Climate change and sanitation, water resources

Resilience in the face of Uncertainty: why cooperation is necessary

Suresh Kumar RohillaProgramme Director

Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi (India)

at STEPS Workshop

27 January 2016

Key Points for India :

Water security in the poor’s world:

The agenda for research, policy and cooperation to manage scarcity, plenty, pollution and waste in an

age of climate risk

The face of India’s farmer Grief, despair, desperation

Unseasonal rain, hail, freak storms have destroyed crops over millions of hectares

Not just normal variability

Is this climate change?

• Cannot say if this season of despair is linked to climate change

• But cannot say that these extreme weather events are not climate change

• Weird is now normal• Normal is now devastating – the poor not

responsible for climate change are worst impacted

Climate Negotiations on economyNot ecology

Climate change is about economic growth

No country has built a low carbon economy So action is little and too lateConvention signed in 1992

25 years later world is still talking; procrastinating; finding excuses not to act

Economic growth on line

Acceptable??? 1 US citizen =

107 Bangladeshis 134 Bhutanese 19 Indians 269 Nepalese

Unacceptable. Need to secure ecological space for growth

The age of climate risk• Monsoon is India’s finance minister

• Water insecurity already high and crippling

• In this situation, what do farmers do?

• How will they manage scarcity; unseasonal and variable rain events; and extreme rain, which leads to flooding?

• Agenda for water managers

Agenda for water future

• Management of competing demands – between agriculture, cities and industry

• Management of risk – untimely and deficient rain

• Management of pollution – ensuring water is not degraded and so unusable

India will not follow transition of rich world – people move to cities; economies move to service-industry; water moves with it

Secure water for growth

• Agriculture will remain critical for livelihoods – 60% dependence

• But cities-industries will grow. Will need water for growth

• Unless we manage competing needs; violence will grow

• Already cases of protest and police firing over water allocation to industry or city

Augment supply• Water for agriculture must be secured

• Recognise groundwater provides bulk of irrigation

• Recognise there are over 19 million well owners – they take decisions on water

• They are more efficient in use

• But crisis is growing – groundwater levels falling

Groundwater: needs recharge

• Recognise recharge is critical

• Large reservoirs centralize recharge

• But rain is decentralised…

Groundwater irrigates more land than surface water

But structures for decentralised recharge have gone

Water security in new age

• Build millions of water recharge structures to improve productivity

• India’s employment guarantee programme needs to be targeted to building durable assets

• But this is not enough

Link water with resilience

• Increase of productivity has to be low-cost

• Higher cost, higher risk, higher loss

• Need multiple crops; need crops that are water resilient; need systems of agriculture that can improve coping abilities of farmers

Resilience is not ‘technology’

• Water is about cropping pattern• Water is about food we eat• Diets are about food we are ‘sold’

• Need to make this link• Need to change nature of food industry in

climate risked world

Urban-industrial waterChallenges

• Need clean water supply for all• Need to take back the waste generated by water

use• Need to treat the waste so that it does not pollute• Need to do this in ways that it does not add to

water conflicts

• How?

The conventional way:

Bring water into the city – storage, diversion, pipe, pump, treat – from further and further away.

Flush and carry the waste out of the city – pipe, pump, divert, treat – further and further away.

The water-sewage connection

Agenda reinvent water-waste

Political economy of water supplyPolitical economy of defecation

Systems of water-waste management that are not affordable and equitable

If not equitable then not sustainable

Water: costly supply

Water sourced from farLeads to increasing cost of supplyLeads to high distribution lossesLess water to supply at end of pipelineLess water means more costly waterCities not able to recover costs of supply Cities have no money to invest in sewage

Capital intensity, Leads to inequity

• Indian cities have ‘enough’ water for supply• But water does not reach all• Intra-city inequity is huge and growing

• Challenge is about justice, but it is about technology – current system expensive, too expensive to supply to all

Groundwater: abused

Water supply does not reach all, only few. No alternative but to move to groundwater

But this is not accounted forCities only consider ‘official’ groundwater useMillions depend on private wells, tanker mafia, bottled water

No recognition of this water source; no respect for its management

Lakes: Present lost

Groundwater is not not considered as critical for water supply, recharge is neglected

Land is valued, water is not

No legal protection for city lakes, catchment and drainage systems

Sponges of our cities then get destroyed

Lakes: Future lost

• With climate change extreme rainfall events will grow

• More rain, fewer rainy days• Cities need sponges to capture rain,

recharge for scarcity• Need to consider in future planning

Water=waste

Cities spend on water, have no funds to spend on cleaning up waste

80% water leaves homes as sewageMore water=more waste

Interception of sewage expensiveTreatment of sewage also expensive

Sewage: more sums

• 30% of total sewage can be treated• But Delhi and Mumbai alone have 40 per cent

of sewage treatment capacity in the country

Cities do not have drains (Sewerage)New growth cities are growing without drainsBacklog and front-log impossible to fixAs cities fix one drain, another goes under

Example - Bengaluru: not reaching

• 3610 km of sewage pipes • 14 sewage treatment plants = 781 mld• Generates 800-1000 mld of sewage• But treats only 300 mld• Rest does not reach• Now plans to build 4000 km more • Builds, grows and more lines need repair• Catch-up that does not catch-up

Partial treatment = pollution

Cities cannot control pollution Cost of building system is high•City can build sewage system for few •Spend to pump, repair and treat waste of fewBut•Treated waste of few gets mixed with untreated waste of majority •The result is pollution

Full costs are not affordable

Privatization or not is not the question

Water-sewage-pollution costs are high and unaffordable by all

Cannot pay full costs

Re-invent water and waste

1. Plan deliberately to cut costs of supply2. Spend on sewage not on water 3. Cut costs on sewage systems4. Plan to recycle and reuse every drop5. Connect water conservation to sewage

management

Humble engineering for future

• Current technologies for sustainability are unaffordable. For rich when rich

• Need affordable and sustainable solutions

• Need to look for answers in past ways; in the knowledge of the very poor; in ‘unproductive’ systems we discount

• Need new engineering for future – Move from unraveling nature to imitating it for sustainable development.

The real water agenda

Catch water where it falls

Flush but do not forget

….Create local and distributed water infrastructure

…Water sensitive design and planning

The real water agenda• Water is starting point for the removal of poverty.

• Basis of food and livelihood security. Leading to local and distributed wealth generation

• This will require new forms of institutional management as current water bureaucracies will find it difficult to manage such vast and disparate systems

Resilience Building in face of uncertainty Why water cooperation is necessary ?

• Emerging science …all streams of concerns – health, climate change, energy security and local imperatives of sustainable development are converging.

• • Need is to reinvent the framework for global and regional cooperation to

find locally and globally appropriate solutions within co-benefit framework

• Need is to bring together best practices in different regions on adaptation and resilience to build a network of advocates for change in different countries

Way forward

… making water everybody’s business

Thank You.

email: srohilla@cseindia.org