Oceanside Chat: Scientist and Co-Founder of the Pacific Institute Dr. Peter Gleick shares with us The Past, Present and Future of Water
On June 29th 2023, Peter explained what the concept of “soft path for water” was during a conversation on water with Stuart Rudick, founder of HydroDAO and top performing investment manager who has been “making money make a difference” for four decades.
Peter is a leading scientist, innovator, and communicator on global water and climate issues. He co-founded the Pacific Institute in Oakland, one of the most innovative, independent non-governmental organizations addressing the connections between the environment and global sustainability. Peter’s work has redefined water from the realm of engineers to the world of sustainability, human rights, and integrated thinking. Peter pioneered the concept of the “soft path for water,” developed the idea of “peak water,” and has written about the need for a “local water movement.” Among many other honors, Peter received the prestigious MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, the U.S. Water Prize, and has been named “a visionary on the environment” by the BBC. He was elected in 2006 to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2018 he was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. In 2023 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Here’s a 10-Minute Teaser of the Talk (the whole talk is published below):
Peter, you have a new book coming out, please tell us about your latest book.
“I have a new book out called The Three Ages of Water. It’s sort of the human history of water, the role that water played in the beginning of the universe and the beginning of our solar system and our own evolution. Stuart said […] Hydrosapiens and in fact, water was incredibly important for the evolution of Homosapiens. The fact that our early ancestors were able to manage and manipulate water to their advantage over other species, I think really has helped us become the dominant species on the planet. That’s the first stage of water that I described as sort of this early history, through the first empires and their control of water in ancient Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley and China. The role that spirituality played in the religions, […] all major religions have water at their core. Until we got to a point, really, when populations started to outgrow our ability to just live off the land. We moved from hunter gatherer communities to agricultural communities. The second age of water I described is really our age. It’s an age when science, technology, culture and art sort of brought the advances that we now benefit from: the technologies that we benefit from, the science that taught us what water related diseases were and how to cure them, the water laws and institutions that again, we rely on. […] The second age really brought unintended consequences, the water crisis that we think about. The third age of water in my book is my positive vision for the future. Stuart said I’m an optimist and I am an optimist. I believe we will ultimately solve our water problems and I talk about it in the book, how we could solve our water problems and the challenges that we face in overcoming the barriers to moving forward, [and] the success stories that I see all around us. […] So that’s sort of a quick overview of what the book is, and where I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately.”
Could you just share some of these details about how we are using less water?
“One of the reasons I’m optimistic is because I see all around me, in the work that I’ve been doing, the travels I’ve done and the people I’ve met, smart things happening around water innovations in technology, but innovations also in the environment and innovations in institutions. Total water use in the United States, for example, for everything, is less than it was 40 years ago, despite the fact that the economy has grown, our population has grown, our water use has gone down. That’s because of improvements in efficiency, improvements in technology, regulations that have changed things, commitments on the part of individuals to change the way they use water, industries that are getting smarter about doing more with less water, farmers that are growing more food with less water. It’s sort of a remarkable fact that people don’t know. That fact alone, that we use less water today than we used 40 years ago, and much less water per capita, because population has grown, is an example of the fact that we can move in the right direction.”
You talk about this third age as the “soft path”. What is the “soft path”?
“The soft path really originates from work that Amory Lovins did many, many years ago on energy. He wrote a book called The Soft Path for Energy in [1977] that described for the energy world, the way we had to rethink our energy systems to move away from some of the unintended consequences of our energy policies. The soft path for water says ‘let’s think about alternative ways of thinking about supply’. Supply in the past in the water world meant drilling another groundwater well, overdrafting another river, building a pipeline from another watershed, taking more water out of the environment. There are new supply strategies that don’t require damaging the environment like water reuse. You know we collect a lot of wastewater and we treat it to a very high standard and then typically we throw it away. That’s a resource. It’s not a liability anymore. It’s an asset. Israel has recognized this. Singapore reuses all of its wastewater, treats it to a very high standard, so high they use it in their semiconductor industry, which requires very pure water. California, at the moment, reuses about 18% of its wastewater and is talking about doubling or tripling that. That’s a new source of supply and that’s part of the soft path: thinking differently about supply. But the soft path also says ‘think differently about demand’. In the old days, it was assumed that population would grow and the economy would grow, demand for water would grow. As I’ve already suggested, in the United States, that’s already not true but if we think about demand management and efficiency, and conservation, that’s some of the cheapest sources of new water for us. It eliminates the need to tap into ecosystems and to overdraft groundwater. The soft path also says ‘let’s rethink economics’. Water is an economic good, but it’s also a human right. What does that mean for policy? Rethink our institutions. We’ve managed water in these very narrowly defined old institutions that we built 100 years ago, based on what we understood 100 years ago, but the world today requires new institutions and new ways of thinking about management of water. All of these things together are what I call the soft path for water.”
Can you share with us about the work the Pacific Institute does?
“The Pacific Institute, which I started in 1987, is an independent nonprofit research and policy institute working on global water issues. We work very extensively around the world on basically aspects of the soft path: on efficiency, on reuse on stormwater, how to capture more stormwater, how to grow more food with less water, what resilience mean for the water community, what kinds of institutions might be more appropriate in a modern world to manage water. One of the things the Institute has been working on is corporate water stewardship. You know, the corporate world is a big player in a lot of ways. Every industry uses water, even if water is not their core business, to make the goods and services that they provide and there are good corporations who are now thinking about stewardship around water”
How is the Pacific Institute working on the concept of double materiality (financial and environmental materiality)?
“Again, the Pacific Institute has been playing a leading role in this with a number of organizations including the UN CEO Water Mandate. Part of that has been helping corporations understand the risk they face for not dealing with the audit issues, both the risks for themselves and the risk to their reputational values and […] their communities. Some corporations learn about this the hard way. You know, there’s a classic story, probably a decade ago, where Coca Cola lost the right to produce Coca Cola in a town in India, because the local community was convinced that Coca Cola was mismanaging the local water resources and their water problems were because of the Coca Cola plant. Now, whether or not that was accurate or not, it was the perception of the local community and that plant was shut down. That cost Coca Cola a couple of 100 million dollars and it awakened their responsibility. Coca Cola has become one of the world’s leaders now on corporate water stewardship, in part because they understand better, to some degree, the risk they face by not being stewards of freshwater. Again, there are good corporations in this area, and there are bad ones but it’s a growing trend and […] the corporate sector is one of the major players worldwide in the water world.”
What is the CEO Water Mandate?
“Look up the Water Action Hub, look up the CEO Water Mandate. We’ve done work on the human right to water and what that means for corporations. We’ve done work on water risk. We’ve done work on metrics. There are a lot of good resources there”
What about AI in water?
“Of course, one of the challenges with AI is that it’s only as good as what you trained it on. If we’re training our water intelligence systems based on strategies from a century ago, rather than what we now know to be the critical issues and the critical solutions, then AI is not going to help us, it’s going to point us in the old wrong directions. There is a growing interest in using smarter computer systems to manage […] our water resources to detect things faster [and] to respond faster, those are potentially enormous advantages. We have seen a couple of instances where computer systems that control our water systems have been hacked for political purposes. You know, that’s, of course, a growing risk, because we depend on computer systems to manage our water resources but it just requires being smarter about what we’re connecting and how we’re designing those systems to protect those systems from these outside influences and we’re again at the beginning stages of that.”
Here is the full video from the Oceanside Chat:
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