I've handed the reins of my blog over to Mark Avery for most of June. Mark's sharing the successes and challenges of saving nature around the world in the run up to the Rio+20 Earth Summit.
One day last year I drove into New York City in a deluge. An American evangelist had predicted that that day would see the end of the world and although I was fairly confident that it wouldn’t, the weather seemed to be conspiring to make that happen. Later in a hotel room I had a shower and I filled my water bottles from the tap.
Water is an amazing thing isn’t it? You are, I am and the Archbishop of Canterbury is 60% water and we need it to stay alive and to get through the day. Hunger strikers can survive for weeks without food but only days without water.
And New York City’s 8 million people crowded into Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens etc need an awful lot of water and they expect it, as I did as a visitor, to be clean and safe. There’s an interesting story to New York’s water supply that I didn’t know while I was there but which illustrates some aspects of sustainable development.
Much of New York’s water comes from the Catskill Mountains, through which I had driven a couple of hours before arriving in the city, and where I had been admiring the view but cursing the rain for obliterating my chance of seeing a cerulean warbler. In the late 1990s, the water flowing off the Catskills had become sufficiently polluted with sewage, fertiliser and pesticides that it no longer met water standards and New York City authorities had to do something about it. Perhaps the knee-jerk reaction would have been to solve the problem by building more water treatment works but their estimated cost was $6bn with considerable annual maintenance costs in addition.
New York took a different approach and invested money in habitat protection and management to solve the problem, literally, at source. This option was costed at a still-staggering, but much lower, $1.5bn and so represented a massive saving. I wish I had known that when I had my fingers on the tap in my hotel room. We all treat water as a cheap and easy commodity, but that’s because all the hard work to get it to us is done out of sight and out of our minds.
Water companies in the UK are exploring similar approaches and the RSPB is involved in exciting work with United Utilities.
Sometimes you can have too much water. When it comes to floods we are also finding that working with nature is sometimes a cheaper and better alternative to trying to dominate it. Restoring more natural wetlands can reduce floods through reducing the speed of water flows and introducing small wetlands into urban areas cleans water before releasing it back into watercourses.
It all sounds great doesn’t it? Does everyone win?
I think it is great, but that doesn’t mean that everyone wins. If there is a conflict between water supply and food production then if water supplies win, it means that food producers may lose. Encouraging landowners through incentives can attempt to square this circle locally and making sure that we choose the ‘best’ land use to incentivise is a way forward – but not a simple and easy way forward.
Wildlife is likely to win if we work with nature a little bit more. However, just as a rainforest doesn’t need tigers to store carbon, the Catskills don’t need cerulean warblers to provide clean water. Delivering ecosystem services such as clean water and carbon storage doesn’t always deliver wildlife alongside it, but protected rainforests and watersheds are a very good start.
There are some relatively small steps you can take at home. By using water more wisely in our homes, gardens and workplaces, we can ease the pressure on our wetlands and rivers in these times of stress. You could install a water butt, fix leaking taps and use a Hippo or Save-a-Flush device to reduce water used in toilet flushing. Alternatively, consider replacing water-greedy plants with drought-resistant ones.
Dr Mark Avery is a former Conservation Director of the RSPB and now is a writer on environmental matters. We’ve asked Mark to write these 20 essays on the run up to the Rio+20 conference. His views are not necessarily those of the RSPB. Mark writes a daily blog about UK nature conservation issues.
peter - thank you for an interesting comment. It's probably a bit too soon to know what future summers and winters will be like - but they'll probably be different! All this rain is going to make life difficult for many birds - and that's what people seem to be seeing. Plenty of slugs in my garden too.
Intensive land use which disregards water resources is unsustainable. We need to think more and act more to take care of these resources.
redkite - many thanks. A good walk ruined and the neighbouring wetland too, you mean? The RSPB, I remember, did do some work with golf courses on this subject some years ago - but there is more to do.
There is a great campaign in Kenya to protect its "water towers"; Mau forest; Mt Kenya etc etc however the problem in UK is land shortage and intensive land use and what would appear to be a cold summer "monsoon season" while winters seem to be becoming cold and dry which is rather different from the hot summers and wet winters the DoE promised in the 1980's ! Who dreamed that up ?
The problem today on my allotment is lack of sunshine and rampant slugs which is very different from the driest soil ever recorded in late March ?
There is an alternative to austerity and that is closing the tax havens and taxing the receipts the Euro may depend on it; never mind the recession if it collapses............... should Rio be addressing the profound measure of this unsustainability ?
Good blog Mark, talking about use of water, pesticides, artificial fertilizers etc one of the big users is golf courses. I have to say I am not sure of the regulations on the use of these substances on golf courses but I suspect their use is considerable. Further more there is a habit of building golf courses next to wetlands, especially abroad in drier countries and then pumping or draining water off the wetland for the golf course where it picks up pesticides and fertilizer enrichment. Golf courses often cover very large areas with several courses within a club. While I have nothing against golfers I think the environmental impact of golf courses is something to be considered and if needs be regulated more tightly.