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5.

Integrating River Basins

Three points about fresh water. First, it is a basic human need, for drinking, cooking and washing; we can survive days without food or shelter, but only hours without water. Second, water is a valuable and increasingly scarce resource; it should be recycled rather than wasted. Third, it forms the most fundamental biogeochemical cycle, essential to life and virtually all parts of the biosphere as well as to agriculture, human settlements and industry. Do we manage water well? Not very. Its monetary value should first ensure that also the poorest get the water they need, should second encourage conservation; and should third strengthen rather than undermine the water cycle. Most societies fail on all three counts. Almost everywhere, the rich (domestic consumers and farmers alike) pay less per litre of water than do the poor; in most developing country cities, buying clean water is a significant strain on the domestic budget. Almost everywhere, water pricing fails to discourage waste: without water metres, those with dishwashers and swimming pools don't have to pay extra and even more so un-metered irrigation adds to the waste problem. Almost everywhere, we pay little or nothing for the disposal of dirty water, and use public funds to deforest the catchments, canalize the rivers or otherwise damage the water cycle. In North and South alike, water pricing involves a wide range of perverse subsidies. Are we moving towards more rational water and flood management? There are some encouraging steps being taken. Two key ones are restoration of the watershed sponge effect, and reducing community vulnerability to floods. The Sierra Club calculates that restoring 6-8% of the US Red River valley in Minnesota and North Dakota to wetlands would be enough to store 20 days of peak flood flow, and protect the city of Grand Forks from flood. The cost is calculated at 252 million, compared to the 1-2 billion that the 1997 floods cost Grand Forks. A similar figure - 7% of the Mississippi valley back to wetlands - was suggested by a US interagency committee after the massive 1993 floods, which in some areas lasted 200 days. And Romania, which under the Ceausescu regime drained vast areas of the Danube Delta, is currently restoring them to natural marshland. Such attempts are not new. A government programme for reforesting the denuded French Alps started in 1890 and as the trees grew, floods became smaller and less frequent. The need to relearn and build upon traditional coping strategies for floods is a lesson which both developed and developing countries may be starting to learn. After the 1993 floods, the small town of Patonsburg, Missouri, which had been flooded at least 30 times since its foundation in 1845, used US federal flood compensation to rebuild on a new site outside the flood zone. And the Bangladeshi government is starting, under intense local NGO pressure, to consult local communities about its massive Flood Action Plan. One such suggestion is based on the technique of surviving floods on the flat roofs of village houses. Often, though the houses collapse under the weight when the water undermines wooden cornerparts stuck directly into the soil. An Oxfam development project found that embedding these timbers in concrete was both cheap and effective.
[integrative water management translates into less flood damage]

The Dublin principles

The 1992 International Conference on Water and the Environment agreed on four principles for integrated water resources development and management.
  • Fresh water is a finite and vulnerable resource, essential to sustain life, development and the environment.
  • Water development and management should be based on a participatory approach, involving users, planners and policy-makers at all levels.
  • Women play a central part in the provision, management and safeguarding of water.
  • Water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an economic good.
Word Watch integrated basin management n. the planning and management of water resources, surface and underground, for a whole river or lake basin.

In Depth United States Scientific Assessment and Strategy Team. A Blueprint for Change Part V: Science for Flood-plain Management into the 21st Century. Interagency Flood Plain Review Committee, 1994.


Virtual Ideas		 An integrated strategy developed by local farmers