Giulio Boccaletti, is an author and a globally recognized expert on natural resource security and environmental sustainability. Trained as a physicist and climate scientist, he holds a doctorate from Princeton University, where he was a NASA Earth Systems Science Fellow. He has been a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a partner of McKinsey & Company, and the chief strategy officer of The Nature Conservancy, one of the largest environmental organizations in the world.
He is an Honorary Research Associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University. He writes on environmental issues for news media, and is an expert contributor to the World Economic Forum. His work on water has been featured in the PBS documentary series H2O – The Molecule that Made Us.
- To set the scene: the origins of water on Earth date back about 3.8 billion years, (probably due to asteroid activity). Since then, the quantity has been more or less fixed. Water gets re-cycled, but it rarely gets really destroyed. The water we sip today could well have been ‘recycled’ by a dinosaur!
- Water security (and scarcity) relates to “where water is when”, not to a diminishing quantity overall. That said, what we think of as the water we rely on is a fraction of less than 1% of the total quantity present on the planet. The oceans account for 97%, but with current technology, de-salinization is not an economically viable response to water scarcity. The remaining 3% is locked up in the Arctic ice sheets.
- This very small fraction is as important as it is powerful. The intertwined history of water and man distils down to society’s ability (with varying degrees of success) to “wrestle” with, control and deploy this massive force in the landscape.
- Water security equates to infrastructures and institutions keeping water at bay – a society’s capacity to do so is directly linked to, and a marker of its economic development. Investment in water security is an effective platform for development.
- In the developed world, this was, until recently, regarded as a given but with the climate changing, century-old solutions are beginning to fail. As an integral part of their economic advance China, Brazil and India’s are re-engineering their landscapes with concrete to control and harness their great rivers. Populations of the poorest countries, the most exposed to climate change, often lose the battle leading to mass migration and displacement. Often “the biggest risk is not a flood of water but a flood of people.”
- We ‘wrestle’ by transforming the landscape. But there are limits: we’re over-soliciting our landscape. In this context of ‘over-extraction’ the challenge is to achieve workable integration between the various demands we are making. We will have no choice but to work with the landscape as a piece of infrastructure – but we’re not there yet.
- The primary distinction of successful water-management is a state’s economic capacity and political willingness to do so while balancing public interests and individual liberties. For Boccaletti, republics are the political institutions best suited to the task.
- The war in Ukraine is a watershed for environmentalism. Commitments were predicated on a rules-based system which the rise of nationalism in general, and Putin’s war in Ukraine in particular, have seriously undermined.
- Boccaletti purports history has shown that often water is “too important to fight over” and can even be a source of dialogue and diplomacy, citing India and Pakistan entente over the Indus.
