☔️ Water series: Future extreme dynamics of water use: Difference between revisions

==Water Markets==

So, what are the solutions experimented to answer water stress? Water market is the answer of most liberal nations, and to that end, Australia is an interesting case study. Although its water stress is considered low (3.14%), a vast part of aquifers in Australia are slightly saline water, thus unusable for most human activities. The South of the country, were climate is the driest, experiences regular droughts despite the presence of the Murray-Darling Basin. That is why Australia opened the way to localised water markets since 1983, when South Australia introduced a permanent water trading scheme.<ref name=wikisource>source: Wikipedia pages:

source: https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/082810-000-A/main-basse-sur-l-eau/</ref>

For cattle farmers, this is not a transition, just a violent crash happening while almond orchards invades Australia (7th global producer in 2017 (FAOSTAT)) following the path of the Central Valley in California (1st global producer). Here too, the Nasdaq, California’s stock market, opened up to a water market that relies on an algorithm developed to predict water price. Its designer is Clay Landry, who participated to the launch of carbon trading markets a few years before. He is convinced that this type of mechanisms would have a positive effect on water stress worldwide, and he is supported by environmentalists and NGOs. They are interested to buy water rights as a way to “save” water for ecosystems, so that this resource stays away from humans activities. This kind of transactions is said to represent a quarter of the market’s exchanges in California. This seems like a hopeless action, but environmentalists also managed to pass the SIGMA law in 2014, that regulates groundwater use, which was not part of water trading. Thus, some localised markets are created to allow neighbours farmers to trade the groundwater that the law allocated to them. Of course, non-farmers with water rights from their lands (called “riparian” water rights) are gradually joining those market to speculate.<ref name="lordsofwater" />

==Tap water and Bottled water==

On the municipality level, when the public sector fails to answer the public demand for water, governments often take the slippery slope of water privatisation. 30 years ago the British water sector was privatised to Margaret Tatcher’s initiative. Massive water cuts followed, when people were not able to pay their bill. The situation was so catastrophic in the United Kingdom, that 10 years later this sort of cuts were forbidden by the law. Despite the regulation, London water company Thames Water was acquired by an Australian fund in 2006 and kept being criticised for its leakage issues and poor maintenance, year after year, while being notorious for “making” millionaires. After numerous trials, a fine of 20.3M £ was imposed to the company in 2017<ref>source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/22/thames-water-hit-with-record-fine-for-huge-sewage-leaks</ref> for the leakage of 1.4B litre of untreated sewage in nature.<ref name="lordsofwater" />

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4 companies are sharing this growing market: Swiss Nestlé, French Danone, and US Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Not only are plastic bottles and their transport a waste of energy and resource, but the water extraction management of these companies sometimes happen to be detrimental to local communities. Nestlé has often been targeted by citizens groups across North America for its bottling activities in Canada and the US, until the company announced that it would leave this market early in 2021.<ref name="courrier" /> Nevertheless, activist Franklin Frederick argues that this strategy is the same Nestlé used in Brazil to protect its reputation in Switzerland. Indeed, Nestlé must ensure the support of the Swiss Agency of Development and Cooperation (SDC) when it comes to business in Southern countries. F. Frederick criticises the collusion between the public and private sector in his home country: 23% of the SDC public aids, financed by Swiss citizens, are given to projects directed by multinationals like Nestlé. For instance, 5.6M of Swiss Francs will be allocated to the Water Stewardship 2030 project. The project involves associations with friendly names like “Water Resources Group 2030”, gathering 3 of the bottled water giants, including Nestlé. As long as the brand’s activities in foreign countries doesn’t stains the prestige of Swiss institutions, the multinational stands its ground. Since 15 years, Brazilian citizens movements were fighting against Nestlé’s water bottling plants. In 2018, the company was displayed in the Swiss Pavillon of the World Water Forum in Brasilia, alongside Swiss NGOs and the SDC. 20 Brazilian NGOs, trade-unions and social movements sent a public letter about this public-private collusion to the Ambassador Manuel Sager, director of the SDC, asking for public-public partnership that would help countries to develop their own public water companies — as in Switzerland. As soon as the SDC was publicly involved, Nestlé announced the selling of its plants to a Brazilian company that keeps bottling water… Today, the “incestuous” relationship between Nestlé and the SDC is becoming a scandal in Switzerland, and the coalition between Canadian and Swiss NGOs might have motivate Nestlé’s sell of its bottled water brands in North America.<ref>People Dispatch web article by Franklin Frederick, 2020, and its sources from Public Eye Swiss NGO.