No More Red Water Maps, Please
Why Science Needs to Focus Now on Solutions to Global Water Supply
By John Sabo, director, Arizona State University’s Future H2O
Science and NGOs are failing global and country-based water management because we keep making maps of risk that are crisis-focused and not solution-focused.
Just take a look at this coverage by Axios in August of the latest WRI National Water Stress Rankings, which lists 17 countries at “extreme high baseline water stress” and 27 others at “high baseline water stress.”
It’s easy to get a headline by saying “21 cities in India are going to run out of water by 2020.” Everyone will read that. I get it: I have published similar maps of water stress in the past.
But enough crisis science has been done; the challenge is doing science that reveals opportunity to prevent crisis.
And beyond the science, crisis headlines obscure the path to potential solutions.
By Focusing Over and Over on Dire Predictions, We Obscure Potential Solutions
Of course there are impending local shortages across the globe. But the solutions conversation never follows from press coverage of a list of the top 20 countries most in trouble of running out of water. This demoralizing messaging leaves people without critical analysis of how to innovate a new path forward — how not just to prevent crisis, but how to create local abundance.
National or state averages also blur variation within each nation or state. Yes, there are hotspots of future shortage. There are also bright spots — regions of local abundance or innovation in management that produce resilience against the calamity portrayed by simple water stress indices. These stress maps never acknowledge or build upon that spatial variability.
For instance: parts of Arizona would be red on any WRI map. Some parts of the state would be the deepest red possible. But while the state appears red due to transfers of surface water, the state has also been recharging its aquifers with these transfers and treated wastewater for over 30 years. Arizona has thus banked in the neighborhood of 12 million acre feet underground. This is one-third the storage volume of a full Lake Mead. The maps don’t show us that. They don’t show recharge potential. How can Arizona build on that progress to achieve progress at an even bigger scale? And what are the lessons for other cities, states and countries?
It’s eye-catching and dramatic to speculate about taps running dry in cities — but such “Day Zero” events have been very, very rare in recent history. Day Zero was predicted in Cape Town most recently. In the United States, Flint failed to deliver adequately clean water to its people. In both cases, weak water institutions and poor governance were just as much to blame as climate change, poor infrastructure or increasing population. In Arizona, where I live, we have no fear of Day Zero, in large part because we have had strong water institutions for decades.
Aquifers and Groundwater Recharge: Storage Options to Help Water Shortages
Here’s an important untapped solution: the potential role of aquifers and groundwater recharge as storage options that could help these water shortages.
Outside of scientific circles, very few people even know about this pathway to water sustainability. The WRI report nods to conventional solutions such as reusing wastewater. But why doesn’t it go in depth to other solutions — for example, by detailing what’s happening in California, where they’re flooding more agricultural land in fallow periods to facilitate groundwater recharge? Or in Pakistan, where government is beginning to consider recharge as an important intervention to improve water security nationwide? The world needs to know about these moves and whether they are applicable worldwide.
Look at India. As the Axios report suggests, India has many big cities in which groundwater resources are being rapidly depleted, and “Day Zero” for these municipalities is fatefully near. I would also bet that at least half those cities have flood control problems. This suggests a great one-two-punch headline: shortage and disaster. A jab-hook combo.
Instead, I suggest that we combine shortage and disaster more creatively. Empty aquifers are clearly the place where we’ve got to be putting flood water when it’s raining — especially as downpours become more intense in the era of climate change — and then using that stored water in creative ways to recharge those cities’ groundwater resources. Science should explore the opportunity of “gaming extremes” in this context — making maps of the potential to store flood water below ground.
Peri-urban recharge is going to be a big part of the solution for these cities, especially because it will be far more economical than other big infrastructure solutions. So let’s start conversations about mobilizing government and private sector funding in order to use aquifers for that recharge and turn around the trends in groundwater.
Science: Focus More on Maximizing Opportunity
Has science done enough to highlight these solutions? Science has done a great job of providing objective critiques of how we manage natural resources — blowing the whistle on unsustainable practices. Great example: using the GRACE satellite to show where groundwater is being depleted. Having those maps has been eye-opening and important.
But science also needs to contribute to the solutions discussion, and we’re not doing a good job of that. We focus on risk. That’s one of the frameworks of business: minimizing risk. But an equally powerful business framework is maximizing opportunity, and science just isn’t taking up that challenge.
The business community gets it. When you talk opportunity and blue maps to the business community, they’re on board right away. Leading with opportunity and then looking at risk is a much better way to get things done.
We have enough red maps of water stress and scarcity; we don’t need any more red maps. We need science and NGOs to turn immediately to the business of solutions and opportunities to create abundance.
