pro-poor, pro-nature & pro-women.
| "Integrated Water Resources Management Approaches: Global and National Scenario" - A Public Forum |
- by Dr.
Judith Reesl |
London
School of Economics and Political Science, |
London,
United Kingdom |
| I am not going to talk about GWP at all and I am going to follow the notion that it should be a interactive session. So I want to say something, some of you might want to dispute. |
| The first thing I want to say is that I am a social scientist, so I approach either IWRM from social science perspective. I commonly come across my colleagues in Engineering and Physcial Sciences and they tell me that there is nothing new about. IWRM and we have been doing catchment management with interbasin management for a long time. I have to explain to them that it is not IWRM that is about physically managing optimising and a water resources and IWRM is not just about water. |
| IWRM is a means to a different ends. Most ends are actually to improve peoples' welfare over time. So it isn't a physical concept. It is very much essential and economic concept that often causes me quite a lot of difficulties when I am talking to my physical scientists colleagues and I was at a seminar on Catchment Management on the other day and I was the only Social Scientist. I was trying to tell the management implied human beings and not debris going down the street. That is one thing which is important that one must keep in mind. It is also not just about land and water, it is about how do we get the most out of scarce resources. Amongst scares resources of course from their land and water there is also money and on the human capacity that's what we are trying to do when we talk of IWRM approach. We are trying to get full value out of the system, out of the resources, out of the total resources that we have to improve welfare on a long term basis on a sustainable basis. Now I don't find the IWRM mind set in a difficult one because I find sort of fairly common sense we worked in an system which is very segmented and each segment looking very carefully at what they do, but ignoring the cost that they are imposing on everybody else. And so clearly when that happenes you are not getting the best out of your total resource base. In my country they made such resource mistake time and again and again. It allowed local authorities to develop their water system ignoring another local authority might need some water from the catchment. It alarmed the pollution which ruined the water supply downstream. It allowed abstractors to take water which ruined agricultural land. When all these things are incredibly familiarise because the government side and I think we have to say this, that the government has allowed all of these segments to just think of themselves and not think of the externalities and very often not to think of the long term. We are trying to change that. We now but it is incredibly difficult they do. It is very presumptuous because we had a very good future, yesterday. But also that pose some questions to you that came out of our future. Yes obviously got a very segmented system. You have got Metro Water, where the function is to supply water. That is the job to supply water. So we are trying to get water from wherever one can. Not that might be the correct thing to do. It might be correct to transfer water from the irrigation sector if it was sustainable. One of the things we learnt was horrified by us today the combination now metro water pumping and the irrigation pumpig is of water table has fallen a 100 ft in 10 years. 100 ft in 10 years. It is incredible. So you now got saline treatment, but it is not sustainable. So if a more integrated approach, is looked at, it might come with a set of solutions and in fact if had gone a bit further and think more what are the energy cost of having those hundreds of tankers on the road, causing even more congestion in those anyway and may be anyway we would tak even more holistic view. The form of benefit tat 20 landless people who were working on the farm before certainly they don't. It was a question you have to think about that. So it was never heard of this scheme. But I thought I was that was very good, that water pricing and moving things out of agriculture into a high value use. Now I think it all rather more complicated than that and how we need to think things more carefully. Just one more thing in that we as watery people tend to just talk to watery people. More than other things we are trying to do is to say that IWRM approach needs us to go outside the water box. We got to talk to, we got to look at energy pricing for example we need to engage Finance Ministers, we really have to get out to influence those areas that are putting pressures on demand for water. |