We feel Climate Change through Water

1977, the year I had just started school, was the year when the last United Nations Water Conference was held, in Argentina. It was a different age: the global population was about half of what it is today, and “climatic change” (sic) was such a non-topic that it was referenced just once in the typewritten Conference report that aimed to provide a political framework for improving water quality and security.??

46 years later, we urgently need a renewed global focus on water – and I hope that the 2023 United Nations Water Conference in New York will be that moment. Because since 1977, despite reports and goals and strategies, the bar on water has not been raised, despite our planet’s total dependency on reliable water supplies. Increasingly, we are struggling to protect these supplies – even in Europe, where this year Italy is likely to battle a drought that puts a third of the country’s agricultural production at risk. Worldwide, the picture is equally, if not more, alarming. In 2018, 3.6 billion people – about half the global population – faced inadequate access to water at least one month per year. By 2050, this figure is projected to rise to more than 5 billion, while nearly 40 per cent of croplands is forecast to be exposed to severe drought for three months or more each year. And the water crisis isn’t just about “too little” water: it’s also about too much water (floods and storms); water that is too hot (warming oceans and lakes); and water that is too dirty (salinization). No country has suffered more from all four effects in 2022 than Pakistan.

Framed in such stark terms, it is clear that the water crisis is not just a minor inconvenience at a local level: it means economic and humanitarian crises on an epic scale.

It means food shortages. It means mass migration. It means more disease. It means poorer education, especially for girls. It means increased risk of water wars in our own lifetime (indeed, the water-climate change-security nexus was flagged at the recent Munich Security Conference). It is a global crisis that needs solving at a global level, and in this month’s article, I want to zoom in on where the “gaps” remain and how (if at all) they can be addressed by Bayer, by the whole agricultural sector, and by governments across the world.

The UN 2023 Water Conference must end water blindness

On World Water Day, March 22nd, the UN 2023 Water Conference will kick off in New York. Bringing together governments and private sector players from across the world, the Conference aims to stimulate and collate water-related commitments from both groups, ultimately accelerating progress towards achieving the sixth UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) – and, given that they are intrinsically linked, accelerating progress towards the #SDG targets more broadly.

I am excited that Bayer will be among the companies making a firm and comprehensive commitment on water as part of this initiative – we are still working on the last details and will share it at the beginning of the Conference.

But what I can already say is that we have reviewed our activities holistically and will be making deep and considered changes across our business – aiming to reduce the water footprint of our activities and products across their entire life-cycle, as well as to address the issue of water quality.

In this regard, I hope very much that other private-sector players will step up and make ambitious, wide-reaching pledges that will help make UN SDG 6 reality. If they need a source of inspiration in this, they need look no further than Mina Guli – CEO of Thirst Foundation, passionate water advocate and my friend. As Mina and I announced in a joint #120m article last July, as the final flourish to her RUN BLUE campaign to raise awareness of the growing water crisis, and to galvanize individuals and companies to put water front of mind, on 22nd March (the first day of the Conference), Mina will quite literally run up the steps of the UN headquarters in New York – ending her 200th marathon in 365 days. You read that right, 200 – in the last twelve months, she already ran marathons more frequently than most people did the grocery shopping.

During the RUN BLUE campaign, not only has Mina already worn out 18 pairs of running shoes, and journeyed to and across every continent except Antarctica (where the news on sea ice losses during the summer of the Southern Hemisphere is freaking out climatologists), but she has also witnessed first-hand the impact of the water crisis everywhere she has been – from Europe’s stagnating rivers, to Mexico City, which is sinking due to excessive groundwater extraction, to North America, where lakes and reservoirs are drying up (sometimes with worrying consequences beyond aridification).

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To combat the water crisis, we need more commitment from the private sector; more wide-ranging cooperation; and overarching political action

The human stories Mina has gathered from the “front line” of the water crisis around the world have sometimes been heart-breaking, often inspiring, but always unequivocal: the water crisis is happening right now, everywhere on our planet – and we are still not doing enough to fight it. The concrete, scalable solutions we need to combat the crisis are within our reach, but I believe we need three cogs to start turning to get us there: these are more commitment from the private sector; more wide-ranging cooperations; and overarching political action.

The first two are action areas where companies like Bayer are making progress. Not only are we striving to improve our own water efficiency as a manufacturer, but we also are increasingly focusing on responsible water management in our innovations and in public-private partnerships. Whenever possible, we combine the two, as seen in our sustainable rice project. Rice is the staple food for more than half the world’s population, but is also one of the most resource-intensive crops on the planet, currently using more than 165 million hectares of land, and requiring a staggering 43% of the total water used for irrigation. To tackle the latter, we have developed high-yield breeds of rice that can be directly seeded, which require less water, energy, labor and seeds than conventional transplanted and irrigated. Further boosting the impact of this project, we use partnerships with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Direct Seeded Rice Consortium (DSRC) to improve access, particularly to smallholder farmers. And our crop science offering is more than rice, of course: we also contribute research and technical expertise to the TELA Maize Project, a partnership aimed at improving food security and livelihoods among smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa by combating the impacts of droughts and insects on maize crops — the main source of food for more than 300 million Africans.

Beyond seeds, some of our products aim to make farming techniques more water-efficient – like the DripByDrip irrigation system we developed with Netafim. Or, through initiatives like our Climate FieldView? platform, our Gothenburg Water Utilization Learning Center in Nebraska, or our partnership in Australia with Goanna Ag, we help farmers use data to fine-tune their water management and thus increase their water efficiency. Through Unfold Inc., a company formed jointly between Leaps by Bayer and Temasek, we are venturing into vertical farming, which is already proving a commercially viable, revolutionary technique for cultivating high-value, quick-growing crops in a way that uses vastly less water and land than conventional agriculture. And crucially, we are aiming to address the root causes of the water crisis through actions like the results-based finance reforestation initiative we contribute to in the LEAF coalition, or our “Bayer Carbon Program”, which rewards farmer for the work they do in the area of carbon sequestration.

Above all, feeding into the UN Water Conference aim to generate “new commitments, pledges and actions […] towards achieving SDG 6 and other water-related goals and targets”, we are about to build on our existing water actions and take them to the next level entirely.

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Water is life – but it is also political dynamite

The third point which I believe is necessary to solving the water crisis – overarching political action – is one that the UN Water Conference has so far swerved; the UN has already stated that, unlike the biodiversity-focused #COP15 in December, the Conference output will not include any sort of framework or action plan. And I can, to an extent, understand why: the politics of water has been a fraught field for millennia; indeed, the first recorded war in human history, in 2450 BCE, was triggered by competing claims over water access. Water is life, and thus inherently an emotive topic; throw in the fact that rivers and oceans famously do not respect human-drawn boundaries, and when designing a political framework for water, you have a recipe if not for disaster, then at least for prolonged and painful negotiations.

This has certainly been the case with the recent political deadlock over the Colorado River in the US, which boils down to a dispute over which of the seven states dependent upon the river should make cuts in their water consumption – cuts that are sorely needed, as decades of drought in the area have led to plummeting water levels in the two reservoirs feeding the river, and thus in the river itself. Scientists increasingly believe that it is no longer accurate to term the conditions in the American West a “drought”, and that the declining streamflow is simply the new normal (an effect which is on the increase across the world). It is therefore all the more urgent that the states swiftly agree how to replace the current, creaking body of legislation, and ensure water security in the more water-stressed decades to come.

In its tension and complexity, Colorado is a microcosm of the water landscape as a whole – but it has opened a media conversation on unfit-for-purpose water legislation. Add to this the intensified governmental attention on the UN Water Conference, and the growing public visibility of the water crisis thanks to campaigners like Mina, and it looks like we have a “policy window” for crafting water legislation that is nature-centric, transboundary, and cross-sectoral – water policy that aims at solving the water crisis in the long-term. So what does this look like?

Our future depends on the way humanity deals with two molecules: CO2 and H2O?

For a start, politicians must recognize that the water crisis is both as urgent as, and a part of, the climate crisis – because we experience the climate crisis largely through anthropogenic changes to the hydrological cycle.

The way in which we handle two molecules – CO2 and H2O – dictates the future of humanity: reducing carbon emissions is key to mitigating the climate crisis and thus a large part of the water crisis; while we must also strengthen our ability to adapt to the four water events I mentioned earlier (too little, too much, too hot, too dirty).

Firstly, water policy needs to provide for adaptation measures that will also be of environmental benefit in the long-term. This could take the form of equipping our cities to better sequester water or, conversely, cope with flooding; future-proofing our coasts by restoring mangroves and wetlands; or improving water treatment and management processes so that we are wasting as little water as possible.

Going to the root cause of many elements of the water crisis, we need policies that supercharge decarbonization, minimize land-use change and restore natural habitats.

Most importantly, this means investing in reforestation and wetland restoration on a bold scale; accelerating a shift to renewable energies; boosting soil health; and mandating green technologies and industrial processes. As we obtain more and more insights into how precipitation is generated by vegetation, it will become increasingly clear how one region is dependent on protecting the natural resources in another.

In ‘Making Numbers Count’, Chip Heath and Karla Star illustrate how precious freshwater is on our so-called Blue Planet: we can imagine the entire world’s water stocks as a gallon-sized jug (almost 4 litres) filled with water with three ice cubes next to it. But: all of the water in the jug is salt water. The ice cubes represent the entire quantity of available fresh water, and humans can only drink the equivalent of three drops that are melting off each of the three ice cubes.

However, six to seven drops of the nine are used in agriculture in any given year, which is responsible for 72% of freshwater withdrawals globally today and on track to use 80% by 2050. This is why any real reduction in water use is dependent on the sector’s cooperation. Water legislation thus needs to accelerate the shift to carbon- and water-lean agricultural practices, by encouraging sustainable and low-impact farming methods and techniques, as well as encouraging the development and use of innovative technologies that, among other things, combat drought and enable farmers to cope with drought conditions.

Change must go even deeper: currently, water-intensive crops (particularly cash crops) are often grown at high volume in water-scarce regions – think of drought-stricken California’s economic dependence on famously “thirsty” almonds, for instance. Water legislation needs to incentivize a shift away from such incompatibility, for instance by (re)designing subsidies to reconcile agriculture with the local environment and resources. Importantly, water policy also needs to address soil – a vital but less-publicized player in the water cycle – and boost its ability to retain water. Policies that protect topsoil and increase vegetation are vital to this, meaning that they must promote, or even mandate, sustainable and restorative agricultural practices. For instance, subsidies should favour “no-till” methods and crop rotation, while practices such as growing cover crops must become obligatory. Water-smart obligations must of course apply to other industries, too, who after all still contribute 16% of those freshwater withdrawals.

And crucially, water policy worldwide must clean up our waters by preventing pollution at source: for instance, by mandating businesses to practice sound water management and disposal; supporting a shift in high-impact sectors like agriculture to a “doing more with less” approach; and imposing harmonized monitoring and reporting requirements on companies and local governments. Across all legislation, the “river basin” approach must apply, particularly for transboundary waterways, ensuring that rivers and lakes are treated as whole entities and cross-sectoral activities are captured from source to sea.

Water is everybody’s business

It’s up to industry and business across all sectors to support policymakers in this transition: by voluntarily reducing the water footprint of their own activities; by investing in innovations that in turn help their customers to become increasingly water-smart; by scrutinizing their supply chains for planet-conscious water management; and by incorporating water use in their investment decisions.

As consumers, we also have a part to play: our consumption of “virtual water” has a significant impact on the water crisis, most notably in the food and consumer goods we buy. Consuming less (and ideally grass-fed) meat and dairy reduces both our carbon and water footprints: watering crops that are destined to feed livestock uses an estimated 41% of the freshwater withdrawals attributable to agriculture. Farmers only produce what they can sell and will “follow the money” if consumers shift to a plant-based diet. Fast fashion also comes with a significant (and growing) carbon and water impact, meaning we need to ditch our “wear once” attitude towards clothing in order to curb our “virtual” water consumption.?

These are significant changes: in this “Anthropocene age”, our way of life is contingent upon moulding our environment to suit our needs; we increasingly refuse to adapt our behaviour according to our resources and surroundings. But I am convinced we can do it:

humans are nothing if not innovative, and, as the Water Conference will show, companies like Bayer are among the first to be rising to the challenge.

So while we are implementing our own, improved approach to water, we are calling for a bigger, systemic change in attitudes and policies around water. One that that recognizes that “water is a finite resource, something to be conserved and treated with a respect, even reverence, that we haven’t displayed in a long time”. One that recalibrates the human relationship with nature in terms of responsibilities, rather than in terms of ownership and rights. Because as Mina has said before, “our natural resources provide life to us. And if we destroy them, we destroy ourselves.”

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