Q&A

Q. For several years, we’ve been reading and hearing in the media stories about global water shortages. Is this issue as big and serious as the stories portray?

A. Certainly in terms of the life–and–death stakes involved with water, it is a big and serious issue. What reasonable people can and do disagree about is how imminent, how severe and how widespread will be those anticipated water shortages.

Q. Here in Indiana, we’re sandwiched between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes on the north and south, not to mention the fact that we are in the middle of a nation with vast oceans on either side. How can our water supply be threatened?

A. There are two principal threats to Indiana’s water supplies. The first is pollution. Water supplies may be abundant in quantity, but if the quality deteriorates to a point where it can’t sustain most human uses, then you can have a “shortage” even in an area like Indiana that receives 35 to 40 inches of rainfall per year on average and is traversed and bounded by water resources. The second threat is unrestricted use, particularly of groundwater, causing localized shortages. As surface water supplies—our streams and lakes—are being protected and preserved to a greater extent for aquatic species and habitat, and for recreational uses, cities and towns in Indiana are relying more on groundwater for municipal drinking supplies. Depending on rate of increase in groundwater withdrawals and the pace of groundwater replenishment from natural sources, it is entirely possible that some communities in Indiana could draw their underground supplies to unsustainably low levels.

Q. The global water shortage is about much more than supply and demand—there are economic, cultural, political, legal and environmental issues. That we’re using water faster than it can be replenished would suggest that all we need to do is use a bit less, but it’s not that simple, is it? Could you briefly outline the issues for “IU Home Pages” readers?

A. To be sure, the situation would be helped if we all used water more carefully and conservatively. But you’re quite right that it isn’t so simple, for a number of reasons. Here are three.

First, whenever people are being asked to restrain their use of a resource they value, there lurks a potential “collective action” problem. That means that each individual faces some level of temptation to continue his or her use unrestrained, while hoping that others will exercise enough restraint to cover his or her consumption. Putting together the mechanisms—organizational, legal, economic or political—to coordinate and/or monitor people’s behavior and provide strong enough incentives to individuals to restrain their water use is a real challenge.

Second, when water is not used in equal amounts or proportions by different groups in the population or sectors of the economy, as is almost always the case, there arise non–trivial questions of equity or fairness. For instance, if agriculture uses more water than any other sector of the economy, but overall water use is rising because population growth in urban areas is placing added pressure on water supplies there, the answer to who should cut back first or most is not so obvious. Of course, our economist colleagues would recommend just establishing water markets and letting voluntary transactions make the adjustments, but in many places water allocations, even formal water rights, are enshrined in law and/or custom and make the resource less freely transferable than the market model would assume, and it’s no small trick to get people who are advantaged by the current system to consent to a different one.

Third, even in areas where people do succeed in using a little less, those reductions can be offset by population growth. This is currently the case in the southwestern United States, where per capita water use in states such as Arizona, California, Colorado and Nevada has been going down thanks to serious water conservation efforts, but total water use is rising anyway because people are being added to those areas at a faster clip than per person water use is declining.

Q. So if the problem is not having enough fresh water, why don’t we figure out a way to remove salt from ocean water so that we can use it?

A. We have figured that out, and it appears to be an idea whose time has finally come. We’ve known for a long time how to turn ocean water into drinking water, but it has been a comparatively expensive and energy–intensive process, and therefore, has been implemented only in places that had the financial wherewithal to do it and had few or no economically preferable alternatives, for example, Catalina Island off the Southern California coast and several locations in the Middle East.

Within the past decade, technological improvements have reduced the costs of desalting processes, including the energy requirements, to a point where desalinated water has become competitive in some of our larger metropolitan areas. Tampa Bay, Fla., has already begun work on its new desalination plant, and the construction and financing of facilities is currently being planned at seven locations along the California coast.

Even inland areas, such as the Phoenix area, are looking at desalting technologies for bringing some of their groundwater supplies, which have a high salt content, up to usable levels of quality.

Q. How does the environment play into this? We read that the ice caps are melting, so doesn’t that give us more water?

A. Changes in the earth’s climate will undoubtedly affect both the distribution of water supplies—which areas are relatively wet and dry and how much so—and the distribution of water demands. The challenge at this point is to reach some degree of confidence in our forecasts of those effects, and then to prepare for them. As for melting ice, in addition to the concern people have about rising sea levels and coastal inundation, I would point out that whatever short–term supplement to fresh water availability there might be isn’t sustainable.

Q. Are there other possible solutions without having to resort to water rationing?

A. Certainly. We’ve mentioned desalination, but we haven’t mentioned water treatment and reuse. The water we use and discard can be easily captured, treated back up to drinking water quality and returned to the supply system. A combination of improved water–use efficiency and getting more cycles of use out of each drop can go a long way toward redressing the imbalances between fresh water supplies and water demands that so many people worry about.

Q. None of the above issues is small, but it strikes me that the most sensitive are those that suggest “ownership” of water. Many people object to the idea that there could be legal rights to water, but most of us don’t question the idea of owning land or making a profit from mining coal or drilling for oil. Why is that, do you think?

A. There are multiple issues here. One is whether water should be “free,” or whether people should pay some charge or fee for its use. In addressing that concern, we face the question of whether people will use water supplies conservatively and carefully if they pay nothing for them.

A separate issue is how water should be “owned.” For example, should it be a fully privatized commodity traded by individuals, a publicly–owned and managed resource, a common–property resource managed by a community of water users but not necessarily through formal governments, or some hybrid of these?

As we look around the world, we find combinations of all these options working more or less well, so it isn’t clear that there’s an a priori “right answer” to the ownership question, but you’re quite right to suggest that it is a question that is critical to virtually all aspects of the protection and use of water supplies.

Q. Obviously, giving up things like green lawns and swimming pools is nothing compared to the possibility of going without clean water for drinking or water to irrigate the land that grows our food supply. How do we make people understand the seriousness and severity of this issue?

A. It might be nice to imagine that people would anticipate problems and deal with them before they become serious or severe, but the history of human behavior with respect to natural resources suggests that this is not our tendency.

Water crises—droughts or floods that were inadequately prepared for, contamination incidents, open conflict over scarce supplies—are always regrettable, but focus the public’s and policy makers’ attention in ways that warnings from experts often fail to do. I’d love to be able to suggest that enough scientific studies and enough news reports would suffice to get people to take water issues more seriously, but I’m more inclined to believe that we’ll confront the importance of these matters when and where we experience some discomfort from them.