ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute, an internationally recognized water expert and a MacArthur Fellow.

Read his full bio…

The idea for the Cadiz project is simple: mine groundwater faster than nature refills it and sell it to urban centers in Southern California for profit. The full proposal seems more complicated – the owners might try to temporarily replace the lost groundwater with extra water from the Colorado River, if it is ever available (which is highly unlikely), but they propose to pump out this water and sell it, too, so the economics of the project really just depend on the water removed through unsustainable groundwater mining. Without that water, the project fails economically.

The project is located in the desert of southern California, east of Los Angeles and San Diego, in an area with very low precipitation. The owners intend to remove at least 50,000 acre-feet of water a year (and if they can get away with it, 75,000 acre-feet per year in the early years) for 50 years and sell it to local water agencies, including the Santa Margarita Water Agency (SMWA), Three Valleys Municipal Water District, Suburban Water System, Golden State Water Company, Jurupa Community Services, and California Water Service Company. Scientists estimate that nature, in contrast, only refills the basin with around 5,000 and 32,000 acre-feet per year, with most independent estimates at the very low end. This means the groundwater levels will drop and drop, like taking more water out of a bathtub than you put in. This is, simply, unsustainable.

If there were no adverse consequences of this kind of water mining, and if all that mattered was money, then perhaps using up this stock of water and turning it into a private good would make sense – at least to the project owners. But there are adverse consequences for other humans and for the local environment. This is cut-and-run water management: take a non-renewable resource that will last a short time, turn it for a profit, and leave a degraded landscape, mimicking the classic boom-and-bust cycles that characterized much of the mining industry in the western U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Here are some of the other consequences:

• The water supply is unsustainable – it is not a permanent source of water and new sources would have to be found when it is no longer economical to pump.
• The project produces water that is already more expensive than saving the same amount of water through improving urban conservation and efficiency programs.
• Other local landowners and businesses believe their water availability or quality will be affected by the project in ways neither fully understood nor mitigated by Cadiz.
• There are unresolved questions about the quality of the water and how the project might worsen water quality for other users over time.
• And perhaps most important, water in the desert is a rare thing, and the desert pools, ephemeral seeps, natural springs, and playas support delicate ecosystems dependent on the ability of groundwater to reach the surface. This project would draw down that groundwater, leading to the inevitable disappearance of surface water with highly uncertain, poorly understood, but almost certainly negative ecological consequences. And even the project owners admit in their draft Environmental Impact Report (dEIR) that we don’t know enough about the science to fully understand the consequence for centuries to come – long after they’ve left the scene.

In a mathematical sleight of hand, the project argues that water is “saved” by the project because it might reduce evaporative losses when water ponds on the surface during some wet periods. Yet it is precisely this water that local ecosystems rely upon for survival. Another piece of mathematical magic is the claim that the project is actually sustainable because they assume the project life is 100 years long: thus they pump like mad for the first 50 years and take their money and leave, acknowledging that the groundwater might or might not recharge to its original levels over the next 50 years after pumping stops. That’s like saying that fossil fuels are renewable, because nature might make them again in the future. Under the lower (and perhaps more accurate) estimates of natural recharge, there is a real risk of permanent damage to the groundwater basin through subsidence of land or contamination of the aquifer with salts, and it may never fully refill. And the draft environmental impact report says nothing at all about how the real risk of climate change might alter the desert hydrology.

Finally, there are natural springs in nearby valleys that may be connected to the groundwater basin in Cadiz. In a remarkable grammatical sleight-of-hand, the draft environmental impact report states that a field survey done by their consultants concluded that “there is no information demonstrating a physical connection of the identified springs in the local mountains to [Cadiz] groundwater.” Note the wording: “there is no information.” They use that to discount any risks to local springs. But absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence. An honest assessment of the science would conclude that, at best, we don’t know if there is a connection. And in fact the hydrologic assessment does show that if there is any connection, the mining of groundwater would ultimately affect the springs, perhaps long after pumping began. This means that if there is a connection, once it is ultimately noticed, it would be too late to prevent the springs from drying up.

We need new thinking about water in California and new innovative solutions. We must modify how we use water, and we must find new sources of supply. But the Cadiz Project is old thinking, based on the pillage-and-run philosophy of the past centuries, where water was seen as a resource to be mined and consumed, not managed in a sustainable way. This project is an insult to the idea of sustainability, to the efforts to protect the Eastern Mojave’s beauty and unique nature, and to the idea that resource development should respect more than just narrow economic gain. The good news is there are excellent alternatives, including recycling and reuse of water, improved efficiency of use by our cities and farms, smarter and renewable groundwater use and recharge projects, and even desalination of brackish waters or the ocean if the economics and environmental challenges can be properly overcome. Cadiz might have made some sense a century ago when we didn’t know better, but today it is neither appropriate for California nor necessary, and it should be cancelled.

Peter Gleick

Originally published by the Huffington Post on January 24, 2012.

Video © PBS Frontline

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In the above video, Feliciano dos Santos is described as “one of Mozambique’s best known musicians,” though his lyrics are a bit unconventional. Santos uses his music to, among other things, teach villagers about good hygiene, because he knows firsthand what can result from waterborne illnesses.

That’s because Santos is not just a musician — he’s also the executive director of ESTAMOS, a wonderful non-profit, that focuses on HIV/AIDS, as well as water supply, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). ESTAMOS, under the decisive leadership of Santos, has transformed many lives in the far northern Niassa Province, commonly known as the “Siberia of Mozambique.”

I spent 7 years in Mozambique, working and learning from Santos. I remember once when he stopped a show in a village, because an older man was having health problems. Santos knew that he himself was the only person who had an available vehicle to get the man to a clinic, and the show no longer mattered anymore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ned Breslin is the CEO at Water For People, a nonprofit that implements drinking water and sanitation solutions in 11 developing countries. He is author of Rethinking Hydrophilantropy.

But I’ve also connected with Santos on a personal level. I have shared many meals and watched many soccer matches with him and his family, and his deep love for his children is apparent. Taking after Santos’ talent for music, his son is a promising drummer in a band that Santos mentors. This is just one of the ways that he stays connected, though he cannot run and play with his children as he might like to.

Santos, who lost part of his leg to polio when he himself was a young boy, seems at peace, because he has faith that his children will not have to endure the same adversity as he had growing up. He told Frontline in 2008 of the challenges that he faced growing up, of the stigma associated with polio, and of how difficult it was for his future father-in-law to get over that stigma.

But, fortunately, polio is a disease that is fast receding from our global landscape.

The WASH sector could learn a great deal from the international effort to eradicate polio — spearheaded by Rotary International, the World Health Organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and many other organizations — which began by setting a clear outcome that was achievablee at a global level. They targetted the complete eradication of this dreaded disease, and they measured success/results based on the sustained movement towards that outcome.

In other words, these organizations were not willing to settle for anything less than everyone in the world being safe from polio: and, frankly, their work is the inspiration for Water For People’s Everyone Forever initiative.

I humbly suggest that the WASH sector look to polio eradication as a model of how to improve our impact considerably.

• One Collective Outcome: Polio-eradication agencies programmed, coordinated, and were judged on one collective outcome: to eradicate polio. They stayed focused on their programming and fundraising, proving that together it is possible to achieve a result and to demonstrate significant impact over time. Conversely, the water sector, in general, tends to focus on inputs, even though we all have mission statements that speak of eradicating water poverty — we talk about the need for more projects, more loans, more aid with vague notions of the outcome but with no real, systematic strategy to achieve that outcome. No one is truly saying, “We are putting our reputations on the line by eradicating water poverty in this region of the world.” The Sanitation and Water For All initiative is possibly a step in the right direction for the WASH community, but it needs to start moving to actionable, outcomes-based work soon or, I fear, it will lose credibility. Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) could make the case that it is trying to systemmatically achieve full coverage outcomes, as well.
• Partnerships: For the polio community, a clear focus on one collective outcome led to complementarity, sharing, and partnership that — while far from perfect — represents a significant step ahead of where we are in the WASH sector.
• Achieving That Outcome Over Time: The polio-eradication initative did not begin by establishing all the rules and approaches to polio eradication, nor did they wait until all the pieces needed to succeed were clear or fully in place. They did not have perfect policy. They did not have all the implementation partners in place. They did not even know how Africa was different from Asia or who would be needed in each place to make the program a success. They did not say “my approach is best,” but rather they realized that there would be different roads to the outcome, because, ultimately, it was reaching the outcome that mattered most, not who was best at getting there. Yes, common principles emerged over time, but no one group had a monopoly on an approach.
• Valued Monitoring: Monitoring has been essential to the polio-eradication program and has driven the initiative forward. All parties valued monitoring as a way to track results over time, and they tweaked their monitoring systems as they learned what were the better questions to ask and what were the bigger challemges to address. They did not get bogged down in the endless discussions on the “right indicators,” like that which dominates the WASH dialogue. Some may argue that the Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) is an attempt at a common diagnosis for the state of water and sanitation worldwide, but JMP results do not inform WASH programming as well as a sound global monitoring program could.

For example, the polio community monitored cases very closely. Here’s a wonderful Tweet that sums it up well:

@gatespolio FACT: Reported cases of #polio in #India in 1985: 150,000. Reported cases in 2011: 1

(Last week, we also learned that India had its first year without any new polio cases!)

Some, of course, would argue that polio eradication is completely different from water supply and sanitation, which is of course true —; but that response is simply defensive and misses the point.

The real question is whether or not the WASH sector is willing to take that leap to a commitment of full coverage, where investments made today are rigorously monitored over time — regardless of what impact that may have on an organization’s brand or reputation — so that the words contained in all of our mission statements move from the page to actual actions on the ground.

Click here to learn more and to sign the Everyone Commitment.

Ned Breslin
Follow Ned Breslin on Twitter.

Polio eradication may also shed light on a new type of philanthropy, where outcomes over time will be far better valued than short-term activities, such as completing project A or B or making X number of loans and having Y% of people repay those loans: I will continue on with this subject in a future blog.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute, an internationally recognized water expert and a MacArthur Fellow.

Read his full bio…

Humans cannot relate to these changes. Our perception of time is short — measured in days, months, years, or decades, not millennia or eons. And our perception of the world around us is similarly driven by events with human time scales. Again, John McPhee:

Nowhere is this collision of time scales more pronounced than in the current climate change debate. There are a variety of reasons why a few people still find the reality of human-caused climate change to be inconceivable. Leaving aside those who are unfamiliar with or ignorant of the science, those who simply shill for the fossil-fuel industry, and those who for political reasons must toe an ideological line that contradicts scientific conclusions, there remain some whose world view prevents them from accepting that humans can influence something so vast and global as the climate. Coupled with the fact that the Earth’s climate fluctuates naturally, this group has never been able to accept the reality of human-caused climate change. For regular readers of the blogs of climate contrarians (or their comments on this and other essays on climate change), this sentiment will be familiar. Here are a few examples:

Climate does change naturally for reasons well understood by scientists. But it does so over thousands or tens of thousands of years – time scales so slow as to be imperceptible to humans. The causes of these natural climate changes are the cumulative result of tiny but cosmic changes, including incremental shifts in the orbit of the planet around our star, the tiny but real wobble of the Earth’s axis, and variations in the output of energy from the Sun. These natural factors lead to changes in the Earth’s climate. They cause the ice ages, and they cause the warm interglacial periods. But they happen slowly – in geologic time unseen, unperceived, and unfelt by humans. The peak of the last ice age was 20,000 years ago, long before human civilization existed. The next ice age isn’t expected to start for thousands of years and may not peak for tens of thousands of years, and who knows what kind of civilization will exist then.

Human-caused climate changes are different. As the planet’s population has grown to 7 billion people, and as we have learned how to mobilize vast quantities of carbon-based fossil fuels (ironically, created over geologic time scales) to satisfy our short-term energy demands, we have become powerful enough to overwhelm slow geological cycles. We are, for the first time in the 4+ billion year history of the Earth capable of altering the largest geophysical system on the planet – the climate – and we are doing it on a human time scale of years and decades, with consequences we are only just beginning to comprehend. And ironically, our effect on the climate is still slow enough for policy makers, climate contrarians and skeptics, and those simply not paying attention to either actively deny it or to just look the other way, committing the planet to more and more change. [There are other examples of human influences on a global scale: our construction of dams and storage of massive quantities of water behind reservoirs has literally, albeit modestly, altered the rotation of the planet. But none are as significant as our effect on the climate.]

Some will never be able to accept this, no matter the evidence. They will continue to conflate geologic and human time scales and assume that what is occurring today must be what has always occurred in the past — natural. But the inability to comprehend the planetary influence of humans isn’t based on reviewing and rejecting the scientific evidence, which is clear to 97-98% of climate scientists publishing in the field. It is based on ignoring or disbelieving it, just as some dogmatically refused to abandon their belief in a geocentric universe for reasons that had nothing to do with science. And alas, these modern-day dogmatists are unlikely to change their minds, at least not on a human time scale.

Peter Gleick

Originally published by Forbes on January 19, 2012.

But not all zombies are fictional, and some are potentially really dangerous – at least to our pocketbooks and environment. These include zombie water projects: large, costly water projects that are proposed, killed for one reason or another, and are brought back to life, even if the project itself is socially, politically, economically, and environmentally unjustified.

Here are four kinds of zombie water projects that have been repeatedly beaten down for a variety of reasons but that keep rearing their ugly heads. Keep those chainsaws lubed and fueled:

1. Water transfers from the Great Lakes or the Mississippi River or Alaska and Canada to the arid southwestern U.S.

These are perennial favorites: people look at the vast amount of water in the Great Lakes, or flowing down the Mississippi River, or flowing north to the Arctic Ocean and think, gee, what could make more sense than to take that water and move it to where we really need it, like California or Arizona or Las Vegas. After all, we’ve been moving water around since the beautifully designed Roman aqueducts, and even earlier. But most of these mega-projects are zombies – killed off years ago, only to linger, undead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute, an internationally recognized water expert and a MacArthur Fellow.

Read his full bio…

Patricia Mulroy, who runs the Southern Nevada Water Authority, recently revived the idea of moving floodwaters from the Mississippi River all the way to Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona to free up Colorado River water that could then be given to feed Las Vegas. Fear that similar projects would take water out of the Great Lakes led to a provision in the new international agreement signed by the U.S. and Canada that effectively prohibits transfers of water out of the basin because of fear that such diversions would lower the Great Lakes levels and threaten the health of fragile natural ecosystems. And of course there is the granddaddy of all water diversion proposals – called NAWAPA (the North American Water and Power Alliance) – proposed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by a consulting/construction company to divert around 150 million acre-feet of water annually (ten times the flow of the Colorado River) from the Yukon, Copper, Kootenay, Fraser, Peace, and other Alaskan/Canadian rivers all the way east to the Great Lakes and south to the southwestern U.S. and even Mexico. And a smaller version of this zombie is the Million Conservation Research Group proposal (named after Aaron Million – if it had anything to do with the cost, it would be the Billion Conservation Research Group) to build a pipeline from Wyoming to eastern Colorado to take 250,000 acre-feet of public water to sell for private gain. Professor Robert Glennon from the University of Arizona quipped that he sees many obstacles to the project, “not the least of which is the Rocky Mountains.”

These mega-projects are certainly technically feasible: there’s no mystery to building dams, aqueducts, pumping plants, and pipelines. What kills these projects is their massive political, environmental, and economic cost. They would cost tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars and lead to vast environmental destruction and devastation. Half a century ago, we didn’t know about the ecological consequences of massive water diversions, or we didn’t care, but those days are over. On top of this, any such project would require unprecedented political and legal water sharing agreements and anyone who believes such agreements can be reached is living in a fantasyland. But that doesn’t stop these zombies from periodically coming back to life.

2. Water transfers from Alaska or Norway or the Arctic/Antarctic to Asia or the Middle East through the ocean

An international version of the major pipeline or aqueduct projects described above is the idea of putting water in tankers or big plastic bags and shipping it overseas (or, the earliest version – towing icebergs). The most recent example is the proposal to ship water from Sitka, Alaska to Asia or even the Middle East. Once again, a logical idea runs smack into the wall of economics, though for some reason, these water entrepreneurs seem blind to economics. In this case, the proposed price is around $0.01 per gallon. The water would be put into tankers or water bags and shipped overseas. [I don't believe that they can actually ship water from Alaska to the Middle East, or even closer, to Asia, for $0.01 per gallon, but let's assume, for the moment, that they can.] Let’s do a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation that seems to be beyond the ken of those pushing the project: $0.01 per gallon is equal to $2.64 per cubic meter. The current price of coastal desalination, which produces highly pure water, varies from place to place, but is already well below $2 per cubic meter. Why would any buyer agree to buy more expensive water, of no better quality, from someone else when they could build a desalination plant under their own control? So far, none have. But expect to see this zombie staggering around periodically.

3. The Poseidon Carlsbad desalination project

Having just argued that desalination makes more sense than water transfers through the ocean from water-rich to water-poor regions, it turns out that notall desalination plants make sense. It is a proven technology – thousands of desalination plants are operating around the world – but it is a costly one to do properly. An effort by a private development group, Poseidon Resources, to build a plant at Carlsbad, near San Diego, has become the textbook case of how NOT to build a desalination plant (ironically replacing the previous textbook case of how not to build a desalination plant – Poseidon’s earlier venture with the Tampa Bay desalination plant in Florida). The Carlsbad plant was originally projected to cost around $270 million. A year ago, the costs had risen so much that Poseidon was trying to get $530 million in tax-free bonds to help them finance the project, on top of a massive subsidy from local water agencies. A month ago, they filed a new application for $780 million in tax exempt bonds, suggesting the cost is approaching a billion dollars. The company’s current estimate is that the cost of delivered desalination water has skyrocketed over the past few years to around $2000 per acre-foot, which is nearly triple San Diego’s current supply costs. And their design is still controversial because of concerns about location, environmental impacts, and financing. Moreover, the complete lack of transparency about contracts, permit decisions by local governments, Poseidon financial structure and funders, and the true economics of the plant have soured even strong proponents of desalination. This zombie refuses to die only because outside investors (either unbelievably gullible or incredibly smart) keep putting in money.

4. The Cadiz groundwater mining project

Another effort to turn a public water resource into a private good is the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project (or the Cadiz groundwater mining project). This project is the brainchild of another private investment group and hopes to mine groundwater from an aquifer located in the eastern Mojave Desert in San Bernardino County. This project is unsustainable: it takes more groundwater out than nature recharges. Over time, this will result in disappearance of surface springs and ephemeral water in desert lake beds, and a declining groundwater level. In other words, the project exchanges public goods for private gain. An earlier version of the project, not much different from the current one, was killed by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California because of environmental and economic concerns, but like a water zombie, Cadiz has come back to life. A new draft Environmental Impact Statement has just been released, but beware: it is 305 megabytes in size, which makes it pretty much impossible for normal citizens to download it and read it to find out if it needs to be tackled with an axe or a chainsaw.

There are many smart water investments to be made, in industrial and agricultural water-efficiency technologies, better wastewater treatment plants capable of producing the highest quality waters, improved piping and distribution systems, lower energy desalination systems, improved monitoring tools, low-water-using crop types, and much more. But wasting precious time and scarce money on water zombies will not lead to a sustainable water future.

Peter Gleick

Originally published by the Forbes on December 7, 2011.