Report Warns of Rising Water Demand:
A report on global water resources released Monday said that governments must address booming water demand or face grave human, environmental and economic consequences.
‘Water needs to rise up the totem pole of political discourse,’ said Giulio Boccaletti of McKinsey, the consulting firm that wrote the report, during a press conference. ‘We need to stop flying blind in making decisions about water without a map on the table.’
The report, Charting Our Water Future, says that that in 20 years, water demand will be 40 percent higher than it is today, and more than 50 percent higher in the most rapidly developing countries. Historic rates of supply expansion and efficiency improvement will close only a fraction of this gap.
Closing the future “water gap” will cost $50 billion to $60 billion per year of investment by expanding measures already being taken in some communities to boost efficiency, augment supply, or lessen the water-intensity of the economy.
Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, said he expected the report to ‘de-emotionalize’ the issue of water management by simply laying out facts in clear terms.
Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe said that water’s value is not adequately reflected in its cost. He emphasized that access to clean water was a human right, but that ‘it’s not a human right to wash your car, fill up your swimming pool and water your golf course.’
He said South Africa has an example of a sustainable water policy in which households are entitled to 6,000 liters, or about 1,500 gallons per month of free water, after which they must pay.
He also pointed to what he clearly considered an absurdity: that it takes 9,100 liters of water to make one one liter of biodiesel fuel.
‘We don’t give value to the most precious resource we have on earth,’ Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe said.
The home page for the report is here, where you can download the whole thing (200 page, 5.6MB PDF).
In general, I think water has received far less attention than it deserves, especially when considering the energy/water/climate interactions we’ll be dealing with effectively forever, in terms of planning horizons. As I’ve said numerous times, water will be the primary vector for our altered environment to impact human beings in the next few decades.
I think it’s very optimistic to suggest that any report will “de-emotionalize” the water issue. Far too many people are too used to the idea that “water is free” (meaning we might pay for things like electricity to run the pump that pulls it out of the ground, or we pay for the plumbing to carry it, but the water itself carries no fee).
