WATER PEACE AT HOME WATER PEACE IN THE WORLD
Water is man’s most complex risk but it can be leveraged for catalytic change. CWR finds out how from Henk Ovink
“We are not even beginning to understand the complexity of water crises.”On top of that you have water stress and pollution – 2 billion people still drink contaminated water and around 5,000 people die every day due to water-related health issues in Africa alone. Water is also critical for emancipation and equality; especially in areas where women and children are still relied upon to draw water from the well. Then we have to consider the implications of “too much water”, from floods to storm surges to sea level rise. 90% of all natural disasters are water-related; and they are hitting us more frequently and harder every year, putting our assets and lives at risk in the cities we build around the world. These risks are hard to value, and therefore sometimes left out of the equation. So understanding the complexity of these linkages is essential to managing, valuing and governing water for a more water secure water world.
“While water is critical for security, sustainability & safety for society, we are not valuing it accordingly.”It’s great that there is a High Level Panel on Water. It shows that water is raised to the highest level of attention from a political point of view. That level of attention has to also come from business, investor and NGO communities but it’s not yet there. While water is critical for security, sustainability and safety for society, we are not valuing it accordingly.
There are 4 strands of action: long-term collaboration, short-term innovation, inclusiveness & transparencyThere are four mains strands of action: long-term and comprehensive; and short-term and innovative, and a third strand is inclusiveness. If you want to change the world we have to include everyone. Inclusion is critically important. Not so much to ensure that what we do is legitimate, but out of collaboration comes the best ideas. The needs on the ground are inspirational for solutions and these voices need to be heard. Every community, every person, at risk or not, has a story to tell and has an idea of a pathway forward. Fourth, action also needs transparency to be accountable, to make a business case, and most importantly, to learn. We all make mistakes but only by being transparent can we learn and take that learning forwards as a step towards progress. So if we stand by these four principles: long-term collaboration, short-term innovation, inclusiveness and transparency, we build capacity among all stakeholders, among institutions as well as among individuals. All too often nowadays a plan becomes a book on the shelf; a project becomes an incident; inclusion is only an ambition and transparency is left out. Connecting all four principles by a design approach really helps develop a solution and connect through scales, time, and interest. This approach can really talk to the hearts and minds of ordinary people, governments, businesses, investors, assurers and insurers across the board.
“thanks to… the ‘wickedness’ of the challenge, there is a huge opportunity to leapfrog”I believe that thanks to the complexity and the “wickedness” of the challenge, there is a huge opportunity to leapfrog and to make those connections across interests, scales, sectors and borders. I am a hopeful guy so I think although the challenges are big, we can make a difference by working on the ground with a long-term, comprehensive approach.
“If you want to step into the future, you need banks, investors… to become part of the development of the project”I did this in New York after Hurricane Sandy hit. When I talked to President Jin of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), I told him that we need investors as part of the development process. Why? Because every assessment, be it an environmental, a policy or a financial one, is based on what we know; but when you look ahead, it’s outdated the moment you put it into place. If you want to step into the future, you need banks, investors and in this case the AIIB to become part of the development of the project, so their evaluation process can evolve with that development. Based on this conversation we started to build a coalition. Supported by the Dutch government, we partnered with the newly formed Global Centre of Excellence on Climate Adaptation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR), Deltares, and other innovators to assess water and climate risks in South-East and South Asian cities. And so the “Water as Leverage” project was born.
For the “Water as Leverage” project, we pitched competitions in Khulna, Chennai, & Semarang to find the best resiliency approach… …these can become starting points for replication, or inspirationWe had many options but to start somewhere we selected 3 cities: Khulna (Bangladesh), Chennai (India) and Semarang (Indonesia). These cities face complex challenges such as saltwater intrusion, soil subsidence, floods and droughts; all on top of migration flows and urbanisation. So in these cities we pitched a competition, not against each other but for the highest ambition, to find the best resiliency approach. International teams were challenged to partner, to find, and develop ideas in a collective, inclusive and collaborative way. These projects are the needed catalysts for change and can become starting points for replication, or at least inspiration, elsewhere. This spring we will evaluate this approach and come up with a more systemic way to apply the challenge to other cities. After all these 3 pilot cities won’t save the world. We need to do it everywhere. We need to focus on how to attract the finance world to partner with us in this approach of innovation; become a partner more on an institutional level and realise that this first phase – this “pre-project prep phase” – is the most important. By including the financial world in this new methodology, similar facilities or programmes can be scaled up in a region and beyond.
“President Obama wanted to rebuild with an eye on the future… …that’s when I came up with an idea to organise a competition – Rebuild by Design.”After the crisis our Rebuilding Task Force not only rebuilt the New York region in a more comprehensive, sustainable and resilient way; but we also tried to leapfrog. President Obama wanted to rebuild with an eye on the future, and that’s when I came up with an idea to organise a competition – Rebuild by Design – a predecessor to the “Water as Leverage” project. We selected 10 teams from the 148 that wanted to partner with us and over 9 months on the ground, we worked with 500+ community organisations, around 150 government agencies, schools, universities, and individuals across the regions of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. We developed projects that were transformative, that had the opportunity to have a ripple effect, that would create resilient communities while building capacity, while at the same time talked to the hearts and minds of those people on the ground. The result was 10 groundbreaking projects and we selected 6 as winners, which were awarded with USD920 million. These projects are now in the building phase and are advancing very quickly by US standards. However, some have to negotiate a more complex political environment and need more time. President Obama was keen to repeat success on the national scale so I developed the National Disaster Resiliency Competition. This was inspired by the Rebuild by Design competition after Hurricane Sandy and takes the same approach. The difference? Without a disaster, there is no crisis to leapfrog upon to the future. Water is leverage in that sense: it’s piggy-backing on this. Take a crisis as an opportunity, embrace the complexities and step up.
“I am very optimistic.”I also see that with the Paris Agreement and the UN SDGs that there is no escaping this challenge. We have to rise to this window of opportunity for change, or else we fail and that is not an option.