A right to rain

A right to rain
by Daniel Moss
26 Jun 2009
(link to full article, see below)


One man gathers rain to recharge groundwater reserves and another pushes salt water through a desalination plant for subsequent sale. Are these both viable solutions to the world’s water crisis?

With the impacts of climate change, water waste, contamination and mismanagement driving us ever closer to the edge of a cliff, ensuring clean and plentiful water to both people and nature becomes tougher and more urgent each day.

A seemingly broad variety of water management strategies was on display at the recent 5th World Water Forum (WWF), confusing participants with repackaged policy prescriptions and technological bells and whistles. Helping people sift the wheat from the chaff were discussions of how to manage water as a commons. A concise set of principles offered a hopeful roadmap forward.

The forum was a mostly a civil affair, with the notable exception of riot police beating and arresting 25 Turks protesting peacefully for public water and against its privatization. The World Water Forum is convened by the World Water Council, a private, French non-profit whose board of governors tilts towards water privateers.

It’s a tri-annual gathering of government delegations, non- governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and private industry representatives. This year’s forum featured an advocacy effort by 16 governments to move the forum to the U.N., presumably a more accountable institution. The well-subscribed conference - over 30,000 people in attendance - seemed to demonstrate not only that the water crisis is a shared concern, but also, perhaps, the amount of money that can be made trading this precious fluid.

Ragendra Singh, known as the rain gatherer, travelled across Asia to Istanbul to address the forum. Working in arid Rajastan, India, Singh has revived the ecology of the Arwari river. After twenty years of building small earthen dams called johads and a movement called Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), flow has returned to the once dry river, providing sustenance to thousands of families.

At a WWF trade booth, a representative of a Spanish desalination company projected powerpoint slides of barges docked off of coastal cities, sucking in sea water and spitting out drinking water (and brine and emissions). Over 60,000,000 people worldwide drink desalinated water.

The two faces of water technology couldn’t have been more dissimilar – and more caricatured. Ragendra Singh wore a long white kurta. He spoke of water with a mystical air, a grin spreading beneath his ragged beard. The balding desalination representative wore a grey suit, his lips pursed in grim determination to sell his technology.

Both men claim to fulfill a critical need in getting water to those who need it - in Ragendra’s case, beneficiaries include plants and animals. Is there a way for the average person, simply looking to get water to the thirsty, to evaluate if these two strategies are complementary or contradictory?

As a society, we can perhaps agree – although I may be overly optimistic here - that in its broadest conception, water is a commons, a public good to be shared by all and passed on undiminished in quality and quantity to future generations.

In a session on this topic entitled, “Water Commons: Global Experiences in Progressive Water Management”, Maude Barlow, Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the UN General Assembly, suggested ten principles to manage water for the common good. The principles seem a useful measuring stick against which strategies of water management can be assessed. Does the strategy do the following?

1) Affirm water as a commons, that is, it belongs to everyone and no one, passed onto future generations in sufficient volume and quality;
2) Ensure the earth and all of its ecosystems rights to water for their survival – indeed it is on those ecosystems that human life depends;
3) Conserve water as society’s first course of action (enforced by law), including suggesting drastic changes to industrial and agricultural practices;
4) Treat watersheds – the source of water - as a common as well and not simply the water itself;
5) Encourage local, community management while legally binding communities to respect upstream and downstream neighbors’ rights;
6) Forge or affirm trans-boundary agreements that respect water sovereignty for both communities and nations;
7) Provide water as a basic principle of justice, not as an act of charity;
8) Ensure public delivery and fair pricing of water;
9) Promote enshrining the right to water in nation-state constitutions, laws and a UN covenant;
10) Employ innovative legal tools to protect water and manage water as a commons, including through public and community trusts.

To read the full article: http://www.grist.org/article/a-right-to-rain