The
Thai Minister of Science Dr. Prodprasob Surasawadi had a very clear message
about the nature of recent monsoons. Thailand has changed from a country where
the main concern was water supply to one where flooding dominates the agenda.
“I told everyone, we need a paradigm shift” he said “from how to store water to
how to drain water”. Last year’s monsoon was deemed a 1 in a 100 year event and
flooded 63,000 km2 of land, leaving 600 people dead, the majority from
short-circuiting as they struggled with inadequate pumps. The economic damage
was vast and estimated by the World Bank as US$ 45.7 Bn. The minister doesn’t see this as a one off event
however. He reminded us that eight thousand years ago, Bangkok was 6.4 metre
below sea level: “It will come back for sure”. It isn’t just an issue of
increased rainfall though; sea levels are rising at least as fast as they did
during the Holocene and sea water is beginning to intrude into rivers and
aquifers.
But what to do? The Thai government is facing hard choices.
Bangkok is the beating heart of the Thai economy, an Asian tiger that has been
unleashed in a globalised world. That new world that we all inhabit has extraordinary
economic interconnections due to globalisation and supply chains that work on
very short timescales. Some 25% of the world’s hard disks are made in Bangkok
as are key automobile components and a sudden flood can shut down production of
computers or cars in remote parts of the planet.
According to Minister Surasawadi, the choice is to construct massive flood
defences or to move the 9 million inhabitants somewhere else; but where? “I
don’t know how to do it”. He estimated that it will cost at least US$10Bn to
change water management in Thailand and US$20Bn to construct levees, dams and
sea walls. “I don’t believe we have much time” he says. “This will happen not
only in Thailand but in other parts of the world”. And he threw scientists and
engineers a challenge: “We need an answer from you: more practical, more
focussed”.
All of this brings me to the reason why I am here in Bangkok,
adding 3.18 tons of CO2 to the planetary burden despite my economy
class flight. I’m at a meeting of the Global Environment Facility, created in
1992 and the biggest funding mechanism in human history for dealing with shared
environmental problems. The GEF has three main areas of interest: climate
change, biodiversity and international waters. The international waters focal
area covers all waters that cross national boundaries: aquifers, rivers, lakes
and the oceans and, since 1992, US$ 2 Bn it has spent in this area that has
‘leveraged’ (World Bank speak for persuaded people to cost share) a total of
around US$ 7 Bn. That sounds like a huge amount of money but bear in mind the
US$ 30 Bn bill for a temporary fix to Bangkok’s problems alone. Need I say much
more? The GEF can help trigger action,
but it won’t ‘save the planet’. And the planet doesn’t need saving anyway; it
is human society that’s high up on the risk register but we’re far too twee to
talk about it in those terms.
I have a bit of a history with the GEF as I convinced them
to hand over US$ 11.7 m to fund the first marine international waters project –
on the Black Sea – in 1992. Yesterday, a former colleague reminded me how I had
presented my case to a ‘brown bag lunch’ of senior World Bank officials in
Washington. The Black Sea is now in a much better state than it was then but,
to be fair, this is much more to do with the reduction of polluting activities
due to economic decline than my five years of efforts. Only time will tell if
we left a legacy. We did, however, learn a lot through our failures as well as
our successes and we helped develop an ‘adaptive management’ approach that is
being applied worldwide. So almost 20 years later, I was invited to chair an
international panel of practitioners with the remit of looking how we can
improve the science behind international waters projects of every kind. Sheila Heymans from SAMS also worked alongside the group to help bring together the
information from projects all over the world through a GEF project financed
through the UN University (who coordinated the overall study). The report Science-Policy Bridges Over Troubled Waters
that I co-authored with Adeel Zafar, Head of the UNU Institute for Water,
Environment and Health, was published last week and shows how systems thinking
can be used to make the best use of science in future GEF International Waters interventions.
My attendance at the conference was to explain the findings and join in with
the discussions on future application of science in the GEF strategy. The GEF
is operating in almost every developing-country shared waterbody on the planet
and it has the potential to exert enormous influence on the way these systems
are managed.
One source of personal amusement was the press conference
following the launch of our report. Earlier press releases had been picked up
by a few agencies including Reuters and I had done a Skype interview with the
Financial Times. We had foregone our coffee break and were set up for a Q & A
session with local correspondents. In the event, nobody showed up. The entire
press pack had gone off in pursuit of the Science Minister. What do you expect
when you have talked about uprooting 9 million people? At least it was an
environmental news story. I remember doing a long piece on fishing for the BBC
a few years ago. They dispatched a crew to do a seven minute news slot from a
fish market. Just as it was about to be aired, Paul McCartney announced his
engagement to Heather Mills and the editor cut seven minutes to one so I had
a 15 second sound byte. “Overfishing is a serious problem that damages our
economy” CUT!
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