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Water in the 21st Century :
Imperatives for Wise Water Management
From Development to Water Resource Management
The past century has seen enormous changes in the way society conducts the business of economic development, food production, and trade. Concurrently, and especially in the latter part of the century, there has been an explosion in the construction of large projects for water storage, flood control, irrigation, and hydropower. These were conceived and realized in an atmosphere of challenge: how to tame nature to serve the needs of humanity. The limits to the scale of the projects were set by the ingenuity of engineering solutions. The driving forces were population growth, food security, and industrial development. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, irrigated area grew from 50 million to 250 million ha in the last century, and withdrawals of freshwater increased from 500 to about 4,000 km3 per year.
Most large-scale projects have been financed by governments, and governments have naturally assumed responsibility for their management. The absence of private investors reflects not only the scale of the investments required, but also the fact that for some of these projects there were political objectives: for example, to encourage development in remote areas or to distribute development funds among regions. In many cases, it was assumed that users would repay the investment costs through water and other charges. This did not always happen. The repayment obligations have been eased and the cost of providing the services has frequently become institutionalized as a direct subsidy.
Water planners and developers have always worked from projections based on population growth, industrial and agricultural production, and level of economic and social development to determine demand, and hence to formulate engineering solutions to provide the appropriate freshwater supply. However, because of natural resource constraints and the accumulating adverse environmental impact of past projects, changes are beginning to be made in the way planners approach the problems of water supply. This is evident as a discernible shift from water resource development toward supply and demand management. The tightening fiscal environment, recent financial crisis, and reduction in the potential for developing additional surface water and groundwater supplies have added impetus to this shift in the last decades. In addition, people the world over now place a higher value on maintaining the ecological function of freshwater ecosystems. There is also growing public pressure for the costs and benefits of water development projects to be shared more equitably and prudently, and for investments to be directed toward satisfying basic human needs rather than benefiting elite groups at a high cost to the community at large. The heightened awareness of the issues relating to large dams (and which are also relevant to other large-scale engineering solutions) is described in the box below.
The Large Dam Debate
Reservoirs created by dams are essential for supplying water for human needs. They conserve water that would otherwise flow out of the river basin, and thereby enable release of water when river flows are insufficient. They enable the development of towns, industries, and irrigation with all of their economic and social benefits. They also provide hydroelectric power, flood mitigation, and recreational facilities. Water can be released to maintain environmental flows, dilute pollutants, and flush sediments out of the lower river reaches, thereby promoting healthier instream conditions and improving navigation.
Until the early 1980s, systematic evaluation of their environmental and social impacts was not mandatory. Such impacts are frequently serious but difficult to predict and quantify. The displacement of people to make way for the construction of dams and their reservoirs can cause great suffering and social dislocation. The negative ecological impacts can extend upstream into the reservoir and downstream to the sea.
There is now growing opposition in most countries to new large dams, and several projects have recently been canceled due to public opposition. There is also a stricter regulatory framework for such projects. International nongovernment organizations have played a role in fostering independent scrutiny of large dam projects, and they have emboldened the affected communities to seek a greater role in decisions that impact directly on their lives. The good dam sites (and many not so good sites) have already been used, and strict environmental and social conditions are now imposed.
In response to growing concern, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the World Bank established an independent World Commission on Dams in 1997 to review their development effectiveness and develop standards, criteria, and guidelines to guide decision makers in planning, implementing, and decommissioning dams. Key issues in three areas—social, environmental, and economic/engineering—are being examined to work toward a new consensus on the role of large dams in sustainable development. The Commission's report is expected to be issued in August 2000. In support of this initiative, ADB is undertaking a regional technical assistance to examine four major projects and to prepare recommendations on best practices for evaluating, designing, constructing, operating, monitoring, and decommissioning dam projects in Asia.
A positive outcome of the growing opposition to large dams (and generally to large engineering solutions to water-related problems) is the impetus this has given to finding new ways of solving problems of water scarcity. As a first step, planners now look for ways of improving the efficiency of existing physical infrastructure and distribution systems, introducing more efficient industrial processes, reallocating available water among competing users, and finding innovative ways of recycling water. These approaches are fully concordant with ADB's policies and guidelines, through which ADB encourages conservation and more efficient use of water. ADB takes a proactive role by helping its DMCs put in place sound policies for integrated water resource management, including pricing strategies and practices that reward efficiency rather than wastefulness.
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