Kaveh Madani is many things. He has been deputy head of Iran’s environmental agency, an activist, a climate negotiator. But fundamentally he has always been a water scientist.
Now, as director of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health, he is desperate for the world to acknowledge it has misunderstood the droughts, river pollution, conflicts and other problems facing water systems. Often these situations are not crises. They stem from a deeper problem – water bankruptcy.
That is the key message of a new report from Madani’s institute and an accompanying scientific paper. In this interview he decodes what it means for conservation, science and the world.
Dialogue Earth: What’s the idea behind water bankruptcy?
Kaveh Madani: It tries to address the inadequacy of some common terms, like water crisis, that don’t fully reflect the state of the system, and in some cases are very misleading.
Crisis means a temporary shock, a temporary deviation from the baseline. When you’re managing a crisis, you think you can mitigate the situation and hope you can restore conditions to normal.
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For so long, we have been overusing water. If you’re taking too much groundwater out, it’s going to affect your stream flows. If you’re diverting water, it’s going to affect your terminal lakes and wetlands. If you’re over-damming your rivers, there will be impacts.
Kaveh Madani, director, United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health
But a lot of the problems we are seeing are chronic and intensifying. The original conditions cannot be restored, or the baseline conditions have been eroded. Bankruptcy tells you this is a state of failure. It’s a post-crisis state.
Recognising this is a bitter confession, but it’s also an opportunity to prevent further damage, restore what can be restored, mitigate what can be mitigated, and adapt to the new realities.
How is this like bankruptcy?
The report uses the simple analogy of a checking account and a savings account. The checking account is our renewable share: rivers, soil moisture and other quick recharge elements. The savings account is those resources that take a long time to recharge – glaciers, groundwater and so on.
For so long, we have been overusing water. If you’re taking too much groundwater out, it’s going to affect your stream flows. If you’re diverting water, it’s going to affect your terminal lakes and wetlands. If you’re over-damming your rivers, there will be impacts.
So we are using more water than is available. How? By stealing from nature, by tapping into fossil resources that we inherited from our ancestors.
Why do you think water can be a unifying issue?
This report talks about water as an untapped strategic opportunity for the world to create unity within and between nations.
Water is the issue of left and right, of conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats. It’s the issue of the Global South and North. No country is immune from the risk of water bankruptcy.
Of course, we also know that when resources become more limited, there can be more conflicts. We are seeing that with the Colorado River, Mekong, Tigris and Euphrates, Jordan and Nile.
The question is, can we do anything about it and change the narratives, away from a zero-sum game?
Does dealing with water bankruptcy mean reducing consumption?
Reducing overall use is the essential element, but there are regional differences.
In some places, we want people to use more water to improve health and sanitation. That’s Africa, that’s South America, parts of East Asia. In some other places, we want reduction in use, like North America, even parts of the Middle East.
The existing paradigm is a continuation of what we call the “hydraulic mission” mentality: using technology to use or extract every drop of water out there.
When you increase supply you promote further development, you give the painkiller to someone who’s suffering from an infection, instead of an antibiotic.
The report paints quite a bleak picture. How do you stay positive?
When I came back to academia from politics, one of the first papers I wrote was called “What doesn’t exterminate your water system makes it more resilient”. It was about the opportunity crises and extreme events can bring for making systems more efficient, because they help politicians reduce the costs of reforms.
They can create a sense of urgency within societies to address issues that most of the time would be disregarded. History shows us we can use technology, we are smart enough to cope with things. We have seen Covid-19 and world wars. We have overcome major issues.
That said, global tipping points are hard to estimate. It’s very hard to know exactly when a system would collapse. And while we have overcome severe problems before, their cost has not been evenly distributed between every nation and citizen on the planet. We claimed Covid-19 would treat us the same way but learned very quickly that the rich could be more resilient.
The cost of water bankruptcy in the Global North is not the same as in the South. We need to consider justice elements like this.
Why do you think water has been neglected compared to climate change?
A lot of countries in the Global North have been incentivised to invest in renewable energy because energy security is a big concern. Plus the investment helps the planet. Water, meanwhile, has been taken for granted.
Scientific narratives are biased towards those who speak English, those who produce science, and those who have more funds. If you continue to fund the energy research or climate research, of course, the world will be biased towards those things.
We haven’t heard the stories of the farmers in the South. We haven’t heard the stories of Indigenous communities.
Climate narratives are a good example. We have heard that you are concerned about the end of the century. We’re concerned about tonight and tomorrow. Even the ability to think about the future must not be taken for granted.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth under a Creative Commons licence.
