[00:00:22] Bridget Scanlon: I'm pleased to welcome Kaveh Madani to the podcast. Kaveh is the director at the United Nations University Institute for Water Environment and Health and Founding Chair of the UN University Sustainability Nexus Analytics Informatics and Data Program.
So thank you so much Kaveh for joining me today. I really appreciate it.
[00:00:45] Kaveh Madani: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:48] Bridget Scanlon: So Kaveh, we chatted recently about various water issues and a lot of people talk about us globally running out of water. Then other people say, well, it's managing extremes. We have floods and droughts, too much or too little.
I really liked your analogy between water management and bank accounts and considering surface water as your checking account and groundwater as your savings account. And also, I think you mentioned, you prefer the term maybe we should be using water bankruptcy rather than water crisis.
So maybe you can describe some of those aspects, Kaveh.
[00:01:30] Kaveh Madani: Ha! That would be like 10 podcasts. But let me try. Let's start with the term water crisis, right? So. I'm from Iran and I was, some years ago, maybe 10 years ago, was working on Iran's water issues. And I had written a paper on Iran's water crisis, which became very, I would say famous back then, the Iranian media picked it up and a lot of people were talking about it.
And through that I got connected to different groups in Iran, including like documentary filmmakers. And one day I was talking to one of them and he showed me an old black and white footage which was from the sixties I think, or like, late sixties in Iran. And he was talking about the water crisis in Iran and it got me thinking like, that I wrote this paper recently in 2014. I'm still calling it The Crisis. It was a crisis back then. But that kind of is against the term crisis because crisis must be only an extreme with a limited I would say lifetime. And it's an extreme situation where all groups come together and try to address it and to mitigate it.
If something has lasted for so long philosophically speaking, can we call it the crisis? And that's when I, gradually like it first was a question for me. And, later on I tried to find an answer for it. And my answer to it is that actually the crisis is over.
We are in a situation or a post-crisis state that is called water bankruptcy. And what do I mean by that? As you specified? I think our checking accounts are surface water. They get renewed every year. So nature is sometimes more generous than some other times.
But we get some we get our checking account renewed every now and then, precipitation, snow, rain, and so on. We have our savings account being our groundwater there, which we use as backups still, we get some recharge of groundwater. Nature is generous there too. But then we also have some leftovers there saved water there from decades, centuries thousand years, so millennials actually like many years ago there.
And that's the water we inherited from our ancestors, from our grandparents. So it's there to give us resilience. When we are short in our checking account, we go after our saving account. When we are out of that situation not only we switch back to our checking account, but also we try to put some more into our saving account to pay back for what we took out.
But let's look at the situation. Not only we have exhausted our checking account, but also our saving accounts in many parts of the world. Of course, that's not the situation everywhere, but it's the situation in the global south and Californians, Texans are experiencing it. You go to Africa, Middle East and North Africa, they're experiencing it. You go to India, to Australia, a lot of places around the world, this is the situation. Now what do we do? If you're in the business where we are running a financial entity, right? So, we can go take more loans and we can come up with new plans.
And that's what we do. So there we take some loans and we always try to mitigate this situation through tapping into new resources. Give me another line of credit, give me another loan. And that's what we take from nature. Let me dig deeper, take more groundwater out. Let me build another reservoir.
Let me take water from another basin. Do inter-basin water transfers. Let me desalinate and now let me take water out of the air. All of these are focused on increasing our income in a way without thinking about our expenditure. What's happening in the world though is that continuously consumption is going up. And, no matter how much we have invested in increasing the supply side, we have seen that as soon as we increase the supply, the consumption keeps going up.
This is not a new problem, we have experienced it in the energy world as well. We thought that with increasing energy efficiency, we would use less energy. Guess what? We continue to increase our energy use, energy consumption. Same applies to water resources. So what has happened now is that we have many water-right holders that we owe water to, many checks that we have written are bouncing back and many credit cards that many creditors that we owe a lot to.
Now, in this situation, what's smart to do? We have two options. One is the option of mitigation. The option of mitigation is going to another lender and asking for more and give me another, give me more budget. Let me implement another giant structural solution, engineering solution. Or, sometimes even working a little bit on our expenditure, water conservation, reduction in use.
But all we are putting our effort into is mitigation. Trying to convince everyone that this situation is just a crisis is temporary and we can fix it. This is a temporary, this is a problem with a short lifespan. And as soon we know, soon we'll be out of it. We will promise to people, this is just a drought, this is a situation that we win. This is just an extreme. But this is a permanent extreme. If you look around, you see that through mitigation, you cannot fix all the problems. There are lakes and wetlands that have gone dry, and there is no way you can restore them. There are aquifers that have gone dry. There's land subsidence, there are rivers that have been destroyed.
There are like, development in many areas that used to be wet that you cannot reverse. The reality is that by promising mitigation to people, to the policy makers, you're just fooling them. You need to admit that you're bankrupt and you have to file for bankruptcy to let all those creditors know that the first thing that we have to have consensus over is that this problem is not going to be solved.
This problem cannot be mitigated, and this problem is not temporary anymore. This is a lasting situation, and this can be a new normal. We need adaptation in addition to mitigation. Some of our damage is irreversible. We can deny that. We can ignore that, but the problem with ignoring and denying that I'm calling it a crisis, is that by the time we realize that this is not reversible anymore, the cost of adaptation is going to get higher and higher.
So I admire those bankrupt merchants and entities that have the courage to come out and say they're bankrupt. It's shameful. Yes, but admitting that your model is not working is the first step in solving the problem. The model of increasing the supply is no longer going to work, and I think that's something we need to do around the world.
[00:08:50] Bridget Scanlon: Right. So I really enjoyed reading your 2014 paper around water crisis. And you mentioned that, oftentimes these days, something happens with water, springs dry up or wetlands dry up or whatever, most people say, well, it's climate change, and then they don't take responsibility for how they manage water and the impacts of that.
And then it doesn't seem to lead to actions or solutions if you just say, well, it's climate change. So in your 2014 paper on Iran, you talked about a few different drivers of the water issues there: population growth, inefficient irrigation, and development. And maybe an overemphasis on food security and jobs and socioeconomic factors that factor in.
So maybe you could describe that a little bit. Kaveh.
[00:09:45] Kaveh Madani: I mean, the story of Iran is not unique in the world. That's the story that we've seen, we have seen replicated in many places. Some countries have more limited bandwidth and capacity to respond and change, and of course, if they have kept denying it, the chances for swerving and changing the path become more limited.
So that paper just wanted to explain what went wrong and why we are there. In the case of Iran we have the issue of rapid population growth over two decades after the 1979 revolution. The population of the country more than doubled and this discontinued until now that now Iran is one of the lowest population growth rates around the world. But not only numbers, of course when you increase the population, the water demand goes higher, not only for drinking, but also for food production, energy production, or so on. But also where you place the population matters, right? If you place everyone in just small metropolitan, like a few metropolitans, huge metropolitans, but then those places might not have the capacity to, they don't have enough resources to satisfy those people. But what happens is that when the metropolitans get stronger they keep stealing resources from others. And you have seen this in Los Angeles, you have seen this in Silicon Valley, you're seeing it in Las Vegas.
So it's a typical thing that we have seen around the world that we invest in an area we keep developing in an area that doesn't have the required resources. And after that, then you're not going to ask people to move out. You're not going to ask industries to move out. People keep coming to those places because of better opportunities.
And then you keep essentially investing in an area that doesn't deserve so much investment and it's inefficient. So that's one of the problems. And then another problem there was an inefficient agricultural sector. So, so I. And, many countries in dry parts of the world have had this dream of becoming self-sufficient in terms of food production, wheat production.
You have seen this in some countries that were oil producing countries because they were controlling the oil but not controlling the price of wheat. And they had to exchange and they wanted to, through investment in the ag sector, they wanted to make that sector more self-sufficient.
And then they wanted to reduce their reliance on other countries in the west especially. So, many countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and others, had this dream of becoming self-sufficient in agriculture country and a country like Iran that after 1979 has had issues with the West and has been on their sanctions. So of course, this paranoia has become bigger and bigger for them, for the right or wrong. I mean, I think today a lot of Americans can or many of the people in other parts of the world that when they see the trade war, they can understand that some of these paranoias actually could have been helpful or very realistic or had real roots.
So this was not all I would say ruthless or useless phobia in many ways. So, they had, they always felt this threat and wanted to through investment. So a lot of leaders thought that they can address that solution and it can green. The drawing or green the spaces that are short in water availability.
And of course, Iran is not a water rich country compared to the rest of the world. It's a water rich country in the Middle East. So, the inefficient agriculture sector is there, and what has happened over the years, and this is again, another problem we see globally is that all the ag, the agriculture sector employs a lot of people, especially the poor and the rural population, and they're very vulnerable to water shortage.
The problem in these cases is that when you run out of water, then there is a security, national security threat because people, if they're unemployed, they could be migrating and there could be conflicts and so on. So then instead of revising the policies or making the life harder for them.
You keep giving them subsidies, you keep treating them, trying to treat them better. You don't want them angry. And then you keep giving, again, investing in a sector that is not efficient just to keep people's mouth people's mouth shut. And it becomes a political economy problem for you. And it's very hard for you to decouple your economy from water.
So this sector becomes an essentially a securitized sector, and you cannot implement major reforms in it. And this is not a problem of Iran. If you look around the world, this is the problem you're seeing everywhere that most 70% of the water in the world is in the hands of farmers.
And most of them are, many of them are subsistence farmers, substantial a considerable portion of them are subsistence farmers. Many of them are poor. And for them, no water means no jobs means hunger, means essentially migration conflicts, security issues, formation of ISIS and other things that we have seen around the world.
So governments essentially don't have much room to do something because in these cases, you have to essentially diversify your economy, invest in making your government making your economy more industrialized.
Just for comparison 90% of the water in California is allocated to the agricultural sector.
I mean, we can hear different numbers, but sorry, 80% and somewhere there. And if you think about this sector is the contribution of this sector to California as economy. This is less than 2% of its GDP, but still strategically, it has been an important sector for the US wants to play a major role in the food market globally.
So it makes some strategic sense to keep investing in that sector. But what happens to California is that a drought doesn't kill California's economy. California's economy can even grow during dry times because it relies, it, it's heavily relying on the, the business sector and industrial and service sector and other sectors that are strategically more important.
If you go to the global north, we see the same model. Many countries that are extremely wet, but they prefer to import their food. Cheap food from Africa or from other places. And in exchange for technology and industrial goods that are much more expensive. So one drop of water is spent in the industrial sector versus one drop of water is spent in the agriculture sector.
So cheap labor and cheap resources are being imported from the countries of the south. And then we sell them, essentially expensive stuff. And now if you hear the narratives of the trade war you hear some of these things and still, I think a lot of people don't appreciate how much the United States or countries in the North are importing at very cheap prices from these places.
Labor, both labor and resources. So, so Iran, because of its sanctioned economy, doesn't have the chance to respond to this and implement major reforms. It becomes a debt log for them, and they continue investing in this essentially inefficient sector, but what they say is food, self-sufficiency and food security.
And you can always put a slogan there to defend your bad decisions or your mask the problem. And then you have the issue of mismanagement, right? So or what we call the thirst for development. So the countries of the global south, many of them. Let's look at Iran, right? Iran existed before, before many countries for centuries, for thousands of years.
Persians and Iranians were able to dig their groundwater to, through a system called Qanats, Q-A-N-A-Ts. So Romans had their aqueduct for moving trans surface water and Persians had their Qanats for moving groundwater and for thousands of years they could survive. Of course, that model and their traditional models and around those infrastructure that they were building and had wells that they were digging and connecting them kilometers of actually dug wells and connected qanats like or connected groundwater systems and lots of lives were lost in maintaining them and creating them.
But they could, they supported the civilization for years, but then they got exposed to industrialization or let's say the agricultural movement, machinery and so on, which was a good thing for Iran as well as the rest of the world. So, but then what happened was that you adopt and introduce new technology.
So if you look at the history of Iran, then indeed through the help of the United States to a good extent also, they introduced new models of water extraction, dam building, and digging wells. And so pumps and wells became the first competitors , which were cooperative systems that were there in place with institutions with a kind of a community system management around them.
And then you turn these communities into essentially cooperative units into competitive units and, one essentially joint venture that is being broken into a hundred competing agents and then they dig, all of them dig wells and start pumping out. Of course, at the beginning, things are extremely helpful and that's how Iran managed to grow and become a player before the 1979, one of the biggest, growing economies of the world.
And it was helpful. But soon after they realized that the dams, they built the water, that they moved through interfacing water transfer, the wells they dug not only kill the original systems, but also became, we're not necessarily the best match for their systems.
Now we have seen this is not news to you like, in the seventies, eighties, environmental movements in the US slow down building. So we have seen the same thing in Iran, the slow down Iran became after the revolution, one of the top three dam builders in the world, a country that was under sanctions.
It wanted to prove itself before the revolution. It had the oil money and oil revenue. It was investing, wanted to expand after the revolution, also proving itself to the rest of the world, proving that independence is possible and they can do things on their own, like what they're doing with missiles.
They want to build missiles and say; you're not giving us these things. We can do it, and your sanctions cannot stop us. So same thing in many, I would say infrastructural aspects and what you have seen in the rest of the Middle East also. Right? Where do the tallest towers and biggest malls and all these competitions of where symbols of development rather than development, right?
So concrete and essentially concrete becomes a symbol of development for you. A big giant infrastructure that you can show to the world, and then that satisfies your thirst for development. That's something you are proud of, your nation is proud of, and everyone is clapping.
For you still is your achievement, right? And then this is at the time that some other rich nations give up on building bigger and taller skyscrapers and you see this sort of development at the other places around the world. So, so the thirst for development was there, and then the management structure in many ways was wrong.
And now this is where again a problem that we see, I would say across the world, global, North and global South. Now you can blame the problem on climate change. You can blame California's fire on climate change. You can't, blame Arizona's drought on climate change or, any episode, any extreme on climate change, that's an easy victim.
That's an easy narrative. And sometimes we, in academia love it because we have worked, I mean, my dissertation has been on climate change and my career has been dedicated to it. and then there is a big fire. People are dying without even having a proof. I come out and, on tweet that this is climate change, look, you are denying it because I'm looking for a proof for my theory.
And then, I ignore all other dimensions and all other factors and then this is a narrative that we all keep reinforcing. This is not to dismiss climate change. This is not to say that climate change is not real. It's not a big threat. It's not an existential threat. But this doesn't mean, like the fact that climate change is a big threat, doesn't mean that it's the most important existential threat.
There are other things out there that are extremely important and you need to understand those. You need to understand the difference between a drought that is, has been there before, humans step foot on this planet and the drought that you are creating or making permanent because of your bad water use and bad water management.
There's a significant difference between that natural anomaly and your human made anomaly. And these differences are not being made and they're easy to be blamed on that external factor. And then you see countries behave in different ways and so sometimes many times in many places you blame it on climate change.
You have a flood and instead of blaming your evacuation system, your emergency response, your disaster response, you can blame it on climate change and then get away with it, because then you can say that it wasn't my fault. This would, it's an unprecedented event and it would've happened anyway, and it's for the rest of the world to solve it because we have to come together to solve it. And guess what? Countries are not willing to cooperate. So a lot of times, indeed the scientific community is helping some of the leaders who don't want to be accountable and managers who don't want to be accountable for their mistakes and the and the bad decisions they have made.
So I believe that when it comes to water, when it comes to floods, droughts, and all of these destructive things, well, fires and so on, the human element, local decision making elements play a major role. And our narratives dismiss those major roles.
So that paper also talks a lot about the mismanagement element, not within the water sector, but if you think about the development path of a country, you realize that water is so connected to other sectors and especially economy and all these general policies, even in the case of Iran, the nuclear program and so on, that you cannot blame everything on a natural thing or, yes, the industrial economies are responsible for climate change, but it's not because of the industrial economies that you have dried that lake or wetland and you have diverted that water up there and you have dug deeper wells.
It's because of your bad decision. It's because you didn't realize that water must be considered as a limit to growth. That there are other advantages and strength that you have, and there are some weaknesses that you have. Your oil money is good, your energy money is good, you're sitting on natural gas, but when it comes to water, you are short.
You can be delusional and go and spend all the oil money into greening the desert. Or you can invest in some strategic sectors to be able to trade in the global market. But now even that, that narrative about the possibility of doing global trade is under threat because I'm afraid that the politicians in the world are once again promoting the idea of self-sufficiency in many things around the world.
[00:25:23] Bridget Scanlon: Right, so you raise a lot of important points, Kaveh. I mean, I've seen some NASA images of the expansion of irrigation circles in Saudi Arabia and they were growing a lot of wheat and even exporting it, so these are sort of crazy things, but we do the same, and one of the things that you point out is that, these things are not just restricted to Iran, but we see the same thing in the US.
And you mentioned the comparisons with California and with the Southwest US and stuff, but, so some people point out, I think I saw in your paper that maybe 25% of Iran was cultivated and it was using 90% of the water, but that's pretty common in many semiarid regions. And you mentioned that, politically they have to keep those rural people employed and keep that sector going.
And so they deal with the symptoms then and put bandaids and, give them more water and give them cheap energy and keep that system going, but as you say, it's the same in California. I mean, it's such a small contribution to the GDP, but a large rural community.
And so they keep that system going by delivering water and supporting a lot of irrigation. And I guess they're finally starting with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act to try to ratchet back and bring it in line. But I mean, they've got 20 years and and we see how it evolves.
But I spoke recently to your colleague Amir AghaKouchak, and he mentioned anthropogenic drought. We talk about meteorological drought, but anthropogenic drought is, I guess is when you are withdrawing more than the recharge. And so you're taking more money out of the bank than your deposits.
And and so you have this long-term decline. And we see from the GRACE satellite data, in Iran we see a consistent decline in total water storage, but also northwest India and many other regions. So, I mean, you are living in the US now and I mean, you see what's happening in California in the Southwest.
So with all of that water being used for irrigation, maybe that's a buffer. I mean, and municipalities growing in demand it seems like I've been reading recently about water markets and municipalities will ultimately, I guess. buy the water from the agricultural sector and transfer it to the municipalities.
Do you think that's
[00:27:48] Kaveh Madani: Yeah, so, so, a few things. So. The fact that it is like that in California doesn't mean that it's a good thing, right? Indeed. Actually, American, if you think about the the US like a lot of elements of unsustainable behavior and development in the world or lifestyle has been shaped by Americans and, has been promoted around the world.
So, and that's indeed that's the problem. That's because the coordinates of development have been also set by the global North, right? So that's the the problem here because people when you go to the South and say, let's avoid the mistake that Southern California made.
They think you are a hypocrite. When you go there and say, let's not build a dam and you have these giant dams in the United States that were, I don't know, meant to be there only for 50 years, and now they're like, I've been here for extra decades, and you're not removing them, then they think you're a hypocrite.
When you're obese, like, and you're telling people that they have to become vegan and avoid meat, then they don't buy that. Right? So, and this was a challenge for me going home and trying to encourage people to avoid the mistakes. And they thought that maybe I'm just wanting them to stop development.
Kind of the arguments that we see about, for example, the Paris Agreement that, so the industrial economies did their development and now that's our turn. They're saying, oh, don't do this and don't do that. But our people also deserve the same quality of life. We also deserve the same, so, and then we don't have answers for these questions, or we don't have a way of answering it.
And so that ihat's the first thing in order we need to establish. Unfortunately, still, they're looking at the US and then they're adopting and the same model. And before we become vegans and promote, I don't know, salad, dishes and sell salad at an expensive price. We were eating steaks and still we are, and salad was not considered to be a food. It was the food of your food. Now it's trendy. It's like, healthy. So it takes time for other. And then if you look at what the diets that we are switching to, it's the diet that people over there in underdeveloped areas of the world rely on.
Right. And, how do you explain this, right? So, you're telling them to avoid cars. They don't have cars. Actually, they're using their donkeys and horses to get to work. The more the rich ones are using bikes and for us it becomes trendy. Like, after riding our SUVs and, satisfying ourselves, now we are switching to bikes and putting some bike lanes here and there and feel that we are contributing to, so, so first let's understand this, and I think this is something for us in the global North to appreciate and understand why we cannot be trusted in many times because they don't see they feel that our recommendations are it's like you go to your doctor, and if your doctor is the most unhealthy person who's smoking while speaking to you and an obese person and having problems in heart and other places, and that person is telling you, you have to avoid stress and have a healthy life and exercise. It's you don't buy that. So that's something to understand. But there is a significant difference between California and, some elements are similar.
One element, you mentioned groundwater. So before 2014, before the big drought in California the groundwater management system in California was very weak. And the State that is so proud of its water management. If you think about its water system, you can tell that many parts of the water system are like those in the world including Iran might have better, better groundwater management systems in place like, or had or whatever, like in comparison.
So California, Texas were weak, now Texas is doing better, California is also doing better, but the political cost of a change was huge. No one there, like every drought, people spoke about it. When I landed in California in December, 2005, it was after Katrina, and back then there was also a flood around December, like January time.
So people were in the flood mode. It was like, Sacramento was the most vulnerable place after Louisiana, like, so it was one of the most vulnerable nations one of the most vulnerable places in the nation. Everyone was in that mode. Sometime after that, like, you switch to a drought and everyone's speaking about drought, and then when rain comes, then it's cool.
But if it's an unprecedented drought, then the political cost of a change and a reform drops, that's where the Californian governor finds the courage to say, hey, Southern California, you have got conserve, you have got to reduce your consumption by 25%. You have to shut down some of your golf courses. Why didn't they ask for that earlier?
I mean, why this was not possible earlier. Because politically it was impossible politically, it was impossible to get close to the people's wells and start monitoring and measuring them. But then that's what you need. Now, a big difference here is that California can afford it. There is a legal system and a water right system that it's funny in some ways, right?
But there's a system in place, a mix of, different appropriations and then the riparian system, so the British system and so on. So that's in place and then you have the legal rights and priorities and so on, and that helps you to do trades.
And indeed many of the old models, optimization models were showing that California can handle the situation and trades can happen, and those inefficiencies would turn into buffer for you, and trades are possible, and movement of water thanks to that big infrastructure system is possible.
But can you turn the land subsidence in the Central Valley. No. If can you fix some of the damages you have created? Can you recover and restore the different wetlands that have dried up? Can you fix, did, were you able, let's forget California for a second.
Like, have you been able to fix the Salt Lake problems? So Salton Sea problem, like, other things. So, these problems are permanent. You cannot move people out of Southern California. People went there, you started development, you provided water, you took the water to Southern California and then they keep asking for more water.
There was a fire lately. And then there was even a decision that didn't make a lot of sense from a water engineering perspective, but it was a political decision to release some water in an irrelevant season, which had no real impact on the fires, but it becomes a political thing, but the economy of the system is so resilient that even if some small cities in the Central Valley go bankrupt, if farming communities go bankrupt, the state remains untouched.
People that you don't anticipate, at least let's hope so that would like, people over there would be like, dying of hunger or migrating and, mass migration at the scale you see in Africa or other places would happen in California. Yes. So you can hope for increased efficiency in those systems.
And indeed, 15, 20 years ago, I was thinking that, okay, what Iran is going through is this stage of development and eventually this would be reversed. But no, the damages are permanent and the economy is weak. The economy doesn't have the chance to bounce back and come back and shift the pressure from one sector to another.
And that's what makes us scared. California still makes a decision about where to use the water, almonds or alfalfa , right? Almonds become a political, product and it goes on TV and it makes a lot of noise, but still , its growth continues there because economically speaking, it makes more sense and it's more efficient to grow almonds versus alfalfa, right?
So, those decisions are made, but if your country is on their sanctions, maybe you might need to grow your cereal even if it doesn't make sense, even if you're using your fossil water, even if you don't have food issues, food security issues, because of unemployment threat, you might let people farm onions and grow onions and cucumbers and eggplants that don't play a strategic role for food security, but still keep people employed because you keep them employed.
Because by far unemployment is a bigger threat than hunger. In or, sorry, repeat by far. unemployment is a bigger threat than environmental degradation. Indeed environmental degradation is a secondary issue for many governments, but also for us to be honest. Like we can advocate as environmental activists, we can make noise, but even, during COVID-19, we're not too far from COVID-19, all we were trying was to stay alive. Did you ever say, I'm not going to wear a mask because of birds and because of different species and the waste that I'm generating? Did you say that it's better for me to die, like actually it's, if I die it helps the planet Earth.
So I don't get vaccinated because we're equal to other species. You didn't. We didn't. And that's like, so the human beings all of us global north global south, at that moment, we didn't talk about it. There are wars going on in, around the world. Like people, how can you speak about the rights of the future generations if you're dismissing the rights of people and children dying in front of your eyes in other parts of the world today.
So, then that, that's where we have these issues of. Yes, we say something that sounds nice. It's, sounds very humane but it's not practical, it's not realistic. It's more of a slogan than reality. So we need to create a balance between these things. And we need to remind these states that path of development should not happen in the same way, but it's not an easy thing.
Like, you're talking to your children. Our parents talked to us and said, don't do this, and don't do that, and do this and do that. And we did. We developed our own path and we repeated a lot of mistakes and we learned it. And after that, it's like, that's what my dad had told me.
I could have, but that's why people want to replicate and repeat all those things. And before they learn, of course, I think we have to be open to that part of development as well. I think that's also part of the development path and learning by doing and failing, by repeating because you don't trust others.
And of course in this world with what you're seeing you can understand what trust cannot be. A hundred percent trust cannot be established. And now we are learning that even for example, like I'm in Canada at the moment, right? So, like for Canadians, what's happening right now in the world with their neighbors is very shocking.
We indeed in the water world, wherever we wanted to encourage countries to work together on transboundary problems. We use the examples of the Great Lakes. We used the examples of Canadians exporting electricity to the Americans. And guess what? With the trade war, all of those narratives became problematic because someone wanted to change.
Even the borderline, the other, person retaliation, threatened the other side to stop the electricity export. And a lot of things that go against our narrative that we were promoting or like, encouraging the rest of the world to essentially reproduce or experience.
[00:39:55] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah. So, you mentioned a lot of important points. I mean, we lead by example. It doesn't matter what we say. I mean, when you're raising kids, they just look at you, and it doesn't matter what you say. And so it's very difficult for us in the global north to say much because we have benefited from all of these advantages and everything.
We've gone down that path, and then we just say, oh, don't do this. And also changing behavior is a very difficult thing. I mean, we know how much effort it was to get people to reduce smoking. It took decades. And so you can change these things overnight and, people say, oh change the crops you grow, use more water efficient crops, or do this or do that, or change your irrigation system.
But that's the only system, and so it's very difficult to, to change things. I like what you say about not just blaming climate change for everything, but taking responsibility and understanding. We first need to understand the causes of the issues in order to develop appropriate solutions.
And so, if we just say it's all climate change, then we will just not take responsibility or do anything. And so we need to do stuff too try to resolve the issues, which is really a big disconnect between supply and demand. And as you mentioned earlier, we focus mostly on the supply side, adding more supplies, adding more bandaids, and then just keep on with the problem without acknowledging that we are actually bankrupt in many regions.
So one of the things that I would like to get some information from you Kaveh is about the UN universities and how the UN and why water is not more front and center with these global agendas and stuff. It's kind of like a third rail, it's just not given the emphasis that it should.
[00:41:44] Kaveh Madani: Yeah. First thing is because we never understood that we would hit the state of water bankruptcy and water was a resource that all countries had access to. Like, in any dry, even you go to the driest place on the planet, there's some water that you can find some surface water or groundwater, fossil water.
So, all countries have water. Some anyway, we even, there is a saying that there is no shortage of water. There is always a shortage of cheap water. So, eventually you would pay the price and this was not the case for energy right. Before we discover their renewables, like, only a few countries that access to energy resources.
So water was never seen as a major issue. Mostly we saw water problems in relation to the first stage of development, which is access to clean water and sanitation. So you want toilet and you want clean water for different hygiene purposes. But then after that, it was not a big concern.
Still to date. This is the issue. We don't have a UN agency dedicated to water. We have many nations that don't have water like a federal or, central water agency. You go across at the federal level. You tell me what exists for the US whether you go from one state to another, even the model of water management and the centrality of the authorities would change. Canada just recently launched a federal water agency, they didn't have it. So, so you see that increasingly countries are appreciating the importance of water. This doesn't mean that the countries of the global south didn't understand it. Like, or some countries in the globein dry areas, right? Israel is an example of a country that right at the beginning appreciated it's physical constraints when it comes to water.
But we say that when it comes to water, we have two types of water scarcity. A physical water scarcity and an economic water scarcity. The economic water scarcity happens where there is water around you, but you don't have the infrastructure. Or the financial resources to build the infrastructure to extract water. If you go to Africa, if you go to South America, you go to some parts of Asia everywhere is green, but still people don't have water for drinking. They can't have clean drinking water or they cannot move water for irrigation. They have to rely on their cattle or horses or donkeys to help them move water because they don't, they can't afford pumps. There, they can't afford pipes and canals. So that's an economic water scarcity.
That's where we have stopped actually. That's where we have got more focused on because when it comes to the global south and the poor areas of the world, we all agree that they deserve clean water, everyone should have it. We understand the different impacts on women, on children. We understand and appreciate those problems and everybody agrees that we have to invest in that sector and investment in that sector is not too hard. We have had issues when, like some clashes in places where we have privatized water resources, but mostly like investments in that sector, for those purposes continue.
The problem is what we call, is the physical water scarcity, where there is not enough water. Essentially your consumption is more than your available water and now with climate change, we are, our income or available water is even more restricted. That's a physical water scarcity for that. We don't really have a solution. Even our solutions are very academic. Improve irrigation efficiencies, remove subsidies, water management, a more integrated way.
These are classic examples of, I don't know, and I don't want to assign any number, but I would say roughly without doing a proper research on it and having any evidence for it, so don't quote me on the number I'm giving, but over 70% of the research papers we write and we, if they're about water management and with this like, these suggestions, which are cliche, nothing is new about them because they're impractical.
If they were not practical in a place like California or Arizona or somewhere else, why would it be practical where we're touching the farmers or messing with the farmers mean like ending your essentially your power who wants to mess with them? If you're afraid of farmers lobbies in the United States, wouldn't you be afraid of farmers coming to streets in India or China or other parts of the world?
So, that is, a history to remember now the United Nations University, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year is one of the UN agencies it's headquartered in Tokyo. It's head director of the United Nations Universities, one of the UN under Secretary Generals who sits in New York.
And then the university system. These agencies comprised of 10 institutes. Soon it will be 11, two programs and one center in 12 countries around the world. Again, soon it will be 13 countries. And each of these entities 13 entities who have particular mandates and are focused on certain areas, all of them so are you, and you as a whole.
The system as a whole is involved in three pillars of active research. That's why we are not only the academic and scientific arm of the United Nations, but also it's think tank. We are supposed to inject science into the policy circles, serve as a bridge between scientists and policy makers and the member states.
So not only where there it's academic arm, but also it's think tank. And so first pillar is research. Second pillar is education and capacity building. We get involved in different, we have different programs, joint PhD programs, sometimes in-house PhD programs and master's programs, joint master's programs and postgraduate programs, online learning, hybrid programs, certificate programs and so on. On demand programs that governments professionals ask us to develop. And in all of these education programs, we want everything and also our research to be oriented toward the real world, solving the member states problems.
And the third pillar of our activity is policy and advocacy.
So that's what makes us different from traditional universities. We are a UN entity, but we have the mission of connecting the two sides. So anything we do in the education pillar and the research pillar should connect well with policy. The three are interlinked because at the end of day we want to solve a problem. We want to respond to a problem. We want to help our other UN agencies that are, also having want to serve the member states and support them in their their efforts. And we are the scientists in the room, or we bring the scientists in the room and we take pride in communicating with the scientists, not because always.
Because of course we are proud of talking to a lot of smart people, but indeed we think it's a two-way and a very constructive way of interaction. Of course, we ask for their scientific output and their newscience and knowledge, and we try to translate, help them translate those or communicate those to the general public and the governments, but also we help them with understanding the real problems on the ground and reminding them that you're wrong or your narrative is misleading or is incomplete.
And sometimes we know that our, I mean, and I can say that because , I'm still having an academic hat but that sometimes in academia we're solving a wrong problem, a superficial problem that doesn't exist, and guess what? Like, some funding agencies have given us huge amounts of funding for solving that problem, which is more of a mathematical modeling exercise that I can have with, and I can write a lot of papers with and I can graduate students with, but it doesn't solve any real problem.
[00:49:52] Bridget Scanlon: Well, I really appreciate your focus on solutions and I think we need to do a lot more of that in academia. And then the last question I would like to ask you, you lead this UN university sustainability nexus, analytics, informatics and data with the different modules and some covering droughts, floods, groundwater, food security.
Really nice effort to develop a network of people and put out papers on specific topics and stuff like that. Maybe you could just describe that a little bit. Kaveh.
[00:50:26] Kaveh Madani: Yeah, and I think I forgot to mention that I'm heading that UNU institute that is, is working on water environment and health and water is the biggest part of our portfolio, and traditionally it has been. So we are near so next year it would be 30 years since our inception and we have some hubs around the world at the moment. One hub is in Sweden, one hub in Hamburg, Germany, one hub in New York and City College of New York, and one hub in Calgary. And so through these hubs we also work with people and we try to take pride in working on water, in the water sector and being a bit one of the biggest advocates for water.
One of my predecessors used to chair the UN water and coordination mechanism across the UN system for coordinating the actions of water. So the institute collectively through the help of many academics or practitioners and professionals who have come and spent time here and left, and went into different directions.
But, we have achieved a big success through the help of science. So recently we also launched this UNU wide program. That called sustainability, nexus Aid, which you mentioned, analytics, informatics, and data to support essentially the member states and practitioners with the best use of analytical tools and data and so on.
So we talk about the fourth industrial revolution, all the tools that are out there, data sets out there. And, we have even a competition over producing tools, right? So, now we see that we used to see competitions over climate models, every country, trying to produce a climate model.
Now we see these, the language models and AI models that like Chat GPT and all of these things that come to the market. So we see that in, we have seen it in academia. We have seen it out there. So initially there was a thought about building a new tool which helps us analyzing complexity and then.
We did this discussion and kind of argued that look like there are many tools and tools are being reproduced and replicated and duplicated. Why do we, why don't we, instead of producing another tool, just bring groups together around problems.
First of all the temperature data set is useful. If I'm solving a problem that is connected to that data, otherwise it's useless. The data set itself is useless , I'm using it for solving a problem. And in real world, a problem like drought is a totally different from flood and it's normally managed by two different groups of people, even if they belong to the same entity.
So we need to bring people together around problems, and these are the peers who come together. And tell us what tools are out there which help can help the nations, what aid tools are available? Analytics, informatics, and data tools available that can help the member states can help the different agencies and sectors solve their problems.
And by looking at also different aspects of it. By, through this approach, we thought, first of all, we don't take the central role. We facilitate a bottom of approach where the where the scientists, especially, and the experts within each field come and tell us what the problem is and how they should address it.
And then they are the ones who identify the most credible tools, and this also creates an opportunity to not only look into, I don't know, tools that have been developed by space agencies or UN agencies, but also, a professor at a random university around the world, which is a very good tool and people must be aware of it, but that person doesn't get the chance to promote it like the other agencies.
But also these are the ones who bring these pieces together, and say where the strengths are and where we have to make more investments. So the next time a government decides about creating a tool. They know where to invest, where we are lacking something, where we need increased resolutions, where we need more computational power, and then how we should make sure that these tools not only are produced but also adopted.
How can we help the member states do that? And to date, we know these scientists have come together. I think at a moment we are more than 130 scientists in that program from around above 90 institutions around the world, and they have identified over 250, if I'm not mistaken, tools, because this keeps changing and they're adding to it that can be part of a solution.
Of course, tools are tools, models are models, data is data. They have limitations but we have to, we can use them to inform decision making, but we need also the experts to use the right models and the right data sets. Otherwise, data can become actually, these tools and data can become a threat because we saw it as we saw it during COVID-19.
Too much data sometimes was also confusing, and we saw a lot of people, non-experts speculating around data and selling conspiracy theories. That's where, made sense by looking at the data if we were not explaining properly the causal relationships between the different elements there. So that's a program that UNU has launched and I hope if people are watching or listening they they also, check it out and join the program and help us making it better and more powerful.
[00:55:48] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah I was very impressed with all the resources that are available there, remote sensing, models, all sorts of information and provided in a very easy to understand format. And so I think it's great to see the network that has developed to help with this. And I include the link in the highlights on the website.
So, our guest today was Kaveh Madani. Thank you so much for taking the time and I really appreciate your outlook. It's very refreshing. And he's the director at the United Nations University Institute for Water Environment and Health. So thanks a lot and enjoy the rest of the day.
[00:56:27] Kaveh Madani: Thank you so much for the invitation and have a good one. And I would use this also opportunity to thank all those people in the academic community advocacy UN and different, activist and enthusiasts who have always helped us become stronger as a community.
And I hope entities like us and platforms like us become the pro, I would say continue to be, serve as the models and promoters of multilateralism and science, diplomacy and exchanges between the south and north and the countries. And with the understanding that there are many lessons to learn from every nation, and that the fact that we are in a better economic state doesn't mean that we know it all, or our solutions are better.
We have to learn from each other and collectively do a better job. We are humans, we're smart, and we continue to revise and stay away from bad decisions and make the world a better place, hopefully for all. Thank you.
[00:57:28] Bridget Scanlon: Thank you so much.
