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In Water for All: Global Solutions for a Changing Climate (Yale University Press, 2023), Dr. David Sedlak charts a realistic, practical, and inspiring course of action for tackling the world’s water crises. Sedlak’s remarkable book is both broad in scope and meticulously researched, and his writing style is engaging for professional and general readers. Those seeking sensible, well-informed, all-of-the-above solutions to water issues should have Water for All on their shelves.
Water for All builds on Sedlak’s previous work, Water 4.0: The Past, Present, and Future of the World’s Most Vital Resource (Yale University Press, 2014), which charts the history of human water development up to the present and points to the future. In Water for All, Sedlak makes more particular our current path toward water solutions, classifying the world’s water crises into six categories, differentiated by economic, political, and use criteria: water for the wealthy, for the many, for the unconnected, for good health, for food, and for ecosystems. Doing so allows him and his reader to understand the diversity of water development that has occurred to date, as well as the options and opportunities for cross-pollination of good ideas, workable technologies, and best practices that can lead to global solutions.
Sedlak sets the scene with a deft and profound articulation of the “Great Acceleration” of population, economic growth, and resource consumption that started in the 1950s. Importantly, the Acceleration happened differentially between wealthy, developing, and less affluent countries, resulting in a disparity of water management issues. During this period, wealthy countries invested in their own massive water infrastructure projects, which are now being surpassed by those in developing countries. Meanwhile, more than a billion global citizens continue to lack basic, affordable water services. Environmental impacts and climate change add further strain to water systems and users, but in very different ways; as Sedlak wryly puts it, “wealth goes a long way toward crisis mitigation,” with the poor who lack water connections being forced to pay ten times what a wealthy person pays for access to the same resource piped to their homes.
To addresses these hard-hitting realities, Sedlak offers insights and opportunities both intuitive and well-informed: prioritize conservation before construction, fill reservoirs with treated wastewater, coordinate dams and recharge operations, expand desalination to brackish inland sources, make cities closed-looped water systems, run rivers better to serve people and the environment. Readers are in good hands as Sedlak expounds on one best practice after another with well-researched detail, astute analysis and commentary, and a broad-minded, positive perspective on what comes next. He displays equal comfort discussing current and future technologies, public policy in national and international settings, and the diversity of socio-economic and cultural approaches, opportunities, and constraints to getting water right in the coming decades.
I was particularly fascinated by Sedlak’s exploration of the long-standing use of treated effluent to recharge groundwater basins that provide drinking water for millions of Europeans and Americans. Equally fascinating is the prospect that small-scale desalination systems tied to water kiosks has the potential to expand water access and protect public health in low-income countries. I came away intrigued but skeptical about the idea of placing what he calls a micro-levy (translation: a “sin tax”) on bottled water to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for global water and sanitation development. And Sedlak’s story of dams — from their development (in the millions!) to their maintenance or destruction and finally to their “second chance” optimization — is told with expert clarity and lack of sentiment (if not sediment). We have such a need for a sober, informed, and non-ideological discussion on this topic; these chapters are a good place to start.
Sedlak’s relaxed style belies a heavy dose of information per page, an attribute that should encourage an equally relaxed (and unrushed) reading schedule. A strategy he uses is to focus on the human aspect of water management, both the positive intentions and the negative unintended bad results. He also has an endearing habit of incorporating understated observations into the flow of his work, ranging from the pithy — “as parents have long suspected, teenagers really do use more water than adults” and “like all other fluids, sewage flows downhill” — to the profound — “water infrastructure is the circulatory system of civilization.” This is a book as much for enjoyment as erudition.
Water for All is written both for today and for the long-haul, mapping out actions that need to happen immediately in order to prepare for climate-induced impacts that will be most strongly felt later this century. The central question this book seeks to answer: can the circulatory systems of civilization be integrated into the world’s accelerating water cycle? Our best hope is to make the answer yes.
