A Conversation with John Mutter of Columbia’s Earth Institute
John Mutter
The State of Global Water Resources John Mutter is a Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Deputy Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
How is human health affected by thetop threats to rivers and estuaries, and to global water resources in general?
Water is often cited as the emergent global resource crisis of the 21st century. Water, especially fresh water found in rivers, is central to managing agriculture, ecosystem services,sanitation, human health, and natural disasters. But because wealthy nations have the robust economy and infrastructure to respond to a change in water supply, many of the most dramatic threats to our water resources will be felt in the developing world well before the wealthy countries are affected.
Globally, the dominant use for water is agriculture. The preeminent concern is that the natural supply of water varies dramatically in terms of where and when it is available, and how clean the source is. Obviously, this directly affects food supply. In the poorest countries, where an estimated 800 million people go hungry and where extreme poverty leads to some 30,000 avoidable deaths per day, water is a key element in day-to-day survival. Nearly a billion people in poor countries lack access to safe drinking water. Providing clean water for drinking and sanitation, as well as supporting a sufficient food supply for basic nourishment, are urgent global challenges.
What are the problems with current public policy regarding river and water issues?
One of the major problems is that (hydropower, transportation, agricultural irrigation, municipal and industrial water supply and sanitation) is a means to different and competing ends. Each sector develops its own priorities and policies, considering water only as a factor of production. When governments subsidize and sub-contract water development to private, sometimes foreign companies—particularly for agriculture—resource quantity and quality is rarely adequately protected, and private companies may abandon the project after making asubstantial profit. This leads to inefficient use of water resources and ageneral failure to maintain that infrastructure. In addition, access to safe water supplies is unreliable, endangering the health of communities, especially in rural villages.
Historically, water management has focused on developing a centralized water storage and distribution infrastructure, such as the massive dam and pipeline projects that provide water to most big cities in the U.S. This is still a vitally important component of water management, and is especially important for developing nations, where each flood and drought results in substantial declines of 10 to 50 percent of GDP, but it needs to be balanced with other strategies.
How can public policy be changed to better manage river and water issues?
Balancing large-scale infrastructure with small-scale strategies is more effective and inexpensive for developing countries and rural villages. Integrated water resources management (IWRM) is evolving: the new paradigm focuses on ‘adaptive management.’ This simply means that, rather than a huge dam and pipeline system, we build water distribution systems that can deliver smaller quantities of water and can adapt delivery based on changing demand or local conditions.
For example, if a population begins migrating toward the cities as farming becomes less viable, water distribution can be rerouted to deliver more water to the cities. Policies should encourage fair water pricing policies and subsidized access for the poor, and allow competing water producers to enter the market, in order to tap a variety of new water and wastewater inputs.
Free-market, profit-driven solutions alone will not be sufficient. Sustainable development will also require governmental leadership, new taxes on social ‘bads’ such as pollution, budget subsidies of social ‘goods’ such as research and development of new technologies, inter-governmental cooperation, participation by civil society, and greater corporate social responsibility.
How can science inform and improve environmental public policy?
By developing and exporting technologies for policy-makers to work with. There is great untapped potential in existing technologies. Advances in fusion energy and cheaper solar power in urban coastal areas can make desalination economically viable. Cheap solar energy would do the same for remote rural areas. A village could use solar energy to power a water pump that could access stores of clean groundwater they couldn’t reach with a traditional well.
Exportable technologies such as those being developed by the Rivers & Estuaries Center could help river communities worldwide. For example, improved forecasting techniques developed by Riverscope will undoubtedly improve operation and management of existing water delivery systems. Riverscope’s new technologies that track contaminants in water by studying sediment movement would allow us to take steps toward improving water quality.
Their newly developed models for collecting a wide spectrum of data and of representing that data as a dynamic, visual display of river life can be applied to rivers and water sources globally to solve real-world problems.
How might the impact of global warming be felt on the Hudson?
Absolute sea level would rise, bringing the ocean further up the river so that the salt front would extend north into places where it is currently a valuable source of fresh water for townships. If warming is accompanied by increased storminess, as many believe likely, then heavy downpours will increase erosion, runoff, and sediment loading into the river. This might also threaten sewage treatment plants.
Warming will basically disrupt the present hydrological cycle in the watershed areas of the river. It is very likely winters will be less severe and smaller amounts of snow and ice will accumulate; hence, the spring thaw event will be much reduced.
