Many parts of the world, not just Sri Lanka, and not just Jaffna, are facing severe water crises. Historically, water problems are tackled by engineers and other domain experts.
This works well in the short term, but the non-involvement of the beneficiaries of the water works, the people themselves, in the conceptualisation and execution of otherwise well-intentioned and well-designed solutions often leads to unintended, adverse consequences. This has been my experience studying water management problems in Australia, USA, China and Europe. Returning to Sri Lanka to attend the JUICE Conference in Jaffna and listening to a wide array of opinions on the subject from the people of Jaffna prompts me to reflect broadly on the unique water problems Jaffna faces and proposed solution approaches. The comments I make apply, with appropriate adaptation, to other parts of Sri Lanka as well.
Not just a drinking water crisis
It is often tempting to think of any water crisis as a ‘drinking water’ crisis. Normally, this should be the least of our worries; an average person consumes just one cubic metre of water in a year. Compared to this, some 10 cubic metres of water per person per year is needed for cleaning, bathing, sanitation and other household uses. A further 100m3 of water per person per year is also needed by industry of all kinds (e.g., factories, power plants, tourist hotels). The largest amount of water is needed for agriculture – to produce food – 1,000m3 per person per year: this is also the case in Jaffna. It has become a crisis in Jaffna only because the same water source (groundwater) is used for drinking, agriculture and (perversely) sewage disposal. The intensification of agriculture and urbanisation in recent times has contaminated the groundwater, leading people to worry about health problems from drinking water. If Jaffna abandons or cuts back on agriculture and imports all the food it needs (say, from the Vanni), then there will be no drinking water crisis.
It's about the economy
But Jaffna cannot abandon agriculture (at least not just yet), which has been the mainstay of the economy for a long time, making water the lifeblood of the economy. It appears that the decimation of all other industries during the war, and the introduction of deep tube wells and the availability of electricity after the war have led to an intensification of agriculture, as this is the option open to people. It has quickly led to (1) saltwater intrusion due to groundwater over-exploitation, and (2) contamination by fertilizers and pesticides. Unless and until less-water consuming industries are established and water use efficient crops and irrigation methods (e.g., drip irrigation) are introduced, this situation will continue. This is really an economic crisis, or at least a ‘water for economy’ crisis.
A governance crisis
It is tempting to think that the water crisis is a resource versus demand management issue. Hydrology is central to assessing the resource, yet the solution to the problem is not in hydrologic science. To meet demand, it is not enough to have the resource, it also requires infrastructure (to store, transport, distribute, and then dispose it after use). It is a technological problem but technology alone (e.g., infrastructure) cannot fix it. It is a financial problem, but money alone cannot solve it. It is a management problem, but it goes beyond simple management solutions. The water problem is social problem, a political problem, and a cultural problem. There are decisions to be made about the nature of the water problem (drinking versus sanitation versus food), who pays (and how much), who gains and who loses (rich versus poor, upstream versus downstream, urban versus rural), short-term gains versus long-term consequences. Many a well-conceived project has ended up in failure because corruption sets in, vested interests gain control, and investments go to places with the most power and clout (e.g., cities and industries) and not to places where poor people live (e.g., villages). Water crisis is really a governance crisis.
Tyranny of small decisions
There is a tendency to address problems one at a time, piecemeal fashion. However, the kind of water problems we face in Jaffna are so multi-faceted, complex and intertwined that when you solve one problem, it triggers new problems arising from issues left out in the solution. These are the unintended consequences of solving problems piecemeal: environmental scientists call this the ‘tyranny of small decisions’. Let’s consider the case of diverting the ‘extra’ water from the Iranaimadu Tank in Kilinochchi to provide drinking water to Jaffna city and its environs. Increasing water supply to Jaffna can lead people to modify their behaviour, as new industries and people move in, leading to increased water demand, which can quickly offset the initial benefits of increased supply. Over-reliance on such additional supplies can also increase vulnerability, and in this way increase the damage caused by limited water supplies in the first place. Increased appetite for water and increased vulnerability will put pressure on the operators of Iranaimadu to release more water to Jaffna, leading to reductions of irrigation water to farmers in the Vanni, further heightening the emerging conflict between the peninsula and the Vanni.
Evidence-based solutions
Water is crucial to life and livelihoods. The lack of water hits everyone hard in a personal way. There is a tendency therefore to react in a personal and emotional way. We saw this firsthand during the Chunnakam Oil Spill episode when emotions ran high, to the point that people (including so-called experts) could not even agree on the facts. Now the problem has simply receded from memory and lessons were not learned from the experience. This is typical. Solutions that are conceived through narrow fields of vision or parochial interests tend to miss major obstacles, or also simpler solutions, leading to long-term adverse consequences. It is far better to be dispassionate, open-minded, thinking outside the box, and relying on evidence-based scientific principles, to explore a range of competing solution options, and choose ones that can deliver the most good to most people.
No silver bullet
The water problems in Jaffna are complex and multifaceted. The city of Jaffna is facing both a drinking water crisis and a ‘water for sanitation’ crisis. The agricultural regions of the peninsula are facing both a depletion of the freshwater resource due to saltwater intrusion and contamination by excessive pesticides and fertilizer application. Post-war economic regrowth is severely limited by these water problems. No alternatives are provided to the people of the region to move away from agriculture and go after other economic opportunities. Any move towards non-agricultural industries is also limited by the availability of drinking water and sanitation in urban centres. As additional water supply is provided to Jaffna and new people move in, there is a need for water for sewage disposal. Solutions to these problems need to be also multifaceted, protracted and out-of-the box, with a combination of hard path (physical infrastructure) and soft path (pricing, economic restructuring, water conservation) solutions. For example, the shifting of agriculture from Jaffna to the Vanni will alleviate the water contamination problems in Jaffna, and will allow for new kinds of less water intensive industries to develop. It is wishful thinking to look for one silver bullet that will address all problems all at once.
One cannot manage what one cannot measure
Jaffna is a small place, and even within this small place supply and demand are highly variable. Water levels and water quality vary from household to household because of the complexity of the karstic (limestone) aquifer we have in Jaffna. There is the presence of the lagoons which cut across the peninsula, and then the islands off the peninsula. Agriculture is rain-fed (for rice) in the areas around the lagoons with marine clays, and is irrigated (vegetables, cash crops) in areas dominated by groundwater lenses and with good soils (e.g., red earth). Centralised solutions will not work here, and decentralised solutions however require detailed mapping of both the resource and the demand or use. This detailed information should be the basis on which regulations on responsible water use (including pricing) should be implemented. To date, I have only seen broad generalisations, mostly in the context of centralised solutions. Assessments need to be made on a fine scale against local human needs, and this needs to be addressed urgently.
Too serious to be left to experts
The danger of leaving the solution in the hands of experts (e.g., engineers) is that they might, as they often do, treat the problem as a technological issue, and ignore the broader economic and socio-cultural issues. The result is that the solutions might look attractive and may even work well in the short term, but they invariably result in unintended negative consequences in the long term. Instead of, or in the process of, solving one problem, they can create new problems due to ignorance or neglect of broader economic, cultural and social perspectives. Discussion about water security issues should therefore be broadened to include community leaders from all walks of life, coming together to develop a vision for the future of Jaffna. No discussion of water security can be complete without a preceding discussion of the socioeconomic aspirations of the community. The concern must be about the limits that water availability imposes on the economic life of Jaffna, and how to cope with expected change in lifestyles, industrialisation, and demographic changes.
Organisation at all levels
In order to tackle the many water problems faced in Jaffna, the community should be involved and better organised, at many levels. The community should come together from the grassroots, in each village and region to get their voices heard. A permanent think tank of wise people should be formed to canvas community aspirations and translate these into vision statements for the future, which can form the basis of major plans to guide the actions of decision makers. High schools and the Jaffna University should be the focal point of research and knowledge gathering of all kinds to underpin potential solutions. There also needs to be regulations about who uses the water, who pays for it and how much, and importantly, regulations about land use and waste management. This is the responsibility of the provincial government.
In conclusion, I advocate longer-term, broader, more holistic approaches to evaluate water security in the Northern Province as a whole, supported by evidence-based participatory planning (i.e., bottom-up), and adaptive management with periodic review. However, the problems are urgent, so I do not want these to stand in the way of solutions being considered; only that they be considered as part of a mix of solutions, and that we do not miss the big picture when focusing on narrow technological solutions.
(Murugesu Sivapalan is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science at University of Illinois, USA. He is a leading international hydrologist and winner of several prestigious awards in Australia, USA and Europe. These include the Robert Horton Medal of the American Geophysical Union, Alfred Wegener Medal of the European Geosciences Union, and the International Hydrology Prize of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, and winner of the Australian Centenary Medal. This year he is the recipient of the prestigious Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (Creativity Prize), which he will receive at the United Nations headquarters in New York on October 29.)
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