Valuing rivers in the era of climate and nature crises
By Stuart Orr, WWF Global Freshwater Lead
Last November, I was at COP27 in Egypt. So too were many people claiming that a ‘doubling of hydropower’ is necessary to solve the climate crisis. But it’s not. And yet this outdated statistic still lingers in most major energy forecasts — despite growing awareness of the damage caused by high-impact hydropower to people, rivers and nature and the plunging price of alternative renewables, like solar and wind.
So here’s reality. If the world followed the forecasts and funded all the proposed hydropower projects on free-flowing rivers, we would gain less than 2% of the renewable energy required by 2050 to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 C, while damming around half of the world’s remaining long free flowing rivers. Overall, we’d lose around 260,000 km of free flowing rivers and all the benefits they provide to people and nature — for a negligible contribution to mitigate climate change.
So why is this possibility still on the table?
And talking of Egypt. Much of it is a delta — which has sustained communities, cities and entire civilizations for millennia — and it is a delta that is sinking and shrinking. Why? Because it has lost 98% of its annual sediment flow down the Nile. Lose that much from your river and guess what — you start to lose land from your delta. And livelihoods and GDP. And biodiversity. And resilience to climate disasters.
Rivers are among the most important, productive and biodiverse ecosystems on Earth. They flow through our cultural identities, civilizations and cities. They provide us with 1/3rd of the world’s food production. They keep us fed and healthy, carry our waste and nourish the land. And healthy rivers — along with wetlands — are essential to global efforts to adapt to the worsening impacts of climate change and achieve a nature positive world.
So rivers can no longer be treated as just another resource to be harvested, dammed, diverted, polluted, and drained — but as the dynamic arteries they actually are — the lifeblood of our societies, economies and myriad ecosystems. It is impossible to reconcile the importance of rivers to our past, present and future with the way they are treated today. Or rather mistreated. And with the simple fact that if the world continues to undervalue and overlook rivers, then we can kiss goodbye to tackling our climate and nature crises. Or delivering on lasting progress towards sustainable development.
It is time for the world to wake up to rivers.
Let’s start with False boundaries and Angry weather
In the conservation world, the concept of Protected Areas has for many years been the primary way of protecting nature and the focus of most conservation efforts. That is, define a landscape, typically a forested or marine area, and then protect it through laws and fences.
There have long been concerns about this traditional approach to conservation and new more inclusive and innovative approaches are now coming to the fore. But there is one concern that continues to be ignored — the traditional approach to protected areas does not work for rivers. Or freshwater biodiversity. Or the people that rely on them.
For decades, global conservation efforts have stuck to the tried-and-failed approach of tethering progress on the protection of freshwater ecosystems, particularly rivers, to progress on land.
Protect this chunk of land, conservationists have long claimed, and you’ll protect the stretch of river running through it. And the wildlife within it. And the benefits it provides. But it doesn’t.
Because rivers are highly dynamic, with hydrological connectivity — the flow of water, sediments, and nutrients — being critical to their functioning. They have distinctive management needs that recognise and protect the crucial roles of flow, connectivity, and related ecological processes for sustaining freshwater species, habitats and benefits for people. Failure to recognise these distinctive needs has led to the ongoing under-representation of freshwater habitats — especially large, biodiverse rivers — in reserve networks and frequent failures to protect freshwater biodiversity.
Recent evidence shows that prioritization based solely on terrestrial needs yielded just 22% of the freshwater biodiversity benefits yielded by specific freshwater conservation actions. Many of us have been pointing this out for years. It’s time for our fellow conservationists and decision makers to pay attention.
But it doesn’t look like they are. These ideas continue to be promoted with a focus in the discussions and drafting of the new global framework on ‘land and sea’. As a freshwater expert, this wording has been the basis of many a good fight. The reality is that the world’s efforts to halt the loss of biodiversity have been undermined by this deeply ingrained and blinkered prioritization of ‘land and sea’.
This approach has been inadvertently promoted by scientists and conservationists — two groups that are overwhelmingly dominated by experts in terrestrial biodiversity — who have incorrectly assumed that safeguarding land areas automatically conserves the rivers that flow through them or the lakes that lie within them.
Unsurprisingly, this scientific-conservationist consensus has been endorsed by governments and agreements — so that it is now second nature for people to refer to ‘land and sea’ as if there are no rivers connecting the two. But the world is interconnected. We cannot halt the loss of nature, let alone restore it, unless we prioritize all three biomes — land, freshwater and sea.
The new CBD global framework for nature must give them equal status. Ensuring that the agreement talks about ‘land, freshwater, and sea’ is a simple, straightforward and significant initial step to elevate rivers, lakes, and freshwater wetlands to a status equal to terrestrial and marine domains.
My colleagues — and other conservationists, scientists and government representatives — have now changed their tune. But we need many more to make the shift. And journalists too, who are still parroting ‘land and sea’. It would be great if they also took off their blinkers and started seeing — and reporting on — the true value of rivers.
Just take a look at the IPCC summary report for policy makers on climate change and land — water appears a fair few times. But there is just one solitary reference to rivers. Needless to say, there has been no IPCC report on climate and rivers — even though the IPCC itself concludes that climate change is altering rainfall patterns and river flows, and melting glaciers.
So that brings me to angry weather. To the historic floods, storms and droughts that are filling the news. The climate crisis will redraw the boundaries of landscapes in the future and demand a new response from us that is no longer river blind. Human constructed landscapes — drawn up by wars and colonial treaties will be overrun by flood waters or drained of life.
Today the impacts of climate change & unsustainable development on the Colorado, Mekong and Yangtze rivers are changing our thinking. Our old concept of a landscape is meaningless when one third of Pakistan is under water. Or on a less catastrophic scale but just as revealingly — when the Danube & Rhine hit record lows throughout their multi-boundary basins.
As the Global Center on Adaptation states — ‘The way humans and society will experience climate change is through water’. Yes, that’s rainfall, but it’s mostly rivers. Climate change is water change & angrier weather will make the river basin the most important development, conservation & planning unit we have. We can no longer neglect to plan from source to sea.
And in many ways, river basins are more set up to be on the front lines of climate action. River basins are already:
- Governed by basin authorities, catchment partnerships, institutions and jurisdictions;
- Connected to international treaties; and
- Recognised by governments.
Yes, in almost all cases, we need to strengthen institutions and give good catchment governance some real teeth, but we have the foundations.
Throughout history, the landscape that has really mattered to our communities, cities and civilizations has been the river basin. When we tamed our wild rivers, we turned our eyes to other ‘scapes’. But climate change has brought the river basin back into play. This is the natural boundary that really matters.
2. Even the water sector undervalues rivers
When I started my career — to be a good water professional was to be one of three things:
- A WASH professional;
- An irrigation engineer — who usually made the greatest sense because they understood the context better;
- Or mostly, an active advocate for big dams. They were called the water buffaloes, because they were bullies and had no problem insulting and denigrating anyone who might challenge their ideas.
And it didn’t matter if you were nuanced or science based — if you correctly promoted system scale planning, or right dams in the right places, or proper consideration for other values and losses or Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) — to suggest any of it was to be anti-development.
And EIAs — if they were ever done at all — too often only went as far as the project site — rarely properly projecting impacts on water dynamics, flows of fish, nutrients and sediment. And where they were identified, the (often unfulfilled) promises to mitigate impacts too easily soothed the conscience of investors and governments thirsty for water revenues and security. And even though many if not most of those dams failed to meet their promised goals, the water sector turned a blind eye to the human consequences, the corruption, the cost overruns, the delays.
And of course to the devastating impact on freshwater biodiversity. Out-of-sight and out-of-mind, what value did some freshwater fish have in comparison to another mega dam?
And here we are, after a few generations of blocking, draining and ignoring river health and services — and we are not in good shape.
Yes there were benefits, nobody can doubt that. But they came at a cost higher than anyone realized. And in most cases, the trade-offs were known. Decision makers went ahead anyway because the perceived benefits were large enough to outweigh the costs.
But it certainly doesn’t need to be this way any more. Indeed, it can’t be this way any more. And you’d think there was more than enough evidence to transform our approach.
You’d think that an 83% collapse in freshwater species populations on average in my lifetime would be enough. Or that 1/3rd of freshwater species are threatened with extinction. Or WWF’s work on the Living Planet report over the last 50 years, which has shown that the decline in freshwater species dramatically brings down the overall loss of wildlife globally.
The real evidence of the damage we have done to the health of our rivers is our deltas.
We’ve all heard the warnings — deltas are one of the most vulnerable places to climate change. But that’s not the real story. The real story is that the world’s great deltas from the Mississippi to the Mekong are sinking and shrinking. Not because the sea levels are rising but because we’ve trapped or mined the river sand and sediment that sustains them.
And we still are. Decision makers are continuing to invest in high impact projects — opting for negligible climate mitigation, while simultaneously undermining climate adaptation. Even when there are more river- and delta-friendly renewable alternatives.
Let’s take the Mekong — where are we now?
The Mekong was still one of the world’s healthiest rivers less than three decades ago, flowing with good water quality and sustaining the world’s most productive inland wild fisheries and a delta that was gaining 16m of land over the sea on average every year.
Today all environmental indicators are in the red. Indeed, the river is so unhealthy that parts of it actually turned blue. The Mekong is meant to be muddy. It’s meant to be packed with sand and mud. It’s meant to be so murky that it’s impossible to see its astonishing array of megafauna — its Giant catfish and Giant freshwater stingrays and Irrawaddy river dolphins. It’s not meant to be blue.
But donors and decision makers have spent decades making the classic river-development mistake — treating it as if it’s just a pipe for water. Forgetting that a river is just as much a flow of sediments and nutrients.
And so, poorly planned hydropower and unregulated sand mining have stripped the Mekong of most of its natural sediment flows. Instead of 160 million tonnes reaching the delta each year — it’s less than 50 million tonnes. And if all the planned development in the basin is given the green light that figure will drop below 10% by 2040.
And this spells disaster.
I think one of our greatest failings as a river community is the fact that most people think deltas are solid. That we’ve failed to ensure people know the truth — that deltas are dynamic systems that are built with mud and sand that flows down rivers. That needs to be constantly replenished with sediment from upstream parts of the basin to compensate for natural subsidence and erosion by the waves. That the health — indeed the very survival — of deltas depends on the healthy functioning of the entire river basin.
Without sufficient sediment, the Mekong delta cannot compensate for subsidence and erosion. So it is sinking and shrinking. This is not because of climate-induced sea level rise. The Mekong delta — an area equivalent to half of the Netherlands — is sinking 5 times faster than sea level rise. That will just make the situation worse.
Even if we stop the seas from rising, the Mekong delta will still sink.
Let that sink in for a minute. The climate crisis and legitimate fears about sea level rise in the future have blinded people to what is happening now. To why the Mekong delta is sinking now. To the structural factors behind its rapidly increasing vulnerability to worsening storms, floods and droughts. To the growing threats to its 20 million people, to a rice bowl that feeds 245 million people across the globe, to extraordinary biodiversity and 30% of Viet Nam’s GDP.
And yet the construction of the Luang Prabang mainstream dam will start in January 2023. And the Sanakham dam is in an advanced stage of planning. There is no scientific doubt about the impacts they will have.
Meanwhile, Lower Mekong countries continue to extract unsustainable amounts of sand from the river. And the science is crystal clear on that too.
The two main channels in the Mekong delta have lost 2 to 3 metres of elevation over the past 2 decades — and will continue to lose up to 10 cm per year. The result — the water table is dropping, salt water is intruding much further into the delta, and vulnerability is increasing.
It’s a depressing tale. But there is a twist.
The narrative is changing in the Mekong. Just a few years ago, you would be very hard pressed to find any media stories about the impact of hydropower dams on the delta. You would have never read anything about sand mining.
But now you do.
And action is being taken too. Thanks to funding from the German IKI climate fund, WWF is partnering with the Vietnamese government on the first ever mapping of the impacts of sand mining on the delta — and even more excitingly, the world’s first ever delta-wide sand budget.
This could really be a game-changer. And not just for the Mekong but for other sinking and shrinking deltas.
And even the Mekong River Commission is finally moving into action mode. Four member countries have endorsed guidelines for Transboundary EIA and Preliminary Designing Guidance for Hydropower — including some good targets to be met by hydropower development in relation to fisheries and sediment.
Small steps that have come too late, but still positive steps that may be the beginning of something bigger? Let’s see.
A moment for Rivers?
The vast majority of rivers are working rivers. They cannot be fenced off and protected. There will always be trade-offs. But the losses we’ve had to live with in the past are not inevitable orunavoidable. Existing solutions, alongside emerging innovations, point toward much greater potential to reconcile economic growth with healthy rivers. Indeed, there will be no sustainable development without healthy rivers. But we must re-evaluate all the benefits of the rivers that flow through our communities, cities and countries.
And this is also on all of us working in river science and conservation. How often do we talk to Ministries of Finance about the value of healthy freshwater fisheries? Fisheries that provide food for 200 million people and livelihoods for 60 million. How often do we point to the fact that the healthy free flowing rivers might be the best, cheapest Nature-based Solution for adaptation — certainly for deltas? And that we no longer have to mitigate at the cost of adaptation.
There must, of course, be trade-offs. But for the first time, I feel that river health is not the first thing that should be automatically traded off.
It is an overused term that this is a ‘watershed moment’ for rivers. But countries that fail to redraw their maps in time, will be left counting the cost. The only line that spoke to the rest of the economy previously was the 1 in 100 year flood line. We know we have to reassess how we plan development in the future in a new hydrological ‘envelope’. Listed companies are already forced to take more seriously the predictable climate impacts that will disrupt their future operations. And as they start to face up to the financial losses they risk due to climate impacts, it’s also becoming clear that they need to respond collectively with others in their catchments — upstream and downstream.
This year, water and freshwater ecosystems were much higher up the Climate COP agenda than ever before — with the first ever Water Day and, critically, the first reference to both water and the need to protect and restore rivers and lakes in a final COP communique. This is a significant breakthrough that reinforces our work and will help us all to push our messaging around climate and water up the climate action agenda.
Next week, the latest — and most important — in a string of COPs kicks off in Montreal. As I mentioned before, all our eyes will be on whether rivers, lakes and freshwater wetlands make it into the final agreement at the CBD COP. No one knows at this point — it’s touch and go. But there is definitely momentum.
And not just for protection. I was at the Ramsar COP before going to Egypt and there was a real appetite for ambitious restoration targets — with a wide variety of countries expressing their support for restoring 300,000 kms of river by 2030. Can you imagine the impact that scale of restoration would have on our rivers — and the people and nature that rely on them?
And talking about a long time coming…in four months many of us will be in New York for the first UN Water Summit in 50 years. An unprecedented opportunity to ensure rivers are at the centre of the debate about water, food and energy security. About peace and security. About tackling climate change and nature loss.
And there has never been a better chance to promote system-scale energy planning. To end the era of harmful hydropower. For the first time, we are now able to meet global climate and energy goals without following the forecasts calling for a ‘doubling of hydropower’. Without sacrificing our few remaining long free flowing rivers.
Thanks to the renewable revolution — the plunging price of solar, wind and storage technology — countries can now invest in power grids that are LowCx3 — low carbon, low cost and low conflict with communities, rivers and nature.
Of course, some new hydropower projects will be needed but not a doubling. And not on long free flowing rivers. And mostly it would be pumped storage — which can be off-river and low impact. Or refurbishing old turbines. Or retrofitting turbines to existing water supply and irrigation dams. There are options now — options that can safeguard the values and benefits of our rivers.
This recognition presents water professionals with a new challenge. We have been calling from the sidelines for decades to be taken seriously. Now this is happening. Can we rise with confidence to the challenge?
The hydraulic mission of the previous champions of development was to ditch and dam — contain and control. We know — the science is clear — that those days are over. Living, dynamic rivers with flourishing wildlife, broad riparian buffers and healthy connected floodplains are needed more than ever to absorb the climate shocks that are already happening.
The road to resilience is a river. We — the river professionals — need to lead, and show that we know how to work with nature to ‘build back wetter’ and construct corridors of connectivity that will see us through the future droughts and deluges.
This is certainly our ‘watershed moment’. A time for water scientists to step into the future, where engineers fear to tread, and lead the way.
Interest in river restoration, wetland expansion and Nature-based Solutions — as well as in new forms of finance and nature positive outcomes — is rising. We can revive rivers — as essential cooling, greening connectors in the cross-hairs of the climate-nature crisis.
We have a huge opportunity and responsibility ahead. So where do we go from here?
First, here are a few statistics to remember:
- We cannot lose sight of this — 2 billion people still lack access to water…so all this development at the cost of rivers hasn’t even delivered water for all. We’ve failed to do that while still wrecking our rivers;
- 2% — the negligible amount of renewable energy that would be generated if all planned hydropower dams were built — while losing 250,000 kms of river connectivity;
- 83% — the collapse in freshwater species populations since 1970;
- One third of global food production is directly linked to rivers; and
- 51% of all fish species are freshwater.
Speaking of the world’s dazzling diversity of freshwater fish. We are here by the banks of the Danube, a river that used to have Sturgeon swimming freely from the Black Sea to the Black Forest. Remember this. The most threatened family of species on the planet is the Sturgeon. That is the clearest indicator of the damage we have done to the Danube.
But we have a chance now — through climate change — to restore rivers to their central place in our social and economic narrative. To re-frame the river as the most important landscape unit — not the lines on a map demarcating the 19 countries that share the Danube basin.
Let us break the sectoral blindness — not just of the water community, but of the energy and food sectors too.
And what about investors and the private sector? We need to shake up governance as it’s not working — because we need investment and collective action to enhance the health of river basins, not more empty pledges and greenwashing. And investors and businesses need it too — to mitigate their worsening water risks and build their resilience.
We must shout more loudly about solutions — because they exist. Like dam removals. They are proven solutions — bringing life and resilience back to rivers in Europe and the US. We need to share these positive stories — at a time when, let’s be honest, people really need them.
Being bullish about our species? I certainly have made the decision that I will not shy away from talking about the threats to our freshwater biodiversity. The water sector never wanted to hear this — now they have to.
And Valuing water — yes of course, this is central, but I’d argue Valuing Rivers is just as imperative. We want people to know what catchment they sit in as routinely as they know their postcode.
And we need to remind everyone, all the time, that water doesn’t come from a tap — it comes from ecosystems. And more than that — it comes from Rivers.
