Water: A Critical Tool for Climate Adaptation
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Jon Lane, chair of the scientific program committee at World Water Week in Stockholm, and host of Liquid Assets, Ravi Kurani discussed the integral connection between water and climate change, and the necessity to address these issues in tandem. He stressed the need for effective communication about water-related issues to various levels of government and the public, and discussed the role of water in peace and security, indicating that effective water management can lead to cooperation and prevent conflict. He also touched on the importance of World Water Week as a platform for dialogue about water issues.
- đ§ Jon Lane stressed the inseparable link between water and climate change, emphasizing that any question about water inherently relates to climate change.
- đ˘ He underscored the importance of effective communication about water-related issues, advocating for a shift from requesting resources to offering water management as a tool for achieving broader societal and environmental goals.
- âŽď¸ Jon highlighted the role of water in peace and security, suggesting that proper water management could serve as a catalyst for international cooperation and conflict prevention.
- đ He recommended Peter Gleick's book, which offers a comprehensive view of water-related issues throughout history and into the future.
Meet Jon
Jon Lane is an accomplished civil engineer and chair of the scientific program committee at World Water Week in Stockholm. With a career spanning over 40 years, he has dedicated his professional life to improving water supply and sanitation for underserved populations in developing countries. Jon's work extends beyond engineering; he actively participates in global dialogues about water issues and advocates for effective communication strategies to address these challenges. His commitment to public service is driven by a personal code of morals and ethics, and he aspires to use his skills and knowledge to benefit others. Recently, his focus has shifted toward the impacts of global heating and climate change on water, reinforcing his belief in the inseparable connection between these areas.
The book, movie, or show
We ask everyone on the podcast for their favorite book, movie, or show. This is what Jon Lane had to say!
The Three Ages of Water by Peter Gleick
A revelatory account of how water has shaped the course of human life and history, and a positive vision of what the future can holdâif we act now
From the very creation of the planet billions of years ago to the present day, water has always been central to existence on Earth. And since long before the legendary Great Flood, it has been a defining force in the story of humanity.
In The Three Ages of Water, Peter Gleick guides us through the long, fraught history of our relationship to this precious resource. Water has shaped civilizations and empires, and driven centuries of advances in science and technologyâfrom agriculture to aqueducts, steam power to space explorationâand progress in health and medicine.
But the achievements that have propelled humanity forward also brought consequences, including unsustainable water use, ecological destruction, and global climate change, that now threaten to send us into a new dark age. We must change our ways, and quickly, to usher in a new age of water for the benefit of everyone. Drawing from the lessons of our past, Gleick charts a visionary path toward a sustainable future for water and the planet.
Transcript
00:00
Jon lane
Nobody values groundwater because they can't see it. And in many parts of the world, it's not really clear who owns it, and it's not really clear who has a right to use it. But if you actually look at the numbers, you would see that most people in the world use groundwater for their drinking water every day of their lives, and yet we neglect it. Italy in two respects. We over pump it. We take more water out of the ground than goes back in. And the two classic examples one is the Indo Gangetic plain of the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. And the second one is in the North China Plain, where the same thing happens.
00:51
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to another episode of Liquid Assets, where we talk about the intersection of business, policy and technology as it relates to water. I'm your host, Robbie Karani, and today we have an amazing guest for you, mr. John Lane.
01:04
Jon lane
Hello. My name is john lane, and I'm the chair of the scientific program committee at world water week in stockholm.
01:10
Ravi Kurani
John is the chair of the scientific committee at the World Water Week. And I just want to hand it over to you, John, so I don't steal the mic anymore. Can you give us just a short little introduction of who you are, what you do, and what your background is?
01:22
Jon lane
Yeah. Thanks a lot, Ravi. A long time ago, I'm an engineer by profession, and I've spent most of the last 40 years working particularly on water supply and sanitation for poor people in developing countries. In recent years, I've moved on more from a field work aspect more to looking at global water policy issues. And so in my work as chair of Scientific Program Committee for World Water Week, I'm concerned with all aspects of water in all parts of the world.
01:51
Ravi Kurani
Beautiful. And let's just take that all the way back from the beginning. So for the last 40 years, you're a trained engineer by profession. What kind of engineer are you?
01:59
Jon lane
Civil engineer.
02:00
Ravi Kurani
Civil engineer, okay. And out of college, did you go straight into water? What was this journey into water? Did you start building bridges? First as a civil engineer? How did that start to evolve?
02:11
Jon lane
Funnily enough, I did start designing bridges. That was a good guess. I'm from the UK, and I got an assignment from the company I worked for to work in Zambia on conventional civil engineering work. And I met my wife there, who was also working in Zambia at that time. And through her, I came to realize that the best thing I could do with my professional life was to dedicate my work to poor people in developing countries. And so I decided that water was the area where I would concentrate. And so I've been working specifically on water since then, and I've just been very lucky to have had that career. Well, I still am lucky. So that's, in a nutshell, and that gave me a real privilege of working and living in other people's cultures. I mentioned Zambia. We've also spent some years in Nepal, we've spent many years in Malawi.
03:07
Jon lane
And I've been very lucky to be able to travel widely, particularly in sub Saharan Africa and in South Asia. In relation to working on water, to me, it's a privilege, and I hope that helps me to gain some breadth of perspective on some of the water topics that we'll be chatting about entirely.
03:27
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. And just to kind of set the stage for what we will be talking about, can you walk us through that journey as you were in Malawi, in sub Saharan Africa, in Southeast Asia? I guess two questions there. One, I'd love to kind of dig deep into why people do what they do. It's just so interesting, especially in the world of water. What drove people to get in the world of water? What was that inflection point right when you first went down to Zambia? And then secondarily, I'd love to, from your point of view, understand what you were seeing in SubSaharan Africa and Southeast Asia at that time with water issues, because I think that's going to be a great setting of the stage of kind of what we're seeing today in 2023 and the work that you're doing today. But those are two questions.
04:11
Jon lane
Okay, the first one very easy. Why do I do this work? I do it because I feel really deeply that a life well lived is a life spent dedicated to helping other people. I'm not a religious person at all. That's just simply my personal code of morals and ethics. And I'm fortunate that I've had a professional education and training as a civil engineer, and that is a vocation that can be extremely useful to other people. And so that's why I've made that dedication. And right through my whole career, my motivation in any particular job I might have been doing at that time has been very simple. It's to use my skills and knowledge, such as they are, to benefit other people. And then on the second issue, what are the kind of predominant feelings that one has with a background living in the UK originally, which is a very privileged background by global standards.
05:12
Jon lane
It's a country with a high GDP per head. It has high living standards. Everybody has water and sanitation. It's been profoundly important for me to know and to experience at firsthand that actually I'm one of a tiny minority, really, and that the majority of people in the world either don't have access to safe and reliable water, particularly to safe sanitation, or they may have drinking water and sanitation, but they may not have good access to water resources in general. For example, for agriculture. And so it's not only about looking at the people who live in a particular country and kind of generalizing about a whole country, but it's also looking within a country, particularly if you take a country with a very large population. And inevitably within a large country, you will find that some sections of society, whether that's individual people or whether that's companies or whatever, have privileged access to resources.
06:17
Jon lane
And water, of course, is a prime example of that. And so, as the years have gone by, I've just maintained, or tried to maintain that determination that when we're looking, which I spend my time doing now, looking at global level water policy issues, if you like, that we need to keep in the forefront of our minds the people who are disadvantaged in whatever way it might be. Therefore, as we formulate policies or as we advise political leaders or business leaders to formulate their policies, that to me is the fundamentally important point, is service to people who are disadvantaged. And then in the last few years, as with many of my colleagues, the whole subject of global heating and climate has become really important to me. And I think we'll talk about that during this conversation. But just as a start, let me say that now a lot of my focus, a lot of my thinking relates to if you look at a question that's to do with willter, that is also a question which is to do with climate change by definition.
07:29
Jon lane
And therefore I feel that whether we're looking at sanitation or drinking water or water resources management or whatever it might be, we no longer have the luxury of studying that topic in isolation. We have to know that topic is part of a bigger picture. And to me, the ultimate big picture is the future of humanity on the planet. And therefore, the whole topic of climate change and global heating is something which is profoundly important to all of us. And that will come through in our conversation.
08:01
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, entirely. Why don't we actually go ahead and jump right into that? Because you've opened up a perfect topic. Can you kind of unwrap that a little bit more against the work that you're already doing, working with policy members and also just for the audience at the kind of largest scale? Let's kind of just get down to first principles, right? Why is water related to climate change related to global heating? How would you explain that?
08:26
Jon lane
Yeah, thanks. Good question. The first thing that strikes people is that you can talk in an abstract way about the average global temperature. We see this all the time in media headlines that since the industrial age started, the average global temperature has now gone up by 1.1 or 1.2 degrees. And the scientists and the politicians are working on trying to limit that to maybe 1.5 degrees, or in a really bad case, two degrees. And it's quite difficult just as an individual person to say, well, hey, what's the big deal with that? Outside my door, the temperature goes up by 20 degrees between summer and winter, what's, 1.1 degree? But the answer is that rather small increase is translated through the medium of water, because water is the manifestation of global climate. Climate means what's happening to water? Where is it raining? How much is it raining?
09:30
Jon lane
Do we have droughts? Do we have floods? Do we have hurricanes? Do we have storms? All of those involve water, either too much or too little, in the wrong place at the wrong time. And so that apparently innocuous. One degree or one and a half degrees translates into enormous turbulent and dramatic changes in climate patterns. And water is the medium through which people are offended, are affected. So the vast majority of impacts on people come from the flooding or from the drought, rather than directly from the increase in average temperature. Okay? So that depicts water as part of the mechanism through which climate change occurs and impinges on us. But what interests me in particular is to turn that around the other way and say, well, what are the characteristics of water and water management that can help us to actually reduce that impact? Where activities that we are currently doing that can actually help to slow down the increase in global heating, for example?
10:42
Jon lane
Or what are we doing in relation to those big climate cycles that would enable us to not just react to, but somehow to be able to help them to be less impactful or less dangerous, both for us and for ecosystems around the world.
11:04
Ravi Kurani
I'm just seeing civil engineer mechanics here at play too, right? If you think about a mass spring dashboard or a bridge, if you have these systems diagrams and you get a really big wave that goes out of control, it's the after effects of what's happening versus the actual one to two degrees yourself. Right? So it's all these elements, these characteristics, these parameters of what the output is of the system diagram that ends up causing the problems. And so if you're looking at what are the characteristics around water and water management to help be more preventative, proactive, or even decrease the impact versus being reactive? What is the pareto of those or what are the top three or top five that we're looking at today? And how can we focus on those characteristics to use water as a heuristic or as a lens to then combat this kind of larger issue?
11:54
Jon lane
Good. Yeah, absolutely. I'll give you the top three. These are water related activities that we can do that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and therefore slow down global heating. Number one is how we grow rice. And you might say, Hang on, this guy's a water guy. What does he know about growing rice? And the answer is, I don't personally know a lot about it, but I know some people who do. And the essential point is that if you flood your rice fields, which you have to do for the young seedlings to start growing okay. But if you keep your rice fields flooded all through the growing season, the microbes around the roots of the rice plants give out vast amounts of methane, huge amounts of methane. We don't really know how to measure the amount of methane, but it's a lot. Whereas if you dry the rice paddies, the rice will still grow perfectly well.
12:53
Jon lane
You'll get the same yields of tonnage per hectare, but those microbes will not give off that methane. And so by modifying your irrigation, which is water management, you can still produce the same amount of rice, but you can reduce enormously the amount of methane going into the atmosphere. That's number one. Number two is human shit. Sanitation, wastewater treatment, whatever you want to call it. The decomposition of any sort of excrete from animals. And humans are pretty numerous animals, gives off methane. And we're only just beginning to realize how much of the methane in the atmosphere is actually coming from human shit. And I'll just give you one example of the city of Kampala in Uganda, where recent academic studies over the last three or four years indicating that perhaps one third of the total human greenhouse gas emissions from that city is from the sanitation systems.
13:58
Jon lane
One third. Unbelievable.
14:00
Ravi Kurani
Oh, my god.
14:01
Jon lane
Unbelievable. You just would never have thought of that. And so now we're beginning to realize that there's something we can do, which is that we can design our sewage treatment works or what we call wastewater treatment plants to capture the methane. So instead of that methane just going off into the atmosphere, we can capture the methane. But wait, because this gets better. If we look at water utilities in general, that's the water supply, but also wastewater treatment. We don't have an exact figure, but it would appear that we are using somewhere between about 3% and 8% of global electricity. Now, that is more than almost any single country in the world. It's at least as much as the aviation business. It's at least as much as the shipping business. And, my goodness, the politicians and the media talk about flying and shipping, don't they, as sources of greenhouse gases?
14:57
Jon lane
But nobody talks about sewage plants, but actually they're comparable. And having captured the methane, we then burn that methane in a controlled manner to create power. And we can create more power by capturing that methane than we are currently using from the national grid. So that's a win. We reduce our methane emissions, and we generate the power. Now, that's brilliant. And that's point number two. Point number three is something which has been known for 100 years, which is hydroelectric power, that the greenhouse gas emissions for generating electricity through hydroelectric power are much smaller than those from burning fossil fuels. And, I mean, it's so obvious, but people do forget that. So that's worth mentioning. And if you look at some of the countries where they're 98, 99% of their power is generated from hydro. Malawi is a good example, norway is another one. Those are saving enormous quantities of greenhouse gas emissions by the use of hydro power.
16:06
Jon lane
And I know hydropower is controversial because large dams are complicated and they have social and economic negative impacts. I totally understand that, but I think we need to keep in mind that of all the watery activities we do, that's one of the big three. If we can manage properly the way that we plan and construct hydropower dams, then that can really be a big win. So those would be the three headline items and there are quite a lot of other water related things that will also reduce greenhouse gases. But those are the big three.
16:40
Ravi Kurani
Really interesting. Yeah, I want touch on those in a second. But is there one in the longer list outside of these top three? That for the audience, they'll kind of scratch their head and they'll say, that's really interesting, something that you came across and saying, oh wow, that's a really interesting dependency.
16:58
Jon lane
Well, I think the sewage works one is the most interesting one, but I've already told you about that one. The other ones are actually a little bit more mundane, to be honest. Because if we look at drinking water supply, for example, we can reduce our energy consumption. I mentioned a moment ago that we use a lot of electrical energy both for the sewage treatment, but also for drinking water supply. And there are lots of ways that we can reduce our power consumption, most notably by using less water. So increasing the efficiency of water supply, reducing leakages, all these things, they're very boring, but they're actually quite useful. You get a lot of small incremental improvements that add up. And it's also the same with water for agriculture because let's bear in mind that out of the water that humankind is using, about three quarters of it we're using for irrigation.
18:00
Jon lane
The remaining quarter is for industry, for hydropower, for drinking water. Well, maybe that's 2% or 3%. So the actual out of the water that we're using, drinking water is a small user and agriculture is by far the biggest. And so wouldn't it be great if we could come out with innovations that relate to irrigation water usage. I mentioned the point about rice because that's specific to methane emissions. But irrigation in general, even setting aside the benefits on methane emissions, it can be made so much more efficient, use much less water. There's this phrase about producing more crop per drop and yes, people have been working on that for quite decades, but there's a lot more we can do. And I think a lot of these modern technologies, for example, remote resource monitoring from space, you see all the headlines about satellites, they're spying on us or they're gathering data about us.
19:06
Jon lane
Well, there is some the good news about satellites as well, which is, my goodness, they're really useful to look at the way that water is moving both on the surface, but even by deduction how underground water is working. And we'll talk about groundwater later, I'm sure, and therefore helping farmers and irrigation managers to optimize their use of water. So, as I say, that's also rather a boring subject to other people. It's very interesting if you're an irrigation manager, but it's pretty boring for other people. But those kinds of things reflect an underlying point, which is how valuable water is. Water, and I've just mentioned that three quarters of it is being used to grow our food. That's fundamental for us all to live. Right. Water is so valuable to the functioning of human society at all to be able to feed 8 billion people. It's so valuable for the industries that serve the needs of all those billions of people.
20:14
Jon lane
And those little examples I was giving of where we can improve our management of water if we're looking, for example, at mitigating, climate change, one can also express those in terms of serving people's social and economic development. Water is one of the fundamental resources available for political leaders, for the private sector, for public sector utilities, for individual farmers and local groups to generate benefits of all sorts, economic benefits, health benefits, even benefits in terms of peace and security and international cooperation. And I think that we as water professionals have been too shy. We've not communicated that very well. I'm sure if we stopped someone in the street outside either where you are or where I am, or all around the world, and we said, how do you feel water is useful to sustain your level of civilization? People would talk about drinking water and clean water coming out of the taps, of course, and people will talk a bit about irrigation.
21:28
Jon lane
But there's a huge amount of fundamental importance that water and water management has that we do not explain to other people. And consequently, if people don't value something, they don't care for it. And that's something that we need to communicate better, which is that water is valuable for us all and therefore let's care for it. And the more we care for something, the more benefit it will give back to us.
21:56
Ravi Kurani
I want to actually unpack two things that you said there. One, I definitely want touch on the groundwater piece. I actually interviewed somebody that was from both an agricultural satellite company as well as one that's doing groundwater. And I'd love to get your take on that. But the first thing I actually want to talk about is what you just said is I feel like water has a messaging problem, right, as a communications problem. Like you said, if you don't value something, then you're just not going to take importance in it. And so is there any strategies that you think about and I know you have, and you work with politicians, you work with governments, is there anything from the governmental side of things that is going to change the overall messaging and communication side? Or what do you think if you had a magic wand to wave that here's, these three initiatives or two initiatives that we could do to get people more interested in water?
22:45
Jon lane
Yes, absolutely. Well, there's one, actually, which is that bewerter people of whom I'm one historically have approached politicians and leaders holding our hands out to give us money. Our subject is important. We need money to build downs or pipelines or whatever it might be. And so we are placing demands on them. We come to a Minister of Finance and we just say, look, we need more money for this, we're important. But that Minister of Finance, she or he gets people every day through their office door saying that what they're doing is important. Health, education, you name it. I think that's completely the wrong way to approach political leaders. My vision of this and this, as I say, is really one point that covers everything, is if we can go to those political leaders and say, here is a tool that will help you to achieve your aims, it turns the whole dialogue round then, doesn't it?
23:47
Jon lane
We're not going in with a begging bowl, we're going in offering them a resource. And the obvious example of that is climate change. And we've talked about that a little bit, but let me just mention that when President Biden took office, you recall one of the first things he did on the international stage was to call a climate summit, presidential summit on climate. It was know, virtual and anyone in the world could watch it. It was on the internet and I watched it and it was fascinating. Everybody was there, president Xi Jinping was there, world leaders from everywhere, they turned up and they all talked about their aims to reduce greenhouse gas. None of them said a word about how to adapt to climate change. They were all concentrating on how to stop climate change. And I thought, Hang on a minute, what do we talk about as water people?
24:40
Jon lane
We talk all the time about how to adapt to climate change. We hardly ever say anything about stopping climate change. And so that's what's made me particularly interested in some of these points, like the rice growing or the sanitation. Every sewage works can be a power station because then we can go back to them and say, look, you're interested in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. You've gone to cop 26 and cop 27 and you're going to cop 28 and you've made some pretty impressive pledges and you've set some reasonably good targets for greenhouse gas emission and I bet you don't know how you're going to do it, but we want to help you. And if you do this with your rice growing and if you do that with your sewage works, that will help. We're offering water as a tool for them to achieve their goals.
25:32
Jon lane
And I'm just giving that climate as an example. But the general point is that it's to do with how we approach the relationship that we have with political leaders and by extension in many, not every country, but in many countries, political leaders are sensitive to the opinions of the people and they respond because people vote for them. So when I say the way we communicate with politicians, that also means the way we communicate with the voters and the citizens of those countries, that the same point applies. If we can explain and project that water is something that can help them, then I think the whole future activity and global policy level relating to water can change fundamentally.
26:22
Ravi Kurani
I love that so much. Right. You change from a taking hand to a giving hand because you're right, you go in to these politicians to these government offices and we constantly ask for things. But if we change the script to giving something, you're going to have a much better conversation and a much better potential upside of actually getting that done versus asking for money. Makes complete sense. Yeah, that's I from a strata perspective, there is everything from local governments in the US. We have entire commissions that do wastewater within the state of California. And all of these things are so they're not even stacked on top of each other. Where you have a clear cut state to a city, to a county, there's water districts that go between two or three cities in themselves that have their entirely on board people that are basically managing that.
27:10
Jon lane
Sure.
27:10
Ravi Kurani
And so what I was almost thinking is there a ten point plan or this kind of structured approach where we can go to various different peoples at different levels of government and give the waterboard something that's very similar in scope to what you give the governor, to what you give the president, to what you give the county leader. Any thoughts about that?
27:31
Jon lane
Yes, that's absolutely mean. Your thumbnail sketch in the United States would be similar in many countries around the world. If you look in particular at water resources management, that's generally done on a river basin basis because that's the engineering logic. Of course it is. And river basins don't respect human political boundaries. So in almost every country, not quite every country in the world, but the vast majority, at least some of their water resources will be shared with their neighbors. And so water resources management being done on a river basin basis would include several countries. I mean, look at the River Nile. Complicated. So that's an issue that is international or multinational. It's the same with groundwater, which we'll talk about more in a minute, perhaps, because aquifers, although you can't see them with your eye, the scientists can tell us that they underlie several countries.
28:30
Jon lane
And so if you have an aquifer management board, which you do, then again, that's going to involve people in several countries. So you have that multinational layer, and then, as you say, you have a national government and then local governments at various levels and in different parts of the world. The structures may be different and the responsibilities may be different. For example, does the city council have the responsibility for water and for sanitation? Sometimes it's different in different places. But the underlying point that you make is spot on, which is that we need to have technical and policy messaging that will be relevant to all those different sorts of people at those different levels. It's not only a case of talking to the Minister of Finance or the Head of State, important though that is. You're right, we need to be talking at all those different levels.
29:22
Jon lane
And the messages may be different at different levels and they may be different in different parts of the world. I've spoken two or three times in this chat about growing rice. Well, we don't grow rice in the UK, Canada, it's not relevant here. But there are 2 billion people in the world that live on rice, so it's relevant to a lot of people in a lot of countries. So the way I kind of think of it is it's like having a song sheet. You might have ten or 20 songs on your song sheet and you're not going to sing the same song to everybody. There might be a song about rice growing that you would be talking about indonesia, for example. But there might be another song which is about hydropower, which you would talk about somewhere else. Or the point about wastewater treatment plants.
30:11
Jon lane
That's relevant primarily in fairly large cities. Of course, you can do things with methane emission, even at a household level, but it's more difficult. But you're really going to be talking to large city utilities about that. So there's this sum sheet with different messages. The underlying point is these are tools to help other people to achieve their aims. It's like you say, we're giving, not receiving. And the song sheet is not universally applicable. It's specific to the particular person to whom you want to sing that song.
30:45
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, entirely. That makes total sense. And I guess it all bubbles up back to that climate adaptation as a headline, and each sheet in the song sheet points up to that same kind of vertex or that same headline that you have. Really interesting. I like that. Let's go ahead and jump to groundwater. I'd love to get you. I know you brought it up a few times. I'll leave it there. What do you have to say about water?
31:08
Jon lane
Yes, thanks. It's a topic that we talk about quite a lot at World Water Week. I don't want to bore you about how World Water Week functions, but just briefly to say, you know, it's a week at the end of August every year and it's in. Stockholm. We choose an overall theme for each year. For example, this year it's about innovation. Last year it was about value and water and so on. And there may be 200 sessions, and most of them will be about that theme. So groundwater, we have had it as a theme a few years ago, but in addition, we talk about it a lot. Even if your theme is valuing water or innovation, groundwater comes up again and again. And the vital point about it, well, it's really a valuing point, which is that nobody values groundwater because they can't see it.
31:57
Jon lane
And in many parts of the world, it's not really clear who owns it, and it's not really clear who has a right to use it. But if you actually look at the numbers, you would see that most people in the world use groundwater for their drinking water every day of their lives. Many people in the world use groundwater, or groundwater has been used to grow the food that they eat every day of their lives. And yet we neglect it utterly in two respects. We over pump it, we're mining water, if you like. We take more water out of the ground than goes back in. And the two classic examples of that one constantly sees referred to one is the indigangetic plain of the northern part of the indian subcontinent, where pumping of groundwater is much more than the replacement from the rainfall and the monsoons.
33:00
Jon lane
And therefore the water table is going down. And the second one is in the north china plain where the same thing happens. The water table is getting deeper and deeper at a frightening speed. Those are just two examples. Every other country is equally guilty. We are abusing that resource, if you like. We're not using it sustainably, that's for sure. So that means that farmers now are getting the benefit of using groundwater, but their children and their grandchildren will suffer because they've used too much. And then the second aspect is that we pollute it either without even knowing about it, or knowing, but not caring. And so pollution of groundwater is getting worse. And that's a really difficult thing to fix because getting pollution out of water when you're up here above ground and you've got a water treatment plant, well, you can do that. But how do you try to treat water which is in the ground?
34:06
Jon lane
So that's the main thing about groundwater, is that people don't value it properly. But as we've said earlier in this discussion, there's no point in lecturing people about it and saying you don't value groundwater properly. Well, that's not going to work, is it? This is not me personally, but a lot of water people are very expert in groundwater, and they are now communicating much better about it than they used to. It used to be a very technical subject. Hydro, a kind of subsector of civil engineering. Hydrogeologists deal with groundwater that's what they do every day of their lives, and they're super brilliant people, but they're a bit technical. And so you can go to a conference on groundwater, and it's a bit nerdy if I'm allowed to say that, very technical. But in the last few years, I'm happy to say that many of those colleagues are beginning to communicate much better with the general public and with other professions about these problems with groundwater.
35:09
Jon lane
Because if you turn it the other way around, you can say, look, if we understand groundwater well enough, of course it's a resource we can use, and if we take care not to pollute it, well, that's fine. Innately, it's lovely water. But then the other point that derives from groundwater not being very well appreciated or valued is that when you then come to the economics of it and actual pricing of water, groundwater is usually underpriced. And again, the much quoted example is the Indo Gadget Gangetic plain, and particularly the part of it, which is india, where for many decades government policies have been to concentrate on food production, which is fine, and therefore to make groundwater available free of charge to farmers, effectively free of charge, because the electricity is free. So if you're a farmer, okay, you've got to drill a ball hole and put in a pump, and that costs you money, but the electricity you use is free, and therefore the chances are you're going to be over pumping, because why turn the pump off?
36:20
Jon lane
It's free. Sure, that's something that it's not the fault of the farmer. It's a conscious decision by politicians to prioritize food supply, and I wouldn't contradict that. I don't think I have the right to contradict the importance of growing food. But I would just say to those politicians, please bear in mind that actually you can probably grow just as much food using much less water. And the policy mechanism that will do that is by charging for the electricity. So groundwater, there are lots of economic and financial aspects to it which come back. They take you back to the doors of politicians at local and national level as well.
37:04
Ravi Kurani
Totally makes sense. I think this groundwater point also relates to something you said earlier around safety and security and peace as well. I'd love to just touch on that for a second. Also for the audience, I think back to the communication messaging, right. People may not know that there is a security and peace element to water. Do you have any examples or things that you're working on or stuff in the past, even case studies of where water has affected peace and security?
37:31
Jon lane
Yes, that's a great question, because it's a fascinating topic. And you recall that the UN water conference in New York this March, which was the first UN conference on water since 1977, so for almost everyone in that room, it was the first UN conference on water. They'd been to, I was there. I think I only met two people who had been to the last. The organizers of the conference structured it on different topics, and one of them is Water for Peace and security. So I think it's fair to say it's an area that as water people, we've rather neglected in the past, but we're really concentrating on it more. And the essential point is that if we work together by jointly managing our water resources and as I've mentioned, there are many water resources that cross international boundaries both above the ground and below. That enables us to get to know our neighbors better.
38:27
Jon lane
It enables us to relate to each other better and we can share the water. In many cases, it's done by treaties, and those can be controversial, partly because some of them are historic. I've mentioned the Nile River, and some of the treaties governing the usage of water from the River Nile date back, oh, a hundred years at least. It's complicated because there are historic elements. But the point is that there's a lot of cause for optimism. I mean, one example is in Israel and in the Palestinian territories, where the water professionals have been working together completely under the radar screen, as it were, of the media and the political aspects of it for decades. I'm not saying it's perfect. There's clearly an unequal power relationship there. If you look at Israel and the Palestinian territories, and so when they agree treaties, you can argue about how fair the allocations are.
39:32
Jon lane
But the important point is that those water professionals, they're not looking at each other through the sights of a rifle, that they're sitting around a table jointly analyzing and thinking and planning how best to use water resources for the benefits of all their people. And that's such a powerful message. And as I say, this goes back decades. Other examples are in river basins. I've mentioned the Nile a couple of times, and there's a lot of really good cooperation that does go on among the riparian countries along the River Nile. But you can also look, for example, at the Zambezi. The Zambezi River basin includes a large number of countries, and they have some really good mechanisms for talking to each other, for working together on water, to see the joint benefits of it. So you do get headlines, and I mean, recently in connection with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there's been this big news item of the destruction of the dam on the Nipro River, and all the allegations about how that dam was destroyed.
40:42
Jon lane
The underlying point is, whatever actually happened to destroy that dam, it has become de facto a weapon of the war. So you get headlines about water as a weapon of war. What you don't hear so much about is all the good examples of where water is a resource to prevent war or to reduce the impact of war. The experts on this well, there's several around the world. But the Pacific Institute in the United States have been doing terrific work on this for decades, on analyzing historically back thousands of years, both of those aspects, the impact of war on water and the use of water as a tool of war. And the headline lesson is that actually, it's very rare that wars are fought over water, and it's quite common that water is a source of collaboration and cooperation between countries. For us at World Water Week in Stockholm, that's a line of thinking and a line of research and a line of communication that we've been carrying on for some time in the past, and we will be again in the future.
42:00
Jon lane
We will be talking a lot more about peace and security and the role that water can play to support it.
42:07
Ravi Kurani
Beautiful. That's amazing. And kind of jumping to, actually what you just said. I wanted to just quickly cover what is World Water Week for all of our audience out there, too? How does it work? Is it part of a larger organization? What's the mechanics behind World Water Week?
42:21
Jon lane
Yeah, thanks very much. There's an organization called the Stockholm International Water Institute. It's a charitable foundation, a non government organization, which is about 30 years old. And right at the beginning, they started a very small scientific symposium about water in Stockholm. 1991 was the first year, and two or 300 scientists came, and they did good things. And then over the years, that's grown into being annual conference. As I say, it's always in the last week in August, it's always in Stockholm, and it's hosted by that institute. So it's not a political activity, it's not a government activity. It's an independent entity. It's grown to be a place, people concerned with water in all of its aspects, whether it's drinking water, whether it's water resources management, whether it's ecosystems management, hydrology, water and climate, whatever. They know that they can come there to talk to each other and learn from each other.
43:27
Jon lane
So there are scientists, of course, still attending. There are quite a lot of academic people, but I would say the majority are what you might call practitioners, whether they're working in local government or they're working for non government organizations. They're people who are actually carrying out water management plans, working for utilities, for example, private sector. They're there. There are a certain number of media there. And then, of course, there are political leaders that come year after year. And the wonderful thing about the way that Seawee has set it up is that seaweed creates it as a neutral platform, a place where everybody's welcome to come and free speech applies. Everyone can give their opinion about these different subjects to do with water. There's no central body directing to say, we have to have a conclusion from this conference, which is going to be X, Y, and Z.
44:21
Jon lane
It's not like that. It's a place to talk to learn to share your experiences. And that's terrific. And until the coronavirus pandemic affected it, we had about 3000 people getting together every year. And if you talk these were senior people from every country in the world. And if you talk to them about what's the role of that week in their working lives, they would say, well, that's where I go. And I see my colleagues, and I learn what's new in other parts of the world. And I get new partnerships, I make new connections. So it's a powerful social network, if you like. Then, since the pandemic, it now has a strong online element. So you can go to Stockholm, of course you can, and be there in person, and 3000 people will be there in three weeks time. And that costs money to go because it's running a conference is an expensive thing, and Stockholm is a pretty expensive place to fly to and to stay in.
45:24
Jon lane
So that's a problem because it's an expensive place to go to a conference. But you can do it all online, free of charge, open access. Anybody in the world can be there. And I would think about 90% of the sessions at Stockholm are up on the website. It's happening live and you can be interacting, so you can be part of it wherever you are in the world, free of charge. To me, the most inspiring aspect of it, and this is really what motivates me to chair the Scientific Program Committee, is that it's changed from being a meeting of water people to being a meeting about water for all people. And that change has been driven by the top leadership at the foundation. That hasn't come from our scientists and our committee, it's come from the very top. And I think that is so powerful because all these things that we're chatting about now, you and I are about how water is a tool for other people to achieve their aims.
46:28
Jon lane
And so we've now designed World Water Week to be a place where anybody can come. People who don't think of themselves as being water professionals, but believe that water is important to them, or they think it might be, they are the people who we want to see there in Stockholm so that they can have all these discussions that you and I are having. And that is really exciting to me. I saw it last year, I'm going to see it this year, next year even more. The proportion of people who are there in that rune is increasing all the time of people who are not conventionally described as water specialists. So that's a 30 year evolution. It'll continue for many years to come. And I think it's a wonderful place to be. And as I say, you can be there online. And I go back to when we started this chat and you asked me a bit about myself and what motivates me, and I said, it sounds a bit corny, but I said, what motivates me is helping other people.
47:32
Jon lane
And to me, the privilege of working as part of Seawee and working on our committee looks at the intellectual content. We don't get involved in the actual administration of the event. What we're looking at is the content, what's going to be talked about, what are the sessions going to be, how are they going to tie together? And we're doing that because we want it to be a place for all people to come to talk about water from their viewpoints. So that's World Water week in a nutshell.
48:05
Ravi Kurani
Thank you. That was brilliant. We should definitely put links to that on the YouTube and also on the link to this podcast as well, to drive people over there 100%.
48:14
Jon lane
Yeah.
48:15
Ravi Kurani
Last question that I always love to ask everybody is, do you have a book, a TV or a show or something for the audience that's pivotal to water that kind of changed your viewpoint? Or we should pick up.
48:28
Jon lane
Yeah, that's a good one. There aren't very many books that actually describe this area that we've been chatting about the interface between water and policy, because it's quite a new idea. There are large, heavy tone on the scientific parts of water. Every year, the UN publishes a World Water Development report. It's free on the Internet, 500 pages long. There's a lot in there. But that's not the answer to your question. So I would say that the number one right at this moment is a brand new book written by someone who happens to be a friend of mine, Peter Glick. Peter is pretty well known in water sorry, very off his props know he's well known in water at the global level and in particular within the United States. He's associated with the Pacific Institute in San Francisco and he's just published a book, and I'm going to get the title of it wrong, but it's something like The Three Ages of Water.
49:30
Jon lane
It's just out. And what he's doing there is he's looking back at the entire history of human civilization through the aspect of water. So he's looking historically, he's looking at the present day, and most importantly, he's looking to the future to analyze a lot of these things that you and I have been talking about how we can see a pathway. In the future whereby the human race will be able to live harmoniously and sustainably on this planet, which is the only home that we have. And how water and the management of water is integral to that vision for our future. I'm slightly putting words in Peter's mouth there, but I would recommend people just Google it. You can maybe put a link ravi in the Peter Gligg's new book on The Three Ages of Water. If someone wants to buy one book and read it, that's the book to buy.
50:29
Jon lane
Awesome.
50:29
Ravi Kurani
I should actually have him on the podcast to talk about the book. That sounds like an amazing interview to have.
50:36
Jon lane
You must have him on Padlock on the podcast. He talks brilliantly about many things and he'd be great. Awesome.
50:43
Ravi Kurani
Perfect.
50:44
Jon lane
All right, John.
50:44
Ravi Kurani
Well, thanks a ton for coming on Liquid Assets. Thank you for your time, for all of you out there. If you're looking on where to find us, you can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from. We also have a YouTube channel and follow us on Instagram. John, thank you again for coming on Liquid Assets.
51:02
Jon lane
Thank you very much for inviting me. Ravi.