UNESCO Centre For Water Law, Policy and Science

Post by Volker Roeben and Rafael Macatangay

On Sunday 22nd March it is World Water Day, and this year’s theme is ‘water and climate change’. To honour the event, this week we are publishing five blog posts exploring different sides of the multifaceted relationship between water and climate change. Each post highlights research at the Centre that touches on these, some of the most urgent problems facing humanity today. Today’s post considers how water can provide renewable sources of energy as we transition away from fossil fuels. 

There are intricate links between water, electricity, and climate change. In the context of climate mitigation, there are incentives for hydropower development to provide renewable energy. By 2050 worldwide, the share of renewables in electricity generation is expected to be 50%, and the share of hydroelectric power in renewables generation, one-fourth (EIA 2020). Impoundment facilities are large hydropower systems that use a dam to store river water in a reservoir. When water is released from the reservoir it flows through a turbine, activating a generator to produce electricity. Pumped hydro systems store the energy from other power sources for later use, by pumping water uphill from a reservoir at a lower elevation to a second reservoir at a higher elevation. This acts like a battery, allowing for the provision of renewable energy to be managed to match times of higher and lower demand.

Hydropower provision must adapt to a changing climate and the associated alterations to river discharge and recession of glaciers. Depending on the incidence, duration, or magnitude of climate change effects, the availability of water for hydroelectric power, especially in vulnerable areas, countries, or regions, could be at risk. Aufhammer et al (2017) suggest that climate change will also change the intensity and frequency of peak electricity demand. These climate impacts must be considered in planning the locations of energy generation, storage and transmission capacity investments.

Hydropower dam building can also play a part in facilitating climate change adaptation, though ironically it can generate GHG emissions through release of methane in certain circumstances. Climate change could affect the supply of or demand for freshwater though an increase in temperatures, the incidence of drought, or the use of irrigation. Hydropower dams can be used to regulate the allocation of water.

Hydropower development is not without environmental and social impacts, which must be carefully considered. The addition of reservoir capacity is potentially in conflict with the protection of the natural environment. Dam infrastructure development can impact water and food security for communities living close by. It can also lead to involuntary resettlement of local communities, with legal frameworks on compulsory purchase for public purposes largely determining the extent to which the rights of those forcibly resettled are protected.

Post by Andrew Allan

On Sunday 22nd March it is World Water Day, and this year’s theme is ‘water and climate change’. To honour the event, this week we are publishing five blog posts exploring different sides of the multifaceted relationship between water and climate change. Each post highlights research at the Centre that touches on these, some of the most urgent problems facing humanity today. Today’s post considers the links between climate change and water scarcity.

The availability of water at the right time and in sufficient quantity is clearly a key necessity for agriculture. The impacts of climate change potentially jeopardise both through increasing scarcity in drier areas, the effects of warming on glacial melting and changing patterns in wet seasons. This consequently affects our ability to produce enough food for a growing population.

The Sustainable Development Goals make specific reference to agriculture but scarcity is one of the conditions that will make their achievement more challenging. SDG 2 demands the doubling of agricultural productivity and sustainable food production systems by 2030, but this will only be possible if water is used more efficiently than it currently is. Irrigated agriculture is the largest sectoral user of water (around 70% globally), but for a variety of reasons, it is often not used as efficiently as it could be. Pricing and infrastructure quality are clearly relevant, but legal frameworks that discourage more efficient use of water are also important. As water stress increases in the areas affected and competition for water grows, finding enough water for food production will become even more challenging. Efforts to expand irrigation networks in Africa are ongoing in order to counteract the vulnerability of rainfed agriculture to scarcity.

In terms of timing, agriculture that relies on glaciers as its water source is increasingly having to deal with earlier melting (and thus sowing) and the potential for water resources to run out before the end of the agricultural cycle. In some areas, farmers may in fact enjoy the benefits of increased meltwater as glaciers melt more rapidly, but this will not last. Farmers in some areas are already seeking to mitigate their potential losses by choosing to cultivate crops such as sugar cane that are less susceptible to variation in water availability.

From a management perspective, irrigators have developed their own approaches to apportioning the burden of scarcity equitably – the warabandi system in Pakistan, for example, or in the context of participatory irrigation management. These tend to ignore groundwater use however, as it is generally so difficult to monitor and because legal entitlements may not restrict overuse. Best practice in water resource management demands that ground and surface waters are managed conjunctively but this demands a level of administrative capability and data that is seldom available. It also requires that irrigators consider their water needs in the context of the entire hydrological system rather than just their own command area. The political reality increasingly is that they are likely to be only one among a number of other water users in a system, all of whom must suffer the impacts of scarcity.

Post written by Andrew Allan, Chris Spray and Cathy Smith

On Sunday 22nd March it is World Water Day, and this year’s theme is ‘water and climate change’. To honour the event, this week we are publishing five blog posts exploring different sides of the multifaceted relationship between water and climate change. Each post highlights research at the Centre that touches on these, some of the most urgent problems facing humanity today. Today’s post considers the links between climate change and flood risk. 

In many parts of the world, including the UK, scientists predict a greater frequency of extreme rainfall events as part of the effects of climate change. An overall rise in flood events has been observed in recent years, with the effects disproportionately falling on the poor. As this winter has shown us, these are not distant risks: we are already struggling to cope with more extreme rainfall events and flooding. In coastal, and especially deltaic areas, the impact of sea level rise compounds this problem. It increases the likelihood of storm surges breaching coastal defences, and creates additional problems for farmers whose livelihoods are destroyed by salt water inundation of their fields.

The natural environment plays an important role in affecting flood risk by regulating drainage and the flow of water. The way that humans manage the environment can affect flood risk through a number of mechanisms. Deforestation for example, can increase local flooding and sediment build-up, and the broader processes of urbanisation that are being seen around the world lead to increased risk. More impermeable surfaces like roads and pavements impede drainage and the proximity of more dense human settlements makes the potential human impact of flood events all the more damaging. These risks can be mitigated to some extent by mapping those areas that are most susceptible to flooding, allowing planners to ensure that homes, for instance, are not constructed in floodplains. Ensuring that construction does not take place in areas of high flood risk is difficult however: very often such locations are desirable for homeowners or for agriculture. Critically, the maps of flood risk areas must be updated regularly to take account not only of recent construction on floodplains, but also to reflect the impact of climate change.

In the past, our approach to protecting ourselves from floods has often entailed construction of physical flood defences. As has been seen around the world however, we cannot rely on these as our only form of defence, and this will become even less true as the impact of climate change continues to rise. They can be bolstered through adaptation methods such as natural flood management techniques that can help tackle floods at both the source (uplands), and along watercourses themselves by slowing or storing water. The Centre has been working on implementing these techniques in the Eddleston Water Project through tree planting, the use of sacrificial land and re-meandering. Stakeholder engagement is a crucial part of these efforts.

Finally, legal responses to all of these challenges have begun to appear, both in the context of disaster risk management approaches and through broader connection to water resource management (e.g. in the EU Floods Directive). Ensuring that legal and institutional frameworks are suitably robust and adaptable will be a key challenge in the coming years.

Post written by Professor Chris Spray

One might wonder what the similarities are between Kerala and the Scottish Borders, and so quite why in February I found myself addressing an International Conference on Rivers for the Future in the southern Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram. This is not an area of India that we in the UNESCO Centre have worked in previously; our focus having been further north on the Ramganga, the Mahanadi and the Ganges/Brahmaputra, though our late colleague,  Mike Bonnell’s work on forest hydrology in the Western Gatts (the hills from which 41 of 44 of Kerala’s rivers flow) was just across the state border in Tamil Nadu. The connection is a shared interest in river restoration and stakeholder engagement; our own work being centered on the Tweed (a UNESCO HELP Basin) in cooperation with the participative catchment NGO Tweed Forum https://tweedforum.org/

The 3-day conference was organised by my hosts the University of Kerala – in association with the Centre for Innovation in Science and Social Action; the environmental campaigning organisation Ozhukanam Puzhakal; and WWF-India’s Kerala office. I was invited there by the Dean of the Aquatic Biology & Fisheries Department, Professor Biju Kumar as part of the University’s ‘Interaction with Eminent Scholars Scheme’ that enables them to bring folk across to interact with their academic and wider communities. As a result, I not only gave the Keynote presentation on River Restoration at the main conference, but also did another presentation in the conference as part of a wider workshop with external organisations on Stakeholder engagement; and a third to postgraduates and staff of the Environmental Sciences Department on the Role of an Environmental Protection Agency. I also spent time with staff and students in these two Departments and the Geology department, as well as meeting with the University Vice-Chancellor, Professor V.P. Mahadevan Pillai.

Compared to my (limited) experiences of working elsewhere in India, the three university departments at Kerala, along with the relevant State government research institutes and WWF-India have a (relative) wealth of data and information on their river systems and are keen and willing to share this and work with others on river restoration. Whilst their upper catchments have been heavily impacted by forest clearance and other land use changes, and their channels constrained by dams, irrigation and bankside developments, Kerala’s rivers themselves are less daunting than say the Ramganga in scale, more closed in size to the Tweed, but the challenges across Indian rivers are similar – water quality, dams, sand-mining, over abstraction, pollution, climate change, etc. – and both the bio-physical and socio-economic/cultural issues are familiar. Similarities with the Tweed revolve around the need for an overarching policy framework to address river restoration that links the degraded state of river ecosystems with the socio-economic livelihoods of the river communities that depend on it. In this respect, I was able to explore similarities in the potential for placing this debate within the frame of ecosystem services and work the UNESCO Centre have done with Tweed Forum on the Scottish Land Use Strategy  (https://tweedforum.org/our-work/projects/land-use-strategy-pilot-scottish-borders/  and on restoring the Eddleston Water catchment (https://tweedforum.org/our-work/projects/the-eddleston-water-project/ ). The key similarity that links Tweed and Kerala is probably the challenge of trying to align national policy directions on the one hand with, on the other hand local community needs and desires – and then developing the governance structures and resources to support implementation.

Of course, there are also major physical and cultural differences between Kerala and Tweed, notably the temperature (both 32 degrees in February, but C in Kerala and F in Tweed!) and the food – Kerala’s fish curries were awesome!