LONDON – For decades, activists, scientists, and conservationists have warned that freshwater is at risk. Yet improving access to this essential natural resource remains exceedingly difficult. The 2023 United Nations Water Conference in March called for the international community to “act now with the speed and priority commensurate with the urgency of this crisis,” but it remains to be seen whether governments will follow through.
There is good reason to be concerned. More than half a million children under five die every year from preventable waterborne diarrhea, and they belong to a much larger population of over 800 million people who lack access to safe drinking water. Sufficient supplies of potable water and adequate sanitation are privileges benefiting only those living in rich countries, where it is a minor miracle that such services are universally available. Crises like the lead-poisoning scandal in Flint, Michigan, and the contamination of the water supply in Jackson, Mississippi, show just how vulnerable these services are, especially in an age of rising inequality.
Nor is the problem confined to services. Experts have been raising alarms about the state of the underlying resources for a long time. Major rivers – from the Colorado River in the United States to the Huang He in China – have been in trouble for decades, owing to growing demand. And groundwater, the “go-to” for those who run out of options at the surface, is faring even worse. A few years ago, when NASA’s GRACE mission started publishing data tracking the depletion of the world’s underground aquifers, the resulting picture was not pretty. We now know that groundwater has been so depleted that the tilt of Earth’s axis has changed.
As if that weren’t bad enough, ecosystems that depend on freshwater have been decimated. While the biodiversity of these habitats is generally under-reported (few people have access, let alone the ability to monitor, places like the Congo River, for example), it would appear that they have already lost the vast majority of their fauna. Over the last 40 years, the overall headcount of amphibians and freshwater species of fish and birds has collapsed by over 80%. These are extinction-level rates – an unmitigated disaster.
Yet we still do almost nothing about it. International conferences “sound the alarm” and issue “calls to action,” but a growing chorus is calling for new ideas and a re-framing of the issue. A UN-sponsored Global Commission on the Economics of Water, for example, wants the planetary hydrological cycle to be treated as a global common good. But is that really going to happen? Our record of achieving multilateral environmental objectives leaves much to be desired.
What Is Water?
Is it true that we simply have framed the issue wrong? Or is something else at work?
It helps to ask what we mean by “water.” The answer is not as straightforward as one might think. We aren’t talking about the molecule H2O (few people have direct experience of that outside of a lab), or even about what rains down from the sky and flows over the landscape. For most of those living in rich countries, the experience of water is something else entirely.
In the 1960s, Robert Dorfman, a longtime professor of political economy at Harvard University, described water as a production process, because it involves the conversion of resources of some kind and in some places into other types of resources in other places. For our individual and collective purposes, the inputs to production are not just water, the substance, but also construction materials, equipment, the land on which infrastructure is built and plants grow, and the manpower to deliver and manage the whole enterprise. Similarly, the output is access to water at a specific time, place, and level of quality and certainty that satisfies a particular need.
Those needs vary widely, from crop irrigation and industrial uses to household consumption. Potable water delivered in a kitchen on the tenth floor of a high-rise has almost nothing in common with the water used for irrigation in the countryside. The first must be provided all day, every day. It takes energy and infrastructure to extract it, store it so that it is available whenever needed, and pipe it up a building until it comes out of that particular tap. When it returns through the wastewater system, it ends up in a different place, at a different time, and almost certainly at a different level of quality.
The water used in a field, by contrast, is drawn from a weir and channeled (thanks to gravity) through secondary canals to the farm’s edge, where it is typically available for only a short period of time – certainly not all day or every day. Ultimately, its use is largely dependent on whether it rains.
Thus, even if the water from the city tap and the water in the country field come from the same source, they are not substitutes. And, of course, there are many other equally valuable water “products” to account for, such as navigation, flood control, ecological flows, recreation, and water’s aesthetic effect on our landscape. Securing the supply of any one of these water “products” in one place says little about how we will fare elsewhere. Protecting ecosystems we value may mean allowing entire plains to flood, in effect supplying water precisely when we want it least. And that, in turn, says nothing about the kind of water we might have access to when we do need it. In theory, all these problems should be solved in an integrated way; in practice, however, it is rarely so straightforward.
In economics, we use “liquid” to describe something that is easily accessible and fungible. The mainstream use of this term owes much to John Maynard Keynes, who adopted it in his Treatise on Money before articulating a “liquidity preference” in his 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Today, the word conjures images of money as flowing water. But it should be clear that the analogy is inapt. By Dorfman’s definition, the water we experience is, ironically, among the most illiquid substances we have. Much like roads or airports, the value we place on water lies not in the substance but in our access to it. That access is immovable and timebound, and our own valuation of it depends on our needs. Water from the tap is valuable; water running through your living room is not.
Some might recoil at such an economistic view, given that most current debates about water crises are framed in environmental or human-rights terms. But our relationship to water is highly mediated by human action, and that makes it fundamentally economic. Nature does not automatically provide the conditions that human societies have deemed necessary for their own self-determination. If we want clean drinking water, sanitation, or protection from floods and droughts, we must invest in furnishing these goods.
When the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 64/292, on “the human right to water and sanitation,” it also included language urging states and international organizations to “provide financial resources” to uphold that right. Money may not be like water, but water is primarily about money. If we forget that, we will struggle futilely to ensure access to it in an age of climate change.
Development as Hydraulics
The climate system defines the landscape through the distribution of water in time and space. Where we grow things, locate cities, build roads, and much else depends on how water shows up in our surrounding environment. But the modern economy must be able to function independently of climate variability. We don’t produce only when it rains, and we don’t go to work only when skies are clear. Business continuity and wealth creation depend on our ability to control material conditions. In rich countries, that control is pervasive. All this may sound obvious; but it is a fact of modern life that we often take for granted.
Over the course of the twentieth century, national economies became the fundamental levers of human collective agency. Keynesian economists like Roy Harrod and Evsey Domar posited that national governments could foster long-term growth by investing in public goods, and that is what they did, including by building systems to manage water.
Few today appreciate – or even know – just how dominant water investments were over the course of the twentieth century. Until the 1950s, hydropower was the only scalable technology for power production, making rivers the scaffolding of industrialization. Clean water was a prerequisite for modern urbanization and public health. Feeding a growing population required vast increases in farm productivity, and irrigation was the key input, particularly in countries with difficult hydrology, like India.
These multipurpose water systems (dams, river infrastructure, municipal supply, and so forth) underpinned most economic development. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned for the US presidency on an electrification platform, with commitments to build integrated water and power utilities across the country. Harnessing the power of American rivers, he promised, would accelerate industrialization and lift millions out of the poverty.
Three decades later, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru followed the same logic when he promoted the country’s large post-war dams as “the temples of modern India.” Water was an instrument of nation-building, and those who could afford to replumb their landscapes did so, pressing their hydrology into the service of industrialization and consumption.
Water management remains a key platform for economic development in low-income countries. Of course, much has changed since Roosevelt’s time. We use different technologies, our knowledge of ecosystems has evolved, our land-use practices have changed, and our ideas about infrastructure and its effects on vulnerable populations have shifted. But even if the large dam is no longer the solution for every water-related problem, a fundamental insight still holds: modern economies cannot function without water security, and that security requires both money and political accommodations.
The Anatomy of Water Security
What kind of water systems does an economy need? In 1962, Arthur Maass, a political scientist interested in the geographical distribution of power, published a famous (among water experts) edited volume that aimed to answer that question. The starting point of Design of Water-Resource Systems was the US Flood Control Act of 1936, which introduced the principle of cost-benefit analysis in the provision of water systems. While the law dictated that “benefits should exceed the costs,” it left open many questions about how such benefits should be defined.
One contributor, the young economist Stephen Marglin, argued that “the prime objective of public water resource development is the maximization of national welfare.” Just as the pursuit of economic growth and redistribution had motivated earlier interventions such as the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority in the US, the same objectives should drive current policy. And since water systems create value across multiple sectors – from transportation and energy to irrigation and environmental services – deciding what mix to seek requires accounting for such systems’ impact on the whole economy.
But it is almost impossible to calculate beforehand what those benefits will be. Water investments last for decades, during which time economies are transformed and systems change. Moreover, people care about more than income. Add in budgetary constraints – which force choices between second-best options, rather than pure benefit optimization – and the problem becomes analytically intractable. All one can do is construct scenarios to facilitate a political discussion about what solution people might prefer. For this reason, Maass’s book ended with a chapter on “system design and the political process,” in which he argued for the primacy of politics and subsidiarity (not having the state do what individual communities can do themselves) in designing water solutions.
Maass, Dorfman, and Marglin were part of the so-called Harvard Water Program. Alongside the engineers Harold Thomas and Gordon Fair, the planner Maynard Hufschmidt, and many others (including practitioners from the US Army Corps of Engineers and the US Bureau of Reclamation), they attempted to describe how a society ought to mobilize its knowledge of hydrology, hydraulics, and economics to leverage its water resources for social and economic development. They used novel computational techniques and a broad inter-disciplinary approach to develop analyses that could inform decision-makers.
They showed that, from a hydraulic point of view, there is no mystery to solving most water problems if one has the full power and purse of the state. To take one notable example, their diagnosis and prescriptions helped resolve the problem of salinization in Pakistan’s Indus basin in the 1960s. But these experts’ most important insight was that an optimal solution will always be subordinated to political will, implying that the process of involving stakeholders and local and national political institutions is as important as the details of the engineering solution. The combination of water design and institutions, steered by a political process oriented toward the public good, is the route to water security.
This lesson was forgotten before it could go fully mainstream. Having spent almost a century redesigning their landscapes and building all that they could, rich countries turned away from water development. Multiyear planning processes were abandoned in favor of structural market reforms. Public finance, which focuses on the economic and social returns to the taxpayer, took a backseat as budgets buckled under the weight of public debt. As private capital became dominant, attention shifted from economic benefits to financial returns. On that narrow measure, water projects often failed to make the cut.
By the new millennium, rich countries had resorted to relying on existing (but slowly deteriorating) water infrastructure, and poorer countries were denied the opportunity to build the water systems they needed. The stage was set for our current predicament.
Water Security Revisited
Why is it so hard to tackle the water crisis? Some think we need new ideas, and they have advanced proposals that often veer into radical utopianism. But the struggle to put water at the top of the international political agenda is not a symptom of missing ideas. Rather, it is a symptom of success: by the time the Harvard program had codified its recipe, most rich countries were well on track to having what they needed, and water was pushed out of sight. Therefore, it is a problem of incentives. The water crisis would receive much more attention if bankers and asset managers suddenly had to wade across a river to get to work.
We may soon have a major opportunity to revisit our collective commitment to water. When the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was first agreed in 1992, the hope was that we would achieve decarbonization fast enough to avoid most measurable changes to the climate system. Had we succeeded, rich countries would have been safe with their existing infrastructure, and developing countries would have been no worse off (albeit still water insecure). But it wasn’t to be.
Now, the climate system is changing. As decades of accumulated greenhouse gases have warmed the planet, the hydrological cycle has stopped reliably following the statistical patterns of the past. Droughts in Europe and the US have become deeper and longer. Summer temperatures are inching higher and higher. Precipitation is more erratic. Climate phenomena now exceed the design criteria of the stock of infrastructure and institutions that once provided effective defenses for the wealthiest. Rich and poor alike are increasingly exposed to the power of water.
In a way, this leveling of the playing field creates an opportunity to re-design our water systems and renew our commitment to delivering security and prosperity everywhere. Contrary to what some claim, our failures are not about how we frame the issue. We know what the problem is, and we know how to solve it. Indeed, we have done it before. What we may have forgotten is how to use the convening power of the state to unlock financial resources for spending on what we need.
There are signs of change. China, now on its 14th five-year plan, has mobilized finance and institutions to provide substantially more water security for its population – albeit at huge environmental costs. And now that industrial policy and some form of state-led economic planning is back in fashion in the US and the European Union, both are beginning to tinker with their landscape. If the US manages to deploy all the resources allocated in its infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, and if Europe takes full advantage of its NextGenerationEU fund, both could make significant progress toward managing their new water problems. But those are big “ifs.” Much will depend on whether the money is allocated through political institutions capable of mediating choices and whether efforts are made to deliver a whole-of-economy vision of water security.
Moreover, many poor countries continue to be as vulnerable as ever. International institutions must press donor nations to do more to help them. The World Bank, now under new leadership, has historically played a central role in the water sector. In addition to being a major lender, it also has access to a large pool of specialists and an institutional mission to think about client countries’ long-term futures. But it must articulate how it can better deploy its considerable resources against what we all agree is a fundamental challenge for the future.
The water crisis is real, and climate change is making it worse. Not even the richest countries in the world can count on their water security. But rather than look for new, radical, unprecedented solutions, we should focus on enabling and assisting governments to invest. It has been done before. It can be done again.
LONDON – For decades, activists, scientists, and conservationists have warned that freshwater is at risk. Yet improving access to this essential natural resource remains exceedingly difficult. The 2023 United Nations Water Conference in March called for the international community to “act now with the speed and priority commensurate with the urgency of this crisis,” but it remains to be seen whether governments will follow through.
There is good reason to be concerned. More than half a million children under five die every year from preventable waterborne diarrhea, and they belong to a much larger population of over 800 million people who lack access to safe drinking water. Sufficient supplies of potable water and adequate sanitation are privileges benefiting only those living in rich countries, where it is a minor miracle that such services are universally available. Crises like the lead-poisoning scandal in Flint, Michigan, and the contamination of the water supply in Jackson, Mississippi, show just how vulnerable these services are, especially in an age of rising inequality.
Nor is the problem confined to services. Experts have been raising alarms about the state of the underlying resources for a long time. Major rivers – from the Colorado River in the United States to the Huang He in China – have been in trouble for decades, owing to growing demand. And groundwater, the “go-to” for those who run out of options at the surface, is faring even worse. A few years ago, when NASA’s GRACE mission started publishing data tracking the depletion of the world’s underground aquifers, the resulting picture was not pretty. We now know that groundwater has been so depleted that the tilt of Earth’s axis has changed.
As if that weren’t bad enough, ecosystems that depend on freshwater have been decimated. While the biodiversity of these habitats is generally under-reported (few people have access, let alone the ability to monitor, places like the Congo River, for example), it would appear that they have already lost the vast majority of their fauna. Over the last 40 years, the overall headcount of amphibians and freshwater species of fish and birds has collapsed by over 80%. These are extinction-level rates – an unmitigated disaster.
Yet we still do almost nothing about it. International conferences “sound the alarm” and issue “calls to action,” but a growing chorus is calling for new ideas and a re-framing of the issue. A UN-sponsored Global Commission on the Economics of Water, for example, wants the planetary hydrological cycle to be treated as a global common good. But is that really going to happen? Our record of achieving multilateral environmental objectives leaves much to be desired.
What Is Water?
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Is it true that we simply have framed the issue wrong? Or is something else at work?
It helps to ask what we mean by “water.” The answer is not as straightforward as one might think. We aren’t talking about the molecule H2O (few people have direct experience of that outside of a lab), or even about what rains down from the sky and flows over the landscape. For most of those living in rich countries, the experience of water is something else entirely.
In the 1960s, Robert Dorfman, a longtime professor of political economy at Harvard University, described water as a production process, because it involves the conversion of resources of some kind and in some places into other types of resources in other places. For our individual and collective purposes, the inputs to production are not just water, the substance, but also construction materials, equipment, the land on which infrastructure is built and plants grow, and the manpower to deliver and manage the whole enterprise. Similarly, the output is access to water at a specific time, place, and level of quality and certainty that satisfies a particular need.
Those needs vary widely, from crop irrigation and industrial uses to household consumption. Potable water delivered in a kitchen on the tenth floor of a high-rise has almost nothing in common with the water used for irrigation in the countryside. The first must be provided all day, every day. It takes energy and infrastructure to extract it, store it so that it is available whenever needed, and pipe it up a building until it comes out of that particular tap. When it returns through the wastewater system, it ends up in a different place, at a different time, and almost certainly at a different level of quality.
The water used in a field, by contrast, is drawn from a weir and channeled (thanks to gravity) through secondary canals to the farm’s edge, where it is typically available for only a short period of time – certainly not all day or every day. Ultimately, its use is largely dependent on whether it rains.
Thus, even if the water from the city tap and the water in the country field come from the same source, they are not substitutes. And, of course, there are many other equally valuable water “products” to account for, such as navigation, flood control, ecological flows, recreation, and water’s aesthetic effect on our landscape. Securing the supply of any one of these water “products” in one place says little about how we will fare elsewhere. Protecting ecosystems we value may mean allowing entire plains to flood, in effect supplying water precisely when we want it least. And that, in turn, says nothing about the kind of water we might have access to when we do need it. In theory, all these problems should be solved in an integrated way; in practice, however, it is rarely so straightforward.
In economics, we use “liquid” to describe something that is easily accessible and fungible. The mainstream use of this term owes much to John Maynard Keynes, who adopted it in his Treatise on Money before articulating a “liquidity preference” in his 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Today, the word conjures images of money as flowing water. But it should be clear that the analogy is inapt. By Dorfman’s definition, the water we experience is, ironically, among the most illiquid substances we have. Much like roads or airports, the value we place on water lies not in the substance but in our access to it. That access is immovable and timebound, and our own valuation of it depends on our needs. Water from the tap is valuable; water running through your living room is not.
Some might recoil at such an economistic view, given that most current debates about water crises are framed in environmental or human-rights terms. But our relationship to water is highly mediated by human action, and that makes it fundamentally economic. Nature does not automatically provide the conditions that human societies have deemed necessary for their own self-determination. If we want clean drinking water, sanitation, or protection from floods and droughts, we must invest in furnishing these goods.
When the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 64/292, on “the human right to water and sanitation,” it also included language urging states and international organizations to “provide financial resources” to uphold that right. Money may not be like water, but water is primarily about money. If we forget that, we will struggle futilely to ensure access to it in an age of climate change.
Development as Hydraulics
The climate system defines the landscape through the distribution of water in time and space. Where we grow things, locate cities, build roads, and much else depends on how water shows up in our surrounding environment. But the modern economy must be able to function independently of climate variability. We don’t produce only when it rains, and we don’t go to work only when skies are clear. Business continuity and wealth creation depend on our ability to control material conditions. In rich countries, that control is pervasive. All this may sound obvious; but it is a fact of modern life that we often take for granted.
Over the course of the twentieth century, national economies became the fundamental levers of human collective agency. Keynesian economists like Roy Harrod and Evsey Domar posited that national governments could foster long-term growth by investing in public goods, and that is what they did, including by building systems to manage water.
Few today appreciate – or even know – just how dominant water investments were over the course of the twentieth century. Until the 1950s, hydropower was the only scalable technology for power production, making rivers the scaffolding of industrialization. Clean water was a prerequisite for modern urbanization and public health. Feeding a growing population required vast increases in farm productivity, and irrigation was the key input, particularly in countries with difficult hydrology, like India.
These multipurpose water systems (dams, river infrastructure, municipal supply, and so forth) underpinned most economic development. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned for the US presidency on an electrification platform, with commitments to build integrated water and power utilities across the country. Harnessing the power of American rivers, he promised, would accelerate industrialization and lift millions out of the poverty.
Three decades later, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru followed the same logic when he promoted the country’s large post-war dams as “the temples of modern India.” Water was an instrument of nation-building, and those who could afford to replumb their landscapes did so, pressing their hydrology into the service of industrialization and consumption.
Water management remains a key platform for economic development in low-income countries. Of course, much has changed since Roosevelt’s time. We use different technologies, our knowledge of ecosystems has evolved, our land-use practices have changed, and our ideas about infrastructure and its effects on vulnerable populations have shifted. But even if the large dam is no longer the solution for every water-related problem, a fundamental insight still holds: modern economies cannot function without water security, and that security requires both money and political accommodations.
The Anatomy of Water Security
What kind of water systems does an economy need? In 1962, Arthur Maass, a political scientist interested in the geographical distribution of power, published a famous (among water experts) edited volume that aimed to answer that question. The starting point of Design of Water-Resource Systems was the US Flood Control Act of 1936, which introduced the principle of cost-benefit analysis in the provision of water systems. While the law dictated that “benefits should exceed the costs,” it left open many questions about how such benefits should be defined.
One contributor, the young economist Stephen Marglin, argued that “the prime objective of public water resource development is the maximization of national welfare.” Just as the pursuit of economic growth and redistribution had motivated earlier interventions such as the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority in the US, the same objectives should drive current policy. And since water systems create value across multiple sectors – from transportation and energy to irrigation and environmental services – deciding what mix to seek requires accounting for such systems’ impact on the whole economy.
But it is almost impossible to calculate beforehand what those benefits will be. Water investments last for decades, during which time economies are transformed and systems change. Moreover, people care about more than income. Add in budgetary constraints – which force choices between second-best options, rather than pure benefit optimization – and the problem becomes analytically intractable. All one can do is construct scenarios to facilitate a political discussion about what solution people might prefer. For this reason, Maass’s book ended with a chapter on “system design and the political process,” in which he argued for the primacy of politics and subsidiarity (not having the state do what individual communities can do themselves) in designing water solutions.
Maass, Dorfman, and Marglin were part of the so-called Harvard Water Program. Alongside the engineers Harold Thomas and Gordon Fair, the planner Maynard Hufschmidt, and many others (including practitioners from the US Army Corps of Engineers and the US Bureau of Reclamation), they attempted to describe how a society ought to mobilize its knowledge of hydrology, hydraulics, and economics to leverage its water resources for social and economic development. They used novel computational techniques and a broad inter-disciplinary approach to develop analyses that could inform decision-makers.
They showed that, from a hydraulic point of view, there is no mystery to solving most water problems if one has the full power and purse of the state. To take one notable example, their diagnosis and prescriptions helped resolve the problem of salinization in Pakistan’s Indus basin in the 1960s. But these experts’ most important insight was that an optimal solution will always be subordinated to political will, implying that the process of involving stakeholders and local and national political institutions is as important as the details of the engineering solution. The combination of water design and institutions, steered by a political process oriented toward the public good, is the route to water security.
This lesson was forgotten before it could go fully mainstream. Having spent almost a century redesigning their landscapes and building all that they could, rich countries turned away from water development. Multiyear planning processes were abandoned in favor of structural market reforms. Public finance, which focuses on the economic and social returns to the taxpayer, took a backseat as budgets buckled under the weight of public debt. As private capital became dominant, attention shifted from economic benefits to financial returns. On that narrow measure, water projects often failed to make the cut.
By the new millennium, rich countries had resorted to relying on existing (but slowly deteriorating) water infrastructure, and poorer countries were denied the opportunity to build the water systems they needed. The stage was set for our current predicament.
Water Security Revisited
Why is it so hard to tackle the water crisis? Some think we need new ideas, and they have advanced proposals that often veer into radical utopianism. But the struggle to put water at the top of the international political agenda is not a symptom of missing ideas. Rather, it is a symptom of success: by the time the Harvard program had codified its recipe, most rich countries were well on track to having what they needed, and water was pushed out of sight. Therefore, it is a problem of incentives. The water crisis would receive much more attention if bankers and asset managers suddenly had to wade across a river to get to work.
We may soon have a major opportunity to revisit our collective commitment to water. When the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was first agreed in 1992, the hope was that we would achieve decarbonization fast enough to avoid most measurable changes to the climate system. Had we succeeded, rich countries would have been safe with their existing infrastructure, and developing countries would have been no worse off (albeit still water insecure). But it wasn’t to be.
Now, the climate system is changing. As decades of accumulated greenhouse gases have warmed the planet, the hydrological cycle has stopped reliably following the statistical patterns of the past. Droughts in Europe and the US have become deeper and longer. Summer temperatures are inching higher and higher. Precipitation is more erratic. Climate phenomena now exceed the design criteria of the stock of infrastructure and institutions that once provided effective defenses for the wealthiest. Rich and poor alike are increasingly exposed to the power of water.
In a way, this leveling of the playing field creates an opportunity to re-design our water systems and renew our commitment to delivering security and prosperity everywhere. Contrary to what some claim, our failures are not about how we frame the issue. We know what the problem is, and we know how to solve it. Indeed, we have done it before. What we may have forgotten is how to use the convening power of the state to unlock financial resources for spending on what we need.
There are signs of change. China, now on its 14th five-year plan, has mobilized finance and institutions to provide substantially more water security for its population – albeit at huge environmental costs. And now that industrial policy and some form of state-led economic planning is back in fashion in the US and the European Union, both are beginning to tinker with their landscape. If the US manages to deploy all the resources allocated in its infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, and if Europe takes full advantage of its NextGenerationEU fund, both could make significant progress toward managing their new water problems. But those are big “ifs.” Much will depend on whether the money is allocated through political institutions capable of mediating choices and whether efforts are made to deliver a whole-of-economy vision of water security.
Moreover, many poor countries continue to be as vulnerable as ever. International institutions must press donor nations to do more to help them. The World Bank, now under new leadership, has historically played a central role in the water sector. In addition to being a major lender, it also has access to a large pool of specialists and an institutional mission to think about client countries’ long-term futures. But it must articulate how it can better deploy its considerable resources against what we all agree is a fundamental challenge for the future.
The water crisis is real, and climate change is making it worse. Not even the richest countries in the world can count on their water security. But rather than look for new, radical, unprecedented solutions, we should focus on enabling and assisting governments to invest. It has been done before. It can be done again.