Soft water path

The Soft Water Path

In the early 2000s, a new approach to water management was proposed by Peter Gleick and other water experts as a way to address serious unresolved water problems from the 20th century, especially the failure to meet basic human needs for billions, damages to ecological systems from water use or contamination, and growing violence over shared water resources.

The concept of the "soft path" is meant to broaden water policy discussions away from the narrow, traditional reliance on building infrastructure to supply water. In 2000, the World Health Organization estimated that 1.1 billion people still lacked safe drinking water, and over 2.4 billion lacked adequate sanitation services . Major ecosystems around the world are being degraded by human use of water, such as the Aral Sea, the Florida Everglades, and the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta. Nearly two million people still die each year from preventable water-related diseases, such as dracunculiasis, cholera, typhoid, and diarrheal diseases. The soft water path argues simple reliance on new large dams and water infrastructure will not be enough to solve these problems.

The Soft versus Hard Paths for Water

Traditional water development in the 20th century relied on a strategy of finding and developing new supplies of water by building large, centralized infrastructure. such as dams, aqueducts, and centralized treatment facilities. This approach – the “hard path” – brought many benefits, such as improved health, reliable low-cost water supplies, flood protection, and irrigation, it left much of the world with critical unresolved water challenges, including billions of people without basic safe water and sanitation, and significant ecological devastation to natural aquatic ecosystems. Some water experts are now beginning to call for new thinking and new approaches to global and local water problems.

The concept of a “soft water path” has been developed and described by Peter Gleick and colleagues at the Pacific Institute and by others, such as David Brooks of Friends of the Earth, Canada [2] as a comprehensive approach to water management, planning, and use. It draws from the earlier concept of a soft energy path developed by energy pioneer Amory Lovins. The soft water path acknowledges the need to continue to develop and use water infrastructure, but combines that with a call for improvements in the overall productivity of water use, the smart application of economics to encourage efficiency and equitable use, innovative new technologies, and the strong participation of communities and local water users in making decisions. Rather than continue to try to develop new virgin sources of new supply, the soft path matches water services to the scale of the users’ needs. It also takes environmental and social concerns into account to ensure that basic human needs and the needs of the natural world are both met.

Underlying the soft path for water is the insight that people don’t want to “use” water, with the exception of minimal amounts of water for drinking and other basic needs – people want to bathe, produce goods and services, grow food, and generally meet human needs. Trying to achieve satisfy these needs more efficiently, with less water, can reduce pressure on limited freshwater resources.

How the Soft Path Differs

The soft path can be distinguished from the traditional, hard path to water in six main ways: [3]. The soft path

1) Ensures water for human needs. The soft path directs governments, companies, and individuals to meet the water needs of people and businesses, instead of just supplying water. People want clean clothes or to be able to produce goods and services – they do not care how much water is used and may not care if water is used at all.

2) Ensures water for ecological needs. The soft path recognizes that the health of our natural world and the activities that depend on it (like swimming, water purification, ecological habitat, and tourism) are important to water users and people in general. Often, by not returning enough water to the natural world, the hard path harms humans and other ecological users downstream.

3) Matches the quality of water with its use. The soft path advances water systems that supply different water quality of water for different uses. For instance, storm runoff, gray water, and reclaimed wastewater, although not of the highest quality, are well-suited for landscape irrigation or for certain industrial purposes.

4) Matches the scale of the infrastructure to the scale of the need. The soft path for water recognizes that investing in decentralized infrastructure can be just as cost-effective as investing in large, centralized facilities. There is nothing inherently better about providing irrigation water from a massive reservoir instead of using decentralized rainwater capture and storage.

5) Includes public participation in decisions over water. The soft path requires water agency or company personnel to interact closely with water users and to engage community groups in water management. The hard path, governed by an engineering mentality, is accustomed to meeting generic needs.

6) Uses smart economics. The soft path recognizes the public and economic aspects of water and uses the power of water economics to encourage the equitable distribution and efficient use of water.

Experience with the Soft Water Path

The Province of Manitoba Canada has explored a soft water path for regional water policy .

See also

• Hydrology
• Water cycle
• Water resources
• Sanitation
• Sustainable development
• Pacific Institute
• Soft energy path

External links

• G. Wolff and P.H. Gleick, "The Soft Path for Water" in The World's Water 2002-2003 (Island Press, Washington D.C., pp. 1-32.
• P.H. Gleick, 2003. Science, Volume 302, November 28, 2003, pp. 1524-1528.
• P.H. Gleick, 2002. Nature, Volume 418, pg. 373, July 25, 2002.
• Manitoba Water Soft Path 2006.