Water and Water Pollution - Environmental Science - page 242

United States by buying up American water compa-
nies and entering into agreements with most cities to
manage their water supplies.
Some argue that private companies have the
money and expertise to manage these resources better
and more efficiently than government bureaucracies.
Experience with this public-private partnership ap-
proach has yielded mixed results. Some water man-
agement companies have improved efficiency, done a
good job, and in a few cases lowered rates.
In the late 1980s, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
placed England's water management in private hands.
The result: financial mismanagement, skyrocketing
water rates, deteriorating water quality, and company
executives who gave themselves generous financial
compensation packages. In the late 1990s, Prime Minis-
ter Tony Blair brought the system under control by im-
posing much stricter government oversight. The mes-
sage: Governments hiring private companies to manage
water resources must set standards and maintain strict
oversight of such contracts.
Some government officials want to go even fur-
ther and sell public water resources to private compa-
nies. Many people oppose full privatization of water
resources because they believe that water is a public
resource too important to be left solely in private
hands. Also, once a city's water systems have been
taken over by a foreign-based corporation, efforts to
return the systems to public control can lead to severe
economic penalties under the rules of the World Trade
Organization (WTO).
In the Bolivian town of Cochabamba, 60% of the
water was being lost through leaky pipes. With no
money to fix the pipes, the Bolivian government sold
the town's water system to a subsidiary of Bechtel
Corporation. Within 6 months, the company doubled
water rates and began seizing and selling the houses of
people who did not pay their water bills. A general
strike ensued, and violent street clashes between pro-
testers and government troops led to 10,000 injured
people and 7 deaths. The Bolivian government ended
up tearing up the contract. Today's the town's govern-
ment-private cooperative water management system
is in shambles and most of the leaks persist.
Some analysts point to two other potential prob-
lems in a fully privatized water system. First, because
private companies make money by delivering water,
they have an incentive to sell as much water as they
can rather than to conserve it. Second, because of lack
of money to pay water bills, the poor will continue to
be left out. There are no easy answers for managing
the water that everyone needs.

Increasing Freshwater Supplies
We can increase water supplies by building
dams, bringing in water from somewhere else,
withdrawing groundwater, converting salt water
to fresh water, wasting less water, and importing
food.
There are several ways to increase the supply of fresh
water in a particular area. We can build dams and
reservoirs to store runoff for release as needed. We can
bring in surface water from another area. We can also
withdraw groundwater and convert salt water to fresh
water (desalination).
Other strategies are to reduce water waste and im-
port food to reduce water use in growing crops and
raising livestock.
In developed countries, people tend to live where the
climate is favorable and bring in water from another
watershed. In developing countries, most people (espe-
cially the rural poor) must settle where the water is
and try to capture and use the precipitation they need.

Trade-Offs: Advantages and Disadvantages
of Large Dams and Reservoirs
Large dams and reservoirs can produce cheap
electricity, reduce downstream flooding, and
provide year-round water for irrigating cropland,
but they also displace people and disrupt aquatic
systems.
Large dams and reservoirs have both benefits and
drawbacks (Figure 11-8). Their main purpose is to cap-
ture and store runoff and release it as needed to con-
trol floods, generate electricity, and supply water for
irrigation and for towns and cities. Reservoirs also
provide recreational activities such as swimming, fish-
ing, and boating.
The more than 45,000 large dams built on the
world's 227 largest rivers have increased the annual
reliable runoff available for human use by nearly one-
third. At the same time, a series of dams on a river, es-
pecially in arid areas, can reduce downstream flow to a
trickle and prevent it from reaching the sea as a part of
the hydrologic cycle. According to the World Commis-
sion on Water in the 21st Century, half of the world's
major rivers go dry part of the year because of flow re-
duction by dams, especially during drought years.
This engineering approach to river management
has displaced 40-80 million people from their homes
and flooded an area of mostly productive land roughly
equal to the area of California. In addition, this ap-
proach often impairs some of the important ecological
services rivers provide (Figure 11-9). In 2003, the
World Resources Institute estimated that dams and
reservoirs have strongly or moderately fragmented
and disturbed 60% of the world's major river basins.

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