By Brian Richter

I recently attended an international water conference during which the keynote speaker revealed a shocking statistic:

Every eight seconds, a young child dies from lack of water or a waterborne disease.

He equated this to a 747 jetliner full of kids going down every hour.

Stunned by the enormity of this tragedy, I reflected on the relevance of our conservation work to this year’s World Water Day theme of water scarcity. The lack of suitable water for people and for nature is a growing crisis:

• More than 1 billion humans lack access to clean drinking water.
• Two billion — almost one in every three people on the planet — do not have adequate sanitation facilities or electricity.

Some may see the conservation of nature as less important and urgent than providing water wells, purifying filters and vaccines for the world’s vulnerable children. These humanitarian efforts have saved millions of lives, and continuing investment in them is essential.

But many of these solutions address the symptoms of the freshwater crisis — not its underlying causes. 

More Conservation Equals More Humanitarianism

The majority of water-related diseases are linked to what humans are doing to our land and water.

When rain falls on an increasingly human-modified landscape, it flushes a chemical stew into rivers, lakes and estuaries, disrupting natural ecosystems that keep disease-causing organisms in check. The explosion of red tides in coastal areas around the world is a warning that when our land and water are sick, we suffer as well. 

As a humanitarian, I understand the motivation to build pumps and reservoirs for delivering water to cities and farms and dams to generate electricity. But as a conservationist, I see many serious and unintended consequences in the world’s rivers.
 
Do these roles — humanitarian and conservationist — have to be at odds? They do not and should not.

The Global Assault on Fisheries

For instance, I recently visited with villagers fishing from the banks of the Yangtze River in China. One fisherman looked at me and held his hands a couple feet apart. Then he moved his hands about four inches closer together and pointed to the Yangtze, shaking his head.

His message was clear: Because fish are becoming smaller and less abundant, it is becoming increasingly difficult for these people to feed their families. Fish provide the primary source of protein for tens of millions of Chinese along the Yangtze, but dams, water diversions and pollution are taking their toll on the river’s fisheries. 

In fact, sharp declines in fisheries following damming and water diversions have been documented around the globe, from the Nile to the Zambezi in Africa, from the Penobscot to the Colorado in the United States, and from the Murray-Darling in Australia to the Mun in Thailand.

How The Nature Conservancy Addresses These Issues

Efforts to alleviate poverty and improve human health must spring from a holistic perspective — namely, to ultimately sustain the well-being of cultures and economies. The Conservancy brings three important strategies to this effort.

• Watershed protection. We work with governments and development planners to identify watersheds that provide clean water for farms and cities and important fisheries for local communities. By protecting these places from inappropriate development, we are conserving nature while helping to meet human needs for water and preventing waterborne diseases.
• Environmentally sustainable dams and diversions. We work with water managers in developed river basins to find environmentally sustainable ways they can operate dams and water diversions. Our scientific knowledge and water engineering expertise allow us to collaborate with water managers to meet the needs of both humans and nature.
• Better water-management practices. We advocate for policies that foster widespread adoption of — and funding for — environmentally sustainable water-management practices. By demonstrating on-the-ground and in-the-water successes, we are proving that sustainable approaches can work in nations both rich and poor.

The boundaries between human development, humanitarian relief and conservation must disappear. The more we can work together, the more solutions we will find that benefit all life on this planet.

Nature picture credits (left to right): Photos © Haroldo Palo, Jr. (Fisherman); © TNC (Brain Richter)