MARSEILLES, FRANCE (12 MARCH)—As food and energy production intensify
around the world, their demands on dwindling water resources have prompted
the search for an innovative and collaborative solution. On Friday, March
16, a High Level Panel convened by the EDF Group
Program on Water and Food (CPWF)
Marseilles at the Sixth World Water Forum (WWF6) to share experiences and
results.
The panel will discuss how to embrace a “nexus” approach to water
management, in which projects that tap water resources are planned and
executed with input from stakeholders in the food, water and energy
sectors. A key goal of the panel is to insert this approach into the agenda
of the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development that
will be held in June 2012.
“We live in a world today where all too often development policies seem
almost perfectly designed to produce conflict between multiple sectors,
particularly energy and agriculture, over water resources,” said Alain
Vidal, Director of CPWF, which is part of the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
Uschi Eid, Vice Chair of the United Nations Secretary General’s Advisory
Board on Water and Sanitation, will open the panel. Other participants
include:
– Alain Vidal, Director of CPWF;
– Gérard Wolf, Senior Executive Vice President, International
Development, EDF Group, one of the world’s largest electricity companies
with 640 dams worldwide;
– Yasar Yakis, Turkey’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs;
– Ogunlade Davidson, Sierra Leone’s Foreign Minister of Energy and Water
Resources;
– Jane Madgwick, CEO of Wetlands International;
– Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego, Mayor of Bogota, Colombia; and
– Anil B .Jain, Managing Director (CEO) of Jain Irrigation Systems,
based in India.
The EDF – CPWF High Level Panel’s work is driven by the problems and
tensions that emerge when officials in both the public and private sectors
fail to consider how water management decisions simultaneously affect
energy, drinking water and food production.
These complementary, but often clashing areas of interest were the subject
of last year’s Bonn2011 Nexus Conference and are expected to be prominent
at the 2012 World Water Week in Stockholm this fall. The concern among many
water experts is that the nexus approach to water management is rarely
applied today, and that increases the likelihood of water-related
conflicts, particularly as economic development accelerates in rapidly
changing areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Vidal noted that with 1.1 billion poor people lacking access to safe water,
1 billion undernourished and 1.5 billion lacking electricity, demand for
water resources for multiple uses will rise dramatically over the next
decades.
“The world is now a very different place because addressing insecurities
related to food, energy and water –particularly in the world’s least
developed countries–is now at the forefront of development strategies
around the globe,” Vidal said. “We know that in the next decade hundreds of
dams are going to be built and the question is, how can we ensure that
before the projects begin all of the potential beneficiaries sit down
together and discuss the purpose of the dam and the pros and cons of
various approaches?”
Laos, for example, is facing criticism that without a nexus perspective,
efforts by the energy sector to build dams in the Mekong basin to become
the “battery of Asia” could damage fish-dependent communities in the region
and exacerbate the existing problem of saltwater intruding into farmlands
in Vietnam.
The severity of last year’s floods in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast
Asia has raised fresh concern about the way water flows are controlled in
the region. There are questions about whether water management decisions in
the region’s network of dams intensified the flooding of agriculture
lands—though there are also policies in Thailand for compensating farmers
who lose their crops to flooding that could inform the broader nexus
discussion.
The Panel will also examine India’s effort to expand drip irrigation
projects as it confronts the daunting disparity between available water
resources and future food, energy, clean water and economic development
needs. A 2005 World Bank report warned that by 2050, absent a more focused
and coordinated water management strategy, India’s various water demands
will exceed “all sources of supply.”
Vidal said there is evidence that recognizing the multiple demands on water
resources can lead to innovative efforts aimed at cooperation. For example,
at the World Water Forum, the High Level Panel will examine a case study of
the Andean region where numerous clashes between various sectors vying for
the water resources in the Machángara River Basin prompted the creation of
the Machángara River Basin Council, (the Consejo de la Cuenca del río
Machángara or CCRM).
The council’s membership includes the regional water and sewerage
authority, the irrigation management agency, the main electric power
utility, the national water secretariat, the Ministry of Environment (which
protects the forests that cover much of the basin) and small-scale farmers
from the area. They are working together to facilitate cooperation among
all of the water users in the basin for sustainable development that
increases the water, food and energy productivity while also protecting the
ecosystem’s services.
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The *CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and* Food (CPWF) was launched in 2002
as a reform initiative of the CGIAR. The CPWF aims to increase the
resilience of social and ecological systems through better water management
for food production (crops, fisheries and livestock). The CPWF does this
through an innovative research and development approach that brings
together a broad range of scientists, development specialists, policymakers
and communities to address the challenges of food security, poverty and
water scarcity. The CPWF is currently working in six river basins globally:
Andes, Ganges, Limpopo, Mekong, Nile and Volta (www.waterandfood.org).