The Value of Water in a Drying Climate

By CSIRO PUBLISHING

Are we making the best use of water? How do we judge this? Are there trade-offs between upstream and downstream water use? What are these and how are they resolved?

Disputes over water allocations are, second to climate change, the dominant environmental and public policy issues of the present era. We are called upon to resolve such controversies using the principles of sustainable development, which integrates ecology, economics and ethics. This timely book establishes a template for all types of resource allocation disputes, whether in Australia or overseas.

An expert team of ecologists, economists and sustainability experts spent three years interviewing people in the Little Swanport catchment, seeking answers to the optimal allocation of water on the Tasmanian East Coast. The hinterland of this area produces some of the most valuable merino wool in the world, the estuary grows mouth-watering oysters, and much of the land is in near-pristine condition, providing very valuable biodiversity resources.

The book is written in an easy-to-read style and gradually evolves to become the story of everyday life of one small Australian catchment. It is about people living in rural settings in the upper catchment with soils and rainfall suitable for farming; people residing in coastal settlements in the lower catchment; people working and relaxing in the estuary where fishing and aquaculture occur; and people and their business in adjacent towns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: Jun 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9780643106642

Book preview

The Value of Water in a

DRYING CLIMATE

Editors: Tor Hundloe, Bond University and Christine Crawford, University of Tasmania

© Tor John Hundloe and Christine Crawford 2012

All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact CSIRO PUBLISHING for all permission requests.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

The value of water in a drying climate/edited by Tor Hundloe and Christine Crawford.

9780643101609 (pbk.)

9780643106635 (epdf)

9780643106642 (epub)

Water-supply – Australia.

Water demand management – Australia.

Climatic changes – Australia.

Hundloe, T. J. (Torstein John)

Crawford, Christine.

333.91140994

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CSIRO PUBLISHING

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Front cover: Little Swanport estuary (photo by Francisco Neira)

Set in 10.5/12 Adobe Minion Pro and Stone Sans

Edited by Elaine Cochrane

Cover design by Alicia Freile, Tango Media

Text design by James Kelly

Typeset by Desktop Concepts Pty Ltd, Melbourne

Index by Indexicana

Printed in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd

The publication of this book was made possible through the generous support of the Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute (TAFI (now IMAS)) and the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC).

CSIRO PUBLISHING publishes and distributes scientific, technical and health science books, magazines and journals from Australia to a worldwide audience and conducts these activities autonomously from the research activities of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of, and should not be attributed to, the publisher or CSIRO.

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Contents

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Prologue

1        Introduction

Tor Hundloe

River basin history

The case today

A paradigm shift: a new view of river catchments

Sustainability science

2        Introduction to sustainability

Tor Hundloe

Our common future

Working with the dynamics of nature

Economics and sustainability

The various forms of capital

More detail on the value of nature

Society and sustainability

To our next step

3        The principles of sustainability and economics

Tor Hundloe

Sustainability and economics

What is economics?

The competitive economy

Correcting market failure

More than efficiency

The future compared to the present

Income distribution in valuing projects and policies

A dollar is not a dollar

4        Economic values of nature

Tor Hundloe

A heroic attempt

Don’t attempt the impossible, do the practical

Doing what we can

5        Practical measurements: water as an ecosystem good

Tor Hundloe

A catchment as a hypothetical country

Why catchment producers trade

Water as an example of an ecosystem good

Water in more detail

6        The world’s great river basins

Amy White and Tor Hundloe

Imagine a river basin

The Nile River

The Amazon River

The Yangtze (Chang Jiang) River

The Mississippi River

The Yenisei River

The Huang He

The Ob River

The Paraná River

The Congo (Zaire) River

The Lena River

The Murray–Darling River system

The Volga River

The Indus River

The Ganges River

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers

The Mekong River

In conclusion

7        Accounting for water

Peter Daniels

The basis of integrated measurement and management

Water accounting and budgets

Our goals for water accounting in Little Swanport

Water accounting advances

Uses for water accounts

Catchment-based water accounts

The natural state of a catchment?

8        An introduction to the Little Swanport catchment

Tor Hundloe

Our team and what we do

A little history

The troubled waters of the Little Swanport

Not top down: nuts and bolts

9        The river system and water management

Christine Crawford

River ecology: landforms and river flow

Flows

Water quality

Ground water

Aquatic ecology

Riparian vegetation

Water management: protected environmental values

Water management plan

Environmental water requirements

Holistic flows framework

10      The Little Swanport estuary

Christine Crawford, John Gibson and Barry Gallagher

Changes in the estuary over the last 7000 years

Estuary sedimentology

Catastrophic changes over the last 100 years

The estuary today

Physical and chemical characteristics

Estuarine ecology

Native oysters

Introduced species

Pathogen levels in the estuary

Future

11      Estuarine responses to environmental flows

Jeff Ross

Field observations

Nutrient budget

Ecosystem box model

Results and discussion

Conclusions

12      A short history of the catchment settlement

Tor Hundloe and Michelle Wenner

The first Tasmanians: the Palawa

Early European explorers

European colonisation and settlement

Settling the lower catchment

Settling the upper catchment

Land grants and land uses

Places of historical interest

13      The people and use of natural resources

Tor Hundloe, Peter Daniels, Amy White and Christine Crawford

The adjacent towns

The catchment landscapes

The land uses

A real mix of land uses

Oyster farming

Grazing

Forestry

The catchment communities

14      Communities and values

Tor Hundloe

The farming community

The residential community in the lower catchment

The upper catchment

In summary

15      The catchment regional economy

Tor Hundloe and Peter Daniels

Sheep

Other farming

Measuring what is produced

Tasmanian input-output tables

Contributions to the local/regional economy

Irregular purchases

Expenses not included

Lease payments

Farm workers

The lower catchment residential community

Household living cost across the total catchment

Farm expenditure by various categories

The flow-on effects

Caveats

To our next task

16      The Little Swanport water accounts

Peter Daniels

Introducing the framework

Mass water balancing

Preliminary water accounts for Little Swanport1

Human impacts on the Little Swanport water cycle

17      The value of water

Tor Hundloe

Our case study

The impact of drought in the Little Swanport catchment

Preventative (defensive) expenditure

Destocking

Feeding stock

Re-sowing pasture

Some simple sums

The impacts of the drought: in summary

Estimating the value of water when it does not rain

18      Conclusions

Christine Crawford and Tor Hundloe

In summary

Notes

References

Index

List of contributors

Christine Crawford is a senior research scientist at the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies (formerly the Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute) at the University of Tasmania.

Peter Daniels is a Senior Lecturer in the Griffith School of Environment, Griffith University.

Barry Gallagher is a PhD student at the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania.

John Gibson is an aquatic chemist with a long-held interest in studying lakes and estuaries, in particular at high latitude.

Tor Hundloe is Professor of Environmental Management and Science, Bond University; Adjunct Professor, Environment School, Griffith University; and Emeritus Professor, Environmental Management, the University of Queensland.

Jeff Ross is a research fellow at the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania.

Michelle Wenner is a Policy Officer, Fisheries, Department of Primary Industries, Victoria.

Amy White is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Institute of Sustainable Development and Architecture, Bond University.

Acknowledgements

We wish to whole-heartedly thank the people of the Little Swanport catchment, especially the Little Swanport Catchment Management Implementation Committee and the catchment members who completed our surveys, for their continued hospitality, interest, patience and support for the project.

We are also grateful to the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC) and the Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute (now IMAS – Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies) for their funding and support for the research and publication of this book.

A big thank you also to the people who supported us with our research, including Oyster Bay Oysters for their logistical support, to Sam Foster our ever reliable technical officer, to Mel Kelly and Sandy Dunbabbin in the catchment, to Dr Beth Fulton at CSIRO for advice on model development and to Ted Lefroy who chaired the initial steering committee and suggested the title of this book.

We have found our publisher, CSIRO Publishing, to be a source of inspiration, sound advice and much help. In particular we wish to thank Ted Hamilton who saw the value in our project. Elaine Cochrane undertook the critical task of editing the book and, in doing so, improved its presentation. Finally, to see the project through to completion we had the expert assistance of Tracey Millen. Their efforts are much appreciated. Any omissions or errors remain ours.

Prologue

The terrestrial world is a myriad of catchments. Only the person who stands on a mountain peak is temporarily not in a catchment. Once rain or snow falls, this person becomes in and of a catchment, regardless of which way the water runs.

Catchments provide the best possible ecological boundaries for the study of nature and of human–nature relationships. We have come to learn the hard way that political boundaries (both between nations and within nations) are a tremendous hindrance to the successful management of human interactions with the environment.

Air- and water-borne pollutants have no respect for the lines we humans draw on maps. As a consequence we have, for decades now, experienced the fall of acid rain in Scandinavia from the chimneys in distant parts of industrialised Europe. There are polluted river mouths in many developing countries where rivers gather human, agricultural and industrial effluent on the way to the sea. The rivers carrying the pollution load are likely to have run through a number of countries, each upstream country hoping to have its pollution out of sight and therefore out of mind. Trans-boundary pollution has been common for decades.

A new threat exists today. Only recently have we come to recognise the probable effects of climate change. It is very early days in terms of our understanding of climate change and the future is uncertain. In the case of global pollutants such as the greenhouse gases, catchments are not the appropriate boundary; the planet is clearly one ecosystem when the pollution is global.

The great oceans are global commons as much as the atmosphere is. Trace some of the great rivers through the industrialised parts of the globe and witness their increasing deterioration as the factories, farms and households, country after country, deposit their wastes, before the river with its load of rubbish enters an ocean. It is not only pollution that is a trans-boundary problem for water. There is the matter of allocation. The fresh, drinkable water on which all life depends is fought over, with the upstream countries better placed to take a far greater share than those downstream. We are without protocols to manage these matters.

It is one thing to recognise that catchments form natural boundaries; it is another to understand, measure, and manage human activities on a catchment basis. For about 150 years (the age of most modern nations) we have attempted to manage human activities on a national basis – with significantly varying degrees of success. We keep attempting to improve the management of our affairs, including human–environmental relationships, within our borders. Even if we perfected management at this level, we would leave the trans-boundary environmental problems unresolved.

In this book we are journeying into the uncharted waters (no pun intended) of describing, understanding and modelling human–environment relationships in a catchment. What we set out to do is not some theoretical exercise; rather it is what is required if we are to make best, sustainable use of nature’s gifts. How we manage human affairs within ecosystem boundaries is our challenge.

This book gradually evolves to become the story of the everyday life of one small Australian catchment. We will attempt to treat the catchment as if it were an autonomous unit, a pretend nation, with its inhabitants needing to ensure they make optimal use of their environment – which means making best use of the available water. The later chapters that take on this role and the ones that lead up to it, and set the scene for it, are about people in and of the environment. These are people earning an income from the land, soil and water that comprise the key natural resources of river basins. It is about people living in rural settings in upper catchments with soils and rainfall suitable for farming; people residing in coastal settings in the lower catchments suitable for residential ‘lifestyle’ villages; people in towns and cities; and people working and relaxing in estuaries where fishing and aquaculture are likely to occur.

The idea of a catchment is universal. At long last – approaching 50 years since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring – we are ready to treat human–environment interrelationships as fundamental to our well-being and future. We have been struggling to find sensible physical and social boundaries to target our governance. One lake is too small; a large island (such as Australia) or a continent (again think of Australia) is too big. A catchment – or river basin – is the sensible unit waiting to be recognised.

No two catchments are the same. Hence this book is not simply a biography of one catchment, although later on we do focus on a small Australian catchment in the island state of Tasmania. It is possible to make a range of important statements about life in a catchment – any catchment. First and foremost we tend to think of catchments (or river basins, drainage basins or watersheds as they are alternatively called) because they actually ‘catch’ rain and snow from the atmosphere and eventually end up with water running through streams to an outlet into oceans or, in some cases, internal lakes. The area that catches the rain or snow defines the boundary of the catchment. Humans and the other animals and plants with which we share the planet maintain their lives by accessing the water that enters and flows through catchments. Hence our study will be the story of water as much as the life it sustains.

Our story will take us back in time. This is for number of good reasons. First, we will seek to understand how our ancestors thought of water. Never dismiss our ancestors’ beliefs as irrelevant. The Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Jewish belief systems remain as strong today as they did in ancient times, notwithstanding all the fantastic inventions – based on science – that we take for granted. One thing we learn from the social sciences is the enormous disconnect that can exist between faith and science, and the problems this causes. When faith (superstition if you like) rules, the scope for a sound scientific decision is very limited, often impossible.

From our brief history of human attitudes to and interest in the use of water we will move to describe some of our world’s largest catchments, again with attention on the human dimension. We do this because we seek to learn.

The critical questions throughout this book will be: are we making best use of our water, the land it feeds and the natural resources dependent on both the water and land? How should we judge this? The introductory chapter sets us on that road. It is a journey that inevitably takes us to the twenty-first century challenge to achieve sustainable development – how to live sustainably. To make sense of what this entails we outline the principles of sustainability in Chapter 2. The fundamental principle of sustainability is the marriage of economics and ecology, and that leads to a discussion in Chapter 3 of how economists attempt to value nature. We will discover the difficulty, if not impossibility, of deriving values we can justify on ethical grounds. Only when we have these background chapters behind us can we commence our discussion of water and the world’s great catchments.

Our case study is based on a small Tasmanian catchment. Its small size is very important. We have been able to get to know virtually every tributary of the river around which the catchment is based – the river that has formed the catchment. The fact that only a few hundred people live in the catchment means that we have come to meet, and talk to, a significant number of the people in the catchment and we have come to understand how they make a living from the resources of the catchment. From this we obtain a measure of the monetary value of the natural and human resources in the catchment. This is where we analyse our catchment as we would a small nation-state, exporting, importing and self-sufficiency. If only we had the data to undertake this type of exercise for the world’s largest catchments! Imagine our knowledge and, based on that, our foundation to make better human–nature decisions.

We are interested in more than the equivalent to the catchment’s gross domestic product (what economists would term the regional product). In addition to this measure, we are seeking to discover and document values that are not recorded in the market. We need to expand economics, and economic thinking, if our goal of sustainability is to be given a chance of success. We will attempt to measure the values that to date have been neglected.

In addition to and separate from these measures, we have been able to delve into the values people put on their lifestyle. Every lifestyle is unique, and we recognise that it will be difficult to generalise from the individual to society’s values. However, much in our study is of universal relevance. The story we tell and the analyses we undertake are ones that will help anyone interested in human–environmental interactions understand what they need to comprehend to ensure healthy catchments and healthy people. This is our aim.

The book is a guide: first and foremost about how we should think about ecology, economics and ethics – using the extremely sensible ecological boundary provided by a catchment to arrange our thoughts and direct our analyses. It is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to use a catchment to illustrate how we can better understand human–environment relationships using the twenty-first century paradigm of sustainability science.

Tor Hundloe

1

Introduction

Tor Hundloe

Ask people to think of a catchment and they tend to think of large geographical areas and extensive communities, for example the Nile River and all the people who work on and around it and benefit from it. As the Nile catchment illustrates, many large catchments extend beyond the boundaries of one nation. For some of the world’s largest river basins, not just two, but many more countries can have some or all of their territory in the basin.

National boundaries dissect catchments. A variety of different land uses and human occupations make diversity the norm of catchment economies and society. Notwithstanding, people’s everyday reliance on the world’s great rivers and their catchments override all else. The water in the basin links all. Without it there is none of what makes a catchment a vibrant ecological and human entity. This reality matters much more than the political boundaries that divide so many catchments.

Where humans commenced the journey from hunter-gatherer to farmer, and finally to urbanised citizen, catchments came into their own. Hunter-gatherers had to range far and wide to find food; hence they did not concentrate in large numbers in any one place and they did not put down roots. Once farming was discovered, decisions had to be made about the best place to grow plants and to corral domesticated animals. River catchments provided the natural environments for this radical lifestyle change. As the surplus of farming became available for the expansion of human activities, towns and then cities formed. For obvious reasons, the lower reaches of major rivers provided the ideal location for the formation of cities, and with cities came civilisations.

Civilisation is what we have come to call the economic, cultural and social organisation of people into complex societies where surpluses of food and other goods are generated for communal uses, and the division of labour underpins work. The process from discovering the advantages of growing crops on flood plains, or at least near to flowing water, to eventually centring huge cities on river banks, if not near agriculture on river plains and river deltas, was not necessarily rapid and certainly not smooth. Success came and went. To underscore this, some of the world’s once very productive agricultural catchments are now near-deserts. Humans managed to destroy productive soils through over-use. They managed to starve flood plains of water by upstream diversions of water to those with the political power to command it. They attempted to irrigate far too much land with limited water flows. These were the mistakes of the ancient world, the results which we can see today in the deserts of once-productive agricultural and urban civilisations in many places in the Middle East.

Not all our ancestors were fortunate enough to live in natural environments that provided them with the resources they could marshal if they put their minds to it. It was the challenges of how to benefit from nature’s free gifts that played on the human mind and led to invention becoming a defining human characteristic. Farming itself was such an invention. The challenge was to provide food season-in, season-out, year-in, year-out, and overcome the vagaries of an uncaring climate – god or nature. The idea of saving seeds and replanting them was a small step in solving this challenge. Not all were in a position to undertake such daring experiments. They were daring because if the expected crop did not grow, people who had become set on being farmers would be forced to revert to wandering (in a relative wilderness at least) as hunter-gatherers in search of the next meal.

It was beyond human ability to convert the recalcitrant soils of arid environments to agriculture; hence, the ever-wandering peoples of the north African and Arabian deserts and the hunter-gatherer existence of the Inuit, the Australian Aborigines and other geographically unlucky people – unlucky because there was nothing in their environment to suggest the possibility of agriculture in the form in which it developed on the river banks of the great Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern rivers. In these richly endowed areas, water-sufficient environments determined economic and social evolution. In these places humans had the right plants and animals, soils and rainfall to work with. The outcome is the society of the twenty-first century. The world and its people are what they are today due to our forebears being able to develop the sciences of agriculture, engineering, accounting and political organisation, something which has eluded all other animals. With this success comes an enormous responsibility for the human animal.

Until the Industrial Revolution commenced about 250 years ago, geographical determinism was reality. Before we had the tools of modern manufacture, we relied on our natural inheritance, the soils, the rainfall and the animals we could domesticate to assist us farm. All of us might have come out of Africa, but where we eventually settled (fertile river plain, desert, or tundra) made all the difference to how we learned to live and how we continue to live. This makes it appear too clearcut. It wasn’t. The interested reader will find Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel one of the most enlightening books on human– environmental relationships as they formed our early history.

In the very early farming communities, the ability to put aside a surplus led to agriculture and invention, and the next invention built on the ones before. A process of material progress was underway. The vast array of the basic tools used in farming were each and every one of them an invention. The time and resources involved in inventing things, of whatever kind, required a surplus of food, enough that a few would be relieved from the daily grind of farming to tinker away as ‘inventors’. This social relationship necessitated investment; investment being the means to provide food, shelter and other material requirements from the produce of past work. People no longer lived day-to-day, but thought of the future – a better future – and planned for it by investing, the most basic means being the putting aside of a few seeds to plant next season, and from the harvested crop putting aside some food for the non-farmer, the artisan who would (with luck or much endeavour) invent the next tool for cultivating the soil.

Farming was undoubtedly the earliest form of investment – working hard, putting aside seeds for the future, and then finding oneself with a new and potentially larger crop next season. The productive soils, particularly in the flood plains of lower catchments allowed for the provision of surplus foods and other resources that underpinned the human development we now take for granted in much of the world. Great civilisations grew from nature’s original gifts of fertile river basins. We will describe these later. Those living in less productive environments were people who were at a disadvantage from the beginning and were destined to hunter-gatherer existence, some continuing to the present. Nature knows no notion of distributive ethics.

Not all early farming was to prove sustainable. In the early days of agriculture our knowledge of nutrients, chemicals and predator–prey relationships was seriously lacking. We stripped soils of nutrients, we killed large numbers of animals that had been effective biological controllers of the ‘pests’ that ate our farmed foods, we over-irrigated, and did much more of a negative nature. Until the invention of science by the ancient Greeks, which was only 2500 years ago, we based much of what we did on myth and superstition and hoped, even expected, the gods to deliver us water and good harvests. We gave our gods names that suggested their powers, to assist us with rain, with fertility, with good harvests. We blamed ourselves when they did not deliver, such was our primitive psychology. We must have offended the gods. Today we have considerable scientific knowledge, yet it seems that it is easier to pray for rain than order our lives around the knowledge we have accrued of the hydrological cycle.

Imagine a ‘Garden of Eden’.¹ I think of a jungle in which there are snakes and leaves large enough to cover crucial human body parts, the leaves being from rain-gathering trees. Need there be an apple tree? Obviously this author has seen too many drawings of the mythical Garden of Eden. Such a place was supposed to exist some thousands of years ago, and some of us reckon we know where it was located. Turn on the television and see the Garden of Eden as an Iraqi desert that is being fought over in the later part of the first decade of the twenty-first century² – once the cradle of civilisation, now a possible foretaste of the end of it.

River basin history

Early human history is largely centred on great rivers. By great we mean long rivers, usually carrying plenty of water – some every day, and the others during floods. Think of the Nile, the Amazon, the Huang He (Yellow), the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Ganges, the Indus, the Volga, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Mississippi, and the Murray–Darling. We will discover in a later chapter that the ones mentioned here are not all in the top 10 largest rivers; however, they are ones most readers would be familiar with. Some of the large and important rivers in Russia and Africa escape everyday attention. The Congo is one of these, as are those in central Russia. We will discuss these later.

The first known civilisations occurred on the flood basins of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers (the once fertile part of present-day Iraq). Following this, civilisations were formed on the Nile, the Huang He, the Indus and the Ganges. For example, there was a substantial Egyptian civilisation in the Nile Delta south of Luxor well before the pyramids were built – and that was a very long time ago.

Move forward to a far more recent era, and we discover that long rivers became the freeways of explorers, raiders and traders. The lengthy rivers of Europe were ideal passages for Vikings in their shallow-draught boats. The Viking era commenced in the tenth century. The Swedish Vikings travelled the length of the Volga, establishing the first Russian state (called Rus) in the process. These Viking ships were the equivalent of today’s super aircraft carrier – state of the art technology. The Norse longships could wind their way for extensive distances in the shallowest of rivers just as easily as they could conquer the high seas, as Leif Ericsson proved when he crossed the Atlantic Ocean to America about a thousand years ago.

Move forward once again to a more recent period, to the ‘wild west’ days of North America, from the eighteenth century on to the early twentieth century. The web of large, long rivers in what was to become the United States provided a major means of transport for both products and people. The glamorous paddle-steamers are as much a part of North American history as the wheeled wagon, coach and cowboys. The wheelers and dealers, cardsharps and ladies who worked the boats were the waterways’ equivalent of cowboys, outlaws and bar-room entertainers. The river folk were just as important in ‘opening up’ the United States as the cowboys and the wagon trains.

At about the same time as rivers were allowing the United States to be colonised by the newly arrived pastoralists and farmers, the British were digging canals to serve as transport corridors between the industrial midland cities and the coastal ports. Raw cotton came into Manchester and Liverpool from the colonies, and once on British shores moved inland to the mill cities via the canals. Manufactured garments found their way back to the colonies (and other markets) via canal-boats to British ports, then ocean-going ships. Water transport was the easiest, quickest and cheapest means of transport in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

The case today

Come to the present. By the end of the twentieth century, most (if not all) of the great rivers have been tamed by massive dams for the purposes of irrigation and/or hydro-power. More often than not, particularly in the past 20 or so years, the construction of dams has been controversial and politically charged. Water allocations are altered when dams are constructed. Downstream uses can suffer as a result of seriously interrupted flows, and natural ecosystems can be damaged with the reduction in environmental flows. In poor countries, peasants have protested at the inundation of their land. In rich countries, ‘not-in-my-backyard’ (NIMBY) groups have often successfully stopped the damming of many a local river. These groups are quick to play the environment card, but self-interest is the fundamental motivation in many cases.

The benefit-cost analysis of altering water flows is generally a very complex calculation. There is ample evidence that many of the analyses undertaken to date have been flawed, and as a consequence water storages have been built when they should not have been, or have not been built where they should have been. We will say much more about water, the environment and economics in future chapters.

Nothing has been more controversial than when an upstream country constructs a dam, and as a consequence alters the flow into downstream countries. Wars have been the result. For example, an often overlooked aspect of the Palestine–Israel conflict is a dispute about access to water. The River Jordan rises in the Golan Heights in southern Syria, occupied by Israel since 1967, and is a significant part of the border between Israel and Jordan and the Palestinian territory of the West Bank and Jordan. Religion may be the face of armed conflict of this festering sore of Middle Eastern politics; however, control of resources is a major cause of the bloody conflict.

More water wars are on the horizon, particularly where rivers meander through a number of countries and where populations continue to increase and the need for basic economic growth is paramount. Rivers find their way through many countries in Europe and the Europeans have been able to settle on acceptable protocols. This is not necessarily the case in parts of Asia and Africa. It is not just quantities of water that lead to disputes; water quality is a major issue in some of these existing, or potential, conflicts.

Water quality was one of the main catalysts for the first United Nations conference on the environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. The dirty rivers flowing through country after country in industrialised Europe provided the evidence that trans-boundary pollution was the environmental problem of the era, and that international agreement was required to address it. In following years, the richer countries did much to clean up their rivers, to the benefit of all who relied on the particular rivers. Rich country governments can do this.

Other than that, and cleaning up trans-boundary air pollution in the richer parts of the world, little was to result from the Stockholm meeting of world leaders. We had to wait until 1987 and the report by the World Commission on Environment and Development to see water quality, water quantity and its allocation on a global scale put on the agenda, along with a range of other unresolved environmental issues. This was when the concept of sustainable development (or sustainability) took hold, first in government departments throughout the global community, then in the business world. Today the idea of sustainability is the Holy Grail. One hopes that those who place their hands on their hearts to swear by it understand it.

A paradigm shift: a new view of river catchments

By treating a water catchment as a geographic whole – regardless of the political and administrative units into which it is divided –our eyes are opened to a much more rational way of viewing the world than the artificial (political) perspectives we have become used to. Just for a moment, think of the countries that come to mind because a part (if not all) of their boundary with a neighbour is a river. The Mekong River, being a boundary between Thailand and Laos, is a good example. Both sides of the river depend upon its water flow for their agriculture and domestic water. The fishers who sit in their boats in the middle of the river could belong to either country.

The politics and the economics of a catchment are likely to differ significantly from those of a nation, and the types of human relationships also differ. Catchment residents, when they are forced to confront and live within nature’s boundaries rather than within political ones, have a different perspective of their world. We will illustrate this with empirical data as we progress through the book.

Sustainability science

This book is not simply the story of river basins, although that in itself has potential to be a minor thriller. Too much blood and guts have been spilt over access to water for it not to be. However, our focus is not the exercise of political, economic – and military – power. The book is designed by scientists (a combination of natural scientists and social scientists) and hence focuses on scientific matters. We seek to solve intricate problems – ones that need to be solved before they escalate to conflicts. While researched and written