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The Troubled Waters of the Planet test

Water is essential for all life, and the fact that less and less water is available for human consumption has been stated many times. A number of global and regional water assessments have been carried out, designed to assist in the management of the world's decreasing water resources, and dwindling living resources in the form of fish stocks. These problems are further exacerbated by the annual increase in human passengers on this spaceship called Earth. Due to our mismanagement of the environment, the available water resources are becoming increasingly polluted or, as a result of other human activities, are being utilized in a less than optimal ways. In the wake of human population growth, transboundary water problems have also increased, with pollution spreading from one country to another, transported by currents along coastal areas, or along the path of rivers when countries or regions upstream construct dams and initiate irrigation schemes. What follows is that populations downstream are forced to survive on less water than before. Ecosystem changes, in the form of the clearing of forests in one region will result in neighboring regions being affected by, among other things, changes in hydrology or increased sediment transport in rivers and streams. The effects of climate change are becoming obvious in all ecosystems and in human populations, irrespective of where or how we live. Overexploitation of living resources and destruction of the biodiversity of aquatic ecosystems are probably outpacing anything so far witnessed on land. The Global International Water Assessment (GIWA), was launched in the mid-1990s on the initiative of UNEP and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) the aim being to provide much needed answers to some of the most pressing questions relating to "International Waters" (the term is used by bureaucrats in the field of international development assistance as a term describing water that flows across borders). GIWA's scientific approach was very ambitious. Not only was it meant to describe in detail all impacts on water resources due to human activities, in quantitative terms, but also the project was to describe the anticipated situation in coming decades. Furthermore, the project was to analyze the problems in several steps in order to be able to pinpoint "root causes". Policy options available for those making decisions in order to provide tools useful in the decision-making process in different sectors of society were also to be described. As the name indicates, GIWA is a global project and the assessments are being made in 66 regions which cover all the major river drainage basins and coastal waters of the world. The assessments are carried out by local expert groups with professionals from different sectors of society and represent different areas of expertise. GIWA is not the first, and, most likely, will not be the last global assessment of human impacts on the planet's ecosystems. Therefore, it may be useful to provide some insights into the working process and progress to date. I can do this based on personal experience as Scientific Advisor to the project during part of the implementation phase. To turn the grand vision of the project into concrete activities on the ground was certainly a challenge. An early constraint, experienced during the implementation of the project, was that the development of the methodology lagged behind the actual assessments in the regions. Admittedly this was a deliberate strategy, to enable a fit with the funding agencies project-funding cycle. The institutional framework for GIWA included a multiagency Steering Group to provide guidance in the implementation of the project. The Steering Group on occasion was challenged to provide unified advice on goals and outcomes of the project. Despite the challenges faced in the initial stages of the project, GIWA is now producing data and information that will help to improve our knowledge base in regard to transboundary resources and environmental problems. This information will contribute to global efforts to manage common water resources. The results from GIWA will not solve the water issues, but they will certainly help to identify some of major problems that need to be addressed. The main supporters of GIWA, the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), Sweden and Finland, the City and University of Kalmar, with UNEP as the lead agency, deserve gratitude for their staunch support of this important initiative. The learning phase that those involved in the implementation of the project have gone through will certainly be valuable in implementing follow-on project activities. This special issue of Ambio contains a selection of the GIWA reports. However, space constraints have limited the focus of the articles either to the issues characterizing the situation in a region or to the socioeconomic causes and policy options.