A New Paradigm for Water Management
Valerie Nelson Monday, October 4, 2010 at 02:49AM 
Welcome to the Water Alliance.
There is only so much fresh water in the world and too often we waste it, pollute it, divert it, hide it, and mismanage it.
Water is fundamental to life. It is a resource that is commonly shared. While some benefit from its use, all share in the costs of its abuse. This makes water a classic case of the Tragedy of the Commons.
Our failure is in our paradigm where our focus is on individual pieces of the Water Commons in silos of expertise. Our peril is the unraveling of the whole. Restoring the Water Commons relies instead on design principles found in nature: in particular resilient systems, loops and reuse, and adaption to local conditions. Already many high-performance treatment technologies, such as membranes, mimic biological designs that scientists are discovering in nature. As we’ve demonstrated in the energy sector, there are alternative approaches that can meet our needs and restore natural resource patterns and functions across a landscape. These “smart, clean, and green” approaches create a wealth of services and benefits at the local level that help restore ecological and societal well-being.
A new paradigm for 21st Century water management is emerging just in time. This new paradigm builds upon our understanding of the linkages between things, that rebuilds feedback loops between cause and effect, and that reshapes our relationship to water, the source of life on earth.
Reader Comments (2)
The New York Times wrote a good piece about measuring and allocating our water "Footprint". The last quote by the World resources Institute brings this issue home. "Whatever management scheme you devise, must have equity built into it, so people have their human right to water."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/business/energy-environment/29iht-RBOGFOOT.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&src=busln
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