Global Change Drivers,

1

• Global Change Drivers,
• Core Practical Issues about Water,
• and Meeting the Challenges
• Dr Wayne Cartwright
• SANZ-UNESCO
• NZDESD Partnership
• Wellington, March 2009

2
Scope of Presentation

• My presentation to you this morning is intended
  to mesh with your later interdisciplinary session
  about managing freshwater resources
• My aim is to provide a future-oriented big
  picture context for your later discussions
• I will attempt this by
• Reviewing the major global drivers of change
• Considering, in the context of these huge global
  changes, the core practical issues about water
  internationally and in New Zealand
• - Commenting on shaping New Zealand to meet these
  challenges

3
Major Global Drivers of Change

• A complex sequence of global changes has already
  begun that will take human civilisation outside
  the range of prior experience in terms of
  magnitude, speed of arrival and simultaneity. All
  are subject to uncertainty about timing.
• These changes will cause abrupt and radical
  shifts in human living, work and recreation.
• These statements are not intended to be alarmist.
  Instead, they should be interpreted as a
  challenge to become prepared and as an invitation
  to face the future with hope, resilience, and the
  required knowledge and skills.

4
Major Global Drivers of Change (2)

• Degradation of global ecologies caused by
  population growth and human economic activity,
  further reducing the already grossly overloaded
  capacity of these ecological systems to clean
  up pollution from human industry and
  consumption, and to continue to have the ability
  to contribute food, fibre, and energy.
• Rapidly accelerating global climate change, with
  associated extreme weather, with both direct
  impacts and the further effects of policies of
  mitigation and adaptation. Irreversible tipping
  points may occur.
• 3. Radical upward trends in the prices of
  hydrocarbons (oil, coal, natural gas) and wider
  variations around the trend, caused by increasing
  costs of extraction, internalisation of carbon
  gas emission costs, and recognition of peak
  oil. Substitution of renewable energy will
  increase, but it will be insufficient to avert
  major economic and social disruption as whole
  sectors of global and local economies fail.

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Major Global Drivers of Change (3)

• Poor and declining regional supplies of water
  (volume and quality) with consequent negative
  impacts on human health and agricultural food
  production and an increase in mortality. Regional
  conflicts will arise.
• 5. Critical global food supply deficit as
  population growth further outstrips the ability
  of both subsistence and commercial food and fibre
  production to feed humanity, resulting in
  widespread starvation.
• Atmospheric and water-borne toxins from
  industrial sources having much more direct
  serious affects on the health and mortality of
  humans and many other species.

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Major Global Drivers of Change (4)

• Geopolitical shifts and disruptions, as nations
  and blocs suffer adverse conditions, adjust to
  change, advance their ideologies, compete for
  critical resources, and attempt to exercise
  shifts in relative economic and military power.
• Wide swings in economic activity including
  widespread market failures as economic and
  financial institutions struggle (with declining
  success) to operate in a world that is shifting
  and changing beyond their ranges of competency.
• Advances in computers, information technology,
  global connectivity, robotics and other
  technologies. Some of these will assist in
  mitigating aspects of the changes listed above,
  but none will be a magic bullet.

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Core Practical Issues about Water International

• Regional conflicts over access to river systems.
  This is likely to cause more strife than access
  to oil (eg parts of Middle East)
• Current and rapidly increasing degradation of
  water quality in rivers and lakes that are
  sources of water for human consumption, by
  industrial contamination, agricultural chemicals,
  and organic waste (eg parts of China and India)
• Similar degradation of the quality of water for
  industry and the increasing price of clean water
• Rapidly lowering water tables in regions of
  subsistence agriculture that are dependent on
  water from wells and bores (eg large parts of
  India)
• Lowering of deep aquifers that supply water for
  irrigation to huge commercial food-producing
  areas (eg parts of US Great Plains)

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Core Practical Issues about Water International
(2)

• Salinisation of many regions that irrigate for
  commercial agriculture (eg San Joaquin Valley,
  California)
• Medium-term severe decline in flows of rivers
  that originate in glaciers
• Accelerating shifts in rainfall patterns (due to
  climate change) so that some traditional
  agricultural regions can support only greatly
  reduced production or none at all (eg parts of
  Australia and Africa)
• Disruption of water supply systems by increasing
  frequency and severity of storms

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Core Practical Issues about Water International
(3)

• Many regions have never had a sufficient
  infrastructure for water storage, conservation,
  and reticulation, and this situation will
  intensify as the global population increases and
  climate changes
• Increasing pollution (nutrification and toxins)
  of oceans, acidification and rising water
  temperatures are combining to cause profound
  degradation of marine ecological systems. These
  effects are reducing the capacity of the ocean
  for carbon dioxide absorption and the vitality of
  fish populations that are traditional sources of
  human food

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Core Practical Issues about Water New Zealand

• Several of the international issues apply to the
  future New Zealand including
• Long-term contamination of ground water, rivers
  and lakes by agricultural nutrients - chemical
  and organic and consequent initiatives to
  mitigate, restore, and adjust
• Lowering or exhaustion of aquifers used for human
  water supplies and irrigation in increasingly
  drought-prone eastern regions, and necessary
  adjustments to community locations and land use
• Declining flows from alpine glaciers and
  necessary adjustments to water usage

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Core Practical Issues about Water New Zealand (2)

• Salt water contamination of coastal aquifers as
  water tables drop and ocean levels rise, with
  consequential adjustments
• Shifts in rainfall patterns - slightly more in
  western areas and much less in the east - but
  with higher variation everywhere and more severe
  and frequent droughts and floods. This has
  implications for human consumption, agriculture,
  industry, hydro-electricity, flood protection,
  and amenity values
• Water storage and conservation infrastructure
  becomes increasingly inadequate, prompting
  decisions about private and societal investment

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Core Practical Issues about Water New Zealand (3)

• There are also issues about water that are
  specific to New Zealand, including
• Establishing the correct societal balance between
  values in water use. For example values related
  to ecological integrity, human consumption,
  cultural beliefs (especially Maori), pastoral
  agriculture, arable agriculture,
  hydro-electricity, recreation and tourism, other
  amenities
• Adjustment of sectoral activities to become
  aligned with this balance of values for example
  dairy farming systems and hydro-electric
  generating systems
• Shifts in land use to reflect changing rainfall
  patterns and the likely need to retire steep land
  from pastoral use to mitigate erosion and
  consequent downstream damage

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Shaping New Zealand to Meet the Challenges

• The challenges that have been introduced are very
  daunting, and these have considered only issues
  about water!
• The Think Tank Project (mentioned earlier)
  established a clear view that current economic
  and governance institutions will not cope with
  the burden of the global change drivers
  including issues about water. This is because
  they are based on an increasingly outmoded
  worldview that equates happiness to material
  consumption and assets, promotes individualism
  and regards nature (ecological systems) as merely
  a resource for use by humans
• The NZ UNDESD Project concluded that these
  institutions and models have to be
  reinvented/replaced according to a quite
  different set of ethics and values if we are to
  accept the challenge to become prepared and the
  invitation to face the future with hope,
  resilience, and the required knowledge and
  skills.

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Shaping New Zealand to Meet the Challenges (2)

• These are ethics and values that
• Place great importance on non-material sources of
  happiness.
• Remove the perceived linkage between economic
  growth and success in New Zealand communities.
• Affirm the deep interdependence of all people
  fellow New Zealanders and in global communities.
• Include a robust sense of mutual respect,
  fairness, cooperation, gratitude, compassion,
  forgiveness, humility, courage, mutual aid,
  charity, confidence, trust, courtesy, integrity,
  loyalty, and respectful use of resources.
• Value nature intrinsically through knowing that
  human society and its political economy is an
  integral and interdependent component of nature
  and the biosphere.
• Have reverence for nature and know that they are
  responsible for their impact on the integrity of
  all ecosystems in the biosphere in which they are
  engaged.

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Shaping New Zealand to Meet the Challenges (3)

• The Think Tank Project went on to suggest
  conditions for a strongly sustainable New
  Zealand, and has commented on the way in which
  this could be achieved
• This is not the time or place to take this matter
  further, but a paper will soon be available to
  those interested to know more about this work
• To conclude, I emphasise the importance of the
  citizens of New Zealand (and the world!)
  addressing the coming changes with hope,
  determination, resilience, and the right
  knowledge and skills