Because this important book succinctly defines why humanity is facing a global water crisis, Out of Water will be of interest to students and water policy practitioners alike. Written by a senior and a junior expert with a combined 25 years of experience with the International Water Management Institute, it is not a book that can be taken lightly. Out of Water gets a lot done in 200 pages; not surprisingly given that it was published by Financial Times, The book builds carefully, one hard reality upon another, until it arrives at a key chapter on water rights and pricing near the end of the book. The lasting impression the book leaves is that the problems we face with the protection and management of water are not being adequately addressed and will become more difficult in the future if we fail to move in certain directions now.
The foreword of Out of Water establishes the dimensions of the problem Chartres and Varma explore in detail in the following chapters. In many water-scarce countries, water demand is expected to significantly outpace supply in the coming decades. This will have many effects; the most important of these, however, will relate to food production.
At the beginning of this century it was estimated that some 850 million people around the world were living below the poverty line. The recent financial crisis coupled with the global food crisis of 2007 2008 pushed these numbers to over a billion. The reader may wish to examine what this statement means. A result of the greed and malfeasance in the financial sector that caused the economic collapse of 2008, combined with the impact in part of the decision to use a large part of the annual American corn crop to produce gasoline instead of food, meant that more than a 150 million people were pushed over the line from subsistence to abject poverty worldwide. People in wealthy countries like Canada sometimes need to be reminded that more than a billion people on this Earth do not have the money or the means to provide themselves or their families with adequate nourishment and clothing let alone attend to basic health needs. This poverty is also often exacerbated by social and political disorder and disease.
Chartres and Varma argue that the implications for how much water we need and the urgency associated with its more efficient use is made clear by the fact that if we are to feed the increasingly numbers of people expected to inhabit our planet by 2050 we will likely need about twice as much water as was used globally in agriculture in the year 2000. Demographers and economists predict that after 2050 the human population is likely to stabilize somehow around 9 billion. We seldom challenge the inevitability of such predictions. We unquestioningly accept such conjecture as though it were somehow gospel; as if they came to us from on high as conventional wisdom that cannot be refuted. We treat the question of population growth and the impacts it will bring in its wake as if it was somehow beyond our means to do anything about it and that there was some kind of taboo associated with even considering limiting it. We are left with simply having to accept that there will be more people in the world and trust that our populations will miraculously level off as demographers and economists have speculated. None of the economists or demographers who confidently make these predictions, however, can tell us how we are going to feed our growing populations in the interim 40 years or how we are going to feed a third more people if and when our population does in fact level off in the future. It is left to books like Out of Water to do that.
The thesis behind Out of Water is that we have to manage our global water supplies far better than we have in the past if we are going to have any hope of feeding a projected world population of nine billion by mid-century. We cannot continue with stagnating or low growth of food and water productivity if everyone is to be fed and cities and industries are to have enough water while at the same time serving nature's needs. Farmers particularly, but not exclusively, in water-scarce developing countries have to increase the efficiency of their water use. Chartres and Varma warn that we have to stop taking a business as usual approach to the relationship between water and food production. Large scale engineering and economic initiatives alone will not get the world where it needs to be when it comes to the nexus of water availability and food production needs. As in the case of finding solutions to the problem of peak oil seeking solutions to the challenge of peak water will require major investments in infrastructure, significant reforms in governance and policy and changes in the way our most important and longest-established institutions manage water. The needs of the poorest and most vulnerable must be put at the heart of the solution. The direction of these changes will have to support the enhanced capacity of poor farmers many of whom are women not just to grow food but to find better ways to deliver it to markets and to find the capital and support they need to grow and raise yields. While they will not be easy to implement, Chartres and Varma point out that solutions exist and now is the time to be acting upon their possibility.
What Chartres and Varma intend to demonstrate with Out of Water is that water management is not simply a matter of understanding the hydrological cycle and laws of gravity. Whether you live in a developed, emerging or developing economy, appropriate management can only be achieved through the balancing the aspirations of all elements of society. Equity matters. While sound scientific principles and progressive economic theory may be a useful foundation for durable solutions, it is the on-the-ground acceptance of those solutions by the people affected by them that will determine their success.
While Chartres and Varma clearly appreciate that you can't manage what you can't or don't measure, Out of Water is about the central water management issue of our time: governance. They argue that access to high quality data and information should be goal of all water planning and management initiatives. They clearly identify the importance of providing enough water to nature so that it can provide to us the water we need. The authors are also very clear in their analysis of the growing water quality crisis associated with the intensification of agricultural production. They explain the need to manage urban and industrial demand. Equity in water management, they argue, requires the empowerment of women and the poor in decision-making. But it is governance that is the real problem.
Chartres and Varma conclude that a global water crisis can be avoided through integrated water management approaches that combine the best science and engineering with first class economic and social policies that empower all who can help themselves by helping the water sector achieve sustainability. They observe that in the past human societies have never done well in managing such complex issues in an integrated manner. Our habit has been to atomize problems through reductionist principles that provide explanation to smaller and smaller parts of natural systems. They suggest that if we are going to solve the very real problem of food and water security we are going to have to move forward in a far more integrated way than we have to date. The problem, as Chartres and Varma point out, is that we don't have much time to learn to manage water differently and more efficiently. Our very numbers may soon overwhelm our outmoded ways of managing water.
The premise of Out of Water is one familiar to many people working in water management in Canada today. The authors conclude that we should be dealing seriously with emerging problems now, while time and prosperity are on our side, so that as our population grows and our climate changes our social and economic future is not limited by water availability and quality problems we could have and should have addressed in better times. While this message is of global importance, it is particularly relevant to Canadians, making Out of Water of interest to a wide audience of water practitioners.