Workshop on climate change and uncertainty from below and above, Delhi. http://steps-centre.org/2016/blog/climate-change-and-uncertainty-from-above-and-below/

1. Climate change and sanitation,
water resources
Resilience in the face of Uncertainty: why cooperation is necessary
Suresh Kumar Rohilla
Programme Director
Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi (India)
at
STEPS Workshop
27 January 2016

2. Key Points for India :
Water security in the poor’s world:
The agenda for research, policy and cooperation to
manage scarcity, plenty, pollution and waste in an
age of climate risk

3. The face of India’s farmer
Grief, despair, desperation
Unseasonal rain, hail, freak storms have destroyed crops
over millions of hectares

4. Not just normal variability

5. Is this climate change?
• Cannot say if this season of despair is linked to
climate change
• But cannot say that these extreme weather
events are not climate change
• Weird is now normal
• Normal is now devastating – the poor not
responsible for climate change are worst
impacted

6. Climate Negotiations on economy
Not ecology
Climate change is about economic growth
No country has built a low carbon economy
So action is little and too late
Convention signed in 1992
25 years later world is still talking; procrastinating;
finding excuses not to act
Economic growth on line

7. Acceptable???
1 US citizen =
107 Bangladeshis
134 Bhutanese
19 Indians
269 Nepalese
Unacceptable.
Need to secure ecological space for growth

8. The age of climate risk
• Monsoon is India’s finance minister
• Water insecurity already high and crippling
• In this situation, what do farmers do?
• How will they manage scarcity; unseasonal and
variable rain events; and extreme rain, which
leads to flooding?
• Agenda for water managers

9. Agenda for water future
• Management of competing demands –
between agriculture, cities and industry
• Management of risk – untimely and deficient
rain
• Management of pollution – ensuring water is
not degraded and so unusable

10. India will not follow transition of rich world –
people move to cities; economies move to
service-industry; water moves with it

11. Secure water for growth
• Agriculture will remain critical for livelihoods –
60% dependence
• But cities-industries will grow. Will need water
for growth
• Unless we manage competing needs; violence
will grow
• Already cases of protest and police firing over
water allocation to industry or city

13. Augment supply
• Water for agriculture must be secured
• Recognise groundwater provides bulk of
irrigation
• Recognise there are over 19 million well owners
– they take decisions on water
• They are more efficient in use
• But crisis is growing – groundwater levels
falling

14. Groundwater: needs recharge
• Recognise recharge is critical
• Large reservoirs centralize recharge
• But rain is decentralised…

15. Groundwater irrigates more land
than surface water

16. But structures for decentralised
recharge have gone

17. Water security in new age
• Build millions of water recharge
structures to improve productivity
• India’s employment guarantee
programme needs to be targeted to
building durable assets
• But this is not enough

18. Link water with resilience
• Increase of productivity has to be low-cost
• Higher cost, higher risk, higher loss
• Need multiple crops; need crops that are water
resilient; need systems of agriculture that can
improve coping abilities of farmers

19. Resilience is not ‘technology’
• Water is about cropping pattern
• Water is about food we eat
• Diets are about food we are ‘sold’
• Need to make this link
• Need to change nature of food industry in
climate risked world

20. Urban-industrial water
Challenges
• Need clean water supply for all
• Need to take back the waste generated by water
use
• Need to treat the waste so that it does not
pollute
• Need to do this in ways that it does not add to
water conflicts
• How?

21. The conventional way:
Bring water into the city – storage, diversion, pipe,
pump, treat – from further and further away.
Flush and carry the waste out of the city – pipe,
pump, divert, treat – further and further away.
The water-sewage connection

22. Agenda reinvent water-waste
Political economy of water supply
Political economy of defecation
Systems of water-waste management that are not
affordable and equitable
If not equitable then not sustainable

23. Water: costly supply
Water sourced from far
Leads to increasing cost of supply
Leads to high distribution losses
Less water to supply at end of pipeline
Less water means more costly water
Cities not able to recover costs of supply Cities
have no money to invest in sewage

24. Capital intensity, Leads to inequity
• Indian cities have ‘enough’ water for supply
• But water does not reach all
• Intra-city inequity is huge and growing
• Challenge is about justice, but it is about
technology – current system expensive, too
expensive to supply to all

25. Groundwater: abused
Water supply does not reach all, only few. No
alternative but to move to groundwater
But this is not accounted for
Cities only consider ‘official’ groundwater use
Millions depend on private wells, tanker mafia,
bottled water
No recognition of this water source; no respect
for its management

26. Lakes: Present lost
Groundwater is not not considered as critical for
water supply, recharge is neglected
Land is valued, water is not
No legal protection for city lakes, catchment
and drainage systems
Sponges of our cities then get destroyed

27. Lakes: Future lost
• With climate change extreme rainfall
events will grow
• More rain, fewer rainy days
• Cities need sponges to capture rain,
recharge for scarcity
• Need to consider in future planning

28. Water=waste
Cities spend on water, have no funds to spend on
cleaning up waste
80% water leaves homes as sewage
More water=more waste
Interception of sewage expensive
Treatment of sewage also expensive

29. Sewage: more sums
• 30% of total sewage can be treated
• But Delhi and Mumbai alone have 40 per cent
of sewage treatment capacity in the country

30. Cities do not have drains (Sewerage)
New growth cities are growing without
drains
Backlog and front-log impossible to fix
As cities fix one drain, another goes under

31. Example -
Bengaluru: not reaching
• 3610 km of sewage pipes
• 14 sewage treatment plants = 781 mld
• Generates 800-1000 mld of sewage
• But treats only 300 mld
• Rest does not reach
• Now plans to build 4000 km more
• Builds, grows and more lines need repair
• Catch-up that does not catch-up

32. Partial treatment = pollution
Cities cannot control pollution
Cost of building system is high
•City can build sewage system for few
•Spend to pump, repair and treat waste of few
But
•Treated waste of few gets mixed with untreated waste of
majority
•The result is pollution

33. Full costs are not affordable
Privatization or not is not the question
Water-sewage-pollution costs are high and
unaffordable by all
Cannot pay full costs

34. Re-invent water and waste
1. Plan deliberately to cut costs of supply
2. Spend on sewage not on water
3. Cut costs on sewage systems
4. Plan to recycle and reuse every drop
5. Connect water conservation to
sewage management

35. Humble engineering for future
• Current technologies for sustainability are
unaffordable. For rich when rich
• Need affordable and sustainable solutions
• Need to look for answers in past ways; in the
knowledge of the very poor; in
‘unproductive’ systems we discount
• Need new engineering for future – Move from
unraveling nature to imitating it for
sustainable development.

36. The real water agenda
Catch water where it falls
Flush but do not forget
….Create local and distributed water
infrastructure
…Water sensitive design and planning

37. The real water agenda
• Water is starting point for the removal of poverty.
• Basis of food and livelihood security. Leading to local
and distributed wealth generation
• This will require new forms of institutional
management as current water bureaucracies will
find it difficult to manage such vast and disparate
systems

38. Resilience Building in face of uncertainty
Why water cooperation is necessary ?
• Emerging science …all streams of concerns – health, climate
change, energy security and local imperatives of sustainable
development are converging.
•
• Need is to reinvent the framework for global and regional
cooperation to find locally and globally appropriate solutions
within co-benefit framework
• Need is to bring together best practices in different
regions on adaptation and resilience to build a network of
advocates for change in different countries

39. Way forward
… making water everybody’s business

40. Thank You.
email: srohilla@cseindia.org