A fresh look at the world’s water crises, and the existing and emerging solutions that can be used to solve them
As we see in news headlines and in our own neighborhoods: water crises are more frequent and increasingly severe. Our twentieth-century approach to providing the water that grows food, sustains cities, and supports healthy ecosystems are failing to meet the demands of growing population and the challenges brought on by climate change. But the grim news reports—of empty reservoirs, withering crops, failing ecosystems—need not be cause for despair, argues award-winning author David Sedlak.
In Water for All: Global Solutions for a Changing Climate (Publication date: November 7, 2023; Yale University Press), David Sedlak identifies the challenges that society faces, including ineffective policies and outdated infrastructure, and the myriad of tools at our disposal—from emerging technologies in desalination to innovations for recycling wastewater and capturing more of the water that falls on fields and cities.
Sedlak discusses:
- The six separate, but interlinked water crises, that he identifies as key to solving our water crises:
- Water for the wealthy
- Water for the many
- Water for the unconnected
- Water for good health
- Water for food
- Water for ecosystems
- New plans with promise, from in-building water recycling and other approaches for breaking our historic reliance on imported water, to rethinking the way we use existing water infrastructure and reducing the amount of water that we use to grow food, support industry and run our homes
- How communities on the front lines of previous crises have pioneered approaches that can be adapted to other struggling locations
- The importance of extending water rights and the means to realize them to the urban poor, rural communities and ecosystems
- Emerging technologies that can unlock vast amounts of untapped water resources without damaging the environment
In Water for All, Sedlak offers an informed and hopeful approach for changing the way that water is managed. With this knowledge we can create a future with clean, abundant, and affordable water for all.
About the Author
David Sedlak is the Plato Malozemoff Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Water Center. He is author of the award-winning Water 4.0: The Past, Present, and Future of the World’s Most Vital Resource. He has written for, or been interviewed or covered by, media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Nature, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Review of Books, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Marketplace and Living on Earth. His TEDx talk on this subject has had over a million views. He lives in Berkeley, CA.
A Brief Conversation with David Sedlak, Author of Water For All: Global Solutions for a Changing Climate
Your last book, Water 4.0, looked at the history of water systems. In your new book, Water For All: Global Solutions for a Changing Climate, you look at six interrelated crises that you say need to be addressed wholistically to solve our current and future water crises. What did you learn in the decade between Water 4.0 and your new title that made you want to write this book?
The attention that Water 4.0 received provided me with numerous opportunities to visit many of the places in the world where people were facing water crises. Learning more about the many ways that communities experience water scarcity, I was surprised at how the origins of the problems can often be traced back to a small set of flaws in the ways that water systems developed along with stresses to those systems being caused by development pressure and climate change. I also saw that the places that were making progress in alleviating water crises often employed innovative policies and new technologies together with a greater recognition of the role that water plays in sustaining life. By sharing what I learned about the magnitude of the challenge and the wide range of existing and emerging solutions I hope that this book can inform and inspire communities in their efforts to respond to water crises.
You identify six areas of focus—water for the wealthy, for the many, for the unconnected, for good health, for food, and for ecosystems—which you say must be addressed for water resources to be equitably and productively managed. You have some interesting observations that might defy knee-jerk conclusions. For example, you allow wealthy communities can contribute by reducing excess water use, but you also point out the well-funded communities have been at the forefront of water technologies which have benefits outside their borders. Are there other points you make, that may surprise the reader?
When readers look beyond the headlines, they will discover many counterintuitive facts that help explain the difficulty in solving water crises. For example, some of the highest per capita water use takes place in low- and middle-income countries.
Unlike the situation in cities located in wealthy countries, where it has been possible to raise water rates to reduce water use and to mandate or incentivize the adoption of water-efficient appliances and plumbing fixtures, cash-strapped utilities in many low- and middle-income countries often lack the tools needed to bring about changes that might decrease water use.
There are also surprises related to unexpected consequences of adopting new water-saving technologies. For example, advances in irrigation technology, like drip irrigation and micro-sprinklers, allow farmers to grow crops with less water. However, those savings often have little effect on overall water use because farmers can realize economic benefits by directing water savings to thirstier crops that generate higher profits. By understanding the ways that water use patterns resist efforts to bring about change and by considering the ways that new technologies become cheaper and more effective over time, we can implement more effective approaches for alleviating water crises.
What are some of the technological innovations you see that may be instrumental in making water available to all?
The reverse osmosis membrane is at the top of my list of technological innovations that have the potential to help solve water crises. Reverse osmosis membranes are the heart of modern seawater desalination plants. They produce freshwater with only about 20% of the energy needed by earlier generations of plants. These devices also are integral to the water recycling plants that are allowing cities to return recycle all the wastewater that their citizens produce. As reverse osmosis membranes have moved from a niche technology to devices produced in large quantities, prices have dropped, and manufacturers have developed smaller modules suitable for the household and village scale. Tens of millions of under-the-sink reverse osmosis systems provide safe water to middle-income families in China and India, while in Sub-Saharan Africa and South America, water kiosks that use reverse osmosis to purify local water sources are competing with bottled and trucked water. As reverse osmosis membranes use grows, it is likely that prices will drop further, and resourceful people will find new applications for these simple-but-effective water treatment devices.
You discuss some ideas to expand conventional and unconventional water sources. What are some of the most promising ideas there?
By conventional water sources, we are referring to water that is normally stored above ground, in reservoirs, or below ground, in aquifers. As the many limitations of dams have become apparent, interest has turned towards approaches for capturing excess water that would normally flow out to sea and storing it underground.
Recently, progress has been made in water-stressed regions where flood waters are being directed into infiltration ponds or are being sent into fallow farm fields. But this strategy for recharging aquifers is only useful during brief periods when excess water is available.
A more promising approach for augmenting underground water storage involves the coordinated operation of reservoirs and infiltration basins, which allows water managers to gradually feed water stored behind dams into aquifers. Converting stored surface water into groundwater also creates extra space in reservoirs. This allows them to capture more of the water that falls in the intense but infrequent storms that are becoming more common with climate changes.
Are there places in the world that are modeling good usage practices? If so, what can we learn from them?
The best water practices tend to develop in places facing the most severe water crises. At a regional scale, the Murray-Darling River Basin serves as an excellent example. Australia restructured its approach to using the Basin’s rivers for irrigation in response to a drought that happened about 20 years ago. Under the new system, water is allocated in a manner that assures that there is sufficient flow for ecosystem protection and for meeting the drinking water needs of cities. This was made possible by setting aside funding for farmers who rely upon the river system for their livelihoods. But the continuing challenges of monitoring compliance with the rules established in the Murray-Darling also reveals how difficult it is to avoid a return to old practices after a drought ends.
Among cities, it is possible to find model practices and policies in Australia, Israel, Spain and desert regions where water scarcity is an obvious fact of life. But efficient water use practices can also be found in unlikely places. Seattle stands out to me among U.S. cities because it reduced its per capita water use by over 50% as part of an effort to avoid building new dams and reservoirs to keep up with a surging population. By bringing along the community in their effort to reduce outdoor water use, the city’s utility was able to avoid the costs and environmental damage associated with new imported water infrastructure. They also convinced people that water conservation is important in one of the rainiest cities in the country.
So where do we go next to ensure the best outcome? How do we tackle these areas in concrete, strategic ways?
The difficult part of achieving water for all is that there is no single approach for solving water crises. The strengths and weaknesses of every plan only become evident when the community gets involved in the process. Knowing the flaws in the status quo as well as the ways that new approaches improve through the process of learning-by-doing should encourage more investment in community- and regional-scale experiments. By pursuing an all-of-the-above approach—consisting of water efficiency and new technologies, repurposing of existing infrastructure, and development of unconventional water sources—communities can navigate their own path out of water crises. In the process of rebuilding our water systems, we will have to pay careful attention to unintended consequences and the impacts of these approaches on the low-income residents, rural communities and ecosystems that are often left out of previous water investments. Water for all will not happen because of a government study, a new loan program or a marketing campaign. It will only come about if we reconsider the ways that we obtain and use water, the approaches that we use to pay for it, and the ways that we balance the needs of all of those who rely upon this increasingly threatened resource. Only after members of the public, their leaders and the professionals responsible for water management understand the challenge and the potential solutions will it be possible to realize a future of abundant, safe and affordable water for all.
Advance Praise:
“Securing water for all is the challenge of our times, one made more urgent by the changing climate. Water for All not only highlights the many solutions available, it connects them and, above all, communicates that we have tools to hand.”
—Kalanithy Vairavamoorthy, executive director, International Water Association
“Although war, climate change, and the economy capture the headlines, water is the real issue that deserves our attention and is the critical common thread among those challenges. Water for All is a forward-looking roadmap for how to improve the world’s relationship with water so that human civilization and ecosystems can thrive together.”
—Michael Webber, author of Power Trip: The Story of Energy and Thirst for Power: Energy, Water, and Human Survival
“Water for All is a well-researched and engaging guide to clever ways to meet our future water challenges.” —William Alley, coauthor of The Water Recycling Revolution
“In this remarkably factual book, David Sedlak shows that we have the knowledge, technology, and means to solve the world’s water problems. If you read only one book this year, read this one.” —Asit K. Biswas, chief executive, Third World Centre for Water Management, and visiting professor, University of Glasgow
