The
Geographer SPRING 2016
The newsletter of
the Royal Scottish Geographical Society
Water and the Hydro Nation • Annie Lennox Receives Livingstone Medal • Scotland the Hydro Nation • Origins of Onshore and Offshore Freshwater • Water Towers in the Himalayas • Portrait of Pskov: Exhibition • National and International Water Policy • Water, Food, Energy and Economics • Wet and Windswept on Rockall • Reader Offer: The Railway Atlas of Scotland
“We never know the worth of water until the well is dry.” Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
plus news, books, and more…
The
Geographer
freshwater
“ We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.”
Lorne Gill
Jacques Cousteau It is easy to take water for granted in Scotland, especially after the winter we’ve had – one of the wettest on record and with severe flooding in many parts. I even joked to someone in January that we should start to name the dry spells rather than the storms just to cheer everyone up a bit. But although it might not feel like it sometimes, water is an invaluable resource and, perhaps less obviously, a finite one. Whether it was first formed within the heat of our planet, or delivered by asteroids during the Late Heavy Bombardment, water is not created afresh; it is simply cycled round and round. So the water we receive is in many ways a blessing and we need to learn to look after it. And our weather, our lochs and rivers, give Scotland both a reliable and sustainable supply at home and, through its management, a real global expertise in its research, use and protection. With the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agreement in New York last year, there is increased international focus on the global requirement for sustainable clean water supplies and sanitation (SDG6), and a growing concern that a shortage of water (and not oil) may fuel conflict in the 21st century. By recognizing the power and breadth of its expertise, backed up by years of excellent water management and coupled with its ambition to show global responsibility, Scotland has done a great deal to try to build on this natural strength. Many of our academics and policy makers are working under the Hydro Nation programme within the Scottish Government to co-operate on and maximize this potential, and to help share advice and learning throughout the developed and developing world. World Water Day was established by the UN in 1993 to highlight global water-related issues. This magazine has been published to coincide with World Water Day 2016 and is being made available to delegates at a launch event in Dundee, at the same time as being more widely distributed to the many and various members and contacts of RSGS. The aim of this event, and of this magazine, is to demonstrate Scotland’s commitment to the global water agenda by highlighting activity around the world where Scottish expertise is leading the way or contributing to better resource management. We are grateful to the Scottish Government’s Hydro Nation team and the various expert contributors from around the world who have provided their insights to this magazine and helped make this possible. I hope you enjoy it. Mike Robinson, Chief Executive RSGS, Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU tel: 01738 455050 email: enquiries@rsgs.org www.rsgs.org Charity registered in Scotland no SC015599 The views expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the RSGS. Cover and Masthead images: © Lorne Gill
We are grateful to Lorne Gill for donating several wonderful watery photographs for our use in this edition of The Geographer. See www.scottishnaturephotography.com for more of Lorne’s (and his son Fergus’s) work.
Introducing Anne We are delighted to welcome Anne Daniel to the staff. Anne joined us in January (replacing Alexa) and is the first point of contact for many of you when you phone or email the office. Whilst her background is primarily in molecular genetics, in working with us she will help to support local groups and volunteers, the talks programme, exhibitions and events. I am sure she will become a familiar face to many of you over the coming months.
Glowing reports We have received some really lovely compliments about The Geographer recently, which we hope you will forgive us for sharing with you, but they do underline the impact it is having throughout our membership and networks. “We enjoy your high quality magazine… keeping up with the changing world.” “It’s the best charity magazine I can think of.” “The last magazine was genius.” “Once again I read it from cover to cover.” “Every time I pick it up I find myself sucked in and don’t realise how much time has passed.” “I love it – I always learn something new and the balance of articles and perspectives is fabulous.” From America: “You have a truly incredible talks programme – better than any I can think of by a comparable organisation in the world. And the magazine’s not bad either!” And from Australia: “Of all the societies I have encountered, only the RSGS has an active magazine and programme working at a local and an international level.” We have been very fortunate to attract the high quality of expert contributors we do to write for The Geographer, and we are grateful to all of you who have helped to make it so well received. We are continually working to ensure it is both relevant and readable, and feedback is always welcome, as we strive to improve it further.
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Rock and Croll Hopefully, more members will now be familiar with the janitor/ genius James Croll, further to our fundraising appeal in 2014 and the talks that Mike Robinson has given to several RSGS local groups. Mike has been delighted to find that often when he gives a talk, more information comes to light. Most recently, a distant relative of Croll’s helped direct Mike to Croll’s grave in Cargill Churchyard – scotching the previous belief that he had no marked grave. Buried with his parents, wife and brothers, on the banks of the Tay, Croll’s gravestone is clearly marked. We are delighted to report that the Fair Maid’s House garden is finally being developed into the Croll Garden. Tayside Contracts have kindly provided stone from Collace Quarry for the garden, since Croll lived in Collace whilst building the church at Kinrossie and, with his father being a stonemason, would have known the quarry well. Mike has also made contact with an artist, Kay Hood, who now lives in a cottage in Blairgowrie which was Croll’s address in the 1890s; Kay is hoping to produce some art to feature in the Fair Maid’s House to accompany the work. We hope to complete the project and open the garden in May. Thank you to all of you who have put money towards this scheme. Fittingly, Mike is to give the next 20th talk about James Croll in his home village of Wolfhill, on April the evening of 20 April 2016.
Annie Lennox OBE RSGS Livingstone Medallist Annie Lennox OBE has received the RSGS Livingstone Medal, in recognition of her humanitarian work in helping to draw attention to the inequalities of HIV/AIDS and its impact on women and children, particularly in the poorest societies. At a special event in Edinburgh on Friday 18th March, An Evening of Conversation with Annie Lennox, she was interviewed by Sheena McDonald. She shared her experiences of being an ambassador for many causes, including UNAIDS, Oxfam, 46664, Amnesty International and the British Red Cross, and spoke passionately about her work campaigning for and raising awareness of the HIV/ AIDS pandemic.
Fair Maid’s House opening
Train time travel For those of you interested in rail, the recent report from the Inter-City Express (ICE) coalition, led by Transform Scotland, is interesting reading. It makes a strong case for rail improvements north of the central belt, and features some surprising statistics. According to the ICE, journey times from Edinburgh to Perth and from Edinburgh to Dundee were six or © ScotRail seven minutes quicker in 1895, the year in which the first Times Atlas of the World was printed, than they are today. See intercityexpress. transformscotland.org.uk for more information.
RSGS Writer-in-Residence We are pleased to announce that author and editor Jo Woolf has been appointed as the new RSGS Writer-in-Residence. Jo has been working hard to capture some of the stories of RSGS medallists and speakers; with the help of the Collections Team, she has dug deep into the RSGS’s archives, press cuttings and ephemera files to pull out some fantastic tales. Jo has a column in History Scotland magazine on Scottish explorers, and you can read more of her work on her own rsgsexplorers.com blog.
9 As many of you will know, our visitor centre in the April Fair Maid’s House is open seasonally from spring to late autumn. This year, Professor Iain Stewart will formally reopen the centre to the public at 1.00pm on Saturday 9 April, when there will be a chance to discover a number of special items from the collections, and to hear more about RSGS’s work. th
Updates to the visitor centre this year include refreshed interpretation panels in the Earth Room, new items in the Explorers’ Room, additional timeline panels recalling recent events, and the opening of the Croll Garden in May. Our first exhibition this year, running from 12 April to 21 May, will feature some stunning photographs of the Russian city of Pskov – see pages 14-15 for a preview of the treat in store! We are always keen for more people to volunteer at the Fair Maid’s House, and would encourage you to get in touch with Anne at RSGS HQ if you think you can offer any of your time. Fair Maid’s House Opening Times 2016
visit or volunteer
1.00pm to 4.30pm • Tuesday to Saturday • 9 April to 22 October
2 SPRING 2016
news Opportunities in Geoscience In February, we attended an Opportunities in Geoscience event at the Glasgow Science Centre and IMAX. The event was put together by Cameron Mackay, a Geography student at Glasgow University, and was a great success. Cameron had arranged for pupils and teachers from over ten schools in and around Glasgow to attend the event and to watch presentations by both students and those working in Geography and other Geosciences. One of the speakers was RSGS Board Member Vanessa Collingridge, who spoke to pupils about her career and where studying Geography has taken her.
A world map in the process of being coloured in.
From this spring, schools will have a choice of two maps that can be painted onto their playgrounds: a map of Scotland (approx 5m x 3m) or a map of the world (approx 8m x 6m). Schools can get Scotland for £150 or the World for £200 (discounts for schools that are RSGS members). Further details are available on our website or by contacting Linda at RSGS HQ in Perth. We now also have simple lesson plans produced by an enthusiastic teacher in Coupar Angus and available for different age groups (P1-4, P5-7 and S1-3). If other teachers have lesson plans they are happy to share, please send them to us for inclusion on the website as free resources for other schools.
Making an impact RSGS is working hard to remind people of the importance of geographical thinking in a number of policy and practical areas – keeping geography at the heart of the debate.
Promoting Geography For the second year in a row we attended the careers day at Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh. The day let us, and other science and geoscience organisations, talk directly to students and teachers to promote Geography in the curriculum. This year we were joined by a few of our pilot Geography Ambassadors. Thanks to Our Dynamic Earth for organising the event and to our Ambassadors for helping out.
The Polar Academy Time to leave for the Arctic Craig Mathieson, RSGS Explorer-in-Residence
We continue to push for the increased profile of Geography in the school curriculum, and are convening a series of meetings with most major educational players, including Education Scotland, the General Teaching Council for Scotland, the Scottish Association of Geography Teachers, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education, and the Scottish Qualifications Authority. In addition, RSGS has regular meetings with Scottish Government Ministers, and our Chief Executive has given evidence to the UK Climate Change Committee, and sits on the Scottish Government’s Air Passenger Duty Forum, the Scotrail Stakeholder Advisory Group, and Perth’s City of Knowledge and Learning Project Board. Mike is also a trustee of coalition groups Stop Climate Chaos and Scottish Environment Link, and of the Polar Academy, and is busy promoting RSGS and geography at any and every opportunity. These networks reflect the breadth of geography and our determination to remind people of its currency and relevance in modern society.
Robert C Cumming FRSGS Sadly we report the death in December, aged 94, of Robert Cumming, who gave sterling service and much sage advice to the RSGS as a Trustee until 2009 and previously as a Convener of the Finance Committee. With his long professional experience as a Senior Banking Executive, strong presence, gentlemanly ways and incisive analyses of RSGS’s financial situation, he will be well remembered by many. The Society owes him a huge debt, for his financial acumen, firm hand and deep integrity.
In late March, I am taking the next group of young adults up to Greenland for their Polar Academy expedition. It’s fair to say that everyone is very excited, as well as a little nervous; however, they are all fit and prepared for whatever the Arctic can throw at them. Over the past few months, this group of young people from Edinburgh have been building up their fitness to the point that they are able to haul heavy tyres over rough ground for up to 30km: this is a time-tested method of polar expedition training. On their return is when the real work begins, as there are 21,000 school pupils in Edinburgh they are tasked to inspire and motivate. It’s going to be great!
Craig
University News
Playground maps
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Scottish Geographical Journal Editorship of the RSGS’s academic journal has now passed from Dr Tim Mighall and Dr Lorna Philip of the University of Aberdeen, to Dr Dan Clayton and Dr Charles Warren of the University of St Andrews.
Scotland Rocks 2016 will take place over the 23rd-24th weekend of 23-24 April. Geobus will organise a April day of fieldwork on the Saturday, before a series of events on the Sunday in Perth, with speakers, industry representatives, teachers and pupils engaged in Earth Sciences or interested in physical geography. Get in touch with RSGS HQ to book your place or for further details.
We are very grateful to Tim and Lorna for all their hard work in successfully editing the SGJ over the past six years, establishing it as a timely and professional journal, working well ahead of schedule, and lifting the five-yearly citations levels to their highest in recent decades. We look forward to building on that work with Dan and Charles. The SGJ is available from Taylor and Francis online at www.tandf.co.uk/journals/RSGJ or in hard copy. All RSGS members are entitled to receive the SGJ for free. If you are not currently receiving the SGJ but would like to, please contact us at RSGS HQ.
University News
Scotland Rocks 2016
Thank you for remembering RSGS
RSGS University Silver Medallists
We are grateful to two former Members – Gordon Ruffle of North Berwick and Sheila Whamond of Edinburgh – who were kind enough to remember RSGS in their Wills.
In March, Mike Robinson was pleased to present a welldeserved RSGS University Medal to Jonathan Kitchen who graduated from the University of Stirling in 2014.
Both were very long-standing supporters: Mr Ruffle had been a Member since September 1952, and was RSGS’s Accountant for over 30 years; Miss Whamond had joined us in October 1959. We appreciate their remembering us, as we will remember them.
University Medals for the same graduating year have also been awarded to Frazer Christie (University of Aberdeen), Ashley Gorman (University of Dundee), Thomas Stewart (University of Edinburgh), Kirstin Watt (University of Glasgow), and Emma Victoria Hutchings (University of St Andrews).
RSGS is founded on the support of individuals – subscriptions, donations and legacies have provided much of our core income since 1884, and are vital to our future. Over the years, legacy gifts have often sustained us through lean times, allowing us to continue and to grow; many of our achievements have only been possible thanks to money received from RSGS supporters in their Wills, or in memory of loved ones. Please consider helping RSGS into the future by writing a bequest into your Will. If you would like to know more, please contact Mike or Susan on 01738 455050.
Land reform research In early 2016, RSGS ran a land reform round-table meeting with the Scottish Consortium for Rural Research and a wide group of experts from the academic and policy communities. Our hope is that this can help to better inform the development of land reform legislation, and identify those knowledge gaps in which research can be targeted to understand the full impact of change and to help steer its future direction.
Giving young adults a voice We have received lots of entries for our Young Geographer project, and are assembling a small team who will be trained to design and sub-edit the magazine. If you are no more than 30 years old and would like to write an article or be involved, please contact RSGS HQ in Perth by 30 April.
Jonathan Kitchen with Senior Lecturer Dr Robert McCulloch.
We congratulate them all for their hard work, and wish them well in their future geographical endeavours.
Remembering Henry Worsley In January, we were sad to hear of the death of Lt Col Henry Worsley during his attempt to complete the first unsupported solo crossing of Antarctica. He had begun the 1,100-mile coast-to-coast journey in November, and was rescued just 30 miles short of the finish point. He was taken to hospital in Punta Arenas, Chile, but died of bacterial peritonitis. In his last audio message from Antarctica, he said “My summit was just out of reach. When my hero, Ernest Shackleton, was 97 miles from the South Pole on the morning of January the 9th 1909, he said he’d shot his bolt. Well today I have to inform you with some sadness that I too have shot my bolt.” In May 2009, Henry gave an RSGS talk in Perth, where he presented a young Scout with a scarf which she had given to him and which he had taken to the South Pole. We remember his kindness in an article on the RSGS blog.
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news
Earth Sciences RSGS, through the Earth Science Education Scotland forum, is continuing discussions with the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) about the introduction of an Earth Sciences award. SQA have challenged us to test the demand for such an award. Working with the University of St Andrews Geobus, we have found a good deal of support amongst Geography teachers, with c90 teachers interested in teaching it. We are now gathering evidence from school Senior Management Teams who are willing to timetable Earth Sciences, and already have 20 schools signed up to back it. Over the Scotland Rocks weekend (23-24 April 2016), we will schedule a wider discussion with interested teachers and employers, around the appropriate level of such an award, the support and resources required, and the best composition of course content, including those units which should make up the new award. We would welcome any comments and input from people who think they can help. If you would like to discuss this further or get involved in this discussion, please contact Mike Robinson at RSGS.
join the discussion
Luke Robertson’s South Pole success
A gift from the end of the world We are pleased to have made a link with friends in Tasmania. The Royal Society of Tasmania (RST) has gifted to the RSGS a signed limited-edition copy of The Library at the End of the World, written and edited by Anita Hansen and Margaret Davies, and published by RST in 2014. It’s a remarkable and beautifully illustrated book, giving insights into the lives and work of some of the artists and scientists from one of the greatest periods of growth in geographical knowledge prior to the modern era.
L-R: Tony Culberg (Honorary Secretary, RST), Peter Meyer (Honorary Treasurer, RST), Matthew Spencer (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, TMAG), Glenda Hosking (TMAG), and Anita Hansen (art historian), in Hobart, Australia.
We also received a copy of Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania (Vol 148, December 2014), plus Aspects of Tasmanian Botany: a tribute to Winifred Curtis, and prints of John Gould’s Birds of Tasmania.
Spartan army: request for help A PhD student from St Andrews is looking for help in creating maps of Greece for her project on Spartan history. With a membership full of cartophiles and cartographers, we thought we might be able to help her. Please contact Mike at RSGS HQ if you would like to know more.
Professor Ian Simpson, University of Stirling
In January, Luke Robertson became the first Scot and the youngest Brit to reach the South Pole solo, unaided and unassisted. In achieving this great feat, he raised over £50,000 for Marie Curie. Our congratulations go to Luke both for his record-breaking achievement and for his fundraising efforts.
Geography Ambassadors The pilot scheme of Geography Ambassadors is going well: our volunteer co-ordinators (Rachel Hay and Addy Pope) have run two training sessions with students from Edinburgh and Glasgow, and those students have now organised multiple visits to schools in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Students have been very keen to get into the classroom and share their love of Geography with pupils, in order to encourage them to continue studying the subject at university. We are delighted with the pilot and are working hard to find a way to make the project sustainable and affordable before rolling it out further.
Damage and loss of UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) monuments in the Kathmandu Valley resulting from the April 2015 Nepal earthquake is an international heritage tragedy. The Durbar Squares of the early city states of Hanuman Dhoka, Bhaktapur and Patan, monuments to the integration of Buddhist and Hindu world religions, suffered extensive damage to ‘outstanding universal value’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘integrity’ criteria of the WHS designation. The loss also has broader resonance for the heritage tourist economy and in the sense of identity that these places bring to local communities. The University of Stirling has developed a programme of geoarchaeological research (‘reading’ the soil record to give archaeological reconstructions), in collaboration with Durham University, Scottish Universities Environment Research Centre, UNESCO and the Nepalese Government Department of Archaeology. Preliminary stratigraphic assessments at the Kathmandu Valley Durbar Squares indicate that there are features of cultural and environmental significance beneath the collapsed monuments. A longer version of this item is available on the RSGS blog.
University News
Post-earthquake World Heritage Site management in Nepal
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Prof Dame Anne Glover FRSGS
Public talks
In February, at the talk she gave to an RSGS audience in Edinburgh, we were delighted to present Professor Dame Anne Glover with Honorary Fellowship of the RSGS, in recognition of her leadership in the field of scientific advice, and her ability to communicate science to the highest political and decisionmaking levels.
Given all of the flooding around Scotland, the Esk 3rd Valley Trust is hosting a special lecture by Emeritus May Professor Alan Werritty, the noted rivers expert, entitled What can we do about floods? The talk will be given on Tuesday 3 May 2016 at St David’s Hall, 41 Eskbank Road, Dalkeith. Please contact enquiries@eskvalleytrust.org for further information.
The Pearl Button
At 4.30pm on Thursday 12 May 2016, RSGS Mungo 12th Park Medallist Lindsey Hilsum FRSGS will deliver May the annual Wreford Watson Lecture at the University of Edinburgh’s George Square Lecture Theatre. Tickets for World Without Borders: How Warfare and WhatsApp are Changing Reporting are available from Eventbrite, with a link on the RSGS website. Please contact the university for further information.
Extra RSGS talk
The film is due to be shown this spring in various venues across the UK. For more information, see www.newwavefilms.co.uk (search for ‘The Pearl Button’, then click on ‘Buy/Downloads’ for venues and dates).
RSE Award for RSGS President The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) has awarded its Senior Public Engagement Prize for 2016 to Professor Iain Stewart MBE, in recognition of his exceptional, wide-ranging public engagement through the medium of broadcasting and his work with school pupils and teachers. Professor Stewart said, “It is fantastic news to be recognised in this way by the RSE. Over the last few years I’ve been working with their outreach team on communicating issues around energy, climate change and geo-heritage, and so it is wonderful to know that those efforts have been appreciated.”
Delhi’s water supply In February, up to ten million of Delhi’s residents were affected for several days by the loss of freshwater supplies. Jat community members, in an increasingly violent protest against job quotas which favour lower castes, sabotaged the Munak canal which provides around 60% of the city’s water. Prior warnings allowed people to save water, and water tankers made hundreds of trips to affected areas of the city, but this was not enough to make up for the shortfall. Principally affected were those living in homes with piped, running water; many of Delhi’s residents live in slums and rely on water tankers and other sources such as bore wells. Suryatapa Bhattacharya, an investigative reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s Delhi bureau, explained that Delhi “relies on a precarious system of supply. It doesn’t have adequate surface water and the state’s only river, the Yamuna, which provides 12% of water, is polluted. The rest of the supply comes from ground reserves and a canal in Uttar Pradesh state. The state hasn’t built, dredged or maintained areas that historically collected water, as infrastructure has failed to keep up with rapid urbanisation. The city’s Hauz Khas lake was built in the 13th century to store water but is now dirty, full of algae and unfit for consumption. Most step wells in Delhi, ancient structures dug into the ground to store water, haven’t been maintained.”
freshwater
One of our supporters has highly recommended a new independent film from Chilean documentary director Patricio Guzmán. The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar) explores, amongst other things, the history of the indigenous Patagonians, and the water and ocean of Southern Chile. Using both archival images and gorgeous new footage, the film manages to convey different periods of history and geography in a gripping tale of our modern world.
At 7.30pm on Friday 13 May 2016, Colin Souness will share some of his experiences of working aboard a Russian nuclear icebreaker in the Arctic, in a talk organised by the RSGS Edinburgh Group and held in Lecture Room 183, Old College, University of Edinburgh. The talk is open to all; admission is £8, or free to RSGS members. Please contact a member of the RSGS Edinburgh Group Committee or RSGS HQ 13th May for further information.
6 SPRING 2016
Scotland the Hydro Nation: making a contribution Barry Greig, Hydro Nation Manager, Scottish Government Water Industry Division
The Scottish Government is working to deliver on its vision of Scotland as the world’s first ‘Hydro Nation’ – one that is committed to managing our water resources to best advantage, improving efficiency and employing our knowledge and expertise effectively, not only at home but also internationally in ways which can help improve people’s lives. We believe a unique feature of our approach is that it is underpinned by a statutory duty on Scottish Ministers to develop the (economic and non-economic) value of Scotland’s water resources. The strategic direction of our approach is informed by the Hydro Nation Forum, a high-level group of experts, chaired by Keith Brown MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure, Investment and Cities, that advises Scottish Government. Key elements of the programme include the Hydro Nation Scholars Programme, and the Hydro Nation Water Innovation Service (www.hnwis.scot) which will support product testing in the critical stages of development and help Scottish businesses bring new water technologies through to market more quickly, benefiting the economy as a whole, as well as consumers. Scotland is extremely fortunate to enjoy abundant water resources which contribute to the quality and distinctiveness of our environment. We enjoy excellent access to clean, fresh drinking water and high standards of sanitation, but many millions around the world do not.
scarcity, access to adequate safe and affordable drinking water and sanitation, or developing thinking on thorny legal transboundary issues, or in the fields of economic and noneconomic regulation and governance where Scottish expertise is increasingly acknowledged as an exemplar of best practice. The prize for Scotland in taking Hydro Nation onto the international stage should not be seen solely in terms of benefit to the Scottish economy, important though that is. Rather, we believe that we can make a meaningful contribution towards solving global water issues, and that it is the right thing to do. We have already been active through the Climate Justice Fund which, with £6m worth of support from Hydro Nation, has already delivered successful water-related climate adaptation projects in Malawi, Tanzania, Rwanda and Zambia. Many will be aware that Scotland enjoys a special relationship with Malawi, due to the historical ties between our two nations. That relationship is strengthened by joint working at an official level between the Scottish and Malawian Governments on water resource management, governance and legislation. On World Water Day, 22nd March 2016, the Scottish Government announced its plans to extend the reach of the successful Malawian Water Futures project. This will bring benefits to even more people in the Lower Shire basin, enabling them to access groundwater resources protected from the impacts of climate change by improved hydrogeological modelling and practical action related to the siting of boreholes.
“Our aim is to demonstrate Scotland’s commitment to the global water agenda.”
Following the UN Sustainable Development Summit in September 2015, the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon MSP, announced Scotland as one of the first countries in the world to publicly commit to the Sustainable Development Goals. The global context is that water scarcity affects more than 40% of the world’s population, an alarming figure and one projected to increase with the rise of global temperatures as a consequence of climate change. Although much progress has been made – some 2.1 billion people have gained access to improved water sanitation since 1990 – many still do not have safe water or adequate sanitation. This is a major problem impacting every continent, and it is a problem for us all. Scotland has long been an outward-looking nation, and our aim is to demonstrate Scotland’s commitment to the global water agenda by highlighting Scotland’s water research excellence and activity around the world, demonstrating where Scottish expertise is leading the way or contributing to better resource management, whether in relation to water
Ensuring universal access to safe and affordable drinking water by 2030, as envisioned by the Sustainable Development Goals, requires that we invest in adequate infrastructure, provide sanitation facilities and encourage hygiene at every level. The Scottish Government is proud to be active in this area of global concern. Through our Scotland the Hydro Nation programme, and the efforts of our many partners, we aim to make a difference. In this edition of The Geographer you can read about some of the impressive achievements and work being undertaken by a wide range of institutions and partners who are helping make Scotland the world’s first Hydro Nation. FURTHER READING www.gov.scot/Topics/Business-Industry/waterindustryscot/ ScotlandtheHydroNation Scottish Government (2015), Scotland the Hydro Nation, Second Annual Report (www.gov.scot/Resource/0048/00487846.pdf)
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The origins of water Professor John Finney, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University College London
How did water originate? How did it get to Earth? Astrophysicists are confident they can answer the first question. The second one is trickier. About a couple of minutes after the Big Bang had produced a soup of subatomic particles, the temperature was low enough (about three billion degrees!) for protons and neutrons to get together to form nuclei of our four simplest elements. Once the temperature had fallen to about 4,000°C, these nuclei were able to capture the electrons needed to form atoms of hydrogen, helium, lithium and boron. Getting to larger atoms (we need oxygen for water) had to wait until gravity had done its bit by condensing this gaseous soup to form stars, within which nuclear fusion processes produced many of the other elements in our periodic table. Obtaining the heaviest elements, however, required other nuclear processes which are triggered when a star dies after collapsing under its own gravity, in spectacular supernovae explosions that also scatter the raw material from which our world was formed.
“However much there is, only about 2% of it is freshwater.”
If we now look ‘out there’, we can see in spectacular molecular clouds the results of these explosions and what time has done to them. In addition to the dominant hydrogen, we find other gases such as carbon monoxide and ammonia. And of course water – which turns out to be one of the commonest molecules in the Universe after hydrogen. These molecular clouds also contain small grains of solid material such as silicates and carbon, often with a coating of ice. As these grains come together under gravity, the resulting ‘clump’ flattens into a rotating disc. Most of the material gathers at the disc centre to form a star – such as our Sun. The gas and dust grains further out accrete to form small rocky bodies (planetesimals) that collide with each other, and cohere to form larger bodies. Eventually we have ‘planets’ – at this stage perhaps more like molten rock, but containing much of the material we now have on Earth. There are several ideas about how water got here. Many of the dust grains were ice-covered, so maybe that water was retained on accretion. Another suggestion is the capture of gas from the molecular cloud from which the Sun and our solar system formed, though it’s thought unlikely that much water arrived this way. Finally, water may have come from
impacts with asteroids and comets, though results from the Rosetta mission argue that comets may not be a source of our water. Until more evidence is in, perhaps we’re forced into a compromise position that all three of these sources may have contributed. The ‘terrestrial’ history of our water seems to be a pretty intractable problem in Geochemistry. However, informed speculation might note that during the formation stage, the colliding planetesimals might deposit enough energy to at least partly melt the Earth to produce a magma ocean, containing water and other volatile molecules. As the magma cooled, the volatiles would be ejected to form a primitive atmosphere of mainly carbon dioxide and water (the Earth’s gravity being too weak to retain hydrogen). On further cooling, water vapour condensed into clouds. And then it rained and rained and rained… So within about a hundred million years of the Earth’s formation, it may well have had a primitive atmosphere and large oceans. We don’t know with any degree of certainty how much water the Earth has grabbed. Oceans, rivers, groundwater, ice, rocks and organic matter account for about 1.9 billion billion tonnes, some 70% of which is oceanic salt water. In addition, perhaps up to two Earth oceans-worth is locked up in the mantle. However much there is, only about 2% of it is freshwater. And with about half of that locked up in the ice caps and around 90% of the remainder in groundwater which it would be irresponsible to completely mine, we can reasonably access only about 0.1% of the grand total. 1.9 million billion tonnes may appear a large amount, but the smallness of the fraction might focus our minds on looking after our freshwater sources. We need them to maintain our climate and to keep us, and other living things, alive. Professor Finney is the author of Water: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press. The book provides an introduction to the science of water, ice, snow, and steam, and how the structure of water molecules gives rise to its physical and chemical properties. Main image © Lorne Gill
8 SPRING 2016
Co-operating over transboundary waters Dr Alistair Rieu-Clarke, Reader in International Law, Centre for Water Law, Policy & Science under the auspices of UNESCO, University of Dundee Sustainable Development Goal 6.5 (SDG6.5) calls for the implementation of integrated water resources management (IWRM) at all levels, including through transboundary cooperation as appropriate. IWRM is considered a process that promotes co-ordinated development and management of water, land and related resources. Such co-ordination across multiple levels and scales poses great challenges, not least when water crosses sovereign borders. Waters that cross sovereign borders are a significant component of the world’s freshwater supplies: 276 transboundary river and lake basins, representing nearly half the Earth’s land surface, are shared by 145 countries. Additionally, while hidden underground, the importance of an estimated 275 transboundary aquifers should not be forgotten. Even States, such as the UK, that are not directly reliant on significant amounts of transboundary waters, may well rely on the goods and services produced in these transboundary systems.
climate change and so on. At the global level, efforts have been made to adopt standards for sharing waters between States through the 1992 UNECE Water Convention and the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention. However, while interest in both these instruments has been growing in recent years, less than 25% of transboundary water States are party to these instruments.
“Even States, such as the UK, that are not directly reliant on significant amounts of transboundary waters, may well rely on the goods and services produced in these transboundary systems.”
Ensuring that transboundary waters around the world are managed in an equitable and sustainable manner is also an important means by which to foster wider sustainable development, as even peace and security. Without co-operative arrangements, tensions over transboundary waters are only © Lorne Gill likely to escalate. Current ‘hot spots’ are clearly evident. For instance, tensions have run high between Egypt and Ethiopia relating to the latter’s plan to build the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile. Similarly, recent plans by the Lao Government to build dams on the mainstream of the Mekong River, have led to serious disagreements with their downstream neighbours, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. Recognising the importance of transboundary waters is one thing; a greater challenge is to gain the widespread political support needed to ensure that States co-operate over such waters. Gaining such political support has proven very difficult due to a preference by some States to take a unilateral approach to water resources development. At present, many transboundary waters lack any agreement between the States that share those waters. Similarly, many of the agreements that are in place are not fit-for-purpose, given the challenges of population increase, biodiversity,
Numerous efforts have been made to boost political support for the need to co-operate over transboundary waters. The first UN conference on water, which took place in Mar del Plata in 1977, recognised the necessity for States to co-operate over transboundary waters, but did not go much further. Subsequent efforts have gained little ground. 1992 saw the Rio Conference on Environment and Development, and Agenda 21, a blueprint for sustainable development. The need for co-operation over transboundary waters was only weakly referenced in the action plan, which stipulated that cooperation amongst transboundary water states “may be desirable”. Similar language was adopted in subsequent global water policies through the 1990s and 2000s. The Ministerial Declaration of the 6th World Water Forum in Marseille in 2012, for instance, talked about “promoting” and “encouraging” co-ordinated water utilisation in transboundary basins. These soft statements hid major disagreement between States over the extent to which they needed to co-operate with their neighbours on transboundary water issues. The adoption of SDG6.5 marks a significant step forward in recognising the need for transboundary water co-operation; 6.5 is not couched in terms such as “desirable”, “encourage” or “promote”, but rather clearly stipulates the need to adopt IWRM at a transboundary level. Much needs to be done to turn this aspiration into a reality. An immediate challenge will be to associate credible targets to this goal, which are capable of measuring progress towards “co-operation”. However, as a driver by which to ensure that co-operative arrangements for transboundary waters are in place, SDG6.5 certainly moves us in the right direction.
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Offshore aquifers: an untapped resource Renee Martin-Nagle, PhD Researcher, University of Strathclyde, and Treasurer, International Water Resources Association
According to scientists familiar with the phenomenon, vast reserves of fresh to brackish water are lying in the seabeds under continental shelves around the world. At a time when predictions of a global water crisis are growing more urgent, the presence of hidden caches of the planet’s most vital resource would be welcome news indeed. These mysterious aquifers originated during the last glacial period, when much of the planet’s water was concentrated in the polar regions and in massive ice sheets that blanketed much of the northern hemisphere. At the time of the glacial maximum more than 20,000 years ago, sea levels were approximately 125 metres lower than their current levels, exposing today’s submerged continental shelves to the same meteorological conditions as every other land surface. Precipitation and runoff accumulated on the edges of the continents and soaked into the ground, saturating porous, permeable geological formations. When higher global temperatures melted glaciers and added their enormous volumes to the seas, three types of aquifers survived as coastlines were buried under water – those that are unconnected to any other water body, those that are connected to a land-based aquifer, and those that allow freshwater to exit freely into the sea through karstic rock formations. The karstic spring formations do not create reservoirs capable of development, but the other two types of offshore aquifers are estimated to contain twice the volume of water that has been extracted from land-based aquifers since 1900. In the event that these estimates are valid and demands for freshwater prompt pursuit of new supplies, clever minds may turn to development of offshore aquifers for agricultural, industrial and domestic uses. However, offshore development would require a sophisticated series of operations. First, the volume of water in the aquifers would have to be determined through exploratory activities, and the degree of salinity should be calculated. Once an offshore aquifer with enough good-quality water to warrant development has been identified, the mechanisms for extraction would have to be put into place. The offshore oil and gas industry has decades of experience in extracting liquid resources from the seabed, and that expertise would doubtless be utilised. Once extracted, the water would have to be transported to shore, either via a tanker or via a pipeline, and then may also have to be treated to remove any salinity or impurities. Finally, the water would be distributed to final users. All of these steps would require significant financial investments, so we can probably assume that, for offshore water to become a viable resource, the price of water would be much higher than it is now, or governments would be willing to subsidise the operations, or both.
As the technical and financial issues are being resolved, ownership of the water will also have to be determined. To date, all of the offshore aquifers that have been discovered lie within the exclusive jurisdiction of one country, and would therefore be considered as domestic aquifers under current legal regimes. However, the presence of aquifers that straddle the jurisdictions of two or more countries is easy to foresee, much as oil and gas fields are often shared by two or more countries. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and general customary law provide that natural resources lying in the seabed within 200 miles of a nation’s shoreline are the exclusive property of that nation. However, the law is not clear on what happens if a resource straddles one or more national borders – both UNCLOS and the International Court of Justice have directed nations to find an equitable solution to these shared resources. In the hydrocarbon industry, that directive has led to unitisation and joint development agreements, whereby the nations reach an agreement on how to split costs and revenues and then appoint a single operator for more efficient and effective exploration and development. Once the viability of offshore aquifer resources has been verified and the technical, financial and legal issues have been addressed, mankind will have to determine who will benefit from these new additions to our collective water budget. At that point, offshore aquifers may become really interesting.
“Offshore development would require a sophisticated series of operations.”
© Mike Robinson
10 SPRING 2016
Asia’s water tower in peril in Tibet Jane Qiu
As a fierce tethered Tibetan mastiff loudly announces our arrival, Dodra emerges from his mud house to greet us in a gloomy, snowy July afternoon. Dressed in a black robe, silver buckles, high boots and a cowboy hat, he gives us a brief tour of his modest dwelling in the village of Dotse at the headwater region of the Yangtze River in the northern Tibetan Plateau.
But people like Dodra are among the lucky ones who still live off their land: nearly 100,000 Tibetan pastoralists have been moved to newlybuilt settlements at the fringe of urban centres, often hundreds of kilometres away from their own communities. Such ‘ecological migrants’ are forced to sell their livestock, cannot find jobs because of a lack of education and skills, and often experience discrimination. They also suffer from identify crisis. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” says Sonam, a former herder from the Madoi county who moved to the Golok New Village over 600km away. “I was good at what I did [as a herder]. Now I feel useless.” Nostalgic of their past lives as nomads, Sonam and his fellow migrants often gather and socialise in tents erected in their courtyard.
“The family received… ecological compensation, which came to a halt two years ago.”
The courtyard where the mastiff now sits quietly is home to a motorbike, two solar panels and stacks of yak dung lying neatly against the wall. Outside, the pasture looks like a worn carpet with cracks that run through like gigantic arteries, exposing patches of lifeless soil. Through the thick mist, one can barely discern his 40 or so yaks grazing leisurely in the distance, dotting the green folds of rolling hills dusted by fresh snow. With a gentle smile that radiates Jane Qiu is a freelance writer kindness, Dodra leads us into his in Beijing. Her trip across incense-filled house, consisting of the Tibetan Plateau was two rooms that are the sole living supported by the SciDev. quarters of his family of eight. His Net Investigative Science wife, wearing an orange and blue Journalism Fellowship for the beaded necklace, quietly brings Global South. over hot milk tea, tsampa (roasted barley bread), and dried yak meat, before putting more dung into the stove that occupies the centre of the front room. As his bright-eyed, red-cheeked children curiously look on, the 35-year-old herder explains his struggle to stay afloat. “We get most of our food – milk, butter and meat – from the yaks,” says Dodra, a sense of apprehension palpable. “It’s barely enough to feed the whole family and we have little income for other things.” They are forced to give up half of their animals since the government began a decade ago to impose strict limits on livestock numbers, in an attempt to restore degraded grasslands across the Tibetan plateau. In return, the family received US$2,750 a year as ecological compensation, which came to a halt two years ago. Now the entire family lives on an annual income of a mere US$470, which barely covers basic necessities such as grains and clothing. The compensation money may resume later on this year, but nobody knows how long it will last. “What will we do when it stops?” asks Dodra. Equally worrying is the state of his yaks. “The pastures haven’t improved much and the animals are not looking good.” If the situation continues, he says, “we will lose our only lifeline.” Dodra was one of the herders I encountered during my 4,700km journey last summer across the Tibetan Plateau. Many families face similar predicaments. They are at the forefront of China’s fight against widespread grassland degradation across the plateau, which it attributes to overgrazing. To reduce grazing, Beijing implements strict policies of yicao dingmu (limiting the number of livestock based on the size of the pasture), divides the land to individual families, and builds fences to demarcate the boundaries between households and villages – turning a mobile lifestyle into a sedentary existence. Even government officials admit that such policies have been hard on the herders.
Many scientists and policy researchers are highly critical of China’s grassland polices in Tibet – especially fencing, blanket grazing bans in some areas, and ‘ecological migration’ – saying that they have no scientific basis, nor do they recognise local culture, knowledge and sensitivities. And as herders are moved off their land, other human activities, such as tourism, road construction and mining, are increasingly encroaching on the Tibetan rangeland. At Lake Eling and Lake Zhaling, two gigantic freshwater lakes at the source region of the Yellow River in the core zone of the Three Rivers’ Headwaters National Nature Reserve, hotels and restaurants rise up from a lakeside littered with beer cans and plastic bottles. Construction workers are dredging sand and gravel for a new road to connect Madoi and the two lakes, scarring an otherwise pristine landscape – a recurrent theme along our journey across the plateau. Leaving Madoi and heading south towards Yushu, where the Yangtze River originates, we drive along a nearly completed 1,000km highway which, when it opens later on this year, will significantly shorten the travel time between Yushu and the provincial capital Xining. The US$1.8bn project is rumoured to have been personally approved in 2010 by Wen Jiabao, China’s former Premier, after the deadly quake struck Yushu and the poor road conditions impeded rescue and relief efforts. The highway cuts right through the Three Rivers’ Headwaters reserve, including its core zones, but, astonishingly, its construction has proceeded without an environment impact assessment. Mining is another major source of disturbances, and can impact heavily on water supply. The Tibetan Plateau’s geological history bestows the region with a rich reserve of minerals such as zinc, copper and gold. As most of the
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mines in Tibet are open pits and have limited environmental oversight, “air, water and soil pollution is particularly serious,” according to a report released by the Chinese Academy of Sciences last year. Officials release few details about the actual pollution levels, but the report says that the mines produced 100 million tonnes of waste water in 2007 and 18.8 million tonnes of solid waste in 2009. At Dotse, near the Yangtze headwaters, herders indeed attribute grassland degradation to mining. The nearby mountain, known by the locals as the ‘golden-bird mountain’, is named for its plentiful gold. Despite residing within the Three Rivers’ Headwaters reserve, “the miners rip the entire slopes apart and pollute streams and rivers, killing many livestock and inflicting liver diseases to villagers,” says Dodra. Such activities “have rid the land of its divine spirit,” he says. “This is why the pastures are degraded.” And degradation of the Tibetan grasslands affects not only local communities. Known as Asia’s water tower, the Tibetan Plateau – covering 2.5 million km2 (three times the size of Scotland) with an average elevation of 4,000m above sea level – gives rise to the continent’s ten major rivers that are a lifeline to over 1.4 billion people. Its ability to act as a water tower is partly due to the grasslands’ buffering capacity to absorb water during excess and release it in shortage. When green prairies turn into sand dunes – as I witnessed in parts of the plateau, especially the headwater regions of the Yellow, Yangtze, Indus and Brahmaputra Rivers – the consequences can be dire.
“‘The miners rip the entire slopes apart and pollute streams and rivers.’”
12 SPRING 2016
Responding to challenges in the Hindu Kush Dr David Molden, Director General, International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development
and landslide events, are wreaking havoc on the livelihoods of The Hindu Kush Himalayas – an arc of mountains stretching people in the mountains and the plains, and every year during from Afghanistan, through Pakistan, China, India, Nepal, monsoon we wonder when and Bhutan, and Bangladesh, clear to where the next disaster will hit. Myanmar – are a gift to Asia, and the world. They are a well-known destination The resilience of mountain for those seeking adventure, spirituality, people, living in incredibly harsh recreation, and biological and cultural environments, is unmatched, diversity. However, as the source of and has been tested over ten major Asian rivers, the Hindu Kush centuries. Yet one wonders Himalayas also act as the water towers whether limits are being of Asia, supplying vital water resources reached. to over 1.3 billion people. These rivers At the International Centre not only provide freshwater to the region, for Integrated Mountain they also feed the demands of a rapidly Development, we are working to growing Asian population for energy and better understand the impacts food. The plains of these great rivers – of changes in the mountains of the breadbasket of Asia – feed over three Nilgiri Himal, Mustang District, Nepal. the Hindu Kush Himalayas to billion people. Sustainably tapping the support sustainable mountain development and the resilience region’s huge hydropower potential as a source of clean energy of mountain communities. We do this through knowledge will also be increasingly important to fuel growing economies. generation and sharing and promoting regional co-operation However, there are disturbing signals coming from the between countries, between people in the region, and with mountains. And given Asia’s high dependence on the those who share our love of mountains. mountains for water, energy, and food, there is reason for We are all drawn closer by globalisation and climate change. concern. Changes in water supply and rainfall patterns in the Hindu Melting glaciers are a major signal of climate change in the Kush Himalayas, and the resulting impact on food production Himalayas, as in other parts of the world. Mountain glaciers for example, will have global repercussions. Each day we are are shrinking, some quite rapidly in recent decades. Air in a race against time, in the face of rapid change – not only pollution from the plains is finding its way up to the high climate change, but also economic and social change. For wise mountains, leaving soot on white snowfields, causing increased and sustainable use of resources, for peace and prosperity, melt in addition to affecting the health of local residents along attention to the mountains will go a long way. its path. Given the importance of water to the region, knowing what will happen to glaciers and water supply is of critical importance.
“The Hindu Kush Himalayas… act as the water towers of Asia, supplying vital water resources to over 1.3 billion people.”
There are about 56,000 glaciers in the region containing about 6,000km3 of water stored as ice – enough water to feed global annual irrigation water needs about two times over. The story of these glaciers, which has important implications for future water availability, is beginning to unfold as we collect more data. However, we still have large knowledge gaps to fill. Mountains also play a role in regulating monsoon patterns. With changes in temperature, how will monsoon patterns change, and what does this mean for future food and energy security? And how will people adapt to such changes? Initial research results suggest that over the next decades the amount of water reaching rivers will increase because of enhanced glacier and snow melt. However, after that the contribution from snow and glaciers will decrease, affecting communities in parts of the region, like the Indus River basin, that are heavily dependent on snow and glacier melt. Climate models also project an increase in annual precipitation and, in balance, the annual amount of flow may not change dramatically in other basins. In addition to uncertainty about future water availability, mountain communities are also experiencing trends of more intense rains and more drought periods, which may be of greater concern and require more immediate, short-term action than melting glaciers. Floods across Nepal in 2014, the huge event in Uttarakhand, India in 2013, and the megaflood in Pakistan in 2008, as well as numerous other flood
Skardu Valley, Pakistan.
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River regeneration and the reviving of community Rajendra Singh and Minni Jain
In 1985 Rajendra Singh, inspired by Gandhi, went to live in dry and arid rural Rajasthan, India, with the intention of introducing modern education and medicine to that impoverished area. But soon the villagers made clear their primary need was for water. Over the next few years, harnessing the villagers’ traditional wisdom, the river systems in the region were regenerated, dramatically transforming that arid land into a lush, green area of well-being and productivity. Over 28 years, seven entire river systems, previously dried up for 80 years, were revived. Over 10,000 Johads (small earthen dams) were built by the villagers at strategic places. Underground aquifers were recharged, rivers began to flow again and food supplies were secured, helping those villages to become thriving communities again. Now the project is being replicated across India. Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), the Indian organisation that Rajendra set up, began its work in the village by nurturing the Village Council, a traditional body comprised of representatives from each household, where all decisions are taken by consensus. Here, villagers agreed to contribute resources (labour and materials) towards building the Johads, thus developing their sense of ownership and ensuring their ongoing commitment to maintenance. The first fruits of their labours were realised in the very next rains when the river began to flow again. The outcomes of applying this strategy of facilitating community-driven decentralised water management and conservation are: • it encourages disciplined use of natural resources, ensuring sustainable water availability; • it creates an increase in agricultural and milk production, thus ensuring food security; • it restores the area’s ecology; • it regenerates healthy, prosperous communities; • it strengthens democracy and political transparency, and even changes government practices; • its overarching vision of recharging the groundwater on the planet delivers long-lasting, proven, comprehensive transformation of communities. The method addresses two separate universal problems: • it allows communities everywhere the capacity and will to fend for themselves; and • it enables them to respond to the increasing threat of natural resources, even in the developed world.
modern knowledge, will resolve issues like river flow and further strengthen their capacity to adapt to other threats such as climate change. They have also proven conclusively that meeting all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is not just a dream but is eminently achievable.
“Technology can provide us with solutions, but it cannot absolve us from responsibilities.”
The work suggests a strategy for the world so that every community can have access to the knowledge, tools, wisdom and finance to look after their own water resources. Such a strategy is applicable to every water-stressed region in the world, giving communities the wherewithal and responsibility to restore their regions’ natural water-holding capacity. All the SDGs can only be achieved holistically at community level by applying the community’s inherent capacities to address endemic problems.
A gathering of women water warriors at TBS Ashram. This is revolutionary, as traditionally women did not have a say in this work. Now they are organised and have a huge say in what happens to their local water bodies.
There was not much for the animals to eat when the monsoon failed for two years in a row.
There was enough recharge in underground aquifers to provide water for crops, in spite of a failed monsoon for two years.
Rajendra and Philip of The Flow Partnership at the original water body at the TBS Ashram in Rajasthan, built entirely by manual labour – no machines were used.
In the case of the communities in Rajasthan, it was a change of emphasis from control and profiteering to an organic relationship between the community and nature that enabled this rejuvenation. Water is at the heart of everything, whether we exploit it to make products or live with its power to support whole communities thriving in harmony with nature. Of course technology can provide us with solutions, but it cannot absolve us from responsibilities. When people come together in a spirit of community, water can flow naturally. And when that flow is restored, everything else gets restored too. If we combine conservation and harvesting with disciplined water use, problems are solved. Working with actual communities, TBS has shown that rather than imposing generic global solutions, facilitating the flow of traditional wisdom, as well as introducing appropriate
All images © The Flow Partnership
Rajendra Singh, the ‘Waterman of India’, is the winner of the 2015 Stockholm Water Prize. His life’s work has been in building social capacity to solve local water problems through participatory action, empowerment of women, linking indigenous know-how with modern scientific and technical approaches, and upending traditional patterns of development and resource use. Minni Jain is a Director of The Flow Partnership (www. theflowpartnership.org) which, in collaboration with Rajendra Singh, is creating an implementation strategy to rejuvenate the planet’s water-stressed regions through collaborative community work.
14 SPRING 2016
Portrait of Pskov David J Bonnar OBE FRSA
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Main background image: Ploskaya (Flat) Tower at confluence of rivers. 1. T he walls of Gremayachaya (Thundering) Tower turn scarlet as the sun disappears below the horizon.* 2. The C14-16th Krom (Kremlin) and Trinity Cathedral. 3. Krom and Trinity Cathedral at confluence of rivers Velikaya and Pskova. 4. Sleigh ride on River Velikaya. 5. Spring blossom at the 15th century St Varlaam Khutynsky Church. 6. Fire dance at Pskov Krom. * Š Stanislav Tikhonov (www.facebook.com/stanistikhonov) All other images Š Igor Soloviev (photostudio.lis@mail.ru)
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Pskov is an ancient and historic Russian city 200km south of St Petersburg, near the border of Estonia. The 1,100th anniversary of the first mention of Pskov in the Russian Chronicles was celebrated in 2003, and the city has witnessed many significant milestones in the history of Russia over the years. To celebrate 25 years of the twinning of Pskov and Perth, and to stimulate wider interest in a fascinating and relatively unknown part of Russia, the Friends of Pskov Association is mounting an exhibition at the RSGS’s Fair Maid’s House visitor centre in Perth, from 12th April to 21st May, featuring the work of three photographers from Pskov. Please come and see the exhibition if you can.
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Economic benefits from water quality improvements Professor Nick Hanley, Professor of Environmental Economics, University of St Andrews
In the past ten years, several important pieces of European legislation have motivated an increased level of investment in improving the quality of Scotland’s rivers, lochs and coastal and marine environments. The Water Framework Directive, the revised Bathing Waters Directive and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive have all pushed governments and their environmental agencies to seek improved water quality standards. The costs of such measures are, in a sense, obvious: it is not hard to appreciate the fact that building better sewage treatment facilities, for example, is expensive. But what about the benefits? How can we quantify the economic value of reduced levels of faecal coliforms in bathing waters, or reductions in eutrophication problems? Since the 1960s, economists have developed a range of methods for quantifying such benefits. These methods, by and large, apply the principles of economic value which were first worked out for goods which are bought and sold in markets. In a market, we are quite used to thinking of the most an individual is willing to pay for something (eg, a house) as signalling the economic value of that thing. Alternatively, one could ask what is the least which a seller is willing to accept to part with an item (such as a painting) as a measure of its economic value. Markets routinely price millions of goods and services in billions of transactions worldwide, but for ‘non-market’ goods – such as biodiversity, or wilderness quality, or bathing water quality at the coast – no such market prices exist. However, one can still apply the principles of willingness to pay or willingness to accept, to value changes in such environmental goods. Stated preference methods, such as choice experiments and contingent valuation, ask carefully-crafted questions of a random sample of individuals what they would be willing to pay for changes in a specific environmental good, should such a market exist. These methods have been extensively used in Scotland to value changes in water quality. For example, Peter Hunter and colleagues, in a paper in Science of the Total Environment (2012), report results from a contingent valuation study in Loch Leven. Local residents were asked the most that they would be willing to pay, through higher council taxes, for improvements in water quality in the Loch. Another example, this time using the choice experiment method, was applied to two rivers in Eastern Scotland, the Motray and the Brothock. Our paper in the European Journal of Agricultural Economics (2006) shows which aspects of each of these two rivers were most highly valued by the general public in the context of reductions in agricultural (non-point) pollution and abstraction for irrigation. Such benefit estimates can be compared with the costs of improving water quality, or used to prioritise actions. A final example of the use of such methods relates to potential improvements to coastal waters under the revised Bathing Waters Directive. Colleagues and I compared the value that local people place on improvements to risks of bathing due to pathogens, changes in coastal biodiversity, and cleaning up beaches by removing litter. Economists have also studied how the behaviour of recreationalists can be used to evaluate changes in the
environmental quality of sites such as beaches where people surf, or rivers where they kayak. Whilst no admission fees are charged for such sites in Scotland, people do incur costs in travelling to sites. These costs, when combined with their visitation rates and choices over alternative sites, reveal the value people place on such outdoor recreational resources, and how such values change when environmental quality changes. Using methods like this, economists have been able to show that improving the quality of a nation’s rivers, lochs and coastal and marine waters generates real and substantial economic benefits, which can offset the costs of bringing about such improvements. This balances the weight of argument when decisions are made over the management of our aquatic resources. © Lorne Gill
“Improving the quality of a nation’s rivers, lochs and coastal and marine waters generates real and substantial economic benefits.”
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Scotland’s water-based ecosystem services Dr Kirsty Blackstock and Dr Kerry Waylen, Social, Economic and Geographical Sciences, James Hutton Institute
The EU Water Framework Directive is one of the main influences on how we manage fresh and coastal waters. It aims to protect aquatic ecosystems whilst recognising the importance of human use, economic and social development. This fits well with the emphasis of the new UN Sustainable Development Goals on protecting and managing our natural capital underpinning the provision of drinking water and managing waste water.
“Scotland’s waters are often supporting industries, communities and nature conservation simultaneously.”
Since the Directive was ratified in 2000, all EU member states have been busy making and implementing River Basin Management Plans. Scotland has been at the forefront of efforts to consider how to use ecosystem service concepts and the Ecosystem Approach in these plans. To inform the current cycle of River Basin Management Planning, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency have taken the radical step of characterising Scotland’s waters using an ecosystem service classification. This represents a step-change versus previous approaches to describing and understanding our waters. Ecosystem services from water range from the provision of food, water and energy, through regulating floods and droughts, to providing recreational opportunities and sustaining cultural and social identities. Supplying different services can interact and potentially conflict; for example, using water for hydropower can decrease its potential to support recreational benefits. However, Scotland’s waters are often supporting industries, communities and nature conservation simultaneously. We are used to managing for some of these services such as drinking water provision, but not others such as how water resources connect with our cultural and social identity, or how aquatic insects contribute to aquatic ecosystem services. Managing such services may be particularly challenging if they are not currently protected by laws, traded via economic markets, or widely recognised. For example, only in recent decades have we recognised the role of natural systems in regulating floods, so the services of naturally-functioning systems have often been degraded or replaced by artificial flood defences. Therefore, whilst measuring and mapping the services provided by our waters is innovative, attention is needed as to how the overall catchment is managed, how all relevant sectors of society are engaged, that local knowledge is included, and that the institutions responsible for catchments work in a more co-ordinated, if not collaborative, manner. To achieve this, we can build on practical experience, academic studies and policy guidance. For example, Scotland already offers examples of integrated catchment management, complemented by
general management concepts. A particularly important concept is the Ecosystem Approach, a holistic approach to management that was adopted by the UN in the same year that the Water Framework Directive was ratified. In Scotland, the Ecosystem Approach has been translated into three principles: a) Consider natural systems; b) Take account of the services that ecosystems provide; c) Involve people. Taking a systemic approach to managing our environment, however, is not simple or easy, and may entail several changes to the way we do things. Attempts to implement the Ecosystem Approach typically encounter several types of ‘sticking point’: • Institutional – from previous ways of working, eg regulatory standards; • Cognitive – from previous ways of thinking or framing issues; • Political – from previous relations shaping who holds power. Furthermore, it is difficult to integrate the Ecosystem Approach and ecosystem service concepts with policies that place less emphasis on the links between society and nature, such as the Natura2000 Directives for biodiversity, or which focus on one service, such as the recent EU Floods Directive. Therefore it may take some time before the full promise of the Ecosystem Approach or ecosystem service-based frameworks are delivered. However, two recent pilot projects in Aberdeenshire and the Borders explored how an ecosystem service-based framework and the Ecosystem Approach could support an innovative approach to water and land use strategic planning. This work underlines the importance of water services, the pressure from intensive agriculture and forestry, and the threat of climate change. Scotland is illustrating how ecosystem service concepts can be used in decision making and linked to policy implementation. As we strive to connect the key policies and involve all sectors of society in decision making, this should allow Scotland to plays its part in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, illustrating how to manage and protect water for nature and society both here and abroad. FURTHER READING Scottish Government (2016), Evaluation of the Regional Land Use Framework Pilots [Aberdeenshire and Scottish Borders] (www.gov.scot/Publications/2016/01/9321) Convention on Biological Diversity (2000), Ecosystem Approach (www.cbd.int/ecosystem/default.shtml) Waylen KA & Blackstock KL (2015), Sticking points – implications for environmental management (www. knowledgescotland.org/briefings.php?id=393) MacAdam CR & Stockan J (2016), Identifying ecosystem services provided by freshwater insects (www.knowledgescotland. org/briefings.php?id=394)
Orcadian lochan contributing provisioning, regulating and cultural ecosystem services. © Kirsty Blackstock, 2015
18 SPRING 2016
Water security, economic growth and sustainable developmen Professor Asit K Biswas, Distinguished Visiting Professor, and Dr Cecilia Tortajada, Senior Research Fellow at Institute of Water Policy,
“When one door closes, another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the one that is open to us.” Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) Scottish engineer and inventor
A major current global concern is how to ensure a high rate of economic growth that is both sustainable and equitable, so that hundreds of millions of the people who are now poor can have a significantly improved standard of living and quality of life. Equally, the middle classes need to maintain their current lifestyles and improve them progressively over time. All these have to be achieved with the full recognition that the world population is likely to increase to 9.7 billion in 2050, from 7.3 billion at present.
Individually, each of the three topics of this paper – water security, economic growth and sustainable development – is a difficult, complex and challenging subject. Academics and policy-makers often differ with each other as to even the definitions of the three topics, let alone their ramifications. Accordingly, and not surprisingly, when these three interrelated topics are combined, their complexities, uncertainties and intricacies multiply by several orders of magnitude, and become further convoluted.
Achieving these goals will not be easy, because the world will have to eradicate poverty that exists now and then further cater to 2.4 billion additional people during the next 85 years. Even in the world’s most prosperous country, the United States, the Census Bureau reported in 2012 that more than 45 million people, 14.5% of all Americans, were living under the poverty line. The United Nations estimates that nearly 795 million people (nearly one in nine) in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life.
The fact is, in the real world, from a development-related policy perspective, they should be considered and analysed within a holistic and synergistic framework. The danger often is that when these three topics are considered independently, as they mostly are, policies in one area have direct and indirect impacts on the other two sectors. These unplanned and unexpected impacts are often negative. This mostly means that formulation and implementation of policies exclusively in any one of the three sectors are likely to have sub-optimal, or even net negative, impacts over the medium to long terms. Water security, economic growth and sustainable development are closely interrelated. One affects and, in turn, is affected by the others. So, over the long term, they have to be considered together.
We need to consider water security, not in the present myopic sense of availability of enough water to satisfy the burgeoning water needs of current and future generations for drinking, industry, agriculture, energy and other uses, but rather water as a cross-cutting issue which can act as a catalyst for economic development, improving the standards of living of all people and ensuring a clean aquatic environment. Future global water needs are currently being seen primarily in terms of business-as-usual incremental scenarios. Such analyses invariably conclude that the world will face an accelerating water crisis of unprecedented magnitudes. Forecasting apocalyptic visions of water has been a feature for some three decades. Putting “water crisis” in Google, on 20 February 2016, identified some 74 million entries, and this number is increasing exponentially. Nearly each month, at least one major institution somewhere in the world comes out with the forecast that the world will be facing a serious water crisis. Our view is different. We have consistently argued that the world is not facing a water crisis because of physical scarcity of water. It is facing a crisis because of poor management of water over a century. Consider a few facts which seldom enter into the current discussions. First, water is a renewable resource. This means water differs from other important natural resources like oil, coal or gas, which once used break down into different components and cannot be used again. In contrast, after water is used, it becomes contaminated with pollutants. This wastewater can be properly treated, and then reused for all purposes, including drinking. This use-treat-use cycle can continue ad infinitum.
© Lorne Gill
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nt: linking society, economy and environment Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore
We have had the technology and management expertise to continue this cycle for at least three decades. For example, the city of Windhoek, Namibia, has been using treated wastewater as a direct source of drinking water for well over 35 years. Second, for the world as a whole, water for drinking and agriculture account for about 9% and 69% respectively. These two sectors alone use 78% of annual global water use. Sadly, agricultural water use is mostly free, and domestic water use is either free or heavily subsidised. Consequently, both these sectors use water very inefficiently. Take domestic use in Qatar, a desert country which provides water to its citizens primarily through desalination. An average Qatari citizen, who receives water for free, uses around 1,200 litres per day. In contrast, an average non-Qatari, who pays about 35% of the operation and maintenance cost of water, uses about one-sixth that of a Qatari citizen. Compare this level of per capita water use with cities like Tallinn or Hamburg. Through the use of economic instruments like pricing and incentives, as well as public education and awareness, average Tallinn and Hamburg residents use 95 and 111 litres per day respectively. Producing drinking water and supplying it to households, and then treating wastewater, are normally very energy-intensive processes. Since around 90% of water used comes back as wastewater which needs to be treated, less water use results in lower energy requirements for both water supply and wastewater treatment, thus saving both water and energy. Third, efficiencies for water use in agricultural and urban sectors are very low. With existing knowledge and technology, water use for the agricultural sector can be reduced by one-third without sacrificing crop yields. Policy instruments are already available which can save 23% of current global water use. For urban water, most cities of the world currently lose 25% to 60% of water that enters the supply system. The largest water utility of England and Wales, Thames Water, which has been in private hands from 1989, routinely loses 25% of all the water it supplies. In contrast, water utility in Tokyo loses less than 4% and Singapore less than 5%. Even a third-world city like Phnom Penh loses 6.5% of water. Thus, there are tremendous opportunities of saving water in urban domestic sectors as well.
“The world is not facing a water crisis because of physical scarcity of water. It is facing a crisis because of poor management of water.“
Fourth, it is necessary to take a holistic look at water, food, energy and economic development sectors. If achieving food security is an objective, one of the low-hanging fruit is to reduce food waste. At present, some 40% of food produced is never eaten by consumers. It is estimated that if this food waste can be eliminated, it will save 57% of water extracted from the environment and one-third of the land cultivated to grow food. Thus, if saving water is an important objective, reducing food waste has to become a priority consideration. Regrettably such alternatives are not in the purview of all water ministries or the profession. Fifth, all the apocalyptic views of the water sector assume that science and technology will advance only incrementally in the future. We think this is fundamentally wrong. Major advances are taking place in crop breeding, genetic modifications, advances
in using sensors and technology, and many other areas which are likely to change the water-food-energy interlinkages very substantially in the coming years. Sixth, during the post-2000 period, more and more major heads of multinational corporations are becoming aware of the importance of sustainable water management. Probably the most notable example is Peter Brabeck, former CEO and current Chairman of the Board of Nestlé. Under his leadership, Nestlé has institutionalised efficient water management in its culture. The company has reduced its water requirements to manufacture each tonne of product by one-third during 2005-13. It has also reduced water discharges per tonne of product by 60% between 2003 and 2013, and in total quantity by 37.2%. In 2013 alone, it reused 6.7 million tonnes of water. In its Mexico and India milk factories, recovery and use of condensation from milk, and other conservative practices, have made them selfsufficient in terms of water. Other major multinationals like Unilever, Danone, CocaCola and Tyson have also shown significant improvements in their water management practices since 2000. Increasingly more and more business enterprises are realising the value of water and taking measures to continually increase their water use efficiencies and decrease their wastewater discharges.
“More and more business enterprises are realising the value of water.”
Last but not least, many governments are facing up to the dangers of water scarcity to their economies, especially after prolonged droughts. The decade-long millennial drought in Australia, and the current ongoing one in California, have forced governments to take hard political decisions which without the crises may not have been possible. As more and more countries start facing serious water crises because of climatic changes and fluctuations, as well as results of decades of poor water management practices, they will be forced to make difficult political decisions which they have been reluctant to make earlier. All these recent and future crises will create numerous new positive feedback loops which would substantially improve water management practices in the coming years. The water profession and the institutions have largely ignored these developments which will substantially alter the global water management landscape in the coming years. In fact, we believe water management practices and processes will change more during the next 15 years compared to the past 150 years. The door to manage water as an exclusive sector is now closing rapidly. However, many new doors are opening which will allow humankind to manage water, food, energy and economic development effectively. Unlike the vast majority of the water profession, we are cautiously optimistic about the world’s water future.
Professor Biswas is the 2006 winner of the Stockholm Water Prize and one of the founders of the International Water Resources Association and the World Water Council. Dr Tortajada is Past President of the International Water Resources Association. Both are co-founders of the Third World Centre for Water Management, Mexico.
20 SPRING 2016
Sustainable Development Goals and ‘groundwater graveyards’ Professor Robert Kalin, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Strathclyde
Water is essential for life, for sustainable human development, and well-managed water services contribute to poverty reduction, economic growth and environmental sustainability. Increasing human population, the impacts of climate change and unsustainable growth all place pressures on water demand, water quality and water availability. As the successors to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are interwoven and provide targets to be met for different water challenges by 2030. The declared purpose of SDG6 is to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”. Groundwater accounts for over 98% of the world’s available (non-frozen) fresh water that we use for drinking, agriculture and food production, industry and manufacturing, and importantly that maintains ecosystems. In fact, on average between 36% and 62% (depending on local climate) of river water is actually groundwater seeping in as river base flow. Perhaps there should be more hydrogeologists within the water resource management sector.
“Water is a high priority for the Malawi Government, and groundwater is the dominant source of rural water supplies.”
Let us examine the case study of Malawi. Water is a high priority for the Malawi Government, and groundwater is the dominant source of rural water supplies. The Water Resources Act (Malawi) 2013 (WRA (2013)) clearly states all the rights and privileges of its citizens in respect of the water environment. The Government of Malawi has an overarching policy (Water Policy 2005 in review) which aims to provide water for the benefit of all citizens of Malawi, including resource management, development and service delivery. The policy, which has “Water and sanitation for all” as its vision, was developed for water interventions in line with the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy. The WRA (2013) provides for the instruments to holistically manage the water resources of Malawi, and the forthcoming policy will align practice in Malawi of Integrated Water Resources Management in line with the Dublin Principles. However, there is an extremely high vacancy rate in the sector and precious few hydrogeologists across the country. As part of the Scottish Government’s Climate Justice Fund project on Groundwater Resource Management in the Lower Shire Malawi, a strategic partnership comprising the University of Strathclyde, Water for People and the Government of Malawi collected data in a target district (Chikwawa) on functionality and potential groundwater risks to over 2,000 rural water points year on year since 2011. The data suggests the current investment in rural groundwater infrastructure in the region may not be fully functioning by the end of 2030. This means the SDGs for rural communities in Malawi will not only have to bring water to the 17% who theoretically are still without water according to MDG statistics (actual figure with non-functionality is closer to 47%), but will also have to undertake replacement by 2030 of water points installed under MDGs due to short lifetime
failures. We are where we are post-2015, and perhaps the SDGs require considered change in the way we implement rural groundwater infrastructure. To meet this challenge, key stakeholders across Malawi met to plan a considered new effort. This new work by the University of Strathclyde, Water For People and the Government of Malawi will evaluate rural water supplies across 25% of southern Malawi, and use this information to inform investment planning to meet SDG6 by 2030. As much of the rural water supplies in the Lower Shire Malawi are groundwater, significant work has started to better understand and manage this resource. Capacity building and training provides on-the-ground oversight of borehole installations, and new contracts for drilling have been put into place that focus on sustainable effective water points, not contracts that seek lowest cost and that produce water regardless of long-term water quality risks. Key to meeting SDG6 is an element that will pilot a modern apprentice scheme. This will ensure that local area mechanics are given hands-on experience in groundwater infrastructure implementation, and support to develop businesses centred on local-scale integrated resource management, including routine preventative maintenance of rural water supply infrastructure. If we are to stop ‘groundwater graveyards’, we need to develop this work, and continue to seek new and integrated ways to implement and manage rural water resources.
MDG development infrastructure in a ‘groundwater graveyard’ after being removed from all installations as they were not a sustainable solution to rural water supplies.
See www.strath.ac.uk/courses/postgraduatetaught/hydrogeology for information on Hydrogeology Training at the University of Strathclyde.
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Global access to safe drinking water Professor Alan MacDonald, Principal Hydrogeologist, British Geological Survey, and Honorary Professor, University of Dundee
Throughout the world, an estimated 663 million people do not have access to a safe water supply. Instead, they take their drinking water from unimproved springs, streams, or shallow dug-out wells, the majority of which are contaminated. Even improved water sources can be contaminated, and a recent review estimated that one billion showed evidence of faecal contamination. The knock-on effects impact every area of life. There is the obvious problem of acute infectious or chronic diarrhoea from drinking contaminated water. A sixth of all children’s deaths in developing countries are attributed to diarrhoea, and the long-term effect of chronic illness can stop children reaching their full potential. The burden of carrying water long distances falls disproportionally on women who could better use their time in more productive activity, and on children who should be at school paving the way for wider, long-term development.
Against this background, in 2015 the world agreed new ambitious targets for universal access to drinking water and sanitation for all by 2030. These Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) commit the global community to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and reliable drinking water and sanitation, to improve water quality, and to ensure that water withdrawals are sustainable. A tall order. It is good to be ambitious though, given the difference a safe, reliable water supply in your home can make. The previous targets – the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – delivered good progress in increasing water access. The MDG target to reduce by half the people without access to safe water, was set in 2000 and achieved five years early in 2010. However, the new SDG targets are of a different magnitude, demanding higher levels of service, and complete coverage. This presents a number of significant challenges, particularly in Africa. Three of them are discussed below: water scarcity; keeping water supplies functioning; and the impact of increased climate variability. The first obvious question to ask is whether there is sufficient water to meet the world’s drinking water needs? The simple answer is yes. In the media there are many recurrent stories about water scarcity, and predictions of water wars. However, although there are considerable tensions in some locations, this almost always refers to water for irrigation which accounts for approximately 90% of the water used in the world. Water scarcity assessments also generally do not account for groundwater storage which can offer a large buffer to change. In Africa, where the greatest effort will be required to increase access to water, irrigation is not yet in competition with drinking water, and there is little evidence of overexploitation of groundwater resources. However, care
will be needed in the future as irrigation increases, and urban water demands increase, to ensure that drinking water is given priority. A second key challenge of delivering the SDG target of universal access to safe drinking water is keeping water supplies functioning. Approximately 40% of hand-pumps installed in Africa are estimated to be non-functional at any one time. Whilst some degree of non-functionality is to be expected, 40% is not acceptable. The causes of the problem are complex and unclear, and the subject of ongoing research. Typically, the problem first manifests itself in one of three ways: a broken pump, the pump running out of water, or the water quality being too poor to use. However, behind these symptoms are secondary causes: a lack of spare parts to fix the pump, the borehole being drilled in a location with little groundwater, poor local governance of the water point, or sub-standard material used in the construction. Digging a little deeper into the problem we find some underlying conditions which can set the culture that makes failure more likely. Issues such as a relentless focus on keeping costs of construction down, inadequate emphasis on training the skilled people required to site, drill and construct water points, or confusion on the responsibilities for longterm maintenance. Climate change presents a further challenge. Threats from climate change relate to changes in temperature and precipitation which in turn lead to changes in hydrology, demand for water, and also damage from storms. Some water technology is more resilient to extended periods of drought than others. Shallow wells, small springs, or rainwater tanks are highly vulnerable in times of drought, while deeper groundwater sources or large piped schemes from reservoirs offer greater resilience. The current ongoing drought in Ethiopia illustrates the impact that this can have, with two million people estimated to be at risk due to the failure of their water sources under drought conditions.
“It is good to be ambitious…, given the difference a safe, reliable water supply in your home can make.”
The new Sustainable Development Goals for water are ambitious and beset by challenges. However, given the great benefit that access to safe reliable water can give a family, surely it’s a target worth aiming for.
22 SPRING 2016
Food, water and energy nexus: a perfect storm? Professor Marian Scott, Professor of Environmental Statistics, University of Glasgow
The language of sustainability is ever-evolving and one of the more recent additions is the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus. It was first introduced at a conference in Bonn in 2011, and was further defined for Rio 2012. The WEF nexus is a concept that describes a system or systems linking water, energy and food, and the feedbacks and flows that exist amongst them. Its development has been linked to the challenges we face in securing a sustainable supply of water, energy and food for all (Sir John Beddington’s ‘perfect storm’). The nexus by its nature is not limited by physical or political boundaries; it is closely related to the recent set of Sustainable Development Goals at a global scale but it is also present at national, regional and local scales. Growing populations, with increasing demand for land /food /energy/ water, and changing climates mean that many societies recognise a need and express a desire to limit exploitation of their natural resources. Here in Scotland, elements of these are captured in our Land Use Strategy. This sets out “to consider an integrated approach to the management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in a fair way”, so within the nexus do we also have an idea of equity? Our goal of a more circular economy “shifts the focus from being efficient in the use of materials to the bigger gains from reusing those materials across the economy”. According to the ‘one planet measure’, we are living beyond our planetary resources. The Global Footprint Network states that “Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.6 planets. Moderate UN scenarios suggest that if current population and consumption trends continue, by the 2030s, we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us. Turning resources into waste faster than waste can be turned back into resources puts us in global ecological overshoot, depleting the very resources on which human life and biodiversity depend. Earth Overshoot Day has moved from early October in 2000 to August 13 in 2015.” The decisions we make and the response of these systems to our choices particularly when we are ‘close to the edge’ makes the tensions, balances and counter-balances more critical at local, national and international scales.
between the different processes is essential to increase our ability to effectively predict and manage them. One challenge in such a complex landscape is where to start. The WEF nexus happens in geographical space, so that might lead us naturally to consider the UK/Scotland and its land and land use management. We can also summarise national environmental accounts through the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting. Looking at the national land use map, and considering the annual environmental accounts on energy or water, does not give us the dynamic process detail that we need, nor the interconnections and interactions. So we need to zoom in, which means our next step is to start overlaying our map with finer detail. Thinking about water, then we might naturally think about catchments and what activities occur in that catchment (agriculture, fishing, recreation, abstraction for hydropower, and so on) which leads naturally to ‘ecosystem accounts’. Is the nexus framing widely used? Increasingly so, but is it useable or practicable? My personal answer to this latter question would be ‘not fully, not yet’. There are only a very few modelling tools that potentially could be used in operational management. Part of the challenge is the complexity of the systems and our understanding, part is the data-hungry nature of the framing, and a further part is the scales at which the systems operate. But the framing is a critical first step. There are some examples beginning to appear, such as work in Qatar and China.
“Understanding the interdependencies between the different processes is essential to increase our ability to effectively predict and manage them.”
What is new about the nexus? Perhaps its very apparent integration and holistic description. Taking water, energy and food individually, each on its own is generally well understood and well measured, but our policies, management and decision-making processes often deal with them in isolation – we still have silos. We also face challenges even in dealing with one dimension, so how much bigger a challenge is it to deal with all three? Indeed, are there more than three dimensions, for example should there be a further W for waste, and what about climate change since that surely must colour all our thinking and our decision making? The water-energy-food (WEF) system includes physical and natural processes, economics and societal elements, and all interconnected and impacted by climate and demographic change. There is not just one scale at which these processes operate – it could be global, national, regional and community level. Understanding the interdependencies
WEFWEBs is an EPSRC-funded project that started in October 2015, that is working to measure and map the WEF nexus to identify boundaries, interdependencies, feedbacks, bottlenecks and disconnects in the network dependencies across scales (national, regional, local and individual) and over multiple dimensions (including social, civic, economic, physical, ecological, political and digital). Maps in this context represent a multitude of different visualisations.
Our first steps in delivering these maps are to collect, review, synthesise and analyse existing data on water, food and energy in the UK, and to map the broad regulatory environment for water (abstraction, pollution control and flood risk), food (farming, food safety, animal welfare and agri-environment objectives) and energy (production and use) and, most importantly, to engage with stakeholders. How successful we will be remains to be seen, but at least we will, by this investigation, advance our understanding.
FURTHER READING www.water-energy-food.org www.unece.org/env/water/nexus
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Sustainable Rural Communities: the water security challenge Richard Allan, MDT Research Fellow in Sustainable Water Management, James Hutton Institute
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2015 states that water and water security are the most significant societal risk factors. This is set in a context of a world which, by 2030, is estimated will have a population of close to 8.3 billion people that will need 50% more food, 50% more energy, 30% more freshwater and around 120 million hectares of additional land to grow crops (for food and energy-related outputs). Balancing the supply and demand of water resources goes hand in hand with the need to secure water quality and safe sanitation. Policy and regulation need to be reviewed to ensure that there is adequate funding for infrastructure projects and behavioural change to deliver sustainable water at a local and national level. Rural communities face particular challenges for access to affordable energy, treatment and disposal of waste, and the provision of drinking water supplies. The Sustainable Rural Community (SRC) concept envisions a paradigm shift in delivery of these services and aims to deliver a closedloop system that is carbon and energy neutral, cost-effective and resilient. The concept is currently being researched by Scotland’s Centre of Expertise for Waters (CREW), operated by the James Hutton Institute.
local population. The outcomes of a SRC could be those listed in the Bristol Accord, although measurable metrics are not easy to apply universally as we are talking about applying a concept or goal rather than an accountable value. The water sector – drinking water treatment, and wastewater collection and treatment – with its energy use, waste production, energy-generating capacity and impact on the water environment and ecology, is central to the SRC concept.
“Rural communities face particular challenges.”
What are Sustainable Rural Communities? The Sustainable Rural Community concept is broad, spanning transport, housing, reducing carbon emissions, human capital, energy use, land use and governance. ‘Sustainability’, ‘rural’ and ‘community’ are not easy concepts to define in simple terms, and SRCs are no easier to describe. Yet the ideals of SRCs have been taken on universally to describe an imagined future of how a community could function. There are government policies that use the concept; for example, the Californian Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008 uses the buzzword of ‘sustainable communities’ to name legislation about meeting carbon emissions targets in the arenas of housing, transport and land use. There are also small-scale water projects that are labelled as supporting SRCs, for example in the use of low-carbon wastewater treatment such as reedbed ponds, or wastewater treatment that generates energy from biogas collected. Social movements such as the ecovillages network (who promote sustainable development in villages) fall under the banner of SRC, but essentially SRC is a broad, subjective concept of a better future as opposed to a prescriptive set of outcomes.
© Mike Robinson
In descriptive terms, SRCs are places that can sustain populations of a viable age structure with a diverse economy, keeping employment rates at levels no worse than urban areas alongside a primary sector producing goods from farming, fishing and forestry for the needs of the
How does the concept of Sustainable Rural Communities apply to Scotland? The Scottish Government is fully focused on water management as part of its Hydro Nation agenda (see page 6) which sets out a sectoral commitment to delivering sustainable green growth in Scotland by maximising the use of Scotland’s natural resources in water. A cornerstone of the Hydro Nation agenda is promoting SRCs and, through CREW, funding projects relevant to SRCs. These projects are managed by a steering group, chaired by Scottish Government, which includes SEPA, Drinking Water Quality Regulator for Scotland, Scottish Water, Citizens Advice Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage, and this ensures good links to policy. The projects have been scoped out in consultation with the stakeholder group and address: • sustainable treatment technologies; • closing the resource loop (chemical and energy demand); • improving public health protection; and, importantly, • engaging the communities to understand the local requirements and the interventions required to deliver sustainability. While Scotland, as a case study, provides one set of circumstances, the output of the projects address some generic aspects of SRCs that support achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal of ensuring access to water and good sanitation. This means that the knowledge output can be applied internationally, and indeed the James Hutton Institute What is a Sustainable Community? is working Bristol Accord Conclusions of Ministerial Informal across a on Sustainable Communities in Europe (2005) number of ACTIVE, INCLUSIVE AND SAFE – fair, tolerant international and cohesive with a strong local culture and other regions such shared community activities as China WELL RUN – with effective and inclusive and India to participation, representation and leadership lead research WELL CONNECTED – with good transport into the services and communication linking people to factors that jobs, schools, health and other services allow rural WELL SERVED – with public, private, community communities and voluntary services that are appropriate to to become people’s needs and accessible to all sustainable. ENVIRONMENTALLY SENSITIVE – providing places for people to live that are considerate of the environment THRIVING – with a flourishing, diverse and innovative local economy WELL DESIGNED AND BUILT – featuring quality built and natural environment FAIR FOR EVERYONE – including those in other communities, now and in the future
24 SPRING 2016
Global landscapes holding water Dr Marc Stutter, Managing Catchments and Coasts Research Theme Leader, James Hutton Institute; Dr Mark Wilkinson, Environmental and Biochemical Sciences, James Hutton Institute; Dr Paul Quinn, Senior Lecturer in Catchment Hydrology, Newcastle University; Minni Jain, Earthlinks UK Globally, there is an increase in the occurrence of floods and droughts; these issues need to be addressed urgently. This winter the UK witnessed a spell of extreme weather, resulting in a number of record river flows and thousands of homes and businesses being flooded. Many of these homes were flooded with dirty water, with the majority of affected people not able to go back home for weeks or months. Our traditional flood defence network was tested to the extreme and in many places was overtopped. With growing costs for increasing conventional protection, such as flood walls, there is a need to look at alternatives for flood management. There is growing interest in Natural Flood Management approaches that hold and attenuate flows in the UK, but similarities of case studies between the UK and India show that floods and droughts are comparable in cause and mitigating approaches. Additionally, learning to be more drought-resilient will bring benefits to rural business in the UK, now and into the future. A changing portrayal of flooding messages in the media has left a complex landscape of concepts. Initially, polarising debate regarding rewilding the uplands pitched environmentalists against farmers, when ironically land managers will be our best allies in delivering well-planned and proportionate flood management. Fortunately, this has matured into sensible discussion of integrated management of landscapes to adapt to and manage flooding. Another growing message is the understanding of the connectivity between rural fringes, where flow is generated and may be most suitably managed, and the downstream pinch points for urban areas and infrastructure. So, given these complex messages and concepts, how do we expect our decision makers, local land managers and communities to interpret these and maintain actions outside of flooding periods? An international collaboration, The Flow Partnership, is showing that simple, clear messages of the benefits of landscape-wide water management have universal appeal and roots in traditional methods. The similarities between Indian Johads (water dams being used to restore droughtaffected areas of Rajasthan, see page 13) and the bunds and buffers being employed in UK Natural Flood Management are striking. The Partnership’s mixed group of academics and water managers are utilising learning from across nations to show that community-led actions can realise costeffective water features based on simple natural engineering principles.
A further element for success is that of clarity of messages, and something that we appreciate in the UK as a growing necessity for joined-up environmental policies and funding. Promoting Natural Flood Management measures will require clearer funding schemes and a societal recognition of water stewardship that encourages novel schemes of funding. There are currently different funding schemes for flow-attenuating features; the multiple benefits of these measures should be able to draw across funding schemes. However, we are living in difficult economic times, therefore holding water promotes ‘doing more for less’. There needs to be closer equity of those who pay (where the actions take place) and who benefits (eg, a flooded settlement downstream). This can be managed with the concept of an extended catchment, whereby services move across scales, for example where food production and flood benefits downstream are viewed as services provided in upper catchments and can be funded by beneficiaries outside of the local area. Public-private tools may help, and several templates already exist within the catchment management programmes for protecting UK drinking waters. It is time to maintain the pressure for action right through the next year, and think seriously about joined-up actions to rethink our landscapes. We can learn from across nations as the concept of holding water applies to both droughts and floods. The long-term messages need to be about slowing and holding water in landscapes, adapting and changing our practices in connected rural and urban systems, and reengaging our communities in stewarding the natural health of their local regions.
“With growing costs for increasing conventional protection, such as flood walls, there is a need to look at alternatives for flood management.”
It must be understood that recent extreme flows are often beyond our capacity to solve with landscape change that would be anything like in proportion with how we use our land for other purposes such as food production, places to live and natural functions such as peatland carbon storage. Yet Natural Flood Management should be viewed as appropriate to give communities that rank poorly in the national costeffectiveness evaluations for engineered schemes, a hand in their own destiny to control impacts from moderate, more frequent floods, and additionally to ‘climate-proof’ larger engineered structures. Often unobtrusive, replicated small features that attenuate flows by temporarily storing water can bring benefits across water, soil erosion and habitat aspects, and are often capable of being community-led. © Mike Robinson
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Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management (FCERM) Dr Catherine Morgan, Energy, Geoscience, Infrastructure and Society, Heriot-Watt University
December 2015 saw the wettest year on record since 1902 in the UK, with storms Desmond, Eva and Frank generating what the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology called “exceptional” hydrological conditions, leading the UK’s rivers to discharge more water into the ocean during one day than ever before. The prolonged, intense rainfall across a large area of upland northern Britain contributed to substantial rainfall totals, and the already saturated soils from excessive November rainfall exacerbated the flooding seen in December. The widespread and repeated flooding created significant disruption to transport, utilities and agriculture, and damage to thousands of homes.
comprising expert practitioners from across research, policy and practice sectors brought together in a network, The Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Network (FCERM. net). This community of practitioners is a crucial resource that will help shape the future of Flood Risk Management. Together, we recognise that there is no one single approach to managing flood risk, rather a holistic and multi-disciplinary approach is required, that targets the physical engineering challenges, respects and enhances the natural ecological catchment dynamics, and engages local communities in creating socially responsible and sustainable approaches to climate resilience. The co-creation of research projects, by leading researchers and experts in flood policy and practice, has been a signature attribute of the network. The inclusion of all of the key players in the Flood Risk Management chain in the research process has been a crucial step forward.
“One… project, Flood MEMORY, recognises the increased flood risk associated with storms that occur in quick succession of each other.”
This succession of storm events occurred two years after the devastation caused by the winter floods of 2013 that inundated Somerset and the surrounding areas week after week. In a report released by the Environment Agency in March 2016, the damage from the 2013-14 floods was estimated to have reached £1,300 million, with severe consequences for small businesses, communities and families. Their analysis indicates that residential properties suffered the greatest proportion of damages, with 25% of total damages occurring to this sector; the best estimate is £320 million incurred by 10,465 properties.
For some, questions remain about the extent our warming climate has played in recent extreme events, and the confidence with which we can make assertions about projections from climate models. What the latest IPCC report tells us is that our world is warming – of that there is little doubt – and it is clear that a warmer atmosphere creates significant shifts in the hydrological cycle. There is robust evidence that the number of people affected by river flooding will increase with greater warming, while there is very high confidence that coastal and low-lying areas will experience inundation and erosion more frequently due to sea-level rise. As we prepare to build resilience, and support communities in adapting for the future, what should our response be to extreme hydrological events? Within the UK there is a body of professional and academic expertise in Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management
FCERM.net has a number of co-created research projects across the UK. One such innovative project, Flood MEMORY, recognises the increased flood risk associated with storms that occur in quick succession of each other – very much like our experience of storms Desmond, Eva and Frank in 2015. While many of our flood defence assets are built to mitigate for a single storm event, increasingly our experience is that the greater flood risks are associated with clusters of storms. Dr Heather Haynes, a researcher on the project, explains the importance of this work: “The project investigates the most critical flood scenarios caused by sequences or clusters of extreme weather events striking vulnerable systems of flood defences, urban areas, communities and businesses. The team analyse and simulate situations where a second flood may strike before coastal or river defences have been reinstated after damage, or householders and small businesses are in a vulnerable condition recovering from the first flood. By examining such events and identifying the worst case scenarios, we hope our findings will lead to enhanced flood resilience and better allocation of resources for protection and recovery.” Other projects associated with the Network explore sustainable water management options for managing flood risk in cities (the Blue-Green Cities project), and investigate resilience and adaptation strategies from small businesses (the SESAME project). It is hoped that, with different sectors of the Flood Risk Management profession working together from inception through to delivery, these projects will produce knowledge, tools and expertise that is leading-edge, innovative and of real practical value to those homes and businesses facing the threat of future flooding. FURTHER READING Flood MEMORY project (wateracademy.org.uk/flood-memory) Blue-Green Cities project (wateracademy.org.uk/deliveringand-evaluating-multiple-flood-risk-benefits-blue-green-cities) SESAME project (sesame.uk.com) Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Network (www.fcerm.net)
26 SPRING 2016
Water challenges in the Pantanal: old problems in new econom Dr Antonio A R Ioris, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh
Water management problems are certainly among some of today’s most difficult challenges for governments, business sectors and wider society. The lack of water for basic needs, caused by excessive water use or by the degradation of aquatic systems, violates human rights, undermines economic development and often compromises social justice and democracy. There is growing recognition of the importance of fair water management, but the global debate about sectoral priorities and the formulation of appropriate responses nonetheless remains widely open. Mainstream strategies, such as the European Union’s Water Framework Directive and other equivalent pieces of legislation, have stirred a heated discussion among water users and stakeholder groups, but have offered little in terms of genuine alternatives to the mounting privatisation of resources and persistent environmental injustices. In that context, climate change makes everything more complicated, urgent and expensive.
and reactive responses that are, at best, only marginally successful. Most of the conservation debate is still focused on a high-level description of problems that, in the end, fails to deal with the underlying socioecological complexity. The available interpretations concentrate on the disturbance of ecosystems, regulatory failures and lack of investments, but it is rare to find critical analyses that connect conservation measures with personal subjectivities and sociospatial inequalities. What is worse, for the majority of politicians and policy-makers, environmental conservation and basic human needs are seen as secondary to the imperative of economic development.
“For the majority of politicians and policymakers, environmental conservation and basic human needs are seen as secondary to the imperative of economic development.”
Those problems are even more acute in tropical wetland areas affected by the rapid expansion of urbanisation, energy demand and agricultural production. Water-related controversies plague the Pantanal wetland, located in the upper section of the Paraguay River Basin, in the centre of South America. It is an emblematic illustration of environmental degradation and social inequalities exacerbated by policy mistakes, ill-conceived infrastructure and the influence of dominant politico-economic groups. The Pantanal is a huge complex of savannah wetlands (around 150,000km2) and one of the most important tropical aquatic systems in the planet. Its Brazilian section is particularly under threat due to the advance of intensive agribusiness production (cultivation of mainly soybean, sugarcane, cotton and maize, as well as extensive cattle raising), the removal of the original vegetation, the construction of hydropower schemes and large navigation projects. Accelerating rates of environmental degradation have resulted in a high level of uncertainty about the future of the Pantanal wetland and the river basin at large. On the one hand, the tension between available resources and strong development pressures has led to recurrent calls for ecological conservation. On the other, the management of ecosystems and natural resources is still a matter of significant disagreement among social groups. The practical outcome is a situation with contradictory demands
Research carried out in the Cuiabá catchment, one of the main tributaries of the mighty Paraguay River, showed the disturbing lack of agreement about who is responsible for environmental problems. This river basin has an area of 28,732km2 that can be schematically divided into three main sections: the plateaus with intensive plantation farming, the medium section around the city of Cuiabá (the capital of the state of Mato Grosso), and the Pantanal floodplain. The catchment is shared by 14 local authorities and has a population of around one million with an urbanisation rate of 93%. Yet, investments in water services have lagged behind the rate of urban growth and only 30% of the urban sewage is collected and treated. The water company of the capital city has been involved in a laughable process of privatisation, re-nationalisation, re-privatisation, which has seriously compromised the quality of the service. Additional funds were allocated to prepare the city for the 2014 Football World Cup, but disturbing evidence of widespread corruption seriously affected the construction timetable (not only in the water sector; industrial corruption also affected transport, roads, infrastructure, etc). As a result, the river system, which has historically been one of the main recreation options for the locals, was then banned by the municipalities downstream of the city of Cuiabá due to the increasing contamination by faecal coliforms and other forms of pollution. The same public authorities that are responsible for environmental conservation and scientific research are
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mic frontiers simultaneously the main promoter, and beneficiary, of such conservative models of economic development that take place in the upland areas surrounding the Pantanal, where agribusiness and intensive agro-industry have appropriated large extensions of land and resources. Instead of an internal coherence and good co-ordination between scales of government, the state apparatus is permeable and especially susceptible to the influences of the most powerful social groups. And it is also evident that the environmental branch of Mato Grosso government is one of the politically weaker and less important divisions of the state apparatus. Ironically, although the primary commitment of the Mato Grosso government remains the expansion of crop production, the social imagery of the Pantanal – populated by colourful images of birds, fish and water – has been consistently appropriated by politicians as supposed evidence of their environmental credentials. The fact that it is still possible to find in the Pantanal ecosystems still relatively well preserved (the result mainly of the difficult access to most of the floodplain rather than the consequence of conservation initiatives) effectively operates as an element of the legitimisation of hegemonic development policies. As much as the symbolism of the Pantanal operates as the ‘moral reserve’ of public authorities in charge of environmental conservation, it is also constantly emphasised as one of the priority regions for the expansion of tourism and ecotourism in Mato Grosso. In addition, the general uncertainty about environmental trends and regulatory responses reflects the wider context of political demobilisation and civil society disorganisation in the Cuiabá River Basin. The local experience has shown that it is easier to contain public criticism and divert attention away from the mounting environmental problems if and when the liability is not clearly understood. Environmental injustice goes beyond the asymmetric distribution of opportunities and negative impacts; it is also a manifestation of the hierarchical and discriminatory treatment of popular demands and the paternalistic interaction with the population. Overall, the research identified a widespread sense of uneasiness with both the condition of the Cuiabá catchment and the Pantanal at large, particularly with what has been seen as the inadequate responses of public agencies. The fact that the public normally holds opinions that contrast with the official discourse and the interests of strong stakeholder groups represents a major difficulty for the enforcement of regulation as well as for the mobilisation of society. The introduction and enforcement of environmental regulation have happened through a patchwork of measures that often are not consistent with each other and fail to lead to results in line with scientific claims, popular knowledge, and the formal objectives defined for the Pantanal by government agencies. The main conclusion is that, despite the evident differences between past and present, development in the region continues to be promoted through the double exploitation of natural resources and of the low-income population. The Pantanal remains in the periphery of national development, but firmly subordinated to the priorities of the main economic and political centres. Regional economic growth has been primarily based on a supposed abundance of land, water and biodiversity, first in the floodplain and later in the entire region. Unrestrained exploitation has led to an increasing scarcity of resources and rising number of environmental conflicts. The biased interventions of the state apparatus have been at the forefront of expansionist activities and have been primarily responsible for the systematic generation of uneven outcomes. The action of the state, in the form of
regulation, incentives and technologies, has ultimately reflected the hegemonic pressure of the stronger economic sectors and their complex articulation with globalised markets. The removal of this chain of discrimination and inequalities constitutes the fundamental challenge to achieve a more sustainable pattern of water management and human development in the Pantanal.
28 SPRING 2016
Rockall Solo Nick Hancock
© Michael Schofield
the only solid object in that tempestuous ocean, unable to do a single thing about it. Speaking to trawler men by VHF, who returned from their safe harbours to the area after the storm had passed, I realised that floating safely over such waves as I experienced that night would have been hard enough, but hoping to sit tight in one spot with them washing over and through my refuge was really pushing my luck.
“There was nothing I could do but wait and hope.”
When dawn broke, I was thankfully still there to see it, and as the weather eased, it was time for damage assessment. There were slack straps at the leeward end of the pod, but they were all still attached; a bent anchor at the seaward end, from where the big wave struck, revealed the force of the water that had hit me in the night. The straps at that end were now under a huge amount of tension, but again thankfully all still attached. My equipment barrels were not so lucky: four of 12 were lost to the sea, containing food, climbing equipment and some non-essentials; enough of a loss to have to reassess my goals and to devise a new method of extraction, as the equipment with which I had intended to lower the RockPod off my ledge was gone. The next few days were spent with wrecked nerves, fearing every crash of the waves below, and every patter of spray falling on the plastic shell of my pod, trying to work out a balance between food, weather and boat availability. Before the storm, I had relished rougher seas as they changed my panorama on a daily basis and let me know there was more than just me and the rock out there. Would I now break the occupation records, or would I have to be retrieved just days before I broke them?
Lying there on Rockall in my home-made ‘RockPod’, alone, foetal, I thought about breaking the promise I’d made to my wife; about not making it home safely. There was nothing I could do but wait and hope that the forecast was correct; that it was now approaching the peak of the storm. Thud, shudder then pray. Wave after wave hitting the pod; the deafening howl of the wind and the sound of spray landing on the deck of the pod was terrifying. Three in the morning, near the forecast peak, and a huge deluge of sea water shunted my shelter across Hall’s Ledge, the only (but small) flat section of rock just below the 17.5 metre summit. Was I still attached to the rock? Were there higher waves and worse to come? I couldn’t check from inside as it was pitch black outside, and daren’t go out for fear of letting in the sea and swamping my equipment and supplies. I just had to lie there and wait. I thought about how this would be a different night if either the wind or the waves had been from a different direction, instead of both being from the south, compounding each other’s effect on my southerlyfacing perch. Two hundred and fifty miles out in the North Atlantic, during a Force Nine in the dead of night, and you know what ‘alone’ really feels like. You also learn very quickly what’s important in your life as you wait in silence to be swept off
After five days the sun returned, as did the minke whales and the seabirds; I returned to enjoying the privilege of being on Rockall, the rarity of the experience, and the sights and sounds of the ocean. My nerves were still shot, but I was regaining confidence, and my morale was growing. Very slowly the days of the records crept closer. I surpassed Tom McClean’s 29-year-old, 40-day solo occupation record first, with the Greenpeace 17-year-old 42-day group deadline passing shortly after. My original motivations for going to Rockall had been achieved. I now had just one thought: home. In June and July 2014, Nick Hancock lived alone on Rockall (some 230 miles from the Outer Hebrides) for 45 days, to raise funds for Help for Heroes. He set two new endurance records: the longest, and the longest solo, occupation of Rockall. Published in July 2015, Rockall Solo: 45 days of Discipline, Optimism and Endurance charts the story of five years of planning, fundraising and logistics just to get to the start line, and Nick’s experience during that record-breaking occupation. Nick will be speaking about the expedition at Birnam Institute (www.birnamarts.com) on 13 April.
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CREW: the Centre of Expertise for Waters Professor Robert C Ferrier, Director of Research Impact, James Hutton Institute; Jannette MacDonald, CREW Manager, James Hutton Institute; Emily Hastings, Social, Economic and Geographical Sciences, James Hutton Institute; Richard Allan, Environmental and Biochemical Sciences, James Hutton Institute; Professor John S Rowan, University of Dundee The aim of the Centre of Expertise for Waters (CREW) is to brigade the best available expertise on the management of water, to simplify access by policy teams to water-related expertise from across Scotland, and to enhance synergy of effort and stimulate innovative thinking in support of water policy. Established in 2011, CREW is a partnership between the James Hutton Institute and all of Scotland’s universities, and is supported by the Scottish Government’s Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division (RESAS). CREW’s purposes are: • to deliver timely and accurate advice to the Scottish Government, specifically to the main policy divisions and to implementation partners (SEPA, SNH and Scottish Water), based on expert scientific judgement provided by CREW members as well as specific policy-tailored research; • to stimulate innovative thinking in support of policy development and implementation; • to develop the co-ordination of research, analysis and interpretation. This requires clear communication mechanisms to ensure that effective knowledge exchange happens in practice. The Scottish Government and its implementation partners have a key role to play in the development of legislation and policies designed to ensure the quality and sustainability of Scotland’s water resources. Relevant government policies include the EU Water Framework Directive, Flood Risk Management (Scotland) Act, Scottish Climate Change Adaptation Programme, work of the Drinking Water Quality Regulator, and increasingly the Hydro Nation agenda and the related Water Resources (Scotland) Act 2013. This work needs to be underpinned by a robust evidence base, with information and data collated from both existing and new studies, made available in a timely fashion and easily understood by the users. A key role of CREW therefore is as a scientific interpreter, designed to deliver both expert information and co-ordinated research. In developing this service, CREW brings together a cadre of over 220 academic experts across Scotland, covering topics ranging from water technology through river and agricultural management to the challenge of basin governance and water law. In addition, the Centre liaises with other related initiatives at the UK and international levels, so that the Scottish Government has access to the most up-to-date, high-quality scientific support in relation to water.
CREW’s ways of working have evolved over time in response to policy and industry user needs, as well as those of the supporting academic community, most notably becoming the Centre of Expertise supporting the Scottish Government’s Hydro Nation Strategy. This involved expanding the Centre’s remit to increase the focus on Scotland’s waters sector and, in particular, the development of a research programme around Sustainable Rural Communities (see page 23). Presently the priority themes for the Centre are: • protecting drinking water; • flood risk management and coastal erosion; • river basin management planning; • Sustainable Rural Communities; • supporting Hydro Nation. Scotland is working hard to achieve its vision as the world’s first Hydro Nation (see page 6). Promoting Scotland as a Hydro Nation benefits Scotland through the economic development and good stewardship of Scotland’s water resources, and shares best practices with the world.
“Scotland is working hard to achieve its vision as the world’s first Hydro Nation.”
As part of the Hydro Nation initiative, the Scottish Government established the Hydro Nation Scholars Programme in 2013, to support its vision and provide postgraduate training to develop the next generation of global water leaders. The scholars benefit from specialised programmes provided under the auspices of the Hydro Nation Graduate School managed by CREW. Building the international profile further, the recently-announced Hydro Nation International Fellows Programme aims to build a science and technology bridge to partner countries, through establishing knowledge exchange leaders to support Scotland’s global ambition in water management and the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. The first appointment will be made in partnership with the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, in the area of resource-efficient water treatment systems for source protection. To date, CREW has delivered over 100 projects with a combined value of £5 million, which have had a direct impact on policy and industry thinking. Examples include supporting the implementation of the Water Resources Act by providing information on the value of water resources to Scotland, and in 2014 developing a methodology for surface water flood forecasting which was piloted at the Commonwealth Games, providing a bespoke surface water flood risk forecast; this latter project is being rolled out in other urban contexts. CREW was established to promote the transfer of knowledge from the research community to major stakeholders in support of the science-policy-practice interface and the implementation of water policy, and we judge our success by the degree to which we meet our aims, ultimately connecting water research, policy, and industry needs. Importantly, many found the processes of project development, engagement, and ongoing participation through strengthening business networks to be as valuable as project outputs themselves, and CREW is increasingly viewed as the ‘go to’ centre for water policy support and industry foresighting. © Mike Robinson
BOOK CLUB
30 SPRING 2016
The Hughs
St Kilda
Scotland’s Best Wee Hills Under 2,000 Feet
The Last and Outmost Isle
Andrew Dempster (Luath Press, November 2015)
Angela Gannon and George Geddes (Royal Commission on the Ancient & Historical Monuments of Scotland, October 2015)
There are 200 Hughs, divided equally between the Scottish mainland and the islands. The 100 mainland Hughs in this first volume are extremely diverse in location, from the rarelyclimbed Ben Hutig in the far north to the ever-popular Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh.
The Year of Living Danishly Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country Helen Russell (Icon Books, May 2015) When she was suddenly given the opportunity of a new life in rural Jutland, journalist and archetypal Londoner Helen Russell discovered a startling statistic: the happiest place on Earth isn’t Disneyland, but Denmark, a land often thought of by foreigners as consisting entirely of long dark winters, cured herring, Lego and pastries. What is the secret to their success? Are happy Danes born, or made? Helen decided there was only one way to find out: she would give herself a year, trying to uncover the formula for Danish happiness. From childcare, education, food and interior design to SAD, taxes, sexism and an unfortunate predilection for burning witches, The Year of Living Danishly is a funny, poignant record of a journey that shows us where the Danes get it right, where they get it wrong, and how we might just benefit from living a little more Danishly ourselves.
In 1527 Hector Boece, the first Principal of King’s College Aberdeen, wrote in his extensive History of the Scottish People of an island of rocky crags and prehistoric sheep, which could only be reached through extreme danger to life. It was, he explained, “the last and outmaist Ile” of Scotland. It was St Kilda. Archaeologists Angela Gannon and George Geddes spent over nine months living and working on St Kilda, as part of a team which has been researching its remarkable history for more than a decade. St Kilda, they argue, has never existed in total isolation, but has always been connected to a network of communities scattered across the north-western seaboard and the Highlands of Scotland. The Last and Outmost Isle pulls St Kilda back from the ‘end of the world’ to tell a compelling story of triumph over geographical adversity. What makes these islands so special is not their distance from ‘civilisation’, but rather their enduring capacity to remain a living part of Scotland over the course of some 3,000 years.
Is the EU Doomed? Professor Jan Zielonka (Polity Press, April 2014) The European Union is in crisis. Crippled by economic problems, political brinkmanship, and institutional rigidity, the EU faces an increasingly uncertain future. Jan Zielonka, Professor of European Politics at St Antony’s College, Oxford, argues that although the EU will only survive in modest form – deprived of many real powers – Europe as an integrated entity will grow stronger. Integration, he contends, will continue apace because of European states’ profound economic interdependence, historic ties and the need for political pragmatism. A revitalized Europe led by major cities, regions and powerful NGOs will emerge, in which a new type of continental solidarity can flourish. The EU may well be doomed, but Europe certainly is not.
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The Railway Atlas of Scotland Two Hundred Years of History in Maps David Spaven (Birlinn, October 2015) The rich diversity of Scotland’s railway network has never before been the subject of a specialist atlas. This substantial book showcases 181 topographical and railway maps, telling the story of the country’s railways from the early 19th century to the present day. Researched and written by David Spaven (who co-wrote the best-selling Mapping the Railways on the history of Britain’s rail network) this beautiful atlas allows the reader to understand the bigger story of the effects of the railway on the landscape and the impact of Scotland’s distinctive geography on the pattern of railway development over a period of nearly 200 years. The unique map selection is supported by an informative commentary on key cartographic, geographical and historical features, and will appeal not just to railway enthusiasts and those who appreciate the beauty of maps, but also to readers fascinated by the role of railways in Scottish history.
Readers of The Geographer can purchase The Railway Atlas of Scotland for only £27 (RRP £30) with free UK P&P. To order, please visit www.birlinn.co.uk or call 0845 370 0067 and quote the code ‘RSGSOFFER’.
RSGS: a better way to see the world Phone 01738 455050 or visit www.rsgs.org to join the RSGS. Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU Charity SC015599
Printed by www.jtcp.co.uk on Claro Silk 115gsm paper. 100% FSC certified using vegetable-based inks in a 100% chemistry-free process.
Prominence, position and panorama are the defining qualities of a new category of Scottish hills identified by hillwalking writer Andrew Dempster. “The Hughs (Hill Under Graham Height in Scotland) is a category based on my personal experience and judgement rather than on strict quantitative criteria, but it invariably signifies outstanding character. All under 2,000ft, these are Scotland’s best wee hills – hills with attitude, not altitude.”