Author: Cameron Walker

Sandra Postel, founder of the Global Water Policy Project, has been studying international freshwater issues for over twenty years. In that time, she has become one of the world's most respected scientific communicators and water-policy strategists--authoring three books, publishing a multitude of papers, inspiring a PBS documentary and garnering numerous awards. Of late, Postel has turned her attention to valuing and preserving the services provided by healthy freshwater systems. The Ecosystem Marketplace profiles Postel's inspiring, innovative and practical approach to managing the world's water.

Growing up on Long Island, Sandra Postel had early Atlantic Ocean-front time that might have pushed her along the path of marine conservation. "I had an early sensitivity to the environment and the natural world in general," she says. But days spent scouring beaches and watching crashing waves have turned into a passion for another life aquatic: freshwater.

Freshwater makes up only about 2 1/2 percent of the earth's water. Ice caps and glaciers freeze up almost two-thirds of this. When it comes down to clear, drinkable liquid that's naturally renewed by precipitation, the thirsty are looking at less than one-hundredth of one percent of the jewel-blue planet that's seen from space. And as populations climb, they're placing ever-increasing demands--for everything from irrigation to household uses--on this shrinking source.

Postel, founder of the Global Water Policy Project, has been studying international freshwater issues for more than two decades. Based in Amherst, Massachusetts, she researches, writes, teaches, speaks, and consults on freshwater issues ranging from safe drinking water to ecosystems' role in disaster mitigation. In 2002, she was named to the Scientific American 50, an annual award that recognizes contributors in a range of scientific fields. Her visionary approach to freshwater issues has also garnered awards from Duke University and the Pew Scholars Program, among others. "My goal is really to promote the preservation and sustainable use of the world's freshwater," she says.

Communicating Science

After studying geology and political science as an undergraduate, Postel received a AAAS Mass Media fellowship, which took her to the Charlotte Observer, where she covered science along with general reporting.

When she moved from journalism into science, her reporting experience became part of her many skills--and pointed her to sharing science with a wider audience. "It began to carve out a niche for me that included communicating about what was happening to the natural world to a larger public," she says.

This communication has taken many forms, including three books, many papers, and an essay, "Troubled Waters," which was included in the 2001 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Her book Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity was the subject of a 1997 PBS documentary.

Brian Richter, who collaborated with Postel on their 2003 book Rivers for Life: Managing Water for People and Nature, says, "Sandra is an outstanding researcher and has a beautiful talent for transforming rather pithy or dry facts into stories of considerable human interest." But even more important than her wide-ranging communications, he says, she goes beyond merely reporting on freshwater woes. "Instead, she takes on the responsibility of offering constructive, practical, and insightful solutions to modern-day problems," he says.

Freshwater Course

Postel's first job out of Duke took her to a small natural resource consulting firm in California. It was the end of the Carter presidency, a time when federal agencies had been directed to include water conservation in all aspects of their long-range planning. Intasa, the Menlo Park, California, company, had contracts with the Environmental Protection Agency--so Postel began work on developing an EPA handbook for municipalities to include water conservation in wastewater treatment, in order to be considered for EPA grants.

Postel began focusing on freshwater and learning the process and pitfalls of water policymaking. "It gave me a chance to really see how federal policy was developing and how agencies were trying to respond, and then to do some case study work in the costs and benefits of water conservation work at the municipal level," she says.

With the dawn of the Reagan administration, water conservation momentum in governmental agencies began to dry up. Postel headed east to work at the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute. Here, her perspective went global. A previous employee had started compiling research on worldwide water issues, and Postel jumped right in. "Being from the United States and having studied in the United States and having worked exclusively on U.S. issues, in terms of my professional life, it was just a whole new stage to look at and to learn about," Postel says.

A Global Water Lens

Water began to shape Postel's view of global issues from politics to agriculture. "I feel like I've always defined my professional life since then as looking at the world through a water lens," she says.

From the beginning, the view wasn't pretty. "At that time, we really were just getting glimmers of the kinds of problems we are now reading about every day," she says. Concerns began with severe droughts in Ethiopia in the 1980s and signs of trouble in the Middle East, but would later spread to China, India, and most of the world's regions.

The very first paper Postel penned for Worldwatch in 1984 made the same argument that she puts forth today: traditional approaches to freshwater supply--big water projects like dams and diversions--sap bank accounts and the environment at ever-increasing rates. Instead, she says, "there needs to be a fundamental shift to the demand side, to managing the demand for water as much as the supply."

In 1994, Postel left her post as Worldwatch's vice president for research to start the Global Water Policy Project, which acts as an umbrella for all of Postel's wide-ranging water interests. She's now a senior fellow at Worldwatch, and has designed and taught courses at Tufts University and at Mount Holyoke College, where she is a visiting senior lecturer.

What's Water Worth?

Much of the work Postel has done with the Global Water Policy Project centers on shifting conventional ideas about the value of water, changing water from a mere commodity to be bought, sold, and traded to a valuation that reflects its central role in human and ecosystem survival.

Global demand for freshwater is skyrocketing; since 1950, the world's demand for water from rivers, lakes, and aquifers has roughly tripled. The economic cost of these growing demands is enormous. In their 2003 book, Postel and coauthor Richter estimate the value of the world's freshwater by looking at the cost of replacing this water. The global economy sucks up about 2,000 cubic kilometers annually. Replacing that with desalinated seawater could cost at least $3 trillion each year.

And the cost to natural ecosystems is evident by what's no longer there. Wetlands are vanishing worldwide. Rivers don't have enough flow to reach the sea--the Nile and the Colorado rivers can feed their deltas only in times of exceptional flooding. The once-vast Aral Sea is drying up.

As direct draws on rivers, streams, and a host of other watery spots increase, essential ecosystem services trickle away. Freshwater ecosystems can aid in filtering the water supply, provide habitat for a host of species, and absorb flood and storm waters, among other tasks. These additional ecosystem benefits have been ignored to our peril, Postel says.

"We've really gone about looking at water as just a commodity and exploiting it for economic purposes, without making sure we protect the non-market values that have to do with water's function as the basis of life," she says. "That's gotten us into some serious trouble."

Postel had early experience valuing ecosystem services in her time at Duke, where she studied the ecosystem services provided by North Carolina's pocosins, an Algonquin term meaning "swamp on a hill." Now, she says, "I think we can do a lot better at valuing ecosystems for the many goods and services they provide."

How can we put the real value into water? At a very basic level, Postel says, pricing for water can be used to more effectively reflect the cost of what's being used. One of the key draws on the world's freshwater supplies is irrigation, used by farmers from Iowa to Indonesia. Irrigation is the world's biggest freshwater consumer, accounting for about 70% of freshwater channeled from rivers, lakes, and aquifers.

But this heavy use is still a bargain. "If you look around the world most farmers are paying 10 to 20% of the real cost of the water, so there's very little incentive there to use that water efficiently," Postel says. Changing prices to reflect the real cost of water could drive interest in more efficient technology and help governments, farmers, and consumers reevaluate the choices they make in crop selection and what ends up on the dinner table.

In the western United States, where water rights can be bought and sold, farmers in the west have begun to sell their water rights to urban areas, either temporarily or permanently. Shifting water use from farms to cities can result in more efficient water distribution, as the market moves water to the highest-value uses. "But that's not going to solve the non-market problems--that rivers in the west are running dry, that lakes are shrinking," Postel says. "The environment is not always at the transaction table."

Conservation groups like The Nature Conservancy have started buying water rights to keep streams flowing. But the task's too large for conservation groups alone--we need governments to step in where the market fails, and in some cases, to get functioning markets up and running, Postel says.

Market Meets Regulation

In her paper Liquid Assets: The Critical Need to Safeguard Freshwater Ecosystems (published July 2005 by Worldwatch), Postel looks at several examples of international water projects in which government and market mechanisms work in tandem. In Australia's Murray-Darling river basin, for instance, a multi-state commission set up a cap on withdrawals after a tripling of water withdrawals between 1944 and 1994, which increased the river system's salinity and threatened wetlands and wildlife. New demands must be met through conservation, increased efficiency, or water trading within and among states.

In this case, the market is chugging along, but the river system hasn't gotten healthier. The government initially set the cap at 1994 withdrawal levels--an amount later determined to be too high to restore the river. An additional government program, the Living Waters initiative, has been started to increase flow to rivers.

In setting limits, Postel says, "you need to look at an intervention that establishes a sustainability boundary, or a cap, or whatever you want to call it, that is geared specifically toward protecting the ecosystem." Caps, if set correctly, will increase water productivity, eventually meeting both human needs and protecting freshwater ecosystems (see Australia: A Pioneer in Sustainable Emissions Trading).

Changing the fate of the world's freshwater sources will take a shift in mindset, one that makes ecological health a primary goal, not an afterthought, Postel says. One program that supports her philosophy is happening in South Africa, where the National Water Act of 1998 set up a two-part water reserve with unique goals – one to provide for the basic household needs of its population, and the second part to set aside water to meet the basic needs of freshwater ecosystems (see What Do Human Rights Have to Do With Water?...Everything).

The South African government assumed its role as custodian of the public trust, which includes protecting freshwater ecosystems. Once basic human needs and ecosystem needs are met, only then can water be considered for use by other enterprises.

It's not an easy road. "You've got to go watershed by watershed and ask, "Okay, how much water does this river need? How much water does this ecosystem need?" Postel says (see Watershed Services: The New Carbon?). "But the basic philosophy is a good one, because it puts the health of ecosystems at the core of water management."

Ecosystems as Insurance

One of the issues Postel is currently working with is ecosystems' function in mitigating natural disasters. Freshwater ecosystems can provide strong barriers against watery onslaughts during floods and other catastrophes (see Bringing Back the Buffer). But to reap these benefits, we need to keep ecosystems healthy. "We need to invest in our ecological infrastructure to reduce our risk and preserve our resilience from disaster," she says.

In 1993 the upper Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, swollen from heavy rains, rose to extraordinary heights. Floodwaters spilled over the levees. Afterward, researchers estimated that the cost of restoring 5.3 million hectares of wetlands in the upper Mississippi would have absorbed enough floodwater to reduce much of the flood damage. The Great Midwest Flood of 1993 caused damages of $16 to $19 billion. The cost of restoring the wetlands: $2 to $3 billion.

Two recent disasters, Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Southeast Asia, have highlighted the connection between ecological and human health. Coastlines in Southeast Asia have been undergoing rapid change as fragile mangroves have been removed for timber and aquaculture. Research published in the journal Science this summer suggests that areas protected by mangroves and other coastal forests received far less tsunami damage than areas without these natural buffers. In Louisiana, a 1998 proposal to restore coastal wetlands stalled in the planning stages; it's likely that more extensive wetlands may have offered New Orleans greater protection against storm surges and floodwaters. "Had we looked at wetlands along the Gulf Coast, as an important piece of ecological infrastructure that was serving a disaster-mitigating role, we might have chosen to invest in [their] protection," Postel says.

There's a dawning awareness that ecosystems can be as crucial to facing catastrophes as more traditional means of recouping losses. "People understand the importance of investing in home insurance and life insurance," Postel says. And people could also understand the need for societies to stock up on disaster insurance by investing in watershed, wetland, and floodplain protection, she says.

Along with her many talents in writing, teaching, and communicating freshwater issues, Postel can add another hat to her multifaceted career: ecosystem insurance saleswoman. When she comes to the door, the hope is that global citizens will be ready to buy what she's selling.

Cameron Walker is a regular contributor to the Ecosystem Marketplace. She may be reached at cwalker@nasw.org.

First posted: January 3, 2006