Messages and meaning - Water Scarcity, Livelihoods and Food Security - page 202

Addressing water and food issues means tackling wicked problems
Water and food challenges are often wicked problems that are difficult to solve
because their requirements are contradictory, changing, hard to reconcile and
not well understood. Solutions require many people to change their mind-
sets and behaviors. They require that social and biophysical approaches be
integrated using consultative processes to develop collective understanding and
responses. Consultative processes and changes in behavior need to be informed
by biophysical research at multiple linked levels and focused on the wicked
problems at hand (Chapter 3).
Poverty often limits water availability and access but water scarcity
does not necessarily cause poverty
Water scarcity was not strongly correlated with economic poverty, which
highlights the danger of assuming that improving water availability will reduce
poverty. Poverty is more strongly related to the absence of basic services such
as safe drinking water, sanitation, health care, education, finance, markets, or
farming inputs. How economic poverty hampers water access and availability
is more closely associated with the level of development at the community,
regional, national and river basin levels (Chapter 2).
The CPWF found that water management is an effective entry point for
addressing broader sets of complex and interrelated development objectives.
Among the objectives are: producing more food while maintaining the
sustainability and resilience of agroecosystems, reducing poverty, ensuring
equitable use of resources, preserving ecosystems services and adapting to
climate change. Improved water management can help achieve broader
development goals as well as being an end in itself (Chapters 1 and 2).
Water productivity is more useful as an entry point to understand
limitations to water access and availability than as a principal objective
Success in addressing water-related development challenges usually leads to
higher water productivity. The success often results in other improvements as
well, for example, land productivity, incomes and ecosystem services. Using
water productivity as an indicator of change, however, is different than using it
as a principal objective.
Water resources are often poorly understood and not used well. Even in
water-rich environments, more efficient use of water resources has huge
potential to support agricultural and aquaculture production and livelihoods
improvement of farming families and communities (Ganges). In principle,
increasing water use efficiency raises the returns to water use (Limpopo). In
practice, however, the estimates of water productivity are complex to interpret,
especially in systems other than crop production. Nevertheless, water produc-
tivity is a useful diagnostic, even where it has limited value as a standalone
objective (Chapter 2).