The Deputy Director of the Global Water Security Center, Kate Brauman discussed the realities of access to sufficient clean water as it impacts agriculture, politics and energy
Water security can have a double meaning: a lack of water or too much water (e.g. flooding). In her Voices of Discovery lecture on March 10, Kate Brauman, deputy director of the Global Water Security Center at the University of Alabama, looked at recent cases of water damage, like Hurricane Helene, and sought to answer three questions: How much water is there, how are we using water, and are we going to fight about water?
The Voices of Discovery speaker series, hosted by Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences, brings to campus preeminent scientists and mathematicians who have left an indelible mark on the way we view the world. They share their remarkable experiences and perspectives with Elon students and the community. This series plays a fundamental role in the university’s commitment to creating a science-conscious community and helping students be informed citizens.
Brauman heads the Global Water Security Center, which supports government offices, NGOs and private industry, aiming to bridge the gap between environmental research and policy development and implementation.
During her lecture, Brauman presented several graphs produced by common environmental organizations that show the scarcity of fresh water on Earth but argued that those graphs underestimate the amount of water available for people to use. She compared the actual amount of water available to a 2,500 m Olympic swimming pool, with some areas having the water equivalent of 400,000 Olympic pools. Because water is not spread evenly across the globe, according to Brauman, scarcity is more real in some places of the world compared to others. Brauman said dry seasons and dry years can also influence the definition of an area’s water shortage.
“When we talk about using up our water, what we are actually talking about is, there is enough water for me to do what I want right now, in this place,” Brauman said.
Brauman also asked the audience how they use water and the responses were mostly consumption usages like drinking, cooking and cleaning. Brauman argues that liquid water is actually mostly used through going down drains. The water is not being used up, it is being recycled and reused.
She compared the water use/consumption to the watering cycle of house plants. When you water a houseplant too, there is a return flow (when the houseplant leaks). When this process happens in real life, for example through agriculture, the excess water placed in the soil then moves around, contributing to groundwater that many farmers pump back to the surface in order to water their crops. This cycle proves that water is rarely wasted as it is recycled over and over again.
“The big joke was always ‘Where does all the municipal household water in Minnesota go? Saint Louis and after that it ends up in New Orleans,’” Brauman said.
In terms of overconsumption, the question is, according to Brauman, how do we personally want water to be used?
“I have talked to farmers in India who say, ‘yes, I do not want my kids to do this [farming] so I will pump that water as hard as I can to send my kids to school so they never have to do what I am doing,’” Brauman said.
Brauman believes that this opinion is as valid as someone who would argue to preserve the groundwater so their future generations can carry on the tradition of farming. A parallel to this argument is prior social conflicts contributing to the fighting over water. Brauman discussed the tension at the Tenth Parallel, an invisible line that divides Muslim people in the North from Christian people in the South. It can be argued that water is sacred in this region causing people to compare how much water each side has access to. This region on the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa already has social conflicts with terrorist organizations like ISIS already existing in the area looking to leverage present grievances to gain supporters.
“What do they want? They want to get people on their side. So they’re looking for people who are already angry and who with just a little bit of organization will protest and to fight the government,” Brauman said.
Brauman argues that water conflicts are normally not the first conflict a country is facing but a publicly visible issue.
“Sometimes we do fight about water, but usually because we were already gearing up to fight about something else,” said Brauman.
Brauman advised student activists concerned with water environmental issues to continue caring about the environment and instead of just believing there is so little water, investigate to see how water is used, and recycled and how the demographics of an area affect its water scarcity rate.