Humanity and world economies face ‘havoc’ unless global water crisis is acted upon: Experts
Half of the world’s food production and 15 per cent of lower-income countries' GDP is at risk due to an ongoing water crisis, according to the Global Commission on the Economics of Water co-chaired by Singapore president Tharman Shanmugaratnam.
by Jack Board · CNA · JoinBANGKOK: A drastic shift in global water management is needed to avoid a “tragedy” that would damage economies, threaten food production and undermine human well-being, warn experts.
In a new report published by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW), launched on Oct 17, leading independent experts from science, economics and policy-making said “unprecedented stress” on water systems has caused a crisis that will worsen in the decades to come.
This is as Singapore’s president and GCEW co-chair Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam urged for wider perspectives when it comes to tackling issues of water governance.
“We can only solve this crisis if we think in much broader terms about how we govern water,” Mr Tharman said in a statement.
The experts found that the global water cycle - the process by which water is continuously moved throughout the Earth and atmosphere - had been persistently mismanaged and further imperilled by climate change and destructive land use.
“As this vital resource becomes increasingly scarce, food security and human development are at risk — and we are allowing this to happen,” said Mr Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and another of GWEC’s four co-chairs, in a statement.
By 2050, the report found that high-income countries are set to lose an average of 8 per cent of their gross domestic product, due to changing rain patterns, rising temperatures and declining water storage levels.
The impacts could hit agriculture and irrigation systems hard, with half of the world’s food production - in areas home to three billion people - at risk by mid-century.
In lower-income countries, GDP loss could reach 15 per cent, it said, highlighting high-population density hotspots, including northwestern India, northeastern China and south and eastern Europe as particularly vulnerable.
Normal precipitation - which so many communities rely on - can no longer be trusted, a scenario adversely affecting poorer populations, which are more likely to both rely on rainfall and be impacted by deforestation.
The report’s authors laid out five “missions” to address the most important challenges of the global water crisis.
• Launch a new revolution in food systems
• Conserve and restore natural habitats critical to protecting green water
• Establish a circular water economy
• Enable a clean-energy and AI-rich era with much lower water intensity
• Ensure no child dies from unsafe water by 2030
To combat the crisis, a recalibrated approach to the economics of water should be considered, the report stated, to repair the “misaligned policies” that currently exist.
That would mean exploring the merits of water trading further through regulated markets and valuing water more as natural capital - something from nature with intrinsic value - rather than a resource with short-term costs and benefits.
“The global water crisis is a tragedy but is also an opportunity to transform the economics of water – and to start by valuing water properly so as to recognise its scarcity and the many benefits it delivers,” Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director-general of the World Trade Organization and a co-chair of the commission said in a statement.
The report also advocated for the underinvestment in water systems to be addressed, both from private and public sources and the redirection of harmful subsidies in the water sector that can lead to water overexploitation and wastage.
For example, governments may currently offer low tariffs for certain industries below the real economic cost of water - or to sectors that further contribute to the crisis, such as the fossil fuel industry.
The further adoption of clean energy and artificial intelligence presented a critical challenge to ensure these nascent technologies do not contribute further to water misuse, the report said.
They can be highly water-intensive - and demand is growing. Google’s data centres used some 20 billion litres of fresh water in 2022, for example, based on research done at Cornell University last year.
It found that “multilateral governance of water is fragmented, incomplete and ineffective”, despite water being a resource that crosses boundaries and broadly intersects across communities and economies.
Notably, water touches on nearly every aspect of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, collective objectives aimed at eradicating poverty, promoting prosperity and protecting the planet, it said.
The findings call for world governments to “reinvigorate” international cooperation to find answers for shared challenges through the establishment of a Global Water Pact.
Such a pact would set out goals and safeguard water resources for sustainable future use.
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