[00:00:00] Bridget Scanlon: Welcome to the Water Resources Podcast. I am Bridget Scanlon. In this podcast, we discuss water challenges with leading experts, including topics on extreme climate events, overexploitation, and potential solutions towards more sustainable management. I would like to welcome Peter Gleick to the podcast.
Peter is the President Emeritus and Senior Fellow at the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California, which he co-founded in 1987. The Pacific Institute is a non-governmental research center advancing solutions to global water challenges. Peter has won many prizes over his career and is a MacArthur Fellow, also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2018 was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. And so the podcast today will be talking about his recent book. And last year he was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. So thank you so much, Peter, for joining me today.
[00:01:10] Peter Gleick: Bridget, I'm happy to be here with you.
[00:01:12] Bridget Scanlon: So today I think we're going to talk about your recent book, The Three Ages of Water, a Prehistoric Past. imperiled present, and a hope for the future that was published last year in 23, last year. And, but before we get into the book, I would like to talk a little bit about the Colorado and California water situations. So I see you, you're quoted a lot on many of these issues. And so would like your thoughts on the Colorado River going through mega drought for the past couple of decades. Many of the agreements are set to expire in 2026. So there's an opportunity to renegotiate them. And I was wondering what your thoughts are about the negotiation of these agreements and how to manage the Colorado River better.
[00:02:02] Peter Gleick: Sure. So actually just as a little bit of background, of course, the Colorado River is really emblematic of many of the challenges we face, not just in the Western United States, but around the world, around water resources. It's a relatively small river through an incredibly hot, dry part of the United States.
It's shared in the United States by seven different states, and then it's shared between the U. S. and Mexico. And so it's a small river. It's a politically diverse and complicated river. It's very significantly affected already by human caused climate change, so even before that, the water resources of the river were very heavily stressed and contested, and climate change, of course, is making that worse.
And there are, as you say, a set of agreements about the Colorado, how to share the water resources among the seven states and between the U. S. and Mexico. None of those agreements, which were signed originally many decades ago, took into account climate change, none of them really took into account the actual amount of water that was available in the river.
None of them took into account the environment and ecosystems. So it's very problematic as a water resource, and of course all of those problems are similar to problems we see in other parts of the world. There are agreements now, and there are ongoing discussions about how to resolve some of the disputes over the Colorado, which is a good sign.
I'm encouraged by the fact that we negotiate over these challenges, but the agreements are short term that expire in a year or two, a couple of years, and they will have to be renegotiated. And you never know which way the politics are going to go. I'm sort of optimistic because of the importance of the river, because of the cooperative nature of the parties.
But again, you never really know.
[00:03:56] Bridget Scanlon: And so California gets 4.4 million acre feet from the Colorado, it's exported to California. And for non U. S. listeners, 1 million acre foot is 1. 2 cubic kilometers. But before Arizona took its allocation, its full allocation, through the Central Arizona Project, California was taking about another million acre feet, about five and a half million acre feet.
So in the early 2000s, California ratcheted back its allocation and the Quantitation Settlement Agreement in the early 2000s, they reduced the Colorado water use by transferring water from agriculture to urban areas. Do you think a similar approach would be used in the new negotiations for Arizona and places like that?
[00:04:46] Peter Gleick: Yes, I do. The amount of water that California is allowed to take or Arizona or New Mexico or Nevada, all the different states, was agreed upon a long time ago. California had the largest share. And as long as some of the other states were not taking their full allotments, California was allowed to take a little more than their legal allotment, but they've had to dial that down, as you note, as the other states have ramped up their demand on the water.
And in fact, California is now taking less than the original allotments because of some of these more recent agreements. Because of the realization that the river just doesn't have as much water as was given away in those early agreements. And part of the solution is going to be, and has been, as you note, a shift in water from the agricultural sector, which has been the largest user and still is the largest user of Colorado River water, to more high valued urban uses: commercial, industrial, residential.
The way the states allocate their allotments internally is up to each state. California makes a decision about how to share its water among the users inside of California. Arizona does the same thing. But because agriculture is both a large user of water and a relatively low-valued user of water in terms of revenue produced per unit of water consumed, I think we have seen, and we will continue to see, shifts, in water from agriculture or more high valued urban uses.
[00:06:21] Bridget Scanlon: Right. And I think Brian Richter has been writing recently about a lot, maybe 60 percent of the water in the lower Colorado going, in Arizona, going to alfalfa and irrigated agriculture. And so there's a buffer there. And so they could move that to address the water shortages in the urban areas.
[00:06:41] Peter Gleick: Well, a buffer in the sense that that reallocation among the different users is possible.
The farmers who might not get the water they've been traditionally getting might not think of it as a buffer. It's a cost to them. and some of the economic implications of shifting water among users and the social implications still have to be addressed. They're going to be very difficult political conversations.
[00:07:04] Bridget Scanlon: Right. And maybe if the farmers get compensated appropriately, that might help.
[00:07:09] Peter Gleick: And in fact, some of that is happening on a temporary basis. Farmers are being offered money to not grow alfalfa part of the year in Southern California, in order to make up some of these shortfalls.
[00:07:21] Bridget Scanlon: Right, right. So, California is doing a lot to address water scarcity and to increase their water security.
I hear about wastewater reuse. I see you commented on that for many places in California. Also, seawater desalination. And so, do you think that maybe California, with these new water sources and stuff, may be able, may not, and so what is the relative cost and energy implications of them developing wastewater reuse versus taking the imported water and the energy and the cost of importing the water?
Is the Pacific Institute looking at that or are you aware of it?
[00:08:03] Peter Gleick: The Institute has done a lot of work on these issues over the many years we've been looking at them, and part of the impetus, part of California's water challenges, is we have a large population, we have limited water resources, we've developed all of the traditional water resources that were economically and environmentally acceptable.
We built a lot of dams, we built a lot of aqueducts to move water from where we had it to where we wanted it, from the mountains to the coastal cities. We've overtapped our groundwater. Those are the traditional ways we've tapped into water supply. And those brought great benefits to us, but they also brought enormous costs and implications.
We're losing our fisheries, our salmon, because of the dams on the rivers. We're overtapping groundwater and land is subsiding and wells are going out of production. And so in order to address our water problems, the Institute has long argued that we need to, and have the ability to, look at nontraditional solutions. For example, water conservation and efficiency, that is, doing more with the water we're already taking out of the system. And the potential for conservation and efficiency we've determined, through a series of analyses over the years, is enormous, at very low cost often. But there are other supply options that are not traditional as well.
You mentioned wastewater treatment and reuse and desalination. We collect a lot of wastewater. We treat it often to a very high standard. And then traditionally we've thrown it away. We dump it into the oceans. Now we have to look at that as an asset, not a liability. We now reuse about 18 percent of our wastewater. We're talking about doubling or tripling that. That's a new source of water. It's very reliable. We can treat it to an incredibly high standard. Singapore treats almost a hundred percent of their wastewater. And some of it is so pure, they use it for their semiconductor industry. So that's a possibility.
Desalination is also a possibility but you asked about the relative costs of these, conservation and efficiency is the cheapest. And wastewater treatment and reuse -- because we already treat the wastewater -- is relatively inexpensive compared to most new sources of water. Desalination is possible, but it's the most expensive. It's energy intensive. It's capital intensive. There's a lot of infrastructure involved that has environmental challenges. It is an option, but if we look at things from an economic and an environmental point of view, first, I put desalination fairly low on the list.
[00:10:33] Bridget Scanlon: So do you think California could, might consider that Arizona could buy some of the Colorado water that California might not need if they expand the wastewater reuse a lot, or what is the relative energy and cost of wastewater reuse versus the water import, imported water?
[00:10:51] Peter Gleick: Yes, politically, I think it's unlikely that California would sell water to Arizona on the Colorado. More likely, California and California farmers and California cities are going to look at some of these options of conservation efficiency, wastewater reuse, and use them internally in California to address California water issues.
But of course, Arizona has the ability to treat and reuse wastewater. Arizona has the ability to shift water from agriculture to urban use. Arizona has the potential to improve the efficiency of water use by agricultural irrigation, changes in cropping types, changes in urban water use. All of the things that we've talked about for California are possible in Arizona and elsewhere.
The political transfer of water, I think, is probably less likely.
[00:11:38] Bridget Scanlon: Right. I mean, I would, it seems like we need to be more aware of greenhouse gas implications and things like that. So the energy intensity of transporting the water to California versus doing wastewater reuse. And so I was just wondering about those two relative to each other. But I mean, I agree that it's unlikely that they would give it up, but we think about a lot of different things and many things won't happen.
[00:12:04] Peter Gleick: Energy is an important factor here. We've developed our water systems and we didn't really think much about the energy implications of water, but we are now. There's a whole field of study called the energy-water nexus, looking at how much water is required to produce our energy systems, how much energy is required to treat and deliver and move water.
One of the reasons conservation and efficiency is so cost effective is because you're not only saving water, but you're then saving the energy required to collect that water, to treat that water, to move that water, to use that water. Washing machines, efficient washing machines in our homes are really cost effective.
They might cost a little bit more up front, but they not only save water, they save energy. Right. It's a huge cost. And, of course, all of those things then save greenhouse gas emissions, too. So we're starting to think about those together, and it's actually changing some of our policies.
[00:12:56] Bridget Scanlon: Right, right. So, so now I'd like to move to talk about your book, which is an amazing compilation of, you go into so much depth on the history and delightful to read and the Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future.
So I was wondering, these are topics, I guess, that you've been thinking about for many years and you really intensively were writing during COVID, I guess. Was that when you, so what drove you to write this book? What was the main driver for it?
[00:13:32] Peter Gleick: Well, in some ways I've been writing this book my whole life.
I've been working on water issues for many decades on all aspects of water.When I startedthere wasn't that much attention being paid to water, more attention being paid to energy. But over the years, water has become much more a focus of a lot of the work of the environmental community, of the political community, the economic community.
And this book is, really a culmination of a lot of the work that I've been doing for a long time. It's the history, the human history of water, how Homo sapiens evolved and how water in the universe evolved. About the development of the science and technology and culture and economics around water through history and the challenges that we face today, the water crises that we face.
But especially, I wanted to write it because of the, what I call the third age of water, which, maybe we'll talk about later, but it's the hope I have for the future. The idea that I really believe we can solve our water problems, and it's one thing to understand the water challenges that we face, and there's been a lot of work done recently to raise awareness about that, but it's another thing to understand that there are solutions.
And I really wanted to write a book that also talked about not just the problems, but those solutions.
[00:14:49] Bridget Scanlon: I really appreciate that because I get kind of depressed sometimes to read about all the problems we have without any hope at the, our light at the end of the tunnel. So I appreciate that you added, you have included that component.
So one of the first things that struck me when I started reading the book, a lot of people say we're running out of water or things like that, but I mean, you emphasize that the amount of water on the planet has been the same over time. And so maybe you can explain that a little bit to the listeners.
[00:15:18] Peter Gleick: Yes. So that basic fact is true. The amount of water we have on the planet today is about the same as we've had for billions of years. So we're not literally running out of water. Sometimes in some places we're running out of the availability of water in a local sense because water is badly distributed around the world in space and time.
There are wet areas and dry areas and wet seasons and dry seasons. We have very rapidly growing populations that are putting more pressure on the limited water resources that are available in specific spots. Sometimes the problem is water contamination. It's not that we don't have water, but we've contaminated it or it's not the right quality for what we want to use.
And so the challenge we face around water is not the total amount that's available. It's not that we're running out. It's that we're misusing it or misallocating or misappropriating it or not pricing it properly or not treating it properly. Those are the nature of the, that's the nature of the challenge.
[00:16:14] Bridget Scanlon: Right. And as you said, we have spatial and temporal disconnects between water supply and demand. We have floods and droughts, too much versus too little and these sorts of issues. So I currently enjoyed reading about the first phase, of the book, the history, and it's just amazing. And thinking about when agriculture began 32,000 years ago, and maybe you can talk a little bit about the first stage.
So
[00:16:42] Peter Gleick: the first stage of water in my book is basically from the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe, when the first molecules of oxygen and hydrogen were created. Once we had oxygen and hydrogen, we had water. And even today, everywhere we look out in space, we see water everywhere in every galaxy and every, on planets, on asteroids, on moons, in interstellar space.
Water is ubiquitous, which is a wonderful thing. And of course, without water, there would be no life as we know it. And then I talk about water in our solar system, how water came to Earth. The role that water and climate played in the evolution of Homo sapiens and the success of Homo sapiens in Africa originally and the outmigration of Homo sapiens around the world, which partly depended on our ability as early humans to manipulate and withstand the extremes of climate and water.
We were able to take advantage of wet periods. We were able to take, we were able to survive droughts. We were able to survive climate changes and ice ages because of the intelligence of Homo sapiens. And that was an important part of our own evolution up through really the first empires in ancient Mesopotamia and in the Indus Valley in South Asia and China where we first learned to manipulate the hydrologic cycle for not just hunter gatherer societies, but intentional agriculture and irrigated agriculture. And those first empires really were built along some of the great rivers of the world, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra in South Asia, and the Indus, the Yangtze River in China.
And those great rivers are where the great empires started because of the availability of water and our ability to manage and control that water resources. And that was really the first stage when we've sort of figured out what water was and how we could use it.
[00:18:45] Bridget Scanlon: I really enjoyed the chapter Controlling Water because before that you talk a lot about the big floods and stuff and the biblical floods and other floods, but we won't have time to talk about those today, but controlling the water from floods to droughts was amazing.
And you mentioned the Yangtze river. Liangzhu, predating the dynasties and rice farming, that was amazing. And in Jordan, the Jawa Reservoir near Amman, and terraced gardens, 5,600 years ago. I mean, it just blows your mind. You just, we don't realize that Egypt dam that was 14 meters high about 2,700 years ago.
So it really is amazing. But just relying on energy from humans, animals, or gravity to move the water, I really appreciated that.
[00:19:37] Peter Gleick: I'm a scientist by training, but I really love digging into the archeology, the history of these early civilizations, the first evidence of dams and manipulation of water, the first aqueducts, again, thousands and thousands of years ago, where people understood that in order to survive, in order to thrive, They were, they had to, and then were able to manipulate water, to store water a little bit in the dry, in the wet season so they could use it in the dry season, to move water from where we got it to where we wanted it. That was all critical for these early civilizations. And yes, they had to also deal with the extremes, had to deal with floods.
The great flood stories in the Bible and earlier than the Bible probably had their genesis in real floods that dealt damages to these early societies, but then these societies drew lessons from them that they passed down first in oral history and then in written histories.
[00:20:37] Bridget Scanlon: in that first age of water you also described, as you just mentioned, the qanats, the subsurface canals, I mean hundreds of kilometers long.
And even in Iran, you mentioned Tehran in the up to the early 60s, they were served by thousands of these qanats, these subsurface canals from them, taking water from the nearby mountains in the subsurface through these canals to the urban regions in the plains where they had the agriculture. It just blows your mind. In 2014 in Iran, they had 37,000 active qanats supplying a lot of the water. That's just mind blowing.
[00:21:15] Peter Gleick: Yeah. Some of these early engineering projects, thousands of years old, are incredible. The qanats there are underground, little underground canals that bring water hundreds of kilometers, as you note, from the mountains in Iran to the big cities, some of which are still operating.
The ancient Greeks, they're famous for their aqueducts. Some of those aqueducts are still providing water to Rome. It's just amazing the engineering skills of our early ancestors.
[00:21:45] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah, you mentioned visiting the Pont du Gard in southern France, a huge aqueduct, moving surface water hundreds of kilometers just by gravity. So controlling the water was a big thing then in the first age. And then moving from the first age to the second age, I mean, it didn't happen overnight. You mentioned, I don't know, about what time period you're considering. Intentional agriculture about 12,000 years ago. And then you talk about the population growth and requiring more management and stuff.
So maybe you can describe a little bit about what the differences were between the first age and the second age of water.
[00:22:24] Peter Gleick: Yeah, I feel like the first age of water ended when populations started to outgrow their water resources, when the engineering skills of the ancient, our ancient ancestors were no longer enough to deal with water.
And when science and technology and engineering and art and culture started to blossom in the Islamic golden age, around the nine hundreds, in the renaissance in Europe in the 15, 16, 17 hundreds when we learned what water was, we learned what molecules were, we learned what oxygen and hydrogen was.
We started to build engines, we started to apply artificial energy to move water, not just hundreds of kilometers in by gravity, but over mountains or through mountains with pumps and a lot more modern technology. When we built big dams that could produce hydroelectricity rather than just the small dams that were vulnerable to damaging floods in the ancient days.
And that was the second age of water, sort of a blossoming of science and technology. And the second age of water is our age. It's the age we all grew up in. We've all benefited from those advances. And I describe the scientists who found out that cholera was a water related disease rather than an airborne disease and then figured out how to treat water.
So that water was no longer contaminated and we could avoid cholera and dysentery and typhoid. The first wastewater treatment plants in Jersey City, New Jersey around 1909, which were so successful that within a few decades, every major city in the Western world had water treatment plants. That's our age when we really benefited from the science and technological advances.
of our, our more recent ancestors. And now that was, we have to acknowledge those benefits, but we also need to start to understand the unintended consequences of those efforts.
[00:24:19] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah, I enjoyed reading about Chris Colles, the guy that was born in Ireland that was developing the water distribution system for New York, and how much he was charging for that.
I can't remember, maybe 1,800 or something back in the 1740s or whatever, but he died a pauper.
[00:24:38] Peter Gleick: Yeah, there are lots of great stories in the book, but New York City's water system is another great story. This was a guy who came to the United States from Ireland at a time when there were no, really no steam powered pumps.
There were a couple of them in the United States, but Britain wasn't exporting them to the U.S. for military reasons, because we were, we were fighting a war. We started to fight the war of independence. And he proposed building a steam powered pump to provide water for the city of New York. And the city of New York agreed and paid him some, some of money to build it.
And then the Revolutionary War interceded and literally within a few months after he demonstrated it, the British occupied Manhattan and they burned his pump to the ground. Eventually, of course, all those things were rebuilt. But it's a great story. And it's related, of course, to the issue of conflict over water and the role that water has played in wars, which is another thing that I work on quite extensively at the Institute.
[00:25:35] Bridget Scanlon: And I enjoyed reading about John Snow and cholera and you mentioned like early on people thought maybe it was cholera was an airborne issue and then he identified and did the forensics and stuff and then eventually it took a long time for people to believe him and then water chlorination and Jersey City, Patterson, the American Public Health association, so all of those things.
So it's really nice to understand where those things, how those things evolved over time. London Chlorinating Water in 1916 and now we are back to the bipartisan infrastructure law and we are, reinvesting in the water infrastructure and trying to build it back up. $50 billion in the US for clean water and safe drinking water.
so I, I want to talk a little bit about water poverty because you have visited many countries that experience, water scarcity and water poverty issues and, would like the UN programs to try to address this and, what we can be doing better to try to improve the situation.
[00:26:43] Peter Gleick: There are many challenges associated with water, but for me, one of the most significant, probably inexcusable in my mind, is what I describe it in the book is water poverty -- that is our failure in the 21st century to provide safe water and sanitation and hygiene to everyone on the planet. And we know how to do that. And there are no longer any technological miracles that have to be invented. We have plenty of money to do that, but we have failed to provide safe water and sanitation today.
There are 2 billion people that don't have safe water or sanitation on the planet. And it's inexcusable. It leads to water-related diseases that, again, we know how to get rid of, we know how to prevent, but we have failed to do that for so many people on the planet. And the United Nations has recognized this first with the Millennium Development Goals in the year 2000, which set a target for 2015 of cutting in half the proportion of people without access to safe water or sanitation.
We didn't meet that target in 2015, although significant improvements were made. And then the UN launched what are now called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There is a whole series of them, but one of them, SDG 6, is focused on water and that target for 2030 is to provide everyone on the planet with safe water and sanitation.
We're not going to meet that target. There was just actually a report released a week ago updating the progress in this and noting that progress is way too slow and that if the progress continues at the same rate we’ll grossly fail to meet the 2030 target. And that's a serious problem. It's water poverty.
It causes water related diseases. It means women and girls have to walk miles to collect water in many parts of the world and they don't have the opportunity to participate in education or in economic activities. But interestingly, it's not just a problem in the poorer countries.
Even in the United States, we have water poverty. We've done, again, a study at the Pacific Institute. Looking at populations in California that don't have access to safe water and sanitation. There are probably two or three hundred thousand people in the Central Valley of California, mostly poor farm worker communities, Native American communities, and reservations that don't have access to running, safe running water or adequate toilets and sanitation facilities.
We saw the disaster in Flint, Michigan, where a city that did have safe water lost its access to safe water because of inadequate investment and corruption and mismanagement.
Jackson, Mississippi, same problem, a big city in the south that didn't have, doesn't have access to safe water and sanitation because they've not invested in their water system.
It's inexcusable, water poverty is a problem that faces us all around the planet.
[00:29:32] Bridget Scanlon: Right. And you have visited many of these developing countries during your career. And the UN program, the Water and Sanitation, Water Sanitation and Hygiene WASH Program, accounts for about 2 million deaths annually.
And you visited slums in Nairobi, and you also visited South Africa where they developed the National Water Act. so I guess there, there's so many challenges to dealing with this issue. I mean, you need energy to treat the water, wastewater discharges are a problem. I was talking to Veena Srinivasan recently, and she mentioned a big issue is that all the untreated wastewater that goes into surface water bodies and that contaminates them. So there are many issues that need to be dealt with to make it safe.
[00:30:21] Peter Gleick: Yes, I have had the opportunity to work in a lot of different countries around the world. I was fortunate enough in 1994 to go to South Africa and work with the new government there under Nelson Mandela.
Aapartheid had just been overthrown. they had an opportunity to rewrite their water laws, and they were holding a series of workshops on water law, and I participated there, and they developed the human right to water. That was a tremendous step forward, the work they did in South Africa at the time.
I visited Kibera, which is one of the worst slums in Nairobi, a terrible, large population of people without access to safe water and sanitation. But even there, community groups working on those issues were doing a great job in trying to address those issues. And so everywhere I go, I do see these positive examples of people working on these issues and making progress on these issues. I wish we could make progress faster to tackle them, but there are efforts underway to deal with these issues. And that's part of why I wrote the book and have a hope for the future.
[00:31:24] Bridget Scanlon: You mentioned in the book, Clean India program where they try to reduce open defecation by October, 2019.
So, so there are many different programs being put forward to try to improve the safety, reliability and safety of water. I know we won't have time to go into details on this because you've written a separate book on it, but commercializing and privatizing water and bottled water industry, you've written a lot about and you've studied a lot.
So maybe you just briefly comment. I enjoyed reading about Schweppes because I recall it from early days and the origin of that. And he was a jeweler and stuff. That was pretty fascinating. So do you just want to mention briefly the bottled water industry and how that is impacting the availability of safe water?
[00:32:10] Peter Gleick: Sure. So I did write another book earlier called Bottled and Sold, the Story Behind our Obsession with Bottled Water, about the bottled water industry. Bottled water is an outgrowth of a lot of different things, an outgrowth of our desire for convenience, an outgrowth of the plastics industry that permitted us to all of a sudden have lightweight plastic bottles that we could just throw away.
And that's of course, both an advantage and a terrible environmental problem. it's an outgrowth of a, a failure to invest in our drinking water systems adequately and the loss of trust by some people in the quality of their water. We tend to hear about problems when there's a problem with our tap water system.
And then people think maybe my tap water isn't good. And so people turn to bottled water thinking that it might be better or being told by the bottled water manufacturers that it's better. All of those things have contributed to an explosive growth in the bottled water industry and the marketing of bottled water as some product that might be better for us, make us more popular, more sexy or more healthy. We've all been inundated with those advertisements. And it's, in a way, it's a reflection of the failure of our ability to provide safe water in our taps to everybody, or to explain to everybody that our tap water is safe, or our failure sometimes to invest in our systems to make sure that they're safe.
In addition, of course, the bottled water industry has money for advertising. Our local water agencies, they don't advertise. They're public agencies, they don't have the money to advertise. It's an uneven playing field.
[00:33:44] Bridget Scanlon: You mention in the book that the bottled water industry accounts for maybe 300 billion dollar industry.
Advertising alone is seven billions a year. So, and about half of the bottled water may be coming from tap water itself. So it's, I mean, it's getting people's attention. And as you say, so many things, convenience and all of these different things, and people don't think about the environmental impacts of drinking bottled water.
[00:34:08] Peter Gleick: It's very expensive. It has serious environmental challenges. I don't argue and I've never argued that we should ban bottled water. Consumers want a choice that they should be able to buy bottled water if they want it. But they should understand the cost, the true cost of it. There should be, for example, mandatory recycling programs, and the bottled water manufacturers, in my opinion, ought to be required to use recycled plastic. Not virgin plastic, which comes from petroleum and natural gas. They should be required to use recycled plastics in producing plastic, and that would help address some of the plastics problem. It would encourage recycling and collection and reuse. We can develop the technologies to clean and purify and recycle plastic, these plastics. That's one way of addressing some of the costs. But economically, bottled water is thousands of times more expensive than tap water. And as you mentioned, a very large fraction of the bottled water originates as tap water, and it's just processed again and put in plastic bottles and sold to us at a big markup.
[00:35:10] Bridget Scanlon: Right. Another chapter in your book discusses water and conflict, and I know this is a big area of research for you. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of time, and I just spoke with Aaron Wolfe and had a podcast with him. But you talk about water being a weapon, or triggering, or being a casualty of violence.
And, and go back in history to one of the first conflicts 4,500 years ago in the Tigris-Euphrates. I really like the database that the Pacific Institute provides on conflicts, and that's a huge help. And Aaron Wolf has a book, has a database on water treaties. We talk a lot about conflicts between nations and stuff like that, but what you also emphasize that within subnational issues, farmers and pastoralists and upstream downstream issues. So it's a huge issue and I'm delighted that you're working on it. And because we're seeing more and more in recent years.
[00:36:05] Peter Gleick: It is a big issue. We've worked for many years at the Institute on the relationship between water and conflict, water and security issues.
I wrote my first paper on it in the 1980s, when it really wasn't on the agenda. People were thinking about traditional security, superpower politics between the Soviet Union and the United States and Europe. But the understanding that environmental issues are playing an increasing role in conflicts is important to understand. We do maintain what's called the Water Conflict Chronology, that's this open-source database on conflicts over water going back thousands of years, up until the present. So if people are interested in that, Google Water Conflict Chronology, and it'll come right up. And we look at conflicts in three categories, water as a trigger of conflict, that is conflicts over control or access to water resources; water as a casualty or water systems as casualties of conflicts that may start for other reasons, wars that start for religious or ideological or economic reasons, but where water or water systems are targeted. And we've seen that most recently in the Middle East and in, in the Ukraine, where urban water systems and dams have been bombed directly. And the third category is where water or water systems are used as weapons, where water is withheld behind a dam or released from a dam as a weapon, or where water is poisoned, for military purposes.
There are over 1900 entries in the Water Conflict Chronology now, and most of them, as you note, are not nation-to-nation, but subnational, between farmers, riots over access to water. or control of water between farmers and pastoralists in Northern Africa. And international treaties are an important strategy for reducing those risks when it's nation to nation.
Some of the other aspects of water sustainability I think are probably going to be more important at reducing these subnational conflicts. Assuring everybody has access to safe water and sanitation will reduce the risk that people fight over access and control of irrigation canals or drinking water.
So the connection between water and conflict and this broader issue of water and sustainability is a pretty important one.
[00:38:15] Bridget Scanlon: I'm glad. And I know I was reading over the weekend, many of your papers on the Ukraine issue, and you've covered that pretty, pretty well looking at from different aspects. So that was very interesting.
Those papers were very interesting. So, water and food are tightly connected. You mentioned water-energy nexus, water-food nexus, and, the chapter that you have on the blue green revolution. I like that we normally just think about the green revolution, but you are putting blue ahead of it, I guess, thinking about the importance of water and in realizing the increase in food production and water's role through irrigation in helping making this happen.
And maybe you can describe that a little bit, Peter.
[00:38:57] Peter Gleick: So in the 1950s and the 1960s, there were serious concerns that growing populations would outstrip food, our ability to produce food. The population bomb was a concern in part. Because of those discussions about population, policies were put in place to try and reduce the risks that there would be a mismatch between population growth and resource availability, in particular food.
And one of the consequences of those efforts was the Green Revolution. We talk about the Green Revolution, which was a revolution of our ability to grow food. The expansion of agricultural technologies to, to Southern Asia and the Great Plains of the United States and the Central Valley in the United States and China hugely improved our ability to grow food.
But I also argue that the success of the Green Revolution was largely as well, a water story. The ability to tap groundwater and to provide reliable water supplies in southern Asia and Africa and in, India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, really dramatically improve their ability to grow food. And so it was a revolution, not just of agricultural practices and herbicides and pesticides and crop types, but it was a revolution of irrigation technology, and that helped our ability even today to grow food for a growing population. Those challenges still exist. We still are worried about our ability to grow food today for 8 billion people and ultimately for 9 or even 10 billion people. And that is a serious issue in part because the blue-green revolution also led to overdraft of groundwater, to the non-sustainable consumption of water.
But it's now beginning to cause some problems.
[00:40:50] Bridget Scanlon: Right. And so you mentioned irrigation accounting for irrigated agriculture accounting for 20 percent of cropland and 40 percent of global food production. And Stefan Siebert saying 70 percent of water withdrawal globally and 90 percent of water consumption.
So it's a big draw on water. And as you mentioned, depleting aquifers in different regions, and you also talk in the book about the GRACE satellite data and how that has helped us to visualize where groundwater is being overexploited in different regions. I think that was a huge help for us visualizing, and I think even in California to helping the policy change and moving towards Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014, of course, being in an intense drought didn't hurt either for making that happen. So we have lots of data now, satellite data, ground-based monitoring, global models and all, and these helping us understand the impacts of all of this irrigated agriculture. So it'd be interesting to see. But then we have more demands on crops, sustainable aviation fuel, they want biofuels, and these sorts of things.
I think they're interesting from the perspective that before biofuels, I think people weren't really as concerned about the water use for crops and stuff because they felt like it was a human right, food is a human right. But then when it was used for biofuels, then they started to balk. Would you like to comment on some of those things, Peter?
[00:42:24] Peter Gleick: Yeah, so the more we learn about water resources, the satellite ability to remote sense some of these challenges to actually see groundwater use and withdrawals over time, to see changes in the ice, from climate change. They've given us a lot more information about what the challenges are, where the challenges are, and some insights into solutions.
But there are always new challenges. The idea that we could use some of our crops for biofuels rather than fossil fuels, there are water implications to that. And one of the more interesting recent stories is Artificial intelligence. Everybody's thinking, Oh, how can artificial intelligence help me address some of the issues I have to address?
But it turns out there's a water implication and an energy implication of some of the technologies used in artificial intelligence that we didn't know about a year or two ago. There are always new challenges. And the better data we have, that's great, but we have to figure out broadly how to move to a more sustainable system overall that integrates all of these issues together.
[00:43:26] Bridget Scanlon: Right. There's never a shortage of issues. And when you try to help partially resolve one, there are more pop up. So this current age of water, I mean, characterized by scientific and industrial development and stuff, industrial growth and environmental disasters. So, talking to Charlie Vorosmarty from New York, it mentions it seems like the traditional pathways that we develop industrially and then we impair the systems, and then afterwards when we have the money, then we can try to repair them. But it would be nice if we could avoid some of that. And he mentioned South America and other regions as possible areas where that could happen. But, you emphasize loss of nature, ecosystems, and how to, manage some of these issues.
[00:44:13] Peter Gleick: I do believe that we're at the end of the second age of water transition because of these crises that we face, because of the ecological crises, the water poverty issue we've discussed because of the growing threat of climate change.
And then we have to move to what I call the third age of water. Charlie's comment that we need a new path. I've written something about what I call the soft path for water, which is an alternative way of thinking of moving away from the hard path of water, the hard infrastructure, the hard institutions, the hard economics that we developed successfully in the second age of water, but also reduce some of these unintended consequences we've been discussing.
And the soft path for water, says, let's rethink the demand for water and what we're really choosing to use our water for. Let's rethink supply and move away from taking more water out of ecosystems and looking at wastewater treatment and reuse and alternative sources of supply that don't damage ecosystems.
Then look at new kinds of institutions and new kinds of economics so that our institutions aren't just water over here and energy over here and food over there, but water, energy, and food together in an integrated way.
We don't price water properly. We don't think about the ecological value of water, but the soft path says, let's think about the ecological value of water as well. It's the soft path is integrate all of these ideas. Look at all of these success stories. That are happening in bits and pieces around the world and move them up front on the agenda and scale them up and expand them more rapidly.
That's the path, the new path. to a more sustainable water future.
[00:45:59] Bridget Scanlon: I totally agree with you. I mean, in the past, we have siloed the different sectors, water, energy, food, and tried to solve them independently. But I think a solution space when we're considering all of these together may be quite different and we can try to optimize and we can't ignore greenhouse gas implications when we're solving an energy issue that might have water implications.
So in your chapter, in the Third Age of Water, you mention five different parameters that you consider human right to water, which is very important, the value, the true value of water and ecosystems, which we've kind of neglected a lot in the past, and maximizing social and individual well being for every drop of water.
And then looking at alternative, unconventional sources of water, treated wastewater, grey water, storm water, and desal. I think it's opening up a lot in the solution space, and I think it's pretty exciting. And I think many cities, are developing portfolios of options to develop resilient systems to climate extremes and, and to improve water security.
You're certainly seeing that in California, right? With all of the things that they're doing there and in the different spaces.
[00:47:19] Peter Gleick: So if we go back to the Colorado River that you started the conversation with; In the old days, the solution for the Colorado River would have been tap more water resources, build more dams, or running out of water, all right, let's divert water from the Mississippi River or the Great Lakes and move it to the southwest.
But we now know that those traditional solutions aren't going to work. We now know that climate change is not only affecting how much water we get, but when and where we get it. and the solutions on the Colorado are going to be the things that I describe in the third age of water that you just mentioned.
It's going to be more efficient use of water. It's going to be more cooperative institutions that discuss how to allocate shortages and deal with extremes. It's going to be alternative sources of supply like treated wastewater and desalination rather than building a pipeline and taking more water from a distant watershed.
It's going to be restoring ecosystems. We're beginning to talk about, even though there are tensions and overallocation of water on the Colorado, leaving some water in the river for the natural ecosystems, the endangered fish, the water that no longer reaches the Delta in Mexico, which used to be an incredibly rich biodiversity site.
They're now starting to think about restoring some of the ecological benefits of the river. All of those things, all of those solutions are part of the idea of integrated solutions. And if we can show that they work anywhere, we can show that they'll work everywhere. And that's the positive vision I offer.
[00:48:51] Bridget Scanlon: Right. And one of the things that you mentioned in the book is willingness to pay and how much people value safe, reliable water. And you mentioned people in Southern China willing to pay two times their water bill to improve the safety of water. So I think people will recognize the value of it, the health implications. All of these other things and may be willing to pay more for it. You also mentioned removing some dams in Oregon and recent, in the last decade and wetlands, recognizing the importance of wetlands and preserving wetlands that we have, because we've lost a lot of them since the seventies, about a third of them globally.
And then constructing new wetlands as a nature based solution to tackle some of the water issues. So we're running out of time, but I thought one of the very interesting stories that you had in the book was about Windhoek, Namibia, with the wastewater reuse that was started decades ago. You visited, did you visit the wastewater treatment plant there with direct potable reuse, DPR?
[00:49:58] Peter Gleick: So in 1994, I did, when I was in Southern Africa working on these issues, I visited Windhoek, Namibia. Namibia is one of the driest nations in the world. Windhoek is the capital, it's in a very dry area. And even in the nineties, early nineties, they had a wastewater system where they collected wastewater.
They used the best technologies of the time, which at the time were relatively simple to collect and treat, and then just reuse that wastewater directly. They pumped it back into the water system. It was very high-quality water. The population was willing to accept it. Even today, there's some public opposition to that idea, but the more we understand that the technologies permit us to produce unbelievably high-quality water, the best quality water you can have, from any source water, from ocean water, from wastewater, that is going to be a technology.
It's not just a technology for the future. It's a technology already for today.
[00:50:55] Bridget Scanlon: I would encourage the readers to read your book and the title is The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future and it was published in 2023 by Public Affairs, Hachette.
It's just a delightful read and I appreciate all the time and effort you put into it and sharing the stories. Also, I'm grateful for your optimism that we can resolve these issues if we put our mind to it and try to develop appropriate approaches to deal with these problems. Thank you so much, Peter, for your time.
[00:51:31] Peter Gleick: Bridget, thanks for having me on. It was a great conversation. I appreciate the fact that you enjoyed the book. And, hopefully some of your listeners will as well. The idea that we can solve these water problems if we look at what's successful around the world and we push forward to accelerate those examples -- that's what gives me hope.
[00:51:51] Bridget Scanlon: Thank you so much, Peter.
[00:51:53] Peter Gleick: Thank you.
