Claudia Sadoff, director general of the International Water Management Institute, argues that our efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change and address food security could be counterproductive if we don’t pay more attention to water and its use. Few details were revealed about Amazon chief Jeff Bezos’ new US$10bn Bezos Earth Fund to tackle climate change, but the announcement last month was clear about one thing: science-backed, evidence-based solutions are critical in this fight.

There are already many “known ways” to address the climate emergency, but what these solutions often miss at their core is the vital importance of water. Most of us worldwide will experience climate change through the impact of unpredictable rainfall, retreating glaciers and melting snowpacks. And the consequences of changing water use and availability will affect the most fundamental building blocks of life: the ability to grow food and quench thirst. Indeed water conservation and management are central elements of the Food Sustainability Index, developed by The Economist Intelligence Unit with the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition Foundation. 

Barking up the wrong tree?

Take trees as one example. An increasingly popular approach to addressing climate change—previously championed by Mr Bezos along with other tech CEOs, the World Economic Forum and several governments—is mass tree planting. The aim is to help increase carbon storage, build resilience to flooding and protect biodiversity. Planting the right trees in the right places can both mitigate climate change and help adaptation to its existing effects. Providing protective cover and shade for food and cash crops can create resistance to rising temperatures, for instance.

But as with many climate interventions, there exists a trade-off that must be managed carefully—in this case with water security.

Many kinds of trees are water-intensive. Planting an additional trillion could place even greater pressure on already-vulnerable communities by limiting their ability to irrigate fields and manage water supplies. To avoid the unintended consequences of land restoration and reforestation (which can reduce water availability and impact ecosystems and agriculture) it is vital that tree planting initiatives also incorporate the latest scientific research on water management. Well-designed land restoration schemes would plant trees both according to the water available to sustain them and the local environmental needs—including those that relate to local agriculture—to ensure restored or new woodlands are doing more help than harm. But planting trees is not the only nature-based solution that can help us deal with the climate emergency. Wetlands, which are home to some of the world’s most productive and diverse ecosystems, offer as much potential for climate action as forests but they are disappearing up to three times faster.

Research suggests that restoring and rehabilitating wetlands could enable ponds and basins to absorb up to 40% of water during flooding. The greatest impacts can then be diverted away from communities and farmland to protect food security. Under current projections, water-related disasters are likely to become more frequent and more intense. For countries like Sri Lanka, which suffered 25 mega-floods between 2000 and 2013, managing water-related risks is critical to save lives and livelihoods and is the first step towards climate-change resilience. Encouragingly, there is also the opportunity to use water alongside other natural resources in a mutually sustainable way.

Innovations like solar-powered irrigation pumps, for example, can help farmers to conserve water while also reducing their carbon footprint. In Bangladesh, a quarter of annual diesel use is linked to agriculture, which includes traditional pumps for collecting groundwater to use on crop fields.

By replacing these with solar-powered pumps, farmers can make more efficient use of groundwater while also reducing harmful emissions. In some systems, the pumps can also be used to harvest solar energy which can then be sold back to the grid, further bolstering farmers’ incomes and expanding the availability of renewable energy.

There are myriad ways to cope with and limit climate change by harnessing natural resources; planting more trees is just one of them. The best solutions will be those that are adapted to fit in with existing ecosystems rather than disrupting them: the protection of resources on which communities already depend must be the top priority. For maximum impact on the climate emergency this means that water—our most precious natural resource—must flow through every intervention.

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