The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [84]
Just as with climate change, exposure to free markets alone will not solve the world’s water problems. We all have a part to play in reducing water waste at the household level. More water-efficient toilets, for example, can be useful in reducing the absurdity of clean drinking water being used to flush away human sewage, while as an individual you can take showers rather than baths and turn off the tap when brushing your teeth. In the garden, ditch the hose and collect rainwater instead—especially if you are making a wildlife pond, where the chlorine in most piped water will damage water life. Give up bought bottled water too: Not only does this save on plastic packaging and transportation, but piped water is also less carbon-intensive than bottled mineral water, and may even be safer too. For households, water meters are a good way of giving people a financial incentive to conserve, and should be retrofitted and made standard wherever possible.
Governments must get involved in this effort. Putting a price on water that truly reflects its ecological scarcity needs the agreement of world governments just as does putting an international price on carbon. The point of a carbon price is to correct the market failure by which fossil fuels producers and consumers pay nothing for the damage greenhouse gases cause to the climate, and hopefully thereby to eliminate carbon emissions. Aiming for zero water however is not an option, because water is a biological necessity both for ourselves and for agricultural production of any sort. Nor is zero water use necessary, given that water is an indestructible and renewable resource. But the efficiency of our use of water can and should increase, so that we use less of it at any one time. Israel has shown the way forward by recycling household water for use in agriculture on a massive scale: More than 80 percent of waste water is recycled for use in producing food.42
It might also be possible for the concept of carbon markets to be extended into the realm of water. Just as carbon credits represent a virtual trade in greenhouse gas permits (no one actually moves tonnes of real carbon dioxide around when they buy or sell, although they may change the site of its emission), so the virtual trade in water might be enhanced by the trading of water credits so that arid regions that save on using water in farming or industry get a financial bonus for helping the world meet the water boundary. Getting cap and trade to work for water will be complex, however, because water is not essentially fungible like CO2, which has the same global warming potential wherever it is released. As I stated earlier, a cubic meter of water in the Jordan is much more valuable than a cubic meter in the Hudson, so any pricing and trading system must somehow reflect this scarcity differential. This apples and oranges problem does not have to be a deal-breaker, however—in the international carbon markets a whole basket of different greenhouse gases (including methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs) are traded interchangeably despite them having very different effects on the atmosphere over different timescales. Markets are human instruments, and can be targeted to achieve any environmental objective if cleverly designed with that end in mind.
Just as the localization of agriculture may be ruled out by water constraints, industrialized farming and the Green Revolution have likely helped humanity with regard to this planetary boundary. In France, for example, wheat yields per hectare tripled between 1960 and 2000 as new technologies dramatically increased productivity.43 In other words, three times as much wheat was being produced per unit of both land and water by the turn of the century as forty years earlier. Wheat in France is mostly rain fed, but the same logic applies in any place where increasing yields