Alumni interview: Changes needed for water, GWP chair says
The global water agenda is facing an inflection point, and changes are needed, not only to increase access to water in the many areas that still go without, but also to ensure that the water supply in areas with services is protected, said IHE Delft alumnus Pablo Bereciartua, who was appointed Chair of the Global Water Partnership (GWP) in July.
Climate-change induced drought and extreme weather events pose tough challenges to areas where the water supply is precarious, making life even harder for the most vulnerable populations. But drought also causes water scarcity in the United States, Europe and other areas where a steady piped supply of clean water is taken for granted. The global situation means that new approaches to water is needed, Bereciartua said in an interview.
“We are living in a time where collective intelligence is a way of solving the complex issues in front of us, so one of the main challenges is to empower network, and to develop and foster ways for network members to increase their capacity of delivering and impacting in their own local conditions and contexts,” he said.
GWP, a global action network with more than 3,000 water resources management organizations in 179 countries and 13 Regional Water Partnerships, is well-placed to foster connections that enable such collective intelligence to emerge, he said.
“Complex systems need complex approaches. Every citizen should have the possibility to really learn and understand the real value of things. We are all clever: if we have the proper information and freedom of decision-making we will end up fostering the better solutions,” he said.
In addition to an IHE Delft MSc degree, Bereciartua holds degrees from University of California, Berkley, Universidad de San Andres and Universidad Nacional de La Plata, and he was a Yale University World Fellow in 2015. Still, he said, his IHE Delft education stands out.
“I wouldn’t be here if I was not an alumni from IHE Delft. I had the chance of meeting people from many different countries and at the same time get a very high-level education,” he said, noting that the thesis he wrote ahead of his 1996 graduation used artificial intelligence, which was very new at the time.
Like many others in the IHE Delft network of more than 23,000 alumni, he remains in touch with his fellow MSc students.
Bereciartua encouraged today’s students to keep their minds wide open.
“Don’t be afraid of working in issues that in the beginning seem maybe not close to water, because at the end of the day you can connect everything,” he said. “We have developed incredibly complex and, in many case, useful infrastructures and systems, and now we need a new way of integrating views to be able to manage those systems.
We need not only water experts but we also need more and more water-trained people with capacity and knowledge in other fields like finance, food security, energy transition and infrastructure resilience.
This means that water agenda cannot remain an agenda considered separate from other areas, he argued: “One of the main goals for me as a chairman of GWP will be speaking to the non-water community. We need the water agenda to become part of the energy transition, the net-zero transition. It should be part of food production and food security,” he said. “We need not only water experts but we also need more and more water-trained people with capacity and knowledge in other fields like finance, food security, energy transition and infrastructure resilience.”
The private sector must be an integral part of efforts to protect and expand access to water, Bereciartua said. For example, climate change means that areas that in the past have been strong coffee producers won’t be as suitable for the crop in the future and will need new uses.
“How are you going be producing coffee in a sustainable fashion in the next decades?” he asked, noting that a business approach is integral to answering such questions. “We need to reach out to the private sector, we need to be able to exchange information, run projects together and to be useful to the private sector institutions.”
Finance, including from private sources, is needed for water progress, but so is sound water governance, which has to “reach accountability for efficiency so that resources are actually delivered and they reach the goals that they were supposed to reach,” he said, adding that open and transparent approaches that include different management and business models are needed.
Radical changes in the water pricing structure can result in more finance being available, said Bereciartua, who served as Secretary of Infrastructure and Water of Argentina from 2017 to 2019 and President of Buenos Aires’ Water Planning Agency from 2015 to 2019. In 2017, water tariffs for the richer part of society were raised more than 2000%, something that made it possible to later raise funds to develop infrastructure in poor areas.
“In many countries what you see is that you are subsidising these resources to the richer part of the society, and at the same time, you do not have resources to bring these necessities for the poorer part of the society,” he said, adding that changing the pricing structure brings incentives – it helps save water, “and at the same time it will help you allocate resources where they are really needed. You see many unfair situations across the table in many societies.”