Who is the odd one out? Matthew Wright, Chief Executive Officer of a UK water utility; Prashant Sharma, director of an Indian sugar mill; Justus Mtolera, manager of a Tanzanian hydropower plant; or Qi Qi, a Yangtze river (China) dolphin?
Yes, three are human beings and one is a cetacean; but there’s more to this puzzle than biology.
Matthew Wright is CEO of Southern Water, an English water utility. In parts of the region it serves, Southern Water abstracts 63% of its raw water from chalk streams like the River Itchen, the birthplace of fly-fishing.
Prashant Sharma is the boss of a sugar mill in Maharashtra, India. He procures sugarcane from thousands of farmers who rely on the Godavari, India’s second longest river, for irrigation water. As Mr Sharma put it, “When the farmer isn’t able to give sufficient water to the crop, the factory isn’t able to reach its production targets.”
Justus Mtolera manages the Kidatu dam on the Great Ruaha River in Tanzania. Hydropower generates 57% of Tanzania’s total power generation, and Mr Mtolera’s dam provides 204 MW of the country’s 561 MW installed hydropower capacity.
Qi Qi was kept in a Wuhan dolphinarium until his death in 2002. No Yangtze river dolphins, or baiji, have been observed in the wild since and none now exist in captivity. So it’s likely that Qi Qi was the last of his kind, and the baiji is the first whale or dolphin species to become extinct because of human activity.
Our odd one out? It’s Qi Qi after all. For him and his fellow baiji the river was home. The three humans rely on rivers not as a place to live but to underpin their businesses.
The trade-offs referred to in abstract food-water-energy nexus debates often take tangible form when decisions are made about how to use rivers like the Itchen, Godavari, Great Ruaha or Yangtze. Yet we hear little in nexus debates about these vital freshwater ecosystems.
Rivers don’t just provide our water. Some, like the Mississippi, are vital trade routes for agricultural and other commodities; others are important fisheries (inland fisheries such as rivers now provide a third of total fish catch globally). Freshwater habitats also host a vast, but declining, array of wildlife.
If rivers run dry or we pollute them, it’s not just wildlife that suffers; water companies, farmers and power utilities are affected too. This is why governments from South Africa to Sweden have prioritised the maintenance of river flows in laws, policy or guidelines.
The maintenance of river flows is critical to determining the future success or failure of meeting the water security challenge. It’s challenging to implement, and it’s too late for Qi Qi. But for Mssrs Wright, Sharma and Mtolera– and for those of us who rely on them for water, food and energy security – there is still time.
Dave will be speaking at The Economist Events' World Water Summit on November 6th 2014.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited (EIU) or any other member of The Economist Group. The Economist Group (including the EIU) cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this article or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in the article.
