Water: No shortage of Problems Science Solutions Women's roles finding answers

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Water No shortage of Problems Science
Solutions???Women's roles- finding answers?

• Women in Science Conference at
• The Biblioteca Alexandrina,
• October 2007
• Margaret Catley-Carlson
• Trustee, Library of Alexandria
• Chair, Global Water Partnership
• International Water Management Institute
• UN Secretary General Advisory Board on Water

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Where We Will Go Today

• Why things have to change the water crises
• New approaches to looking at water
• Science what can we expect?
• Women is there a special concern?
• Women in Science a special role?

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I. Water Basic Statistics

• Oceans 80. 20 per cent of precipitation falls on
  land
• Each day the sun pulls up 1 trillion tons of
  water 12 zeros.
• 100 year period, a water molecule spends.
• 98 years in the ocean,
• 20 months in ice,
• 2 weeks in lakes and rivers,
• a week in the atmosphere.
• Only 2.5 or 35 million km3 is freshwater.
• 70 polar ice caps Soil humidity, inaccessible.
• Usable water -less than 1 per cent of the
  planets existing freshwater.

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Crisis Is Today

• Water tables declining.
• Many rivers no longer reach the sea.
• 1b people no consistent access to freshwater.
• Twice that number lack access to sanitation.
• Freshwater aquatic species in peril(28?).
• Deltas and wetlands disappearing.

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Human Welfare Implications

• Water IS life
• 2 liters, 25 liters, 2500 liters
• We have 400-500 liters per day
• The poor have as little as 20 liters
• 6,000 children per day die clean water and
  sanitation
• Women heavy toll
• Girls education, life chances, fertility
• Sanitation in schools 11 p/y since 1990
• 90 of LDC urban water NOT treated

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Water and Health

• Close to half population of developing world
  suffering at any one time from
• Diarrhea, ascaris, guinea work, hookworm, shisto
• 4 billion cases of diarrhea 2.2 million deaths
• 6 million blind from trachoma
• Well designed system reduces shisto 77
• Arsenic in Asia
• Cholera loss of life loss of economic gain

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What has gone wrong?

• Management along sectoral lines
• Social/institutional development cannot keep pace
  with change
• Low cost/no cost services irrigation and
  drinking water
• Government roles
• Delivery easier than policy
• The big ones
• Population
• Pollution
• Prosperity.

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II. What Has To Happen? IWRM
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Build New Alliances
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Building capacity to support IWRM
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III. What Can Science Do?Very Little

• By common consent, the problem is management.
  Water is badly or not managed everywhere.
• No science innovations required to achieve 90
  of the desired water management objectives.
• The last 10 can be achieved with better
  monitoring systems, forecasting, data management,
  GIS.

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III. What Can Science Do? A Great Deal

• Traditional engineering,
• Agriculture revolutionizing the 17/40/80.
• Finding more water, using water more often
• Biotech, nanotech, membranes.
• Toilets and sewage developments- 38?
• Most of all
• what new science is needed to inform policymaking
  and water management?

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A Real Ongoing Crisis Australian List
(courtesy James Moody of CSIRO)

• Rising public investment/interest
• Greater scrutiny
• Expectation of evidence based decision making
• Regulation, trade, compensation, levies legal
• Community involvement need for transparency
• Commercial interest profit motive need to
  reconcile with sustainability agenda.
• Future challenges for science
• Climate change a whole of climate approach
• Important data sets needed to collate, interpret,
  extrapolate
• Models huge effort and expense to set up and
  test models.

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Future Challenges for Science Moody

• Increased capacity to measure, forecast and
  report on quality and quantity
• Satellite imagery large public investments
• Soil resource information
• Water Resources information network
• Catchment modeling toolkit
• Robust water and pollutant accounts to underpin
  trading, regulatory systems
• Allocating and justifying environmental flows
• Assessing the merits of new infrastructure.

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Solutions and fixes Allocation Needs to Be
Based on Good Science

• Regulatory and water allocation transfers and
  trading issues.
• How much water for environmental flows Tradeoffs
  with other uses Opportunity costs of alternative
  uses, embodied value of "virtual water.
• Economics of setting fees at a level that will
  result in cost cost-recovery and water use
  efficiency.

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The Big One On the Farm

• 17/40/80.
• Water use efficiency. WUE y/w.
• Supplemental irrigation Groundwater harvesting.
• Improvements in on-farm management practices to
  conserve water, soil and salts.
• Saline soils and brackish water.
• Wastewater.
• Biotechnology (genetic modifications)
  major-benefit to future water management.
• Through savings and efficiencies in crop demands
  and yields.
• Knowledge and technologies are available -
  implementation and incentives are lacking.

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New Tech, Nanotech

• Low tech/low cost solutions,
• Point of use purification.
• Well water, solar energy, sanitation.
• Ngo's have been successful in providing this
  level of assistance.
• Membranes, membranes, membranes.
• Nanotech.
• Pollution, arsenic, heavy metals?
• Lower cost desalting for brackish groundwater
• Or Biofuels from brackish water?

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Management Science Decision Support

• IBRD "in the absence of sound policy, increased
  investment will be ineffectual in reaching the
  millennium development goals". .
• Strengthening governance mechanisms
  (privatization, policy and regulatory reforms)
• Financial sustainability (cost recovery, tariffs,
  mobilizing financial resources) Improving
  service delivery (access, quality, partnerships)
  Targeting poverty groups.
• Related science
• Multicultural economic analysis through
  input/output analysis of a region or nation to be
  able to determine the direct and indirect
  benefits of investments and rank the priority
  investments that provide the biggest payoff.

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Global Warming all about water.
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Its a lot about Women June Zeitlin, WEDO

• Women and children are fourteen times more
  likely to die than men are during a disaster.
• 2004 Asian Tsunami - 70-80 overall deaths women.
  
• 1991 Bangladesh cyclone disasters kill 140,000,
• 90 victims were women.
• 2003 Canicule - more women than men died
  Eureopeanj heat wave.
• Hurricane Katrina in the US, African-American
  women -poorest population faced the greatest
  obstacles to survival.
• Women
• the majority of the worlds poor
• Especially he worlds rural poor,
• are largely responsible for securing food, water
  and energy for cooking and heating.
• London School of Economics 2006 analyses
  disasters in 141 countries
• decisive evidence that gender differences in
  deaths from natural disasters are directly linked
  to womens economic and social rights.
• gender inequalities are magnified in disaster
  situations.
• Where women lack basic rights, more women than
  men will die from natural disasters.
• pposite true where women and men enjoy equal
  rights, natural disasters kill the same number of
  women and men.

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Women need to take leadership

• Examples where womens participation has been
  critical to community survival.
• In Honduras, La Masica was the only community to
  register no deaths in the wake of Hurricane Mitch
  due to an early warning system operated by women
  in the community.
• November 2006, Kenyas Greenbelt Movement,
  founded by Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai,
  and the World Banks Community Development Carbon
  Fund, signed an emissions reductions purchase
  agreement to reforest two mountain areas in
  Kenya.
• Womens groups will plant thousands of trees,
  poor rural women with a small income and some
  economic independence.
• will also capture 350,000 tons of carbon dioxide,
  restore soil lost to erosion, and support regular
  rainfall essential to Kenyas farmers and
  hydro-electric power plants.