where we are, and yet more difficult to construct an acceptable future course in any given system. As reviewed in this book, our political, legal and economic institutions shape the interactions between policy and technological changes.
If understanding the natural environment and its relations with the political systems that have shaped humanity’s encounters with water is challenging, the difficulty is nothing compared with that facing those whose decisions enact the policies made in response to political, financial, and other constraints. Sound governance and implementation of such strategies requires technical systems of control (planning, targets, incentives, and oversight; covered in Chapter 17), and the instruments for planning and informing decisions proposed or taken (e.g. Chapter 14). The relation between science, policy and management is, of course, complex rather than linear. In practice it may be quite legitimate to find linkages across and between each component. Policy, for example, exerts a reciprocal influence on science – both directly in that policy‐makers support and commission evidence‐based programmes, and indirectly in that policy often determines tacitly what is considered an appropriate scientific question worthy of study, particularly where limited funding is available for research. Less controversially, scientific evidence is a crucial ingredient in managing water systems.
The chapters contained within the book unpack these challenges both individually and in combination, from a range of perspectives. The range of disciplinary expertise required to solve water challenges extends vastly beyond the water sector alone. The chapters contained within this book draw on ideas in climate science, water chemistry, health and medical sciences, biological and environmental sciences, engineering and information technology. But important though these technical subjects are, the study of economics, finance, politics, history, philosophy, management, governance and administration are necessary in order to reach durable solutions which account for water’s role in societies, economies and ecosystems. Taken together, they inspire a vision for interdisciplinary water research and education to solve some of society’s most pressing threats in the modern era.
The politics and economics of the global water challenge are influenced by the quality and scope of scientific information available to support decisions. For example, improved climate predictions can benefit long‐term decision‐making by improving our capacity to manage climate and hydrological risks. This section tackles the major scientific challenges facing the water sector today. The branches of hydrology upon which water managers might draw include climatology and meteorology (Chapter 2), soil physics, hydraulics, and groundwater science (Chapter 3). But there is a broader sense in which the challenge of bringing water security to a growing population draws on science outside the traditional hydrological remit. Coverage in these chapters of the relations between water and health draws on findings in microbiology, epidemiology and public health, and the relations between water quality (Chapter 4) and aquatic habitats and biodiversity (Chapter 5) are probed in detail for their functional value within the ecosystem and the wider catchment, as well as for their intrinsic benefits. Chapter 6 surveys the emerging new monitoring technologies being developed to support decision‐making, and reviews the rapid growth of large‐scale modelling of the water cycle.
Whilst there is an important role for scientific information in policy‐making, attention must also be paid to the receptivity of those charged with making long‐lived, long‐term investment and allocation decisions, as well as those responsible for day‐to‐day management of water risks and resources. The production of appropriate scientific information is only one entry point to the dialogue between scientists and decision‐makers. Institutional change and enhanced technical capacity are also vital to promote resilient adaptation policies. Institutional transformation within governments, the private sector, NGOs and community participation entails a change in the culture around which those responsible for making decisions take up scientific information.
Without capacity to use new scientific information and to understand its relevance and limitations such approaches are unlikely to realise their potential. Enhanced technical capacity to use climate information requires internal and external actors to consider the most useful form in which decision‐makers might request climate information, and to integrate new and uncertain sources of information into decision‐making. One way to develop this capacity is through the exchange of personnel, and the long‐term effects of policies such as improved education and knowledge exchange with research organizations. The availability of appropriate climate information to inform decisions is key when relevant aspects of future climate and hydrology are conditioned by (i) the temporal extent of decision‐making processes, (ii) the spatially variegated nature of impacts (which may span large regions or be focused on critical locations), and (iii) the potential effects of extremes compared with long‐term variability. Future challenges will draw upon many strands of scientific evidence, and will undoubtedly present new demands for the scientific community. The contributions in this section do not provide all the answers; they outline the chart on which those who take up the challenge might plot the course ahead.