Land, Water and Development

Sustainable and Adaptive Management of Rivers

Malcolm Newson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134111893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Geografía

Water is newsworthy: there is, or will be, a world water crisis. Aggravated by climate change, we are approaching the limits of human exploitation of freshwater resources, notably in growing essential food. The complexities and uncertainties associated with improving our management of fresh water take the potential remedies out of the hands of simple, local, hard engineering and into much larger units – the basin, the ecosystem and the global context, and also require longer term perspectives.

The Third Edition follows the same structure as its predecessors, presenting the historical and scientific backgrounds to land-water interactions and establishing the links with development processes and policies. Throughout, its two major messages are that our new philosophy should be one of 'humans in the ecosystem' and that the guidance from science, being uncertain and contested, must be operationalized in a participatory system of governance based on participation. Following a review of progress towards these elements in the developed world, the international case studies update the situation in the developing world following the Millennium Development Goals, our new emphasis on poverty and on global food supplies.

This book covers the multitude of scientific research findings, development of 'tools' and spatial/temporal scale challenges which have emerged in the last decade. Tensions are highlighted in the current and future role of large dams, country studies are retained (and considerably updated) and development contexts are explored in greater depth as a dividing line in capacity to cope with land and water stress. "Technical issues" have been expanded to cover major droughts, environmental flows and the restoration of rivers and wetlands. A separate chapter picks up these themes under terms of their relationship with uncertainty and the widespread perception that a new ethos of adaptive management is needed in the water sector.

For students of geography, environmental science, hydrology, and development studies this innovative edition provides a reasoned, academic basis of evidence for sustainable, adaptive management of rivers and related large-scale ecosystems using more than 600 new sources. It will also prove invaluable for lecturers and practitioners.

Chapter 1
A ‘world water crisis’?

The history and current trajectory of water management

In previous editions of Land, Water and Development this brief historical review had a mainly scholarly purpose: ‘to explore briefly the nature of Man’s occupation of river basins’, with the added justification that ‘the adoption of a conscious modern attempt at holistic management will almost certainly involve cultural attitudes to the problems, with their roots in history’. It is now given analytical bite by the widely cited ‘world water crisis’. Can we use historical review to discover ‘how we got into trouble’, elucidate virtues and errors along the way and identify constraints for the future in the way human society addresses its needs and the needs of ecosystems for water? Can we further identify a point at which the Anthropocene era began in terms of human impacts on freshwater systems or, alternatively, date the end of ‘natural’ rivers? We ask if there are historical analogues to current dilemmas, such as the Victorian rush to alleviate problems of health and poverty through domestic water supply and sanitation which led directly to degradation, through pollution, of the rivers serving to drain the excrement. Is this the direction now being taken by developing world cities (see also Chapter 5)? Because our focus is on land and development, as well as water, can history and prehistory illuminate the relative responsibilities for hydrological changes caused by catchment land use, land management, structural water management and climate? How have human institutions coped?

To gain an introductory impression of the current situation one can simply line up the descriptive terms used in titles of articles in responsible news, feature and even technical writing:

• ‘the parched planet’;
• ‘every last drop’;
• ‘looming water crisis’;
• ‘looming hydrocide’;
• ‘water—a millennial priority’;
• ‘water quality—a development bomb’;
• ‘water: one of the greatest causes of mass suffering’;
• ‘water: an imminent global crisis’.

Such articles are written partly because the global information base now exists and because an impressive array of international institutions now puts water in a prominent position. Water’s links to poverty and famine are also responsible for intensive coverage, but can water justify a treatment as the first Malthusian limit, i.e. a resource exhausted by population growth alone? As with most resources, a consideration of population is useless without the parallel notions of levels of consumption and compensatory technological innovation. The widely read ‘skeptical environmentalist’, Bjorn Lomborg (2001), claims that water ‘has been touted as a harbinger of future trouble’, but he remains optimistic, stating that ‘there may be regional and logistic problems with water. We will need to get better at using it. But basically we have sufficient water’ (p. 149).

1.1 Hydraulic cultures and religious codes: management in advance of science

Agriculture only makes sense if one can count on water.

(Kandel, 2003, p. 193)

Irrigation began to form a strong bond between humans and river basins in the sixth millennium BC; two important river basin civilisations, Mesopotamia and then Egypt, manipulated water to sustain settled agriculture. Both irrigation and elementary flood control were practised (Kandel, 2003). The food surpluses which were generated by the success of these elementary management strategies were the basis for excess labour to be put into creating the architecture and other artefacts from which we have come to know so much about the Tigris—Euphrates and Nile valleys between 5000 and 3000 BC (Hawkes, 1976). The Sumerians built temples to the gods, whom they considered responsible for the success of agriculture, whilst the Egyptians built memorials to the kings, who were paramount in the strongly structured societies essential to primitive water management.

Toynbee (1976) describes the Sumerian achievement as the source from which Egypt and later the Indus civilisation drew their basic water technologies; he also stresses the importance of social structures:

The human conquest of alluvium must have been planned by leaders who had the imagination, foresight and self-control to work for returns that would be lucrative ultimately but not immediately. The one indispensable new tool was a script. The leaders needed this instrument for organising people and water and soil in quantities and magnitudes that were too vast to be handled efficiently by the unrecorded memorising of oral arrangements and instructions.

(Toynbee, 1976, pp. 45, 51)

Smith (1969) stresses the tight structures responsible for any successful hydraulic culture; summarising Wittfogel (1957) he suggests that:

the construction and maintenance of large-scale irrigation systems require the assembly of a considerable labour force which may be most efficiently created either by the institution of forced labour or the levy of tribute and taxation or both. A centralized administration is also needed for the maintenance of canals and to control water distribution.

(Smith, 1969, p. 108)

Biswas (1967) tabulates a chronology of hydrological engineering works by the Sumerians, the Egyptians and the Harappans who, by 2500 BC, had developed a very powerful (though less creative) civilisation in the Indus basin (Table 1.1). Among the most interesting artefacts remaining is the Sadd el-Kafara (‘Dam of the Pagans’) built c. 2800 BC just south of Cairo. It was apparently built without a spillway and with a capacity so small in relation to its catchment area that it failed early in its lifetime. Distribution of water was clearly more successful than collection; it requires, after all, much more organisation than understanding, and it was to be 2,000 years before the study of nature began and 4,500 years before scientific hydrology!

One must not neglect the military significance of water engineering at this time. Sennacherib the Assyrian destroyed Babylon in 689 BC by damming the Euphrates and then destroying the dam (Smith, 1972). Sennacherib became the agent of some extremely well-surveyed and constructed dams and irrigation schemes. It is suggested by some writers that the need for efficient irrigation prompted the development of geometric ground survey techniques. A tablet in the British Museum illustrates algebraic calculations for the design of dykes, dams and wells.

Water has been a central feature in the development of many, if not most, world religions; the birth of Islam, Judaism and Christianity in semi-arid environments has helped create this linkage—the fundamental shared resource, the basis of food and livelihoods, is bound to figure prominently in religious codes (Table 1.2). However, water has an additional spirituality of its own nature, as an element, a vital force and an agent of destruction. As the poet Philip Larkin wrote, ‘If I were called in to construct a religion I should make use of water’ (Larkin, 1964). An interest in religious attitudes to water is no mere academic luxury: Smith and Ali (2006) demonstrate remarkable patterns in contemporary water use in UK cities related to ethnic identity, patterns which may help improve the service provided by utility companies.

Table 1.1 Key dates in the development of hydraulic civilisations

Table 1.2 Salient elements of attitudes taken to freshwater by major world religions

Summarising the lessons for contemporary water/river management from this section of our ‘rewind’:

• Water had powerful cultural significance as part of a polytheistic concept of environment, one in which ecosystems were considered inclusive and were given geographical boundaries.
• Pre-settlement adaptive management was gradually exchanged for engineering solutions to assure supply and protect against hazards in established settlements.
• The politics of allocation thereafter became entwined in elaborate social structures.

1.2 Engineering and science: the rise of hydraulics and hydrology

Having tentatively concluded that water distribution can occur in advance of hydrological knowledge, how can empirical knowledge and theoretical understanding be put to work in support of engineering?

Empirical records of river levels can be traced for the Nile back to 3000 BC; the famous Roda ‘nilometer’ (Figure 1.1) recorded the annual flood. A system of flood warning may have been developed, using watch towers and ‘extremely good rowers’ (Biswas, 1967, p. 125) who propelled their boats ahead of the flood wave. Biswas also records the 3,000-year history of simple water metering for irrigation supplies in North Africa. In River God, Wilbur Smith’s imagination has the arrival of the Nile flood thus:

we woke to find that during the night the river had swollen with the commencement of the annual flood. We had no warning of it until the joyous cries of the watchmen down at the port roused us. Both banks were already lined with the populace of the city. They greeted the waters with prayers and songs and waving palm fronds.

(Smith, 1993, p. 305)

Figure 1.1 The Roda nilometer, upon which the heights of the annual Nile flood have been measured from antiquity (from Biswas, 1967).

Greek philosophers were not able to advance our knowledge of hydrology, though Archimedes’ observations led to the foundation of hydrostatics. The engineering skill of the Romans, however, led to great progress in urban water supply and drainage systems. Nace (1974) reminds us that, ‘Despite their great hydraulic works, no evidence has been found that Roman engineers as a group had any clear idea of a hydrological cycle’ (p. 44).

The Romans’ largest technical problems in impressive feats, such as the Pont du Gard aqueduct (supplying Nîmes in southern France), would have been the design of capacity for flow and gradient. In an interesting review of the Pont du Gard’s hydraulic design, Hauck and Novak (1987) stress the subtleties of conveying a steady flow of water down only 17 metres of fall in 50 kilometres. The Romans made a clear trade-off between the expense of a higher aqueduct (i.e. a longer span) and the need to maintain a steady gradient. In 19 BC the most precise level was a 6 metre-long bar, levelled by water in a groove or plumb bobs. Simple geometry and a knowledge of the flow rate would have provided the cross-sectional area of the aqueduct’s channel. The work was a masterpiece of applied hydraulics. Bratt (1995) describes more recent masterpieces of mountain water transfers—the 376 bisses (total length 1,740 kilometres) which traverse the steep sides of the valleys in the canton of Valais, Switzerland, in the headwaters of the River Rhône to deliver irrigation water; they were constructed as early as the eleventh century, an indication that not all such skills were lost in the Dark Ages. Nevertheless, the Renaissance in Europe was to create a ‘big picture’ of rivers which began to make fantastic feats of civil engineering for water supply and drainage look increasingly like an option, rather than ‘the answer’ (Box 1.1).

Plate 1.1 Roman water supply engineering, Corbridge, Northumberland (photo M. D. Newson).

Box 1.1 Leonardo’s graphic impact on ‘catchment consciousness’

It is hard to document scientific progress during the Renaissance without reference to Leonardo da Vinci; of him Popham (1946) says, ‘water played a very important part in his life. A great deal of his energies and his intellect were absorbed in directing and canalising rivers and in inventing or perfecting hydraulic machinery’ (p. 70). He was obsessed with depicting water movement in his art, and careful observation aided his design of water wheels and pumps. However, his was not merely a brilliant combination of water engineering and art: he formalised the relationship between catchment and flow properties in his study of the Arno above Florence (see Plate 1.2). The Arno catchment map (1502–03) shows very great care with both the stream network and the contributing slopes; mountains are not shown as isolated hills in the medieval tradition but by contour shading. To record so precisely the relationship between slopes and channels and between events over the river basin and those at a site (i.e. Florence) sets up the combination of hydrology and hydraulics which was eventually to guide modern river management.

Levi (1995) considers Leonardo to be so important to the history of observational hydraulics that he devotes an entire chapter of his historical review to the man. Pughe (2001) examines Leonardo’s written ‘aqueous perspective’.

Despite the arrival of ‘the watershed’, only mystery and magic could explain what went on inside it. The next important step was the establishment of the hydrological cycle. Nace (1974) suggests that acceptable definitions of the hydrological cycle were published at a very early stage of recorded history, for example in the Bible (Ecclesiastes 1:7): ‘All the rivers run into the sea; yet the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of plates
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Preface to the third edition
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: ‘catchment consciousness’
• 1 A ‘world water crisis’? The history and current trajectory of water management
• 2 The river basin (eco)system: biophysical dynamics, ‘natural’ and ‘compromised’
• 3 Land–water interactions: the evidence base for catchment planning and management
• 4 Managing land, water and rivers in the developed world: an international survey
• 5 River basins and development: sample trajectories
• 6 Technical issues in river basin management
• 7 Institutional issues in river basin management: stasis and change in England and Wales
• 8 Sustainable river basin management with uncertain knowledge
• 9 Adaptive land and water management: through participation and social learning to hydropolitical decisions
• Postscript: globalised water – will poverty, trade and energy issues override basin-scale management?
• References