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Hello, I'm Neil Grigg. I'm here today to talk about integrated water resources management.
This is an international initiative which has been created over the last few decades
to deal with all these urgent water issues that are out there. You see on the left from
the headwaters to the right where the water is delivered to someone for critical use.
This is becoming such an urgent issue around the world that a lot of people have mobilized
to see what we can do about it. In this course, we've been talking about the
urgency of water issues. We don't need to reiterate that again. This is a quote from
Global Water Partnership, and I'll explain who that is, in a few minutes. What they say
is that everyone knows that water is essential to the life of the planet and the prosperity
of its people. But what fewer people know and what political leaders fail to address
is that these increasing pressures of climate change, population growth, urbanization ,and
energy, are putting unprecedented pressure on freshwater resources. We've got to do something
about it now. That's what we'll be talking about today.
We've sort of characterized the water issues this way. On the left you'll see a list of
health, environment, economy, and other categories where water is essential and it's used. On
the right you can see how the way water is used translates into impacts on these larger
societal issues such as justice, economic opportunity, sustainability, and those topics.
It all comes together in the water-society-environment nexus which is under pressure from climate
change and population growth and all those other categories of driving forces. This creates
the problem of the web of life and water which we're trying to address.
Going back to after WWII there's been a tremendous international response to trying to figure
out what to do. When I say there's been a tremendous international response, the problem
is so large that it's going to take more than these international conferences and United
Nations actions to deal with it. But this shows at least what people are doing and trying
to create as actions. If you go back to right after WWII, you've got these United Nations
conferences, there were a group of them, environment, population, food, women, human settlements,
and water, at Mar del Plata, Argentina in 1977.That sort of set the stage for the action
which we're seeing today. We went through the 1980s; that was designated as the International
Water Supply and Sanitation Decade. Into the 1990s, a group of actions and conferences,
frameworks for action were formulated, culminating in the Sixth World Water Forum which was held
in Marseille, France in 2012. Along the way there was a lot of emphasis on sustainability
and you see the report called "Our Common Future" which is called the Commission Report
1987. That defines what is meant by sustainability, that is preserving the options for the future
so resources will still be there for them. There have been many actions. Here you see
a web shot of the World Water Council which was created in the 1990s to deal with the
water issues that emerged out of those conferences. You use some of the things they're talking
about and you see Professor Ben Braga who is the current president of the World Water
Council giving a talk at the United Nations about water risks. This shows sort of what
a small world it is among water professionals they were dealing with because Ben Braga,
as a professor at the University of Sao Paulo was, collaborated with us extensively here
at Colorado State University. He even spent his sabbatical leave with us a few years ago
using my office while I was department head at the university. We're in constant touch
with leaders like this who are talking on the global stage about these urgent water
issues. What they basically said is that we need to
focus on water security. Everyone acknowledges that sustainable development is not going
to be achieved without a water secure world and this water secure world will integrate
a concern for the intrinsic value of water such as for society and environment and all
of these spiritual type values of water with a concern for its use for survival and well-being
that is som economic and social purposes. This comes down to the global strategy of
a group called Global Water Partnership which is another group somewhat related to the World
Water Council but a separate entity based out of Sweden. I'm going to explain some of
their outcomes and work in a minute here. Out of this Sixth World Water Forum which
was in 2012 in Marseilles, France, a framework for action was developed with several strategies.
You'll see in these strategies, the key words that we've been talking about all through
the course, we'll go over them in detail, but it starts out by discussing everyone's
well-being and then different measures such as access to water and sanitation, hygiene,
taking care of risks and crises, and cooperating and having peace through water.
Then there's the economic development objective. It has food, water, and energy, green growth,
ecosystem services. I've highlighted in red the Integrated Water Resources Management
which is the tool that I'm talking about today and will explain how it works.
Strategy 3 was keeping the planet blue, quality of water and ecosystems, reducing pressure,
dealing with climate change, and urbanization. Strategy 4 was putting into place the conditions
for success, good governance which is missing all over, financing, and capacity building
through enabling environments. Integrated Water Resources Management is really
a paradigm, a way of looking at water resources management that would bring into harmony all
of these different processes that we've been talking about during this course. What you
see there is a definition that's been developed by Global Water Partnership, where they define
it as a process to promote the coordinated development and management of water, land,
and related resources in order to maximize economic and social welfare in an equitable
manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems and the environment. Like
a lot of things we deal with in water, it's a complex definition, they've tried to weave
all the important words into the definition so it comes out very complex. But basically,
Integrated Water Resources Management is a way to bring everything together and to balance
all of our values and have it work out for sustainability for all purposes.
You see the concepts were developed there, multiple uses, holistic management, multiple
perspectives, participatory approach, and involvement of women, all of these important.
These came out of a conference in the late 1990s in Dublin where a group of stakeholders
worked to develop these key principles. In Integrated Water Resources Management,
there are a lot of tools that can be brought to bear. We have discussed these throughout
the course. There are things like enabling the environment, you see there with good policies,
finances, and legal framework, and things like that.
Then you have identification of key institutional roles. These are very long and complex. We
don't need to focus on everything, but just think about, for example, River Basin Commissions,
River Basin Organizations, and Watershed Organizations. If you don't have those and you don't have
the management capability that you need, the framework for people to work together, things
are not going to work out in the end. Here's another set of tools, this time management
instruments. You see things like assessment techniques, planning indicators, all of these
are very technical, but without them in Integrated Water Resources Management, you're not going
to work well in the end. Here's some more: efficiency, social change
instruments, and methods for conflict resolution. Regulatory instruments, economic instruments.
All of these are critical. In the end, without having good tools like this, Integrated Water
Resources Management is not going to work. To illustrate how this should work, we really
need to focus on case studies. I've got two or three of these to discuss in a little detail
just so we can focus on how Integrated Water Resources Management is supposed to work and
actually does work in a range of different situations. Let's start with the Colorado
River Basin which is one of the case studies that we've been discussing throughout the
course. As you can see, there's seven states there all through the southwestern United
States, all of which have to share this one critical river. How is Integrated Water Resources
Management supposed to work in a situation like that? To start with, it's a large scale
example involving a lot of different organizations, state government organizations, federal government,
Indian tribes, local irrigation districts, and others. The success of cooperative work
at such a high level like this ultimately is going to involve some kind of agreements
that are developed among the states and federal government agencies so that it works out with
high level actions which can be devolved down to the local level to work for actions on
the ground. In this case, the Colorado River Basin has inner-state compacts, Upper Basin
Commission, Lower Basin Commission, and even international agreements between the United
States and Mexico. There's a tremendous amount of effort that's put into using those management
tools including models, water laws, measurement of water, and all of those to make it work
out. For a large scale example like this, Integrated Water Resources Management turns
out to be the key tool but it has to involve a lot of supporting tools, technical tools,
institutional tools, to make it work out. Here's another example which again is a fairly
high level of scale. I've focused on Brazil and what's been done there in recent years.
I've shown a picture of Dr. Jerson Kelman who's one of our graduates who has directed
an effort to organize river basin commissions and studies to address the problems of water
across Brazil in multiple regions. One of the things that they did in Brazil is to organize
a national water agency called ANA. Jerson was the first director of that agency. One
of the focal points of the work of that agency was river basin commissions and studies. One
of those was in a basin that I'm showing here with the cursor is called the San Francisco
Basin, River San Francisco, Brazil. It starts down in the industrialized region of Brazil
down in here and it goes to the northeast where it's drier and the people are lower
in income with a lot of different types of water needs. They've had a tremendous turmoil
over sorting out how to use the water resources in the San Francisco River Basin. It involves
tools and issues all the way from the river basin plans themselves to social actions and
even protests which have included a hunger strike by a prominent priest. Resolutions
of the issues in that river basin have reached all the way to the top levels of the country
including the president's office. Integrated Water Resources Management is essential to
deal with a problem that scale but in the end to work things out is going to be very
difficult and is going to go beyond simple technical tools that we might use.
In Africa, you have different scales of problems. One of those that we've worked with here at
the university is how you can address water management at a local scale to benefit farmers
and villages and get people to work together to resolve their own problems on the ground.
This is not going to take sophisticated national level organizations and large amounts of money
infuse, it's going to take development of local water resources, wells, diversions from
local streams, irrigation systems working together to resolve problems. Integrated Water
Resources Management here is going to be more with people working together to solve their
local problems than it will with those high level large scale measures such as in the
Colorado River. In Asia, if we look there, you see tremendous
problems due to population growth, large spatial scales. I picked out one problem in particular,
urban water management in Jakarta, Indonesia. Indonesia, the islands, the archipelago is
located down in this part of south Asia. There you see Jakarta, the capitol of the country.
The case that I chose to discuss briefly is how you can develop urban water management
in such a large megacity as that where you have so many disenfranchised people such as
this young fellow here who was trying to get water out of a pipe with an illegal tap. The
water pipe happens to be exposed in a water way there so that you can see he has access
to it. Some people are desperate and that's the only way that they've got to get a water
supply. Integrated Water Resources Management in an urban setting like that would mean how
to address water supply, waste water, storm water, and the needs of all kinds of populations
of people, all at the same time, meanwhile paying for it while the financial resources
are not adequate for that in many cases. This was the subject of a dissertation, Roberto
Strieko that you see here on the left, he was one of our students, he worked on that
in Civil Engineering at Colorado State University. Now he's become the President or Rector of
his University located in Indonesia. It's the Catholic university, Parahyangan, that
you see listed on the left with the announcement of his appointment as president.
Integrated Water Resources Management has high aspirations as a way that we can describe
what's going on around the world and what the needs are to address these many issues.
You see a lot of praise for it. It focuses our shared quest for solution to water resources
problems and issues. It provides a principled and normative vision of water management,
what it should be. It explains many water management principles and solutions to situations
which have to be confronted with solutions to deal with human and environmental problems.
But Integrated Water Resources Management also is criticized a lot. Many people who
will say, well it's visionary but it's ambiguous and ineffective. It doesn't work. For example,
that San Francisco River Basin in Brazil that I mentioned, people would blame the failure
of some of the measure that were attempted on a poor Integrated Water Resources Management.
This is a very short sighted view because the problems are simply too big to be solved
through any one paradigm like that. Another criticism is that this is just an engineering
and planning tool. It's oriented too much toward developing water resources projects
like new drinking water supplies for example. In parallel with that, they would say that
because it's an engineering and planning tool, it ignores societal needs and the real political
nature of water. This kind of a criticism is not really aimed at Integrated Water Resources
Management so much as it's aimed at our continuing search for political paradigms and ways to
organize society that work to address our needs in ways that people consider adequate
to meet our needs but also fair toward everyone. What we're looking for is a way to improve
Integrated Water Resources Management as we go down the road. On the bottom left you see
a book I wrote about this. It's called Total Water Management. One the lower left you'll
see another one that I prepared. It's called Governance and Management for Sustainable
Water Systems. We're looking for ways to address these large scale issues in a total way, but
it's a real challenge. If you look at the upper left you'll see the cover of a report,
World Water Vision. We have a lot of good reports like that that address what we need
to do. We have a pretty good idea about the visionary approach, and the challenge is to
make it work on the ground. Meanwhile, there are groups working on that as we speak. You
see Dr. Frank Rijsberman. Frank is the Chief Executive Officer of a group called the Consortium
for Agricultural Research Organizations Around the World. He's there at the Africa Rice Center.
Frank is one of our PhD graduates in Civil Engineering here at Colorado State. He did
his dissertation on systems approach to managing water for food. He's been involved a number
of international efforts to address Integrated Water Resources Management and is one of the
authors of that book that you see on the upper left about what we should do. Once again,
it's not a question so much of conceptualizing the big issues as it is figuring out how to
make this work on the ground. In the end, what it's going to take is Integrated
Water Resources Management would show us the best practices for different situations and
we're looking for balance through collective action of people to balance these many different
purposes of water management. That's where the challenge is. The real challenge is a
people challenge, it's not a technological challenge. Integrated Water Resources Management
explains to us what we should do and you can capture what we should do in those three words:
integrate, connect, act. At the end of the day, the real challenge is to figure out how
to make it work in the real world involving many different people issues.