Oceanside Chat: Climate Scientist, Economist, and Author Giulio Boccaletti tells us About the Water’s Influence on History and Humankind
Oceanside Chat: Water Scientist and Serial Entrepreneur Dolf Zantinge tells us About the Secrets of Coherent Water
Why is water historically important? How did it shape our society? On April 26th 2023, Giulio Boccaletti answered these questions as he joined Stuart Rudick, founder of HydroDAO and top performing investment manager who has been “making money make a difference” for four decades. Giulio shared with the HydroDAO community about his extensive work and knowledge on water security and our intricate relationship with water. For the last 20 years, Giulio’s work has been at the intersection of geophysical and ecological science, public policy, and business strategy. He started out as a scientist, working on climate dynamics and physical oceanography at Bologna University, Princeton University, where he was a NASA Earth Systems Science Fellow, and MIT. He then went into business, working for global consultancy McKinsey & Company, where he ultimately became a partner, one of the leaders of its Sustainability and Resource Productivity practice, and the co-founder of its Water practice. After his experience in the private sector, he joined the Nature Conservancy, first as its Global Managing Director for Water, then as its Chief Strategy Officer. For his work on water, the World Economic Forum nominated him a Young Global Leader in 2014. He has been a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Water and Global Futures Council on Natural Resource Security. His book Water: A Biography, a history of the relationship between society and water, was rated by The Economist as one of the best books of 2021.
Here’s a 10-Minute Teaser of the Talk (the whole talk is published below):
Giulio, can you first give us some examples of modern day systems and societal norms that we use today that were first established due to a civilization’s initial relationship with water?
“If you ask me which institutions and habits surround us today that have their origin in the relationship with water, I would tell you almost all of them. In fact, it’s more a question of not which ones but at what point did [the relationship with water provide the generative moments when we really shaped] each one of the institutions that surround us, whether it’s laws, political systems, religious systems. […] The American Constitution is basically a treaty on the rivers of the country. It emerges out of the Mount Vernon Compact that Washington agreed on the Potomac canal [or] what he hoped would be the Potomac canal. So just to say, pretty much any institution that surrounds us today, you can bet, has genetic material that comes from our relationship to water.”
When did our relationship with water shift from water being this more sacred element to being a pure commodity and us using and manipulating water?
“The development of political institutions [and] the fact that we have to manage water on the landscape is the dominant shaper of the nature and form of those institutions. So those things kind of run in parallel. So you asked me ‘when does that separation happen?’, it never really happened. […] Even though we have this very practical and technical relationship with water through the 20th century, we conceive it as iconic, […] as sort of really deeply tied to identity. We only really lose that when we lose the land, when people move away from agriculture which happens really after the Second World War. Suddenly everybody turns their back to the landscape and looks at their screen. And that I would say is when we really kind of lose the plot and what’s interesting [is that it is] changing again. […] We invested all this resource in transforming the landscape so that we could turn our back to it and just look at our screens, but a changing climate means a changing water world and the waters cracking through the dams and the levees and showing itself at our door’s steps, and so that’s going to change again.”
Has water ever been used as a currency?
“The most famous example of this is oddly in Switzerland, where there’s a village called Törbel, which is a village in the Valais canton of Switzerland. […] It’s a small village of about 200 people and there’s a system of irrigation there that essentially distributes water through wooden canals. These are present in all of Switzerland, but in particular, there are these wooden canals that bring water to each of the plots of land farmed by each individual. There’s an incredibly sophisticated schedule of distribution so that each plot gets a certain amount of water when […] the sun is at a certain point in the sky. So […] there are a lot of examples where people bartered and traded water. Typically, it’s trading access […] to some existing or emergent infrastructure rather than trading the molecule itself.”
Has there ever really been true wars fought over water throughout history?
The only water war that we know of is a war that’s documented in the Stele of the Vultures in the Louvre, which is a rock from about 2500 BCE that describes the war between Umma and Girsu, which were two city states in the lower Euphrates basin. But we only have the point of view of Girsu, the winner. This story claims that it was a fight over a plot of land along the levee of the Euphrates and if that’s true, then that is probably the first water war, but Aaron Wolf also concludes that was probably also the last one. So bottom line is, I don’t think the water wars stories are credible explanation for the past but there is a way in which the water security nexus is important, which is there is important evidence for water being an instrument of diplomacy.”
Do you have examples of different civilizations in history, say, Roman, Egyptian, Chinese, with some unique aspects they’ve had with their relationship with water.
“Well, this is a good opportune time to tell everybody to read my book so you can get the full story. […] This is not exactly the democracy that we imagined today but nonetheless, a distribution of power across society as opposed to a power given from sort of a divine right. How did this happen? That happened because the economy of Athens in the fifth and fourth century was an agricultural economy, a very productive one and the defense of Athens was done by the Hoplites, heavily armored infantry men, who were the defenders. If you read the Peloponnesian Wars or the Persian invasion that Herodes spoke about, the Greek cities and particularly Athens is always defended by the Phalanx. The Hoplites that made up the Phalanx were farmers and they could afford those heavy weapons because they were all wealthy farmers. Because they were the defenders of the Poleis, they demanded political agency and that’s the reason we have those reforms that then gave us the DNA of democracy. They were wealthy because of the distribution of rainfall on Attica, which is the region where Athens is, and in fact, you can go back and reconstruct where different political parties lived in the region and discovered that rainfall maps onto the distribution of power. So that’s an example of where the distribution of water ended up having a profound impact on the distribution of power.”
We have new problems today, among them is the quality of water we are getting.
“When you have density-packed population, you inevitably have issues with waterborne diseases. […] That’s been the primary kind of pollution issue for a long time until you get to the second industrial revolution where you start having issues with […] chemical processing and dyes and then Toms River comes up and all these kinds of […] tragic stories of impact. Italy had a scare in the 80s with dioxin, […] a particular pollutant out of a chemical factory. Ever since then, and to this day, Italy is the second largest market for bottled water as a result of that. Countries that are still industrializing are going through this problem of having to industrialize having all that knowledge but not maybe being able to manage it right. That’s where I think there’s a responsibility of the developed world to help and alas we don’t have a great track record of that.”
Do you think that metrics like the water footprint, which is really devised to look at the hidden water, the embedded water, and all the products and services that we indulge in, will eventually have any major impact in looking at water?
“Now you go to the virtual water picture and what are you carrying then? What value are you carrying in the virtual picture? Well, it depends on where it came from [because] you might be carrying water in coffee that was essentially rainfed in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. That water came for free and it will continue to come for free. There’s no kind of economic […] content in the fact that there’s a lot of water in that coffee […] but suppose you were to irrigate coffee, then that irrigated coffee […] would be carrying water that had a very different value from the rainfed coffee. So one of the challenges of the virtual water story is that whilst it reveals these connections between countries, it actually has no content about the economics.”
Here is the full video from the Oceanside Chat:
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