We are living in the midst of an information revolution where numbers rule. But this revolution is a selective one, reaching only certain people with only limited information. Some numbers, and their meaning, are beyond our understanding or have such depressing implications that we tend to ignore them. Thus, while many people know Bill Gates' net worth (give or take ten or twenty billion dollars), who knows the worth of the billion poorest people on the planet? People in richer countries know how much bottled water costs, but have no idea that it costs hundreds or even thousands of times more than pure water from their taps. We hear about the growing numbers of people with access to the Internet, but who hears about how many people suffer from lack of access to basic clean drinking water? Every day we hear about the NASDAQ, S&P 500, Nikkei, or Hang Seng Indexes, but why don't we hear more about the Human Development Index - a much better indicator of overall human well-being. We know immediately when people die in airplane crashes and train derailments, but who knows how many tens of thousands of children die each day from easily prevented water-related diseases? My children and their peers know by heart the names and characteristics of more than 150 make-believe creatures called Pokéman, but who knows the names of the many real creatures driven to extinction by human actions?

Water runs like a river through our lives, touching everything from our health and the health of the ecosystems around us to the farmers' fields and the production of the goods we consume. The story of water is a complex one, told partly by numbers, partly by real human stories, and partly by intangible, immeasurable things. The World's Water is an effort to tell some of this story - to offer pieces of the puzzle that will let us understand the role of water in the human equation and, conversely, the effects of humans on the hydrologic cycle that sustains all of us. These pieces should be viewed with caution for they are only part of a rapidly changing story. That is one reason why The World's Water was designed to be produced every two years: to publish new information on water problems and concerns, present new data, and pose new solutions to be tried, discarded, or improved.

The first two reports, 1998-1999 and 2000-2001, are not meant to be viewed separately, but rather as complementary to each other. The first book, The World's Water 1998-1999, included chapters on the changing nature of water management, the connections between water and human health, an update on large dams, reviews of the links between water and international conflict and water and climatic changes, and developments in international organizations and structures working on water problems. Extensive data on water were presented in tables not easily accessible elsewhere.

A major focus of the first report was the changing nature of water management, development, and planning - I described it as "the changing water paradigm." There are many components to this change: a shift away from sole, or even primary, reliance on finding new sources of supply to address perceived new demands; a growing emphasis on incorporating ecological values into water policy; a re-emphasis on meeting basic needs for water services; and a conscious breaking of the ties between economic growth and water use. Much has happened in the world of water in the subsequent two years. I believe the evidence for a true change in the way we think about water continues to accumulate.

The World's Water 2000-2001 builds on this idea. In an analysis stimulated in part by the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the legal, moral, and institutional implications of recognizing a human right to water are presented in the first chapter. A human right to water appears to be firmly rooted in international law and the norms of expected State behavior. Acknowledging that right is an important new step in meeting unmet basic water needs for billions of people and in forcing a re-evaluation of water priorities and policies.

New information is now available on the world's stocks and flows and the first new analysis of international river basins in over twenty years is described and analyzed. In the last twenty years, the number of international rivers basins has increased from 214 to 261 - just one indicator of the increasingly political nature of this vital natural resource. The first book explicitly discussed water-related conflicts; this one expands further on the history and nature of such conflicts.

The connections between water and food are addressed in detail here as concerns of food experts begin to encompass the realities of water availability. In some ways, thinking about food is undergoing a revolution similar to that in the water world. It is becoming harder and harder to bring new lands into production and to maintain the historically large annual increases in crop yields. Yet there is great potential for improving the "efficiency" with which we produce food, by changing cropping patterns, by reducing wasteful applications of resources, by cutting losses between the field and the plate, and by altering diets and the manner in which international markets function. Each of these approaches has a parallel in the debate over meeting water needs. But more importantly, the question of whether we can produce enough food to feed a burgeoning population - and get it to where it is needed - is intricately connected to the question of where and when fresh water is available. Decisions made today about water policy will affect whether people continue to be undernourished in the coming decades.

The first book reviewed the state of the world's dams and noted that the old paradigm of relying on ever larger numbers of dams to capture ever larger fractions of freshwater runoff is beginning to fail for environmental, economic, and social reasons. This book focuses on a related trend to take out or decommission dams that either no longer serve a useful purpose or have caused such egregious ecological impacts as to warrant removal. Nearly 500 dams in the U.S. and elsewhere have already been removed and the movement toward river restoration is accelerating. Within a few months of the removal of the Edwards Dam in Maine in mid-1999, salmon, striped bass, alewives, and other affected fish returned to waters from which they had been absent for 162 years. Several other case studies are described in this volume, together with some ambitious proposals to remove some of the world's largest dams.

As traditional approaches to the supply of water become less appropriate or more expensive, unconventional methods are receiving more attention. The concept and practice of transporting fresh water in large ocean-going plastic bags was described in the first book. Several additional fresh approaches are described here, including large- and small-scale desalination technology, water reclamation and reuse, and techniques such as fog collection. More and more cities are discovering that wastewater can be a resource, not a liability, for purposes ranging from irrigation to drinking. Matching water demands with available waters of different quality can reduce water-supply constraints, increase system reliability, and solve costly wastewater disposal problems. Water-quality issues also are addressed in the context of the discovery of the widespread contamination of groundwater in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India with arsenic. The laudable successes in the 1970s and 1980s in meeting the water-supply requirements of millions of Bangladeshis are now threatened by the failure to detect arsenic and to protect public health.

In one of the greatest technical embarrassments of the 20th century, which certainly had its share of technical embarrassments, errors caused by the use of incompatible units of measure by two different groups involved in spacecraft navigation led to the destruction of the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft just as it reached the red planet - a $125 million dollar goof-up. The water world has its share of strange units of measure. In a modest effort to encourage students of water problems to check their work and avoid such expensive mistakes, I've included a comprehensive set of water units and conversions in the Water Brief section. Now readers should be readily able to find out the appropriate meaning (and conversions) for leagues, dekameters, feddans, acre-feet, Imperial gallons, morgen-feet, miner's inches, quinaria, and more.

Many readers commented on the general problem of finding good water data, noting the value of the Data Section offered in the 1998-1999 book. This Section was designed to be a regular feature and it is repeated here with new, updated, and expanded data sets. When no new data were available, data tables from the first edition are not reproduced. For example, new data on cholera, access to clean drinking water and sanitation services, and hydroelectric capacity and production are either not available or little different from the 1998 edition. New tables, however, have been added on water and agriculture, international rivers basins, basic stocks and flows of the world's water, and more. Downloadable selections from both sets of tables are posted on this website.

Some of the other information found in the first edition of The World's Water is also updated in the book. The chronology on water-related conflicts has been modified and expanded, and now appears in the Water Briefs section. As the availability of information on the Internet has grown, so too the section on water-related Internet sites has been enlarged and updated.

A few readers of the first book noted the lack of a detailed discussion of food and agriculture, or flood control, or some other important issue. No doubt some readers of this edition will note the lack of a detailed discussion of water and ecosystems, or privatization, or something else. But I repeat a comment made in the introduction to the first edition: no single publication can adequately address all of the issues of interest to water experts, students, and the public. I urge readers to use these publications as stepping stones into the large, turbulent world of water, with its many different streams and pools.

Peter H. Gleick
Oakland, California

Updated: 03/01/2000
 
(c)1999/2001 Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security