Discussions on water issues are likely to gain prominence in 2010 as the world’s focus shifts away from the climate change policy questions that dominated 2009 in the run up to the Copenhagen summit.
While government, business and civil society will continue to grapple with national and international climate policy in the coming year, the affects of the water crisis on business, supply chains and impacted populations are widely acknowledged and being felt right now. Calls for more corporate reporting on water and accountability from civil society actors is certain to increase.
Water can be thought as the vehicle that many populations experience the affects of climate change. And while climate change can be mitigated globally through aggregated reductions in CO2, water is purely a local issue, necessitating local solutions. Water shortages in India cannot be solved through action in Indiana and vice versa.
Almost half of the global population will live in areas affected by water stress or scarcity by 2030, the UN predicts. In many countries, such as China, Mexico and South Africa, access to water is already a critical political, economic and social issue. In the developed world, particularly in the US and Europe, aging infrastructure and the explosion of chemical compounds infiltrating freshwater supplies has created concern over tap water quality, as the New York Times recently reported.
However, despite significant global challenges to water access and quality, there remain major gaps in impactful dialogue and, in turn, collaboration between government, business and civil society. As large consumers of water, businesses will be increasingly held responsible for water use and stewardship from increasingly active and vocal stakeholders.
In a telling sign of the growing importance of water, the Carbon Disclosure Project, a popular voluntary initiative, which works with shareholders and large companies to disclose corporation’s greenhouse gas emissions, recently announced that it will launch a sister Water Disclosure Project with its first round of surveys to be sent out in February. The new project is intended to increase “the availability of high quality business information on this critical issue.”
Even with greater accounting and transparency of water use, a fundamental, ideological issue polarizing stakeholder positions is the ideological question of whether water is a public good or a commodity. As Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute has stated, the key is finding enough common ground between key stakeholders to balance the characteristics of water as “both a human right and an economic good”.
Tags: global water crisis, pacific institute, Water, water disclosure project, water scarcity, water shortages
