A majority on Earth will soon face severe, self-inflicted water shortage: scientists

Humans are a key feature of the global water system, influencing prodigious quantities of water: stored in reservoirs, taken from rivers and groundwater, and lost in various ways. Additional deterioration through pollution, now detectable on a global scale, further limits an already-stressed resource base, and negatively affects the health of aquatic life forms and human beings.

The scientists say that at a time of impending water challenges, it remains a struggle to secure the basic environmental and social observations needed to obtain an accurate picture of the state of the resource. We need to know about the availability, condition, and use of water as part of a global system through sustained environmental surveillance. History teaches us that failure to obtain this basic information will be costly and dangerous.

GWSP says that humans typically achieve water security through short-term and often costly engineering solutions, which can create long-lived impacts on social-ecological systems. Faced with a choice of water for short-term economic gain or for the more general health of aquatic ecosystems, society overwhelmingly chooses development, often with deleterious consequences on the very water systems that provide the resource.

Traditional approaches to development are counterproductive, destroying the services that healthy water systems provide, such as flood protection, habitat for fisheries, and pollution control. Loss of these services will adversely affect current and future generations.

Sustainable development requires both technological and institutional innovation. At present, the formulation of effective institutions for the management of water lags behind engineering technologies in many regions.

Research from the GWSP and elsewhere confirms that current increases in the use of water and impairment of the water system are on an unsustainable trajectory. Current scientific knowledge, however, cannot predict exactly how or precisely when a planetary-scale boundary will be breached. Such a tipping point could trigger irreversible change with potentially catastrophic consequences.

The existing focus on water supply, sanitation, and hygiene has delivered undoubted benefits to people around the world, but GWSP says that equally, we need to consider wider Sustainable Development Goals in the context of the global water system. Ecosystem-based sustainable water management, a pressing need that was reaffirmed at the Rio+20 Earth Summit, requires that solving water problems must be a joint obligation of environmental scientists, social scientists, engineers, policy-makers, and a wide range of stakeholders.

The scientists who came to Bonn last week for the Water in the Anthropocene were motivated by these realities to make a set of core recommendations to institutions and individuals focused on science, governance, management, and decision-making relevant to water resources on earth. Given the development imperatives associated with all natural resources at the dawn of the twenty-first century, they urge a united front to form a strategic partnership of scientists, public stakeholders, decision-makers, and the private sector. This partnership should develop a broad, community-consensus blueprint for a reality-based, multi-perspective, and multi-scale knowledge-to-action water agenda, based on these recommendations:

1. Make a renewed commitment to adopt a multi-scale and interdisciplinary approach to water science in order to understand the complex and interlinked nature of the global water system and how it may change now and in future.
2. Execute state-of-the-art synthesis studies of knowledge about fresh water that can inform risk assessments and be used to develop strategies to better promote the protection of water systems.
3. Train the next generation of water scientists and practitioners in global change research and management, making use of cross-scale analysis and integrated system design.
4. Expand monitoring, through traditional land-based environmental observation networks and state-of-the-art earth-observation satellite systems, to provide detailed observations of water system state.
5. Consider ecosystem-based alternatives to costly structural solutions for climate proofing, such that the design of the built environment in future includes both traditional and green infrastructure.
6. Stimulate innovation in water institutions, with a balance of technical- and governance-based solutions and taking heed of value systems and equity. A failure to adopt a more inclusive approach will make it impossible to design effective green growth strategies or policies.

GWSP says that the recommendations above, taken collectively, can constitute the centerpiece of a blueprint to promote the adoption of science-based evidence into the formulation of goals for sustainable development. Stewardship requires balancing the needs of humankind and the needs of nature through the protection of ecosystems and the services that they provide. Without such a design framework, we anticipate highly fragmented decision-making and the persistence of maladaptive approaches to water

Background
Water in the Anthropocene
A new geologic epoch, “The Anthropocene,” is characterized by humanity’s growing dominance of Earth’s environment and a planetary transformation as profound as the last epoch-defining event — the retreat of the glaciers 11, 500 years ago.

Among examples of humans’ planet-altering imprint on the world:

• Humanity uses an area the size of South America to grow its crops and an area the size of Africa for raising livestock
• Due to groundwater and hydrocarbon pumping in low lying coastal areas, two-thirds of major river deltas are sinking, some of them at a rate four times faster on average than global sea level is rising
• More rock and sediment is now moved by human activities such as shoreline in-filling, damming and mining than by the natural erosive forces of ice, wind and water combined
• Many river floods today have links to human activities, including the Indus flood of 2010 (which killed 2,000 people), and the Bangkok flood of 2011 (815 deaths)
• On average, humanity has built one large dam every day for the last 130 years. Tens of thousands of large dams now distort natural river flows to which ecosystems and aquatic life adapted over millennia
• Drainage of wetlands destroys their capacity to ease floods-a free service of nature expensive to replace
• Evaporation from poorly managed irrigation renders many of the world’s rivers dry — no water, no life. As a result, little by little, tens of thousands of species edge closer to extinction every day