Managing Water Through Water’s Own Lenses

How to Sustainably Manage Water Given Water’s Unique Characteristics

Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash

Water is a vital and necessary component of life. Without water, there is no life, which makes it even more important for humans to learn to live in ways that don’t cause damaging consequences to its properties, quantity, and quality. Water enables many life forms to transport chemicals and nutrients throughout the organism, which is essential to sustain life. Due to water’s importance to sheer survival, many different human cultures have developed cultural and spiritual relationships with water (Greeley, 2017). It flows in our blood, protects our baby’s first nine months in the form of amniotic fluid, and is expressed as tears in moments of intense emotions. Water has also been and is continued to be used to exert political control, as seen in the expansion of colonial Algeria in the 1860s via physical control of water resources by the French colonial government and the control of water and local water use habits in India, Hong Kong, and Singapore by the British colonial government from 1850 to 1900 (Cutler, 2010; Brioch, 2007; Kung, 2017).

Compared to other natural resources, water has certain unique characteristics that make it difficult to govern and manage. With the current climate crisis, it is important to understand how these characteristics may complicate sustainable water management (SWM), since water sustains life and is home to aquatic and peri-aquatic life forms, but also plays an active role in global natural processes, such as air temperature regulation and water cycle. Water is ubiquitous and diverse in its many forms, so this essay only attempts to tackle some characteristics of freshwater, as much of the SWM narrative surrounds water security in terms of freshwater resources, and the social and economic factors that affect and are affected by freshwater use.

Framework: Governing Water by Understanding Water’s Characteristics

Unique characteristics of water in their categories and their implications for SWM (identified by author). *Alcamo (2019: 127) defines trade-off as ‘a condition by which an action to achieve one goal or target makes it more difficult to achieve one or more other goals or targets’.

Water governance refers to the ‘range of political, social, economic, and administrative systems that are in place to develop and manage water resources, and the delivery of water services, at different levels of society’ (Rogers and Hall, 2003). It also involves the political, social, and economic organisations that take part in water’s management and the complexity of their relationships. SWM should also ensure sufficient unpolluted water for nature and non-human beings for the present and future, as Rothman and Mays (2014) propose. SWM, therefore, is a process of decision-making. These six questions below have been identified and incorporated into the third column of the above table, which guide the four sections on exploring how water’s unique characteristics pose challenges to effectively implementing SWM and what policies may be helpful to overcome these challenges.

1. Where and at what scale are decisions being made?
2. What decisions are made?
3. Who makes the decisions and for whom?
4. How are decisions made?
5. When and based on what timeframe are decisions made?
6. Which actions or policies are required?

The next articles will explore each category in detail.

Part 2

Water’s Unique Biophysical Characteristics

Part 3 — coming soon

Part 4 — coming soon

Part 5— coming soon

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Bibliography:

Alcamo, J. (2019). Water Quality and its Interlinkages with the Sustainable Development Goals. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 36, pp.126–140. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2018.11.005.

Broich, J. (2007). Engineering the Empire: British Water Supply Systems and Colonial Societies, 1850–1900. Journal of British Studies, [online] 46(2), pp.346–365. doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/510891.

Cutler, B. (2010). Imperial Thirst: Water and Colonial Administration in Algeria, 1840–1880. Review of Middle East Studies, 44(2), pp.167–175. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/s2151348100001488.

Greeley, J.-A. (2017). Water in Native American Spirituality: Liquid Life — Blood of the Earth and Life of the Community. Green Humanities: A Journal of Ecological Thought in Literature, Philosophy & the Arts, 2, pp.156–179. doi:https://doi.org/10.25779/85a1-0337.

Kung, M.W.H. (2017). The Multi-Scalar Flow of Water in the Kowloon Walled City: How Diplomatic Concerns Influenced Water Policies in Late Colonial Hong Kong.

Rogers, P. and Hall, A. (2003). Effective Water Governance. [online] Stockholm, Sweden: Global Water Partnership Technical Committee (TEC). Available at: https://www.gwp.org/globalassets/global/toolbox/publications/background-papers/07-effective-water-governance-2003-english.pdf.

Rothman, D.W. and Mays, L.W. (2014). Water Resources Sustainability: Development of a Multiobjective Optimization Model. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 140(12), p.04014039. doi:https://doi.org/10.1061/(asce)wr.1943-5452.0000425.