Early focus on water strategies for the twenty-first century: IWRA as an interdisciplinary forerunner

The IWRA founders have promised to take the association only to those missions which are not covered in depth by any other well-established water-related association. Vujica Yevjevich, IWRA founder, Brussels Congress, 1983

Introduction

As one of the persons present at the launch of IWRA in Chicago in 1973 and one of the first set of governors of the association, my more active contribution to IWRA's history was concentrated in the 1980s and 1990s. The 1985 board discussions were concerned about shrinking membership, and needed to clarify “what IWRA can do better than other scientific organizations.” In the early 1980s, the issue before the IWRA board was “to create good arguments for [members] to stay” in the association after having become members as participants at one of the congresses. What the board stressed was in particular the need to penetrate the implications of the futuristic approach which the board thought could really distinguish IWRA from other associations. This paper has its focus on the different activities generated and some conclusions that could be drawn.

Land/water complementarity

In May 1984, an IWRA seminar was organized at Linköping University, Sweden, on River Basin Strategies for the 21st Century. The outcome was published as a book (Lundqvist et al. 1985). The issue discussed at the seminar was the relation between human activities and the way they are tied to land and water. Interventions are required to increase the socio-economic benefits from these resources, but such benefits are at the same time being impeded by the factual results of such interventions. The tie is two-fold: on the one hand, land use is to a large degree water-dependent, but on the other, water use may be disturbed by water-impacting land use. In a rational world, one would thus expect that this dual interaction would be reflected in knowledgeable environmental management.

Four selected issues were addressed in the case studies presented: obstacles to coordinated land and water conservation and management; legal and administrative tools as incentives/disincentives; problems due to growing urban systems as seen from a river basin perspective; and the river basin as an ecosystem. The seminar, summarized in a synopsis in AMBIO (Falkenmark 1984), contributed to clarifying the complementary nature of land and water, calling for a new strategy of integrated management of these resources. Only by such integration can humans master the growing problems caused by the worldwide, self-inflicted, water-based transport of sediments and solutes in rivers. Attitudes and institutional design have to be changed, and the broad resource illiteracy among planners and managers has to be remedied. It was stressed that the new strategy will not be possible in bureaucracies working with outdated thinking.

Failures in interregional transfer of water management strategies

At the 1985 congress in Brussels, one of the measures taken was to initiate a standing committee on Water Strategies for the 21st Century. That committee remained active for around a decade. In preparation for the committee activities, a problem analysis was performed, “New Water Management Strategies Needed for the 21st Century” (Falkenmark, da Cunha, and David 1987). That analysis put a focus on past failures in interregional transfer of water management strategies, revealing the need to develop new ones, based on fundamental interrelations between land and water, and effective enough to meet various forms of water inadequacies. A point of departure was the recognition that humans are forced to manipulate the environment to reach self-reliance for rapidly growing populations. It is therefore necessary to strike a balance between the benefits intended and the unavoidable feedbacks to the resource base, without endangering its long-term productivity. The analysis particularly stressed the differences between zones with different climates, based on a three-dimensional problem matrix: hydroclimate aridity, water quantity, and quality adequacy, respectively.

The three authors concluded that one of the pressing problems of the world at that point in time was to find effective strategies to manage water inadequacies both in terms of quantity and quality, and for both temperate and low-latitude regions. In the former, the problem was seen as mainly to reduce the per capita demand by water demand management, including the consideration of economic incentives. In the latter, the problem was to allow sustainable societal development on a low per capita water demand level. To these problems of managing water availability constraints were added problems of how to manage the water quality inadequacies. Here also the measures to be taken would differ regionally. Sophisticated waste water treatment is a natural measure in the developed countries. Problems tend to arise when trying to transfer this type of technology to countries with problems of illiteracy and lack of technological familiarity. The authors finally stressed that good water management is essentially a question of increased efficiency in use of water resources and other related resources. The conditions for reaching such efficiency are however not necessarily the same in temperate industrialized countries and tropical developing countries.

Water blindness in the Brundtland Commission report

At the IWRA Congress in Ottawa in 1988, the new Strategy Committee organized a special session on Water Strategies for the 21st Century as a follow-up to a recent UNEP special session on Environmentally Sound Water Management. The background was that the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), in response to the widespread environmental deterioration all over the world already at that time, had developed new concepts and strategies, including environmentally sound management of water resources, integrated conservation and development of land and water, sustainable development, resilience, and so on.

The issue discussed by the special session was the urgent need for new strategies that could be implemented in the arid and semi-arid zones in order to increase life quality, food security and socio-economic development. It was noted that large parts, not only of the actual hunger zone but also of the less-developed part of the world in general, fell within regions where at least part of the year was arid, and that there were both rapid population growth and rapid soil deterioration. Many of the countries were subject to drought problems. At the same time in those regions, however, low-resource agriculture was believed to have a considerable growth potential once applicable strategies could be developed, with the best possible use of local rain as one component.

Emerging from very upset discussions and deep disappointment, expressed during that session when discussing WCED's absent attention to water in the report Our Common Future (WCED 1987), IWRA decided to issue a statement (IWRA 1989). Due to the fundamental importance of water for our common future, the statement was forwarded to the Oslo Conference on Sustainable Development the following month.

The statement stressed that water is a unique solvent, always on the move, and that water would be replacing oil as the major crisis-generating issue on a global scale; that human life is constrained by the limits posed by the global water cycle, and the natural laws governing that circulation system; that water – being as complex as energy – should have deserved a subchapter of its own in the WCED report; that reports regarding water resources tend to be heavily biased towards temperate zone thinking; that sustainable development must be a question of sustainable interaction between human society and the water cycle, including all the ecosystems fed by that cycle; and that fundamental strategy changes are needed to address the massive sustainability problems in the realm of water.

Three fundamental environmental challenges

At the following IWRA congress, in Rabat, Morocco, in May 1991, the Chow Memorial lecture addressed the water-cycle related problems linked to environment as well as development (Falkenmark 1991). The Strategy Committee organized a round table on Water Strategies for the 21st Century: Guiding Ideas and Tendencies. In the announcement, the committee stressed that one of the main keys to sustainable development is a broad water awareness in society, and a general acceptance among the world leaders on the “water planet” of the integrity of the water cycle.

The outcome of the session was a set of water strategy conclusions, summarized in an official IWRA statement (IWRA 1991) and issued in preparation for the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The statement stressed that we were addressing tomorrow's problems with unclear concepts and fixed mindsets from the past, posing severe threats to the success of the Earth Summit. It brought up the fundamental involvement of water and water-related functions in both environmental and developmental issues, and thus the crucial role of water in bridging environment and development issues. The statement identified three fundamental environmental challenges that would have to be addressed:

•	multi-cause water scarcity, generated by population growth per se, by urban growth, and by desiccation of the landscape due to degradation of soil permeability, leading to drought-like conditions even in high rainfall areas;
•	multi-cause water pollution due to airborne emissions, pollution from agricultural land use, industrial activities and human waste; and to waste water outlets, where pollution from these sources gets caught and carried by the water cycle, ending up in land and water ecosystems;
•	multi-cause water-related soil fertility degradation in terms of salinization/waterlogging from poor irrigation management; effects of acid rain originating from air emissions; reduced water holding capacity due to reduced use of organic fertilizers; and land permeability degradation due to mismanagement.

The 1991 statement stressed that, in view of the various integrating functions which water plays in a number of sectors, water-related issues are fundamentally intertwined with most sectors in the national economy. As a consequence, water cannot be seen as a sector of its own; on the contrary, water strategies have to be truly multi-sectoral in character and integrated with the broader economy. The statement concluded that it would be crucial for the success of the Earth Summit/Rio Conference that the actual “water blindness” of environmental and developmental experts, originally founded on a climatic bias in their original concepts and perceptions, be urgently mitigated so that water-related issues be given broad enough and adequate attention at the Summit.

Concerns about future global food security

At the IWRA Congress in Montreal in September 1997, the committee was invited to organize a special session on water scarcity as a key factor in food security. Great concern was expressed about future global food supply, addressing the emerging problems in a follow-up dialogue which was published in AMBIO in March 1998 (Falkenmark et al. 1998). The discussion included a global outlook on increasing food requirements and water-related constraints; it discussed water and food deficit countries with attention to how much water is needed, what limits crop production, the scale of future water scarcity for crop production, and food self-sufficiency problems; it looked at emerging conflicts with attention to the fact that agriculture will have to compete for water, and to the fact that other sectors can pay more for the water; it looked at windows of opportunity with attention to the possibility of getting more food out of less water, of increasing the yields in rainfed agriculture, and of influencing the willingness to produce more; it discussed food imports as an option, with attention to producing the food elsewhere, who is going to pay, and the need to mobilize international institutions to respond. The outcome was summarized in a statement, “Water Experts Express Grave Concerns about Future Global Food Security,” published in the same issue of AMBIO (IWRA 1998).

Conceptual development around water and ecosystems

After the three statements, the problem analysis, and the 1997 round table on water for food, committee members continued their activities through other channels, including the World Water Week in Stockholm. In 1999, a joint seminar, Towards Upstream-Downstream Hydrosolidarity, was organized in cooperation with the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI). In that seminar, experiences from different river basins were brought together and discussed in the light of recent conceptual developments in terms of terrestrial and aquatic ecological services, and hydrological response changes, generated by land use conversions.

The approach taken was dual, highlighting on the one hand a number of conceptual issues, necessary to master in order to successfully address land use, water use and protection of ecosystems; on the other a set of real-world river basin cases with national upstream-downstream conflicts of interest. The contributions to the seminar were published in Water International in June 2000 with hydrosolidarity as the leading theme of the issue. It is worth adding that the interest in hydrosolidarity has continued, as reflected by a recent article in that journal by Gerlak and her colleagues (Gerlak et al. 2011).

The main conclusion drawn from the SIWI/IWRA seminar in 1999 (Anon. 2000) was that a truly interdisciplinary dialogue between various groups of stakeholders is needed in order to arrive at what may be seen as efficient, equitable, and reasonable sharing between upstream and downstream water-related interests. Particular attention was directed to the special characteristics of rivers in the monsoon climate, and to the river desiccation phenomenon, as recently witnessed at that time in the Yellow River. The latter calls for adequate attention to the consumptive use of water involved in biomass production.

Water usability degradation

The three issues highlighted in the original problem analysis by the Strategy Committee included also multi-cause water pollution (Falkenmark et al. 1987). That issue was addressed in an article by the committee chair, “Water Usability Degradation: Economist Wisdom or Societal Madness?” (Falkenmark 2005), concluding that more than three decades of biological argumentation around the need for water pollution abatement had in fact had poor convincing power on economist government advisors. This invited the conclusion that the water community has to take a much stronger part in the debate by:

•	contributing with explanations of the creeping water-related processes behind the visible water pollution components, in focus of the environmental community; with scenarios to make the outcomes of current policy paths visible and understandable; with governance models allowing integrated approaches to water quantity and quality, to land and water, and to humans and ecosystems;
•	proposing technically sound, socially acceptable, economically viable, and legally and institutionally feasible solutions; and
•	securing water resources literacy among the general public and its representatives among decision-makers and politicians.

Conclusions

At the start, the committee set out to address the three core issues, water quantity, water quality and soil fertility problems, on its way towards water strategies for the 21st century. After focusing on quantity issues in Rabat, quality issues in Stockholm and soil fertility issues in Montreal, it had worked itself through all three. Already in Linköping, it had pinpointed the two-way link between land use and water, and the need for an integrated approach on the catchment level. In the last phase, hydrosolidarity was suggested as the direction guiding such a integrated approach.

Twenty years after the water-blind WCED report, the committee chair summarized the global water resources predicament in the journal Environment (Falkenmark 2008), stressing that environmental sustainability – demanding water pollution abatement, depletive water use awareness, aquifer protection, and biodiversity protection – in fact has water as a shared determinant. ILWRM (L for land use) is developing into a catchment-based water balancing tool. The human dimension includes social sustainability, in particular meeting the Millennium Development Goals. In both efforts, water may be seen as a useful entry point, involving a proper balancing and trade-off striking within the constraints represented by water availability.