In just a few months this year, low water levels in rivers caused China to shut down factories and floods in Pakistan killed 1,500 people. Cargo ships could not carry standard loads due to the dried up Rhine River. The Las Vegas Strip became a river and flooded casinos. Water disasters are in the news a lot now.
Businesses have long fought against changing their practices to protect the environment, by not implementing pollution controls, taking climate action or reducing resource use. They argue that the costs are too high and would hurt the economy. The price of that lack of action is now being seen.
Corporations have adoptedsustainability programmes with mounting climate-related weather disasters, social inequality and species extinctions. In a circular economy, practitioners aim to increase the efficiency and reuse of resources, such as water, in order to make more goods and money.
Alternative economic theories include environmental economics, ecological economics, doughnut economics and steady-state economics. The mainstream economics' goal of eternal growth is not possible on a planet with finite resources.
A mark of both the persuasiveness of advocates and the decline of the natural world is that these ideas are starting to trickle into the mainstream. The economists and scientists behind these principles say that some businesses and governments are engaging in greenwashing, claiming their actions to protect the environment are more significant than they really are.
Water is seen as either a commodity or a threat because it is prioritized over human needs. The perspective encourages single-focus problem solving that ignores the complexity and interconnectedness of water's relationships with rocks and soil.
When rivers run low, pumping out water from the ground depletes surface water. A group of people are deprived of water by the erection of a dam. Leveeing up rivers and building on wetlands causes flooding. Cities are paved and water is whisked away.
Michael Kiparsky is the director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. If corporations were serious about water stewardship, they would reform the governance systems that set up the economy around water.
More than 11,000 scientists from all over the world agree that tweaking the margins isn't enough. They called for a shift from GDP growth to the pursuit of affluence in a letter to the journal. In February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agreed to call for integrating natural, social and economic sciences more strongly in order to conserve 30– 50% of Earth's environment.
A growing group of ecologists, hydrologists, landscape architects, urban planners and environmental engineers are working on transformational change from a place of respect for water's agency and systems. Instead of asking what we want, we should ask what we want. They are wondering what water wants. Researchers realized that water always wins when filled-in wetlands flood during heavy rains. They are trying to reduce damage to peoples lives by making space for water along its path.
The detectives are learning that water wants the return of the slow phases of the environment that have been destroyed. Almost two-thirds of the world's largest rivers have been dammed by people over the course of the last two centuries. The water cycle has changed due to these. All of the water detectives' projects restore space for water to slow on land so it can move underground and repair the crucial surface–Groundwater connection.
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Slow-water approaches all reflect a willingness to work with local environments rather than trying to change them. Slow water is spread around the landscape. Wetlands and floodplains are not the same as a dam and giant lake. Water detectives are starting to scale up their projects around the world.
For most of California's state history, surface and underground water have been treated separately from one another. Physically, they are linked by gravity and pressure. The water table is raised when river levels run high and spill over into wetlands. Wetlands and springs are fed from below. It's ridiculous to treat water differently. That is not a circular thing.
California's water supply has been overtaxed. Huge dams, levees and long distance aqueducts prevent the great rivers of the Central Valley region from occupying their floodplains. When there is a scarcity of surface water, people are aggressive in pumping. The two are connected, that makes the surface water decrease. People have to drill deeper wells if they want to get water. Infrastructure can be destroyed by collapsing the land. Salt can be pushed inland by using the ocean as a conduit.
Since the passage of the SGMA, California has prioritized using excess winter water and floodwater on land so it filters underground, or injecting it underground through wells. Flood management that sets back levees allows floodplains to once again serve their purpose, and a search for palaeo valleys are among the state programmes.
Key hurdles remain to seize the bounty of winter floods. There are legal legacies of the artificial divide between surface water and underground water. Colorado has integrated the rights systems for the water. It's legal to connect them so that they can facilitate projects such as draining winter water to refill ponds. The water enters the ground and rejoins the river, which makes it possible for farmers to get the same water later in the year.
The connection between surface water and the ground is a focus of the country. Almost two-thirds of the population live on a desert coastal plain that gets less than 2.5 centimetres of rain per year and is dependent on water from the Andes. The World Bank predicted that there would be a shortage of water in the city by the year 2030. Over the past decade, Peru has passed a number of laws that recognize nature as part of water infrastructure and require water utilities to invest a percentage of user fees in wetlands.
The protection of rare high-altitude wetlands called Bofedales, which hold onto wet-season water, and release it in the dry season, is one way to invest. Peat thievery for the nursery trade has led to the demise of these segulls. Utility investments are trying to restore wetlands. Scientists studied a local practice of carving out more space for water in the landscape to expand the Bofedales and found that these expansions can hold the same amount of water as the original ones.
The Wari people invented a practice 1,400 years ago that is still being practiced today. The Wari family still builds canals in a few villages. The amunas route wet-season flows from mountain creeks to natural basins, where the water sinks underground and moves slower than it would on the surface. It comes from lower-altitude springs, where farmers use it to water crops.
"If we plant the water, we can harvest the water," says Lucila Castillo Flores, a communal farmer. Communal farmers care for the water and share it with each other because of their culture of reciprocity. Much of the water they use for irrigation goes underground and eventually comes back to the rivers that supply the city. The impact of restoring amunas throughout the highlands was calculated by using a variety of methods. The city has less water than it needs. The researchers showed that by restoring amunas, they could make up for the water deficit and give the capital an extra 5%.
In Washington state and the United Kingdom, people are taking aholistic approach to their water needs. People are protected from disasters by the rodents. Before people killed most of the beavers, North America and Europe were much more civilized thanks to the dams that slowed the water in the land. About 10% of North America was covered in wetlands before Europeans arrived.
Benjamin Dittbrenner is an environmental scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. In the first year after relocation, the ponds created an average of 75 times more surface and underground storage than the control site. Climate change will make water storage more important. The increase in summer water availability was found by Dittbrenner. Almost one-quarter of the capacity of the Tolt Reservoir that serves Seattle, Washington can be found in just one basin.
Emily Fairfax is an ecohydrologist at the California State University Channel Islands. A fire break can be created when the widened wet zone is used to re-populate stretches of stream. Plants are less flammable because the ponds raise the water table beyond the stream.
The floods can be prevented by the help of the beavers. Peak flows that have been inundating streamside towns in England have been reduced because of their dam's slow water flow. During storms, peak flows in the water were on average 30% lower than in sites with no dams. Even in the middle of winter, these benefits were still present.
The ponds help to remove pollutants from the water. According to Fairfax, the value for these services is around US$69,000 a year. A mile of stream can be created with the help of a couple of beavers and their kits. She says the value of a lifetime of work for two beavers is more than $1 million. She says that if we return to having 100 million to 400 million beavers in North America, the numbers will blow up.
Mainstream economics doesn't take into account the many important services provided by healthy, intact ecosystems, such as water generation, pollution mitigation, food production, crop pollination, flood protection and more.
Fairfax's value calculations are often ignored by the market. A landmark report 11 in Nature in 1997 was co-authored by Robert Costanza, an ecological economist at the Institute for Global Prosperity. Global services were worth tens of trillions of dollars at the time. The global economy had grown but the value of the services was still higher.
The degradation of those services is not counted against profits because they are paid for by the environment. Hannah is an environmental economist and data scientist at the non-profit organization Resources for the Future in Washington DC Water that used to be in the area that used to absorb it has gone somewhere else. The value of wetlands nationwide, just for flood absorption, is estimated to be between two and three trillion dollars. Based on flood damage data, that is a conservative estimate.
Costanza asserts that GDP has a narrow focus on market-based production and consumption and does not accurately measure human well-being. He says that a circular economy will fall short. Should you be producing and consuming all those things if the goal is well-being? Natural resources and rebuilding social capital are more likely to achieve well-being.
Common asset trust is a way of putting more natural ecosystems into it. State or local parks, hunting reserves, or wildlife refuges can provide benefits to the community. She says that communities that invest in protecting a wetlands will see the benefit of avoided costs quickly.
The rights of nature movement started in the early 1970s and has gained ground over the past 15 years. Local government changes in the United States, as well as personhood for the Whanganui River in New Zealand and the Magpie River in Canada, are included. Some corporations in the US have personhood. People can argue in court on behalf of a river's rights if it is granted personhood. Freedom from pollution, protection of its cycles and evolution, and space are some of the rights of a river. Costanza says that people are part of the system and not separate from it.
States reform century-old water rights, utilities invest in wetlands and Indigenous techniques, and scientists use beavers in engineering. Natural capital isn't pushed aside because other things are higher priority
Costanza thinks a lot of change is needed. The underlying goal of the circular economy is still GDP growth, and these things get in the way of that.
In the dominant economy, people are doing what they can. Costanza says that people can protect social capital and environmental systems if they switch from GDP to metrics such as the Genuine Progress Indicator.
Some of these metrics have been adopted by governments in Maryland, Vermont, Bhutan and New Zealand. Shifts like these help to facilitate water detectives' work in caring for water systems so that they can sustain life.
The article is part of Nature Outlook: Circular Economy.
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The World Bank is working on a project to prepare for future dry spells in Arequipa.
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