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Guest blog: Local solutions for global water challenges
12/04/11 14:34
Peter G. McCornick
Director of Water, Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy at Duke University
We already know that the combined effects of a number of major drivers, including climate change, are causing varied, somewhat unpredictable, and increasingly severe effects on water resources. While efforts to determine the specific impacts of climate change on the local hydrological conditions need to continue, prudent decision makers are already incorporating these additional uncertainties into their planning processes, and considering how to secure and sustain water resources for the population, production systems and the environment.
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Tears in the rain: climate change, infrastructure, and sustainable development
22/03/11 19:04
Cross-posted with the Center for Strategic and International Studies
Water suffers from an awareness gap: many aspects of our food, energy, forestry, and health care securities intimately depend on freshwater, but these linkages are often ignored. When demand is low or water is plentiful, sloppy coordination usually has few consequences. But water resources are also among some of the most responsive aspects of the global climate system. I believe that one of the most difficult challenges for developing economies will be managing water resources in ways that do not make poor nations and communities poorer, generate international conflict, or trash freshwater and riparian ecosystems. In practice, this will mean that policymakers will have to build and operate water infrastructure to function under a much larger range of conditions than we can accurately predict today. And that also means that climate-sustainable water policy will need to be incorporated beyond the water ministry and merge into agriculture, energy, urban planning, health, and even foreign policy.
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Water suffers from an awareness gap: many aspects of our food, energy, forestry, and health care securities intimately depend on freshwater, but these linkages are often ignored. When demand is low or water is plentiful, sloppy coordination usually has few consequences. But water resources are also among some of the most responsive aspects of the global climate system. I believe that one of the most difficult challenges for developing economies will be managing water resources in ways that do not make poor nations and communities poorer, generate international conflict, or trash freshwater and riparian ecosystems. In practice, this will mean that policymakers will have to build and operate water infrastructure to function under a much larger range of conditions than we can accurately predict today. And that also means that climate-sustainable water policy will need to be incorporated beyond the water ministry and merge into agriculture, energy, urban planning, health, and even foreign policy.
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A month of War and Peace
21/03/10 08:48
I’m always a mess on the flight home, but I thought this was a unique, solitary experience until today (or whatever 20 hours ago is in the context of a three-continent plane ride). The lesson came in a taxi on the way to the sprawling Delhi international terminal, my mobile rang — my hydrological colleague who was in Guatemala was calling. He was in a cab as well, also headed to an airport on the way home. If I have a brother in water, it must be B.
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