Q&A: Mark Giordano on the Sustainable Development Goal for Integrated Water Resources Management

Mark Giordano: The big issues used to be that, because water wasn’t scarce, people in different sectors just used it however they wanted. As water scarcity increased, we realized how interconnected water is with almost everything and how use in one sector impacted others, leading to conflicts and misuse.

So we said let’s stop thinking about water sector by sector and think instead of an integrated way to manage it. That is where the idea of integrated water management—with small letters—comes from.

It makes sense, of course. We shouldn’t be using water across purposes and not understanding what the tradeoffs are. But in some cases the idea of integrated water resources management has turned from a good idea to acknowledge into more of a prescription of exactly how we should manage water, and it has become something in large capitals—IWRM.

Mark Giordano: This is not the case everywhere, but one of the downsides is that implementing something called IWMR can become a prerequisite for action to happen. For example, an international lender may not lend to another country if it does not have IWRM in place. The country may put the IWRM policies in place but with no intention to implement and with no meaning on the ground. Or worst case, it may implement a poorly thought out IWRM plan. Different things work in different places, and countries themselves have to decide how to solve the water management problems they have, and not follow some outside prescription.

Mark Giordano: The urban users tend to be the highly valued users. They’re willing to pay more for their water than agricultural users, who are the main water users generally. It can create conflict in places where water is scarce, and the question is, how do you move water from agriculture into cities where it has more value without destroying food security or hurting farmers.

Mark Giordano: We forgot that the environment needed water — this is in the U.S. case — and we didn’t consider that surface water and groundwater were interconnected. We over-allocated surface water, we over-allocated groundwater, and then we remembered we should have left some for the environment.

There is now increasing awareness in the U.S. and elsewhere that the environment needs water too, not just because of an intrinsic value, but also because of all the services it provides.

Mark Giordano: Getting clean drinking water to everyone is a moral imperative. We can worry about how you finance it in the long-term, but the number one priority is to get water to the people now.