{"id":1721,"date":"2012-09-30T17:05:27","date_gmt":"2012-10-01T00:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.obwb.ca\/blog\/?p=1721"},"modified":"2014-08-22T14:05:43","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T21:05:43","slug":"the-value-of-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/obwb.ca\/blog\/2012\/09\/the-value-of-water\/","title":{"rendered":"The Value of Water"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things<\/em>.\u201d \u2013 Benjamin Franklin<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Expensive On Other Planets: \u00a0<\/strong>In Salt Lake City, I once met an exobiologist<\/a>\u00a0who studied the bacteria that live under the Antarctic ice-sheet. Camping in a tent, she spent her days diving into holes in frozen lakes to collect samples. She told me it was a \u201cMars model,\u201d considered one of the few places on earth that can approximate extraterrestrial conditions.<\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s latest mission<\/a> just spent $2.5 billion dollars to actually look for water on Mars. Its simple presence is a signal that life can exist, whatever planet you are on. Whether or not one feels this is money well spent, it shows the lengths we’ll go and the money we’ll spend on water.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Priceless On Earth<\/strong>:\u00a0 Here on earth, there is intense and growing (but controversial) interest in defining the value of water and the monetary value of ecosystems <\/a>in general. There\u00a0are a wide range of opinions about what \u201cvalues and valuation\u201d imply, and whether a dollar value can be calculated for water at all.<\/p>\n

I have struggled with these competing ideas.\u00a0 On one hand, we have social and moral values, spiritual and environmental values. We value our families and living in a valley free from war and pollution. We appreciate the intrinsic value of water like we respect the intrinsic value of human life.\u00a0 It is inextricably linked to all we hold dear.<\/p>\n

The indigenous\u00a0Okanagan people<\/a>, who have lived here for time beyond measure, are very explicit: water is alive and sacred, and essential to all other lives.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pipelines carrying water from the Snowy Mountains in NSW, Australia.<\/p><\/div>\n

Natural Resources or Nature<\/strong>? \u00a0On the other hand, there are the actual monetary values that are attached to water treatment, water delivery, and the things we can do with it. \u00a0Someone asked me this summer, “Should farmers be able to sell water from agricultural wells to keep the farm afloat?”<\/p>\n

Hard questions.<\/p>\n

Calling water a \u201cnatural resource\u201d immediately frames it as something for human use. A friend of mine was co-writing a book, and everywhere her co-author had written \u201cwater resource,\u201d she crossed it out and wrote \u201cwater.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ecosystem valuation puts a dollar figure on the services provided by riparian trees and shrubs, mature forests, wetlands, and other elements of nature<\/a>.\u00a0These are essential services, like\u00a0stabilizing stream banks and hillsides, cleaning water pollution, creating habitat for animals, generating oxygen and moderating the temperature and weather.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But it\u2019s difficult to accurately place value on ecosystems, considering what is left in their absence.\u00a0 Think of a Mars-scape: no living soil, no plants, no animals or birds, just water frozen in crevices. Who wants to live there?\u00a0 I\u2019d rather go\u00a0swimming in\u00a0Antarctica.<\/p>\n

So far, we\u00a0have been able to capitalize on redundancy (always more fish in the sea, more\u00a0trees in the forest), but there are more and more cases where we’ve taken ecosystem services too much for granted – especially as the population grows<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nature is a Tough Mother<\/strong>: And while we’re on the subject of money, there can be huge costs associated with water where we don’t want it: floods, landslides, and sewer back-ups. For most of our development history, building cities, roads, and bridges, we’ve assumed that the water will stay in one channel<\/a>, with a predictable range of flow rates \u2013 more or less forever.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Wreckage of the Testalinden dam failure<\/p><\/div>\n

Should we calculate a negative\u00a0value for water when it breaches the levies and carves a new path through Metro Vancouver or New Orleans?<\/p>\n

Floods can also be healthy for the landscape. Farmers for millennia relied on the annual flooding of the Nile, but it’s hard to remember that when water is backing up into your\u00a0 basement.<\/a><\/p>\n

Adding Value to the Invaluable<\/strong>: The work of the Okanagan Basin Water Board is to add value to the management of the invaluable.\u00a0Resolving this contradiction is like the word problems you once loved to hate in algebra.<\/p>\n

(a)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Water itself is priceless;
\n(b)\u00a0\u00a0 Ecosystems are priceless in theory, but are bought and sold anyway;
\n(c)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Water is costly to treat and deliver, but people forget because of (a);
\n(d)\u00a0\u00a0 Excess water \u2013 in our basements or spilling over roads \u2013 also has huge costs;
\n(e)\u00a0\u00a0 We can add value if we reduce (c) and (d), often by relying on (b);
\n(f)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Deciding the best approach for (e) means we sometimes have to artificially value (b);
\n(g)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Whatever we do, we need good information and sometimes have to go after more.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>What Price Ignorance?\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>At a recent meeting, someone asked, \u201cBut what would it cost if we didn\u2019t do anything?\u201d He was referring to our work collecting water data and information, and our water science studies.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a reasonable question, but tricky to answer. What do you compare when weighing potential future paths taken in ignorance?<\/p>\n

Having complete knowledge of stream flows, groundwater, future climate change and the value of healthy ecosystems, would be ideal but expensive. Nonetheless, making a mistake about where to site a wastewater treatment plant (often in flood plains, but nasty when they flood), or\u00a0whether to approve a golf course on groundwater (will the aquifer meet the demand?), can also be pricey for someone down the line.<\/p>\n

We always try to go for the biggest bang for the buck: What information is most valuable? Where are the greatest potential costs and risks? How can we\u00a0bring together\u00a0people with joint interests to do joint projects?\u00a0\u00a0What gaps can we bridge, across the valley?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Einstein said, \u201cEverything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In practice, we measure what we can, and we count what we can – sometimes in litres, and sometimes in dollars. In the end, we send the new knowledge back out to the purveyors, the planners, and the policy makers so that they can make choices\u00a0that protect the things we value most.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.\u201d \u2013 Benjamin Franklin Expensive On Other Planets: \u00a0In Salt Lake City, I once met … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3,56,36],"tags":[69,70,49,71,84],"class_list":["post-1721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-updates","category-water-security","category-watershed-management-2","tag-ecosystem-services","tag-ecosystem-valuation","tag-okanagan-water","tag-values","tag-water-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/obwb.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1721"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/obwb.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/obwb.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/obwb.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/obwb.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1721"}],"version-history":[{"count":57,"href":"https:\/\/obwb.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2108,"href":"https:\/\/obwb.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1721\/revisions\/2108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/obwb.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/obwb.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/obwb.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}