How should we use our rivers? Developing countries around the world have often looked to the past when answering this question.
This formula – one that assumes that human interventions into river systems will always be an improvement of nature’s “messy” ways – has been a widely copied model for nearly a hundred years.
The consequences – poor water quality, disappearing fisheries, and even the ecological collapse of key rivers – have been growing beyond our ability to address them.
Efforts to manage the water cycle with enhanced engineering and technological capabilities, combined with an unhealthy obsession with often unnecessary mega structures, are compounding these problems.
The proposed Murray-Darling Basin Plan released in late 2010 demonstrates that river ecosystems are indeed complex and dynamic, so complex that the layman’s guide to the proposed Basin Plan runs over a thousand pages long.
In Australia, the process for translating the complexity of rivers into public policy has only just begun.
How then can developing and middle-income countries avoid the mistakes of the past when they lack important prerequisites for sustainable water management?
Such dilemmas are acerbated when you consider that these countries often lack the necessary scientific information, the presence of strong environmental advocates (and sometimes even the freedom to voice criticism) and a only a basic level of water literacy among its policy leaders.
China recently finalised its 12th five-year plan, the country’s vision for the next half decade, which promises to strike a balance between economic growth and the environment.
During a highly publicised internet chat session, the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao talked up the plan’s green credentials: “We can no longer sacrifice the environment for the sake of rapid development and reckless construction … These will only lead to overcapacity in production, increased pressure on environmental resources and unsustainable economic growth”.
Despite the rhetoric, the five-year plan makes clear that China is about to begin the most relentless dam-building program ever undertaken in history. China’s National Energy Administration has announced that it will approve 140 gigawatts of new hydropower projects on China’s rivers over the next five years.
To put this in perspective, Australia’s largest hydropower project – the Snowy Hydro Scheme – has 3.8 gigawatts of capacity. Missing from these goals is any statement on how China’s rivers will cope with the development onslaught. Unfortunately the pros and cons of hydropower development and water management in China are unlikely to be openly debated.
The Chinese government has given every indication that it intends to move forward with this unprecedented damming of its’ rivers, even if the unintended price is their ecological collapse.
If we step back and move to the international level, the prescriptions espoused by the international water policy community are neither sufficient nor satisfying.
The policy frameworks and economic tools being sold by institutions such as the OECD and World Bank pledge to create the perfect institutional, financial and regulatory systems to simplify the “unpredictability” of rivers.
But can we really expect developing countries to translate and implement these policy directives in the real world?
The solutions for better water resources management in developing nations do not lie in creating more structures and bureaucracy.
Neither should the primary focus be on regulating subsistence and low-income farmers so that their water use is more efficient. Rather, it lies in changing the modern day assumptions that control (both the engineered and the red tape kind) will bring about sustainability.
A new paradigm to manage, use and sustain this valuable resource is required. First and foremost, policy makers need to admit that in such complex systems, we don’t know it all.
We don’t know the consequences of breaking the connectivity between underground aquifers and rivers.
We don’t know the breadth and depth of the impacts of major water diversions on downstream communities.
We don’t know how a highly engineered environment will cope in a changing climate.
They say that admitting you have a problem is the first step. We must acknowledge that the current models and management frameworks have brought many of our rivers to the point of collapse.
We need to restore the sophisticated workings of rivers and learn to live within their limits. To get there, we desperately need to invest in our understanding of how rivers function. It is with this scientific information and knowledge that we can decide how to best use, manage and sustain rivers.
Our global challenge is to ensure that decision-makers realise that water management practices of the past will not lead us to a better future. If we want to see through this century without the environmental destruction of our rivers, and without water becoming the source of violent conflicts, we had better get this right.
Grace Mang is an environment and water lawyer who currently coordinates International Rivers’ China Global Program. Until last year, she was an environment and water policy adviser at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
This article originally appeared in the Australian – http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/river-use-the-next-global-challenge/story-fn8ex0p1-1226064997582