>>Water, as we have seen in this course, has lots of uses. It can be used in the household
for cooking, drinking, cleaning, bathing, and sanitation. It can also be used by industry
to make goods, or to make energy for electricity. And it is used most abundantly by farmers
who grow and raise our food. But it is not only quantity that is being shared but quality
that is being impacted. Water used for running a turbine or for growing cotton does not have
to be nearly as clean as water used for drinking. This water does not recognize political boundaries,
and more than 260 river basins or watersheds throughout the world are shared between governmental
entities. That is, they cross over boundaries of nations. Because of these realities, one
of the newest scientific disciplines that is being practiced today tries to balance
and coordinate these many uses of water. It is called Integrated Water Resources Management,
or I'll call it IWRM. IWRM is a concept that promotes the planning of water on the basin
or watershed level. In other words, instead of managing water on the basis of a political
boundary, such as a state or a national jurisdiction, the planning happens at the level of where
the water drops fall and where they travel once they have fallen. Rain that falls within
a given watershed will stay in the watershed naturally. So it makes sense to kind of follow
the raindrop, as it were, paying attention to both quantity of water and quality of water
as it moves through the watershed and gets used in various ways.
An example from India might help you understand this. Increasing drought conditions and a
longer dry season have meant that many farmers have less water and lower yields in one village.
So the community formed a water committee to decide what to do. The committee decided
to build a check dam to stop the flow of rainwater during the wet season and collect it in a
low, natural depression. The water seeps into the ground and replenishes the water table.
This is water that would otherwise drain out of the area or out of its watershed, and outside
of anyone's use. Each farmer is given an allotment based on the acreage they own and pay a small
tariff accordingly. This encourages them not to waste water, and use a form of drip irrigation
that delivers water directly to the plant roots. The additional water has allowed a
three-fold increase in crop yield. People can eat better, and they can sell the excess
crops that they don't need to feed their families. In more developed countries, IWRM becomes
even more complicated and needs to encompass many more water uses. The Tennessee Valley
Authority is one organization that has been doing this kind of management for many years.
In the years before and during the Second World War, the TVA built hydroelectric dams
on many of the rivers coming out of the Appalachian Mountains in the southeastern U.S. These dams
had many purposes. They were built first of all to spur economic development in the Tennessee
Valley, an area particularly affected by the Great Depression. They did this by providing
for navigation of barges up the Tennessee River, and by ensuring cheap electricity for
aluminum and fertilizer manufacturing, and for the homes of residents who lived in the
extensive valley. Later these same dams also became important in flood control and in recreational
usage. These many uses were often competing with each other, and some of the most sophisticated
hydrologic computer models were developed in order to manage these various uses.
But of course, one of the ways to manage uses of water is by controlling or influencing
the price that people pay to get water. The price of water like any other commodity is
influenced by the laws of supply and demand. The harder it is to get the water, or the
less water there is, the more the price will go up. And so after years of drought, water
that has to be piped in father to a large city, or water that has to be pumped from
a greater depth in an aquifer as the water level lowers, is going to have a higher cost
than previously. These higher costs will typically get passed on to the consumer in the form
of a higher price. Thus far, the cost for much of our water supply, especially the initial
capital cost, has been subsidized by government funding, either federal grants or local in
the form of bonds that citizens agree to support. Another model that emerged in the 1990s as
part of a wave of market-based approaches was the privatization of water supply. But
in order for a private firm to make a profit in delivering water, the firm had to recoup
the cost, incurred, plus charge a little extra. So what happened in many places of course
was that the price of water now had to go up. Cheap water was now a thing of the past,
because it was no longer subsidized by taxes or grants. Such a drastic change had a much
greater impact on the poor, those who were already paying a greater portion of their
income for water. A U.S.-based corporation, Bechtel, had set up a private water scheme
in Bolivia after being given control of it all by the central government. Because it
was a monopoly, there were no constraints on the prices it could extract. A revolt took
place in Cochabamba, as 80,000 people stormed the streets, forcing the government to send
in the Army, and forcing the water company to flee the country.
Regarding technology, a final interesting occurrence has been developing of late. Due
to increasing water shortages, there's actually been a return to older, low-tech forms of
water collection and harvesting, forms that were practiced years ago in diverse parts
of the world. Rainwater harvesting right off the roof is becoming more fashionable in industrialized
countries. The technique of building a check dam, already mentioned today, is also becoming
widely used again. More advanced technology, such as reverse osmosis to make freshwater
out of brackish water is using a very old form of power generation, a wind mill, to
provide the energy needed to force the water through the RO membrane. "What goes around,
comes around," it is often said. And so it is with water technologies. As we come to
realize that our supply of freshwater is not limitless, we are remembering the ways of
our ancestors to collect, store, and manage water.