Key recommendations for action
5. Mitigation of water-relevant syndromes Besides the key recommendations directly
de-rived from the guiding principle of sound manage-ment of water resources, the Council has identified three syndromes in which increasingly negative trends in the water-centered network of interrela-tions are concentrated. They therefore play a crucial role in exacerbating the global water crisis and hence require rapid and effective strategy responses. Key recommendations giving special consideration to the systemic nature of the freshwater crisis can be de-rived in this area as well.
• The analysis of the Green Revolution Syndrome shows that the food security problem cannot be at-tributed solely to food shortages in specific re-gions. More specifically, poverty and the severe lack of resources and capacities are primary deter-minants of chronic malnutrition and famine. The Council’s recommendation to the Federal Gov-ernment is that it take steps within its develop-ment projects to ensure that farmers have clearly defined water rights and fair competitive condi-tions with water traders so that they can plan ahead with confidence and thus achieve a modi-cum of local sovereignty. Adequate training and education programs must be implemented to im-prove awareness of the interrelationships between agricultural activities and the environment and to build the capacities of local communities to solve their water problems.
• The analysis of the Favela Syndrome shows that health and hygiene problems in the slums of major cities have reached extremely alarming propor-tions. The Council recommends that the damage to health caused by contaminated water be seen as
the priority issue in the field of development poli-cy and that action be taken to combat the root causes. Additional steps should involve the devel-opment of affordable wastewater treatment sys-tems and the provision of support for essential health care (e.g. simple forms of disinfection and hygiene education).
• To cure the Aral Sea Syndrome, the Council rec-ommends that environmental and development strategies be designed in such a way that large-scale water development projects be granted fi-nancial and otheror non-material assistance only on condition that the social and environmental costs are taken into consideration as far as pos-sible. Construction of large-scale facilities should be dispensed with entirely if the environmental and social guard rails are overstepped.
Introduction B
Water is the best of all things (Pindar, 552–446 B.C. (?), Olympic Odes 1,1) In the Valley of Kings, scenes from the ancient Egyptian books of the dead adorn the walls in the tomb of Pharaoh Rameses III. The deceased ruler raises his hand in oath to the godhead Osiris and swears the following: never has he held back the wa-ters of the Nile in the season of floods, never has he dirtied the waters of the Nile, never has he been cru-el to any animal working in the far-reaching system of water use.
Today, the River Nile has been dammed by the gi-gantic Aswan Dam (“Sa’ad el Ali”), the river is a ca-nal for transporting waste and pollutants of all kinds, while the flora and fauna in the river valley suffer the consequences of a society in transition driven by a preoccupation with growth.
Are we to conclude that the 3000-year-old mes-sage from the Pharaoh’s tomb – admonishing pur-poseful, equitable and environmentally sound man-agement of the most valuable resource a high civil-ization can possess – has become irrelevant for our time? The precise opposite is the case: in terms of its importance for sustaining life, freshwater ranks a close second behind the very air we breathe. It is at once the medium for the most elementary physiolog-ical processes and for evolution itself, the cohesive force for cultural organization and the source of indi-vidual well-being. However, unlike air, the freshwa-ter medium is distributed very unevenly in time and space due to its physico-chemical properties and the geography of the world. As a result, many regions on our planet have little or no share in the overall sup-ply of this virtually inexhaustible and continuously regenerated life-giving substance. Even within well-endowed regions, the volume and quality of the freshwater to which humans have access can vary considerably. This combination of indispensability and scarcity make freshwater the most precious raw material that our environment provides.
Water resource management – the harvesting, dis-tribution, utilization, purification, control and de-fense of water – has shaped the history of human civ-ilizations to a major and permanent degree and signi-fies a challenge of immense importance for present generations. Today, around 2 billion people have no access to clean drinking water and sanitation, and only 5% of the world’s wastewater is treated or puri-fied. As a result, half the population in the develop-ing countries suffers from a water-related disease, and 5 million people die each year after drinking con-taminated water. Between 1992 and 1995, almost
800 million people were victims of floods or land-slides, and the number who have died in droughts over the last thirty years is beyond estimation. Fresh-water is the most important limiting factor for food production, as seen by the fact that agriculture ac-counts for 70% of global water use today. Worldwide, as many as 40,000 dams are in operation to safeguard and increase the supply of water in space and time, with a new dam being added daily. The total volume stored in reservoirs is currently about 10 trillion li-ters, five times the total in all the world’s rivers. Dams of all kinds influence more than three quarters of all natural runoff in North America, Europe and North-ern Asia. Competition for this precious resource is hard and often ruthless. The legal system in India, for example, is dealing at present with a series of water conflicts between a number of states, e.g. Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh; many observers view these con-flicts as a serious destabilizing factor for India as a nation-state. Were the Ethiopian government to im-plement its plans to dam the Blue Nile, thus diminish-ing Egypt’s water supply, escalation into military con-flict would become increasingly likely. The threat pronounced by President Sadat, the former Egyptian president, that “Anyone who plays with the waters of the Nile is declaring war on us!” remains as topical as ever.
For a full understanding of today’s global water problems, it is essential to analyze freshwater as an integral factor within the specific causal webs that generate the dominant crises of environment and de-velopment – the syndromes of global change (WBGU, 1997). It is only within the context of uncon-trolled urbanization (the Favela Syndrome), the en-vironmental and social impacts of large-scale pro-jects aimed at “taming nature” (the Aral Sea Syn-drome), or the political and economic offensive to in-crease food production by importing inappropriate techniques (the Green Revolution Syndrome) that one can identify the reasons for poor management of water resources – as the direct or indirect results of (improper) human behavior.
The future of the international community’s fresh-water resources is even more foreboding, due to the unrelenting and mutual enhancement of the major driving forces behind water-specific syndromes: the world population continues to grow at a rapid pace, for example, and will stabilize at 8–10 billion after 2050, according to “best case” scenarios. However, it is not only the sheer numbers of people in the next century that pose severe problems, but also their in-variable concentration in megacities and large-scale urban agglomerations, coupled with the growth in in-dividual demands associated with the transformation of lifestyles across the globe. In order to realize the sheer scale of resource demand, one need only com-Αριστον µεν το υδωρ` `
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20 B Introduction
pare present-day water consumption in India (25 li-ters per inhabitant per day) to water consumption levels in the tourist centers around the Mediterra-nean (1,000 liters per visitor per day). If this tourist standard were extrapolated for the expected world population, then humankind would empty the total content of all the rivers on the planet within the space of six months!
This illusory scenario contrasts starkly with the re-alistic forecast that the number of chronically under-nourished people (currently more than 900 million) will increase still further unless global food produc-tion is raised by about 60% by the year 2010. This can only be achieved by increasing the area of irrigated land – already 17% of the total cultivated area and accounting for almost 40% of global food produc-tion.
However, this might only reinforce a vicious circle, with greater pressure to produce leading to intensi-fied use of natural resources and hence to the degra-dation of soils, ecosystems and landscapes, and thus to further and further deterioration of the basic con-ditions for agricultural production. One of the great-est threats is that the transformation of river catch-ments by human settlecatch-ments could gather additional momentum, with all the negative repercussions this would involve; even today, the sediment load trans-ported by the Earth’s rivers has risen five-fold as a re-sult of land-use changes (approx. 45 billion tons).
These future prospects are further overshadowed by the expected climate changes due to human activ-ities, which will lead in all likelihood to modified pre-cipitation patterns on the continents and thus to se-vere pressures on humans and nature to adapt ac-cordingly. The international community is at a cross-roads: unless the right environmental and ment policy measures are put into force, the develop-ing countries in particular will experience dramatic water problems that could escalate to a worldwide crisis through long-distance mechanisms such as mi-gration, infection, exported conflicts or normal trade links. That said, there are ways to prevent such a tra-jectory, in that the freshwater problem is exceedingly responsive to strategic policy action. There is hardly another sector within the entire environmental-de-velopmental complex that promises a comparable humanitarian dividend per US$ or DM spent. Fur-thermore, there are economic, institutional, techno-logical and educational potentials worldwide for bet-ter management of freshwabet-ter resources. These po-tentials must be mobilized quickly, however, because many countries in the world are already verging on a developmental crisis as a result of water-related fac-tors. For states in the Middle East and in North Africa, in particular, time is running short.
The dimensions and implications of today’s fresh-water problems, the source of a potential major crisis of global society and the environment, have prompt-ed the Council to focus this year’s Annual Report on this burning issue. In Section D, the overall complex is firstly analyzed and evaluated in terms of basic facts and interrelationships. This is followed by a de-tailed description of the available instruments for freshwater management, before ways to prevent a global crisis from unfolding are outlined. The solu-tions put forward by the Council are based on two elements. The first main element is the Council’s
“crash barrier” model, which is an attempt to resolve the dilemma between social, environmental and economic goals by setting clear priorities. A robust paradigm for the “sound management of freshwater resources” is generated in the process. The second main element consists of a global strategy for imple-menting this principle; the strategy is sub-divided into three components: creating an international consen-sus, instituting a World Water Charter and drawing up an international Plan of Action to combat the freshwater crisis. The latter Plan should be guided by the basic awareness that water is a scarce resource and must be priced accordingly, with only minimal exceptions.
National and international institutions play a spe-cial role in the prevention and mitigation of crises.
The various treaty regimes, rules and authorities re-sponsible for ensuring “sound management of water resources” should be endowed with greater flexibil-ity, which has been the case so far, and should pro-mote the principle of public participation. However, there is also a general need to improve international cooperation in the field of freshwater resource man-agement. Despite the long tradition of intergovern-mental agreement regarding the use of transboun-dary water resources, the level of cooperation has been inadequate in many regions. One good sign is that the Framework Convention on the Non-Naviga-tional Uses of InternaNon-Naviga-tional Watercourses, which has been in preparation for twenty years, is likely to be adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in the near future.
The Council particularly welcomes the fact that the integrated management of water resources was made a key sectoral issue at the 6th Session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD). The “Water 21” initiative of the European Union, which was proposed at the 5th Session of the CSD in April 1997, should be given strong support by the Federal Government. The Council expressly sup-ports the priority attached to this issue, not only by the Secretary-General of the United Nations in his call for a “Global Consensus”, but also by the EU in
21 Introduction B
its Community policies and in its common interna-tional policy.
The freshwater issue must be understood more clearly than hitherto as a key component of global environment and development policy in the so-called Rio process.
The Council dedicates the standard section of the 1997 Annual Report to a review of this latter process over the last five years. The aim is an initial assess-ment of the extent to which the objectives and meas-ures defined in AGENDA21 have been implemented through efforts at national level as well as through collective international operations. Within this con-text, the issue that must be raised is whether there is evidence of an integrated concept, adequate for tack-ling a cross-cutting problem such as freshwater sup-ply, to link the institutional facets of the Rio process.
Such an integrated concept would have to center around three core elements, namely
1. a common principle for controlling the environ-ment and developenviron-ment process,
2. a strong, independent international organization as the driving force behind this process,
3. a robust global financing mechanism for support-ing and strengthensupport-ing this organization.
In the recommendations section, the Council will put forward its specific suggestions.
The central concerns in this year’s Annual Report are the global dimensionsof the freshwater problem;
the aim is not to provide an in-depth water manage-ment or limnological analysis for Germany.There are two main reasons for this: firstly, Germany is a “coun-try of surplus” as far as water is concerned, and, sec-ondly, the Council of Experts on Environmental Is-sues (SRU) shall be presenting a study on key nation-al aspects in 1998. Aspects of freshwater resource management pertaining specifically to Germany, such as concepts for waterworks, are referred to only when model solutions for the international commu-nity can be derived from them. The most important recommendations to the Federal Government re-garding policy action and research will not relate to the national management of water resources, but to measures within global environment and development policythat would have to be coordinated, in the ide-al case, by the main federide-al bodies with responsibility in this field (BMU, BMZ, BMBF, etc.).
Even if certain aspects of the freshwater problem are filtered out, it remains an issue of confusing breadth and scope. The reader will need a good deal of motivation and patience to digest this Report.
Only rarely are there simple answers to complex is-sues, and these are invariably wrong.