WATER AND CLIMATE CHANGEETHICAL AND GOVERNANCE

PRINCIPLES FROM THE

NEW WATER CULTUREPedro Arrojo Agudo

Foundation for the New Water Culture Foundation

The breakdown of aquatic ecosystems

The degradation of aquatic ecosystems and aquifers all over the world has led to

dramatic social impacts:

more than 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water and, as a

consequence of this, about 10,000, mainly children, die every day.

Why do we talk about New Water Culture?

The problem that we are confronting is not just the need of changing political approaches, assuming new technologies or building new strategies for water management, but the need of inducing a new general approach in coherence with the paradigm of eco-social sustainability, involving a new ethic and cultural approach based on intra and intergenerational equity principles.

Poverty and climate change: catalysts of the humanitarian crisis on the way

• When we break the health of aquatic ecosystems, first fishes die, and then people from poor communities begin to get hill and die too (specially children).

• Rise in average temperatures (with increasing plant eva-potranspiration), together with decreasing rainfall, depen-ding on regions, can lead to less water availability.

• Increasing variability -more frequent and intense events of drought and river-swell- will aggravate the ecological crisis of aquatic ecosystems and its social impacts.

WRONG POLICIES FROM INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

Under a contradictory & schizophrenic approach the WB

• promotes traditional and obsolete supply-side strategies, financing hydraulic mega-infrastructures, apart of any economic rationality, encumbering heavy public debts of impoverished countries;

• enhances privatization and deregulation with respect to supply and sanitation services in the big cities of these countries on behalf of economic rationality under the logic of market.

Perspectives and alternatives from the New Water Culture

• Preserving the resiliency of water cycle, restoring and conserving the ecological fitness of water ecosystems: wetlands, lakes, rivers and aquifers constitute complex and flexible systems that are

capable of cushioning the impacts of climate changes

• Assuming and developing the precautionary principle; beyond the principle of prevention with respect to foreseeable factors.

• Developing demand management strategies more flexible than the traditional supply-side strategies

• New Participative Governance based on a new Ethics

New Ethical approach

Functions of water, range of values and priorities The diverse functions and uses of water are related to scales of value and

ethical categories that need different priorities and management criteria

• Water for Life : linked with human rights

• Water for Pubic Services of General Interest: linked with citizens rights

• Water for Economic Growth: linked with the individual right to improve the standard of living

Water for Life linked with Human Rights

Top priority guaranteed on the principle of efficacy.

• Access to safe drinking water as a human right: 30-40 l/person/day of save drinking water is only 1,5% of the total water

used by our global society at present: the public drinking fountain, with save drinking water, for free and close to the home of everybody

• Life-Water for sustainability :

Recovering and conserving a Good Ecological Status of aquatic ecosystems has strong links with public health, access to safe drinking water and fight against hunger.

Water for Public Services of General Interestlinked with social rights of citizens

Second level of priority under the principle of social efficiency and participative governance

• Social cohesion and equity values at stake. • Community & Public responsibility.• Social participation, empowering people.• Social responsibility and fair tariff system.

Water for economic growth linked with private legitimate rights

• More than 60% of total water demands.• These demands can never be prior to the water for life (human

rights), including ecosystems sustainability, and services of general interest (social citizen rights).

• It is necessary to assume the basic rules of economic rationality based on full cost recovery, including environmental costs and opportunity value of water.

• Water scarcity, for economic goals, may not anymore be considered as a tragedy but as a part of the reality to manage under economic rationality.

NOTE: A significant proportion of family farms, specially in traditional and indigenous

communities, must be protected and considered as economic activities of general interest.

Global and urgent challenges on water for UN

• The UN recognition of the Human Right to save drinking water in General Commentary 15 of the C. of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (2002) is insufficient. A more solemn declara-tion together with specific and prior engagements is needed.

• Domiciliary water and sanitation services must be considered as a public service of general interest (and not as an economic ser-vice) within a framework of global citizenry to be established following the Charte of the Earth proposal.

• Under the perspective of conflicts worsened by climate change, UN must promote legislation &institutions with the authority and resources to mediate in international conflicts on water.