Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

In December, Portland, Ore.-based, Iberdrola Renewables began generating electricity at its 30-MW facility in Alamosa County. The 89-hectare (220-acre) site used to be farmland, but now it holds roughly 110,000 silicon panels.

By Brett Walton
Circle of Blue

SAN LUIS VALLEY, Colorado — Just as in every address that he has made to a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama this week confirmed his commitment to the economic and environmental benefits of wind and solar energy, adding that opening more federal land to clean energy development is in the national interest.

“I’m directing my administration to allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power 3 million homes,” the president declared in the State of the Union address on Tuesday evening.

But the government’s plan to turn large expanses of the American West into clean energy production zones is confronting considerable challenges, not the least of which is growing public resistance to big wind and solar projects that are popping up on wild lands close to rural communities. The public restiveness — driven by concerns about the effects of utility-scale installations on the environment and on small-town community values — is altering the government’s planning process and putting in doubt just how big the clean energy footprint will be on public lands.

In few places are the outlines of the opposition more clearly defined than here in the San Luis Valley, a high-altitude farming and ranching region that is the size of Connecticut. In this sunny section of Colorado, the Obama administration has designated four parcels — totaling more than 6,500 hectares (16,000 acres) and administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — as “solar energy zones.”

“We are not against solar,” rancher Julie Sullivan told Circle of Blue. Last year, Sullivan helped defeat a large project on private land near her Saguache County home. “But we didn’t want a bad solar project, because then the bar would be lower. That would open the door to more bad projects.”

Competitive Edge and Citizen Acceptance
Indeed, as Jesse Morris, a solar analyst at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a renewable energy research and consulting group, explained in an interview with Circle of Blue, the wind and solar business is being influenced by a host of new trends in energy markets and citizen acceptance.

For instance, innovations in drilling technology and production have boosted domestic supplies of natural gas, which produces half the carbon emissions of coal and is selling at such low prices that utilities are planning new gas-fired electrical power stations. According to Morris, with such competitive pricing for electricity produced from natural gas, the economics of clean energy production could shift from big centralized solar installations to individual rooftop solar and smaller distributed systems.

In other words, big solar plants could quickly become obsolete.

“Solar is great, and we need as much of it as we can get to meet current and future energy needs,” Morris said. “The federal focus is on larger facilities. But — looking longer term — those facilities have real issues.”

In the meantime, the four solar energy zones here in the valley are joined by 13 other solar zones in five additional Western states that, three years ago, the federal government designated as prime areas to generate power from the sun. The Interior Department and a number of sister agencies are nearing the end of an environmental review, which began in 2009 and will reach another milestone on Friday, when the public comment period for the supplement to the 11,000-page draft assessment closes.

The final version will be released this summer. It will amend the BLM’s resource management plans to allow the agency to concentrate solar development in the most suitable areas.

Even through a casual reading of the citizen observations made during the first public comment period in early 2011, it becomes clear that the concerns expressed about big solar plants in the San Luis Valley are shared around much of the West. The Department of the Interior heard complaints about the negative effects of solar development on wildlife, on plants and water resources, on the fragmentation of animal migration corridors, on the cultural resources of Indian tribes, and on marred scenic views.

As a result, the department narrowed the number of solar zones to 17 from 24 and tightened the boundaries of others. The total area now prioritized for solar development on BLM-managed lands has been cut by more than half — from 273,972 hectares (677,000 acres) to 115,335 hectares (285,000 acres).

Though the Interior Department kept all four zones that had been proposed for the San Luis Valley, their total acreage was reduced by a fifth.

Sense and Sensitivity
Since 2010, the BLM has approved more than 5,600 megawatts of solar generating capacity, all in the deserts of Arizona, California, and Nevada.

Right now, a company can apply for a solar permit for any BLM land, Joe Vieira told Circle of Blue. He works on renewable energy projects from the agency’s San Luis Valley office in Monte Vista.

On conducting the latest environmental review, Vieira said, “the BLM is trying to be more strategic with where solar could be developed — finding those places with the least conflict over endangered species, views, and cultural and environmental resources.”

Two of the valley’s four zones have applications pending, Vieira said, and new transmission line capacity would be needed for all four solar zones. Because of suggestions made during the public comment period, the boundaries of three of these zones were modified and reduced. If all four zones were fully developed, the draft assessment estimates that they could support 1,450 MW using photovoltaic (PV) panels, or 2,612 MW using solar troughs.

Ceal Smith, of the San Luis Valley Renewable Communities Alliance, which supports small-scale solar development, calls the BLM plan “a giveaway to industry.” This is partly because, unlike gas and mineral leases, federal laws for wind and solar confer no financial benefits to the host community. To correct this, several U.S. senators from Western states have co-sponsored a bill that would create royalty payments for the two renewable sources based on the amount of electricity generated.

“If energy is being produced, the area needs to benefit,” said Christine Canaly, director of the San Luis Valley Ecosystem Council, a public lands advocacy group. “That mechanism is not in place for the BLM zones.”

Instead of developing thousand-acre tracts of public land, Smith suggested putting solar panels on degraded private land or in the empty corners of fields that are irrigated by the legions of center-pivot systems in the valley. That course of action would minimize land disturbance and help transition marginal fields away from excessive groundwater use that is draining one of the valley’s aquifers and affecting the holders of senior surface rights.

Portland, Oregon-based Iberdrola Renewables, for instance, built a 30-MW photovoltaic array last year on 90 hectares (220 acres) that were once used to grow carrots and potatoes. Whereas the crops would have consumed at least 270,000 cubic meters (220 acre-feet) of water each year, said Richard Sparks, an irrigation agronomist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, the solar plant will use almost none — just a small amount for the bathroom and the kitchen in the operation center, according to Iberdrola spokeswoman Jan Johnson.

On the other hand, solar thermal systems, which use much more water, could put additional strain on the valley’s water resources and traditional land patterns. The authors of the draft environmental assessment anticipated potential conflict, writing that “the transfer of agricultural water rights for solar energy development will result in agricultural fields being put out of production and will significantly alter land use in the San Luis Valley.”

Who Benefits?
The San Luis Valley has long supported small solar projects installed on homes and businesses. But, as Julie Sullivan tells Circle of Blue, few residents of the San Luis Valley are anxious to support a “bad” solar project that could “open the door to more bad projects.”

By bad, Sullivan is referring to a utility-scale project that a decade or so ago would have been widely cited in the national environmental community as beneficial. In this case, it was a 200-megawatt facility proposed by Tessera, a Houston-based company. Initial plans called for a fleet of 8,000 solar dishes, each 12-meters tall (40-feet tall) with Stirling engines to convert the sunlight into electricity.

Sullivan points from her dining room window to the horizon, where the Tessera solar dishes would have stood out against the freshly powdered Sangre de Cristo Mountains. This time last year, neighbors representing ranching, agricultural, and environmental groups were meeting in her home to discuss how to stop the project.

“I never thought I’d be fighting solar power,” says Sullivan, who taught environmental studies at Lesley University before marrying into the ranch life. “But it was an industrial project in an agricultural area. The renewable industry wants us to think that anything ‘renewable’ is green, and it’s not.”

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

In the last few years, four photovoltaic solar installations have been built in Alamosa County near the San Luis Valley electrical substation. Together they have the capacity to produce 87 megawatts.

Last July, the company abandoned the project, citing noise levels that exceeded state limits. Defeating the installation marked something of an opening salvo by opponents in what will be a long-running struggle for residents and the federal government to define what a “good” solar project is and to shape solar development here, in the nation’s highest agricultural region.

A Solar Mini-boom
Another hotspot for solar development in the valley is Alamosa County, to the south of Saguache. Because the valley’s transmission substation is in Alamosa, four projects — 87 MW in total — have been built on private land there, providing financial benefits to the county.

Both Smith and Canaly said that Alamosa County had decided to keep projects relatively small — the largest two are 30-MW facilities on no more than 90 hectares (220 acres). They are popular because they make good use of existing grid space and reap tax benefits, which ultimately help local citizens, said Smith and Canaly.

While solar development on the valley’s public land awaits the conclusions of the Interior Department’s environmental review this summer, private landowners have been leasing or selling land to energy companies. A pair of 100-MW solar thermal plants, each with a 200-meter (656-feet) energy-storage tower, are proposed for 1,600 hectares (4,000 acres) in Saguache County.

On February 2, the county’s board of commissioners will hold a public hearing to discuss the latest application from SolarReserve, a Delaware-based company.

This article was prepared while the author, Brett Walton, participated in a fellowship that was paid for by the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.

Weather Extremes
Floods killed 6 people in Fiji and displaced 3,500 following heavy rains, according to UPI. The government declared a state of emergency in parts of Viti Levu, Fiji’s biggest island.

Coffee yields in Mexico are expected to increase eight percent this year, despite a record drought that is costing the country $2.63 billion Bloomberg News reported.

Policy
Leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland are debating how to power a growing world as resources, such as water, become scarce, AFP reported.

The European Union may team up with China to push for global action at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro this June, according to EurActiv. China’s water problems could make it a key ally, some EU leaders believe.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change created an online database cataloging ways businesses are adapting to climate change.

The Stream is a daily digest spotting global water trends. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.

U.S. Shale Boom
U.S. President Barack Obama pushed support for shale gas drilling and clean energy technology in his State of the Union address. Bloomberg gives the highlights.

Meanwhile, North Dakota’s shale oil boom has sent the state’s economy rocketing, but it’s also pushing rural housing, electric, water, police and emergency services to the breaking point, Bloomberg reported.

Climate and Weather
A NASA video shows 131 years of global temperature change in 26 seconds.

Thousands of residents of New South Wales, Australia were evacuated on Wednesday following monsoon rains and flash flooding due to the La Niña weather phenomenon, the Guardian reported.

South America
The relentless drought in Argentina’s corn fields is pushing global food prices up, according to the Dow Jones Newswires, but will boost U.S. corn and wheat exports. The tighter supplies of corn couldn’t come at a worse time for the world’s poor.

Al Jazeera visits the construction site of the controversial Belo Monte dam in the Brazilian Amazon. Why is the world’s third biggest dam stirring up so much backlash?

The Stream is a daily digest spotting global water trends. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.

Photo © Keith Schneider/Circle of Blue

Domestic production of oil and natural gas is now climbing rapidly, due in part to drilling from rigs like this one in North Dakota.

By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue

Four years ago, when he campaigned for the office he now holds, Barack Obama described the urgent need to pursue clean energy development because of a grave and persistent problem: demand and prices for oil were rising, along with national and economic security risks tied to ever higher imports. Supplies of domestically produced fuel, meanwhile, were falling.

Last night, as the president defined in the State of the Union the basic outlines of an “all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy,” the country greeted much different conditions. Domestic production of oil and natural gas is now climbing rapidly. Demand is going down. Imports are steadily declining. Prices have steadied.

The result is that while President Obama still presses for more sources of cleaner energy — “I’m directing my administration to allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power 3 million homes,” he said — the allure of pursuing them is not nearly so keen. Summed up, the surge in fossil fuel production has indeed produced an economic reprieve, but one that is exceedingly risky for the land and water, and one that could well turn out to be a surrender to the future.

Here’s why.

Soaring Fossil Fuels
Horizontal drilling technology coupled with high-pressure water blasting — much of it developed with the help of federal research grants — has opened deep beds of hydrocarbon-rich shales all over the country to oil and natural gas production. An energy boom has erupted in eight Great Plains states and three mid-Atlantic states, plus Louisiana and California.

In 2011, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), production of natural gas from deep shales reached 18 billion cubic meters (630 billion cubic feet) per month, one-third of total U.S. natural gas production and 17 times more than in 2000. Last year, U.S. oil production reached almost 6 million barrels per day, and, for the first time since the 1970s, domestic oil production had risen for three straight years.

Photo © Keith Schneider/Circle of Blue

Horizontal drilling technology coupled with high-pressure water blasting has opened deep beds of hydrocarbon-rich shales all over the country. Trucks line up to fill with water to frack wells in North Dakota.

“Right now — right now — American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years. That’s right — eight years,” said the president. “Not only that — last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past 16 years.”

The other side of the president’s plan — building a bridge to a new era of cleaner energy sources — is unfolding at a much slower pace. Last year, according to the American Wind Energy Association, about 5,000 megawatts of wind energy capacity was constructed in the U.S. Meanwhile, China built nearly three times as much wind generating capacity.

Troubled Clean Energy
It takes big and consistent federal and state investment in wind, solar, cellulosic biofuels, geothermal, nuclear energy, clean automobiles, trains, and energy-efficient buildings to give innovators and entrepreneurs a solid grip in the cleaner economy. In the era of deficit and disinvestment that describes the political conditions currently at work in Washington, D.C., and most state capitals, lawmakers — supported by the fossil fuel sector — have expressed no enthusiasm for making those investments.

The arguments for pursuing wind, solar, and other cleaner sources of energy make a lot of sense, as do reasons for being more cautious about the consequences of oil and gas production.

The use of water is a good starting point.

Much of the nation’s shale oil and shale gas development is occurring on the arid Great Plains, where drillers require 7,500 to 19,000 cubic meters (2 million to 5 million gallons) of water to hydrofracture each well. In a region where competition for water is fierce, water managers are not sure where the supply for thousands of new wells a year will come from.

In addition, much of the water that goes down each well has to be brought back to the surface and then disposed of safely, because it contains chemical contaminants. States are only now considering requirements for wastewater disposal from shale oil and shale gas fields. Later this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to come out with its preliminary assessment on the risks of fracking. The final analysis will be released in 2014.

Contrast that with generating power from solar photovoltaic and wind energy installations, which require essentially no water to operate. Or generating fuel from switch grass and other sources of plant-based fuel that can be grown on marginal lands and don’t need to be irrigated.

Big clean energy projects, though, are proceeding fitfully as they face mounting price competition in energy markets due to the surge in domestic oil and gas production.

Clean energy projects also confront serious opposition at the grassroots across the country. As Circle of Blue writer Brett Walton will report later this week, one such fight over constructing solar plants is currently taking place in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, which has been identified by the Obama administration as one of the 17 most favorable places in the U.S. to develop solar energy on federal land.

Reprieve or Surrender
In effect, the economic reprieve that is being fostered by new domestic oil and gas production could easily turn out to be a devastating surrender to the future.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have evaluated the effects of rising shale gas production on clean energy innovation and, in a report earlier this month, reached much the same conclusion.

“People speak of [natural] gas as a bridge to the future, but there had better be something at the other end of the bridge,” said Henry Jacoby, co-director emeritus of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and co-author the MIT Energy Initiative’s The Future of Natural Gas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute, an internationally recognized water expert and a MacArthur Fellow.

Read his full bio…

The idea for the Cadiz project is simple: mine groundwater faster than nature refills it and sell it to urban centers in Southern California for profit. The full proposal seems more complicated – the owners might try to temporarily replace the lost groundwater with extra water from the Colorado River, if it is ever available (which is highly unlikely), but they propose to pump out this water and sell it, too, so the economics of the project really just depend on the water removed through unsustainable groundwater mining. Without that water, the project fails economically.

The project is located in the desert of southern California, east of Los Angeles and San Diego, in an area with very low precipitation. The owners intend to remove at least 50,000 acre-feet of water a year (and if they can get away with it, 75,000 acre-feet per year in the early years) for 50 years and sell it to local water agencies, including the Santa Margarita Water Agency (SMWA), Three Valleys Municipal Water District, Suburban Water System, Golden State Water Company, Jurupa Community Services, and California Water Service Company. Scientists estimate that nature, in contrast, only refills the basin with around 5,000 and 32,000 acre-feet per year, with most independent estimates at the very low end. This means the groundwater levels will drop and drop, like taking more water out of a bathtub than you put in. This is, simply, unsustainable.

If there were no adverse consequences of this kind of water mining, and if all that mattered was money, then perhaps using up this stock of water and turning it into a private good would make sense – at least to the project owners. But there are adverse consequences for other humans and for the local environment. This is cut-and-run water management: take a non-renewable resource that will last a short time, turn it for a profit, and leave a degraded landscape, mimicking the classic boom-and-bust cycles that characterized much of the mining industry in the western U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Here are some of the other consequences:

• The water supply is unsustainable – it is not a permanent source of water and new sources would have to be found when it is no longer economical to pump.
• The project produces water that is already more expensive than saving the same amount of water through improving urban conservation and efficiency programs.
• Other local landowners and businesses believe their water availability or quality will be affected by the project in ways neither fully understood nor mitigated by Cadiz.
• There are unresolved questions about the quality of the water and how the project might worsen water quality for other users over time.
• And perhaps most important, water in the desert is a rare thing, and the desert pools, ephemeral seeps, natural springs, and playas support delicate ecosystems dependent on the ability of groundwater to reach the surface. This project would draw down that groundwater, leading to the inevitable disappearance of surface water with highly uncertain, poorly understood, but almost certainly negative ecological consequences. And even the project owners admit in their draft Environmental Impact Report (dEIR) that we don’t know enough about the science to fully understand the consequence for centuries to come – long after they’ve left the scene.

In a mathematical sleight of hand, the project argues that water is “saved” by the project because it might reduce evaporative losses when water ponds on the surface during some wet periods. Yet it is precisely this water that local ecosystems rely upon for survival. Another piece of mathematical magic is the claim that the project is actually sustainable because they assume the project life is 100 years long: thus they pump like mad for the first 50 years and take their money and leave, acknowledging that the groundwater might or might not recharge to its original levels over the next 50 years after pumping stops. That’s like saying that fossil fuels are renewable, because nature might make them again in the future. Under the lower (and perhaps more accurate) estimates of natural recharge, there is a real risk of permanent damage to the groundwater basin through subsidence of land or contamination of the aquifer with salts, and it may never fully refill. And the draft environmental impact report says nothing at all about how the real risk of climate change might alter the desert hydrology.

Finally, there are natural springs in nearby valleys that may be connected to the groundwater basin in Cadiz. In a remarkable grammatical sleight-of-hand, the draft environmental impact report states that a field survey done by their consultants concluded that “there is no information demonstrating a physical connection of the identified springs in the local mountains to [Cadiz] groundwater.” Note the wording: “there is no information.” They use that to discount any risks to local springs. But absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence. An honest assessment of the science would conclude that, at best, we don’t know if there is a connection. And in fact the hydrologic assessment does show that if there is any connection, the mining of groundwater would ultimately affect the springs, perhaps long after pumping began. This means that if there is a connection, once it is ultimately noticed, it would be too late to prevent the springs from drying up.

We need new thinking about water in California and new innovative solutions. We must modify how we use water, and we must find new sources of supply. But the Cadiz Project is old thinking, based on the pillage-and-run philosophy of the past centuries, where water was seen as a resource to be mined and consumed, not managed in a sustainable way. This project is an insult to the idea of sustainability, to the efforts to protect the Eastern Mojave’s beauty and unique nature, and to the idea that resource development should respect more than just narrow economic gain. The good news is there are excellent alternatives, including recycling and reuse of water, improved efficiency of use by our cities and farms, smarter and renewable groundwater use and recharge projects, and even desalination of brackish waters or the ocean if the economics and environmental challenges can be properly overcome. Cadiz might have made some sense a century ago when we didn’t know better, but today it is neither appropriate for California nor necessary, and it should be cancelled.

Peter Gleick

Originally published by the Huffington Post on January 24, 2012.

In Chile, people exposed to high levels of arsenic in their drinking water during the 1950s have a higher risk of cancer despite subsequent contamination control, according to new research, Reuters reported.

Coal
Coal imports handled by the ports of China’s Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region increased more than 60 percent during 2011, reflecting the growing demand from local industries in the water-scarce area, Xinhua reported. Most of the coal is coming from Australia, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Water Recycling
Recycling more municipal wastewater could help bolster water supplies in the United States, The New York Times reported, referencing a new report by the Water Science and Technology Board of the National Research Council.

Environmental Finance
Banks from Sweden and Japan lead the world in issuing green bonds meant to finance clean water, air and energy projects, Bloomberg News reported.

The Stream is a daily digest spotting global water trends. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.

Modernising agricultural technology is the key to boosting China’s food output, according to China’s Premier Wen Jiabao, Reuters reported.

Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun discusses the data-driven approach he pioneered to hold China’s government and businesses accountable for air and water pollution.

Five tons of fuel oil has leaked into the Brisbane River in Queensland, Australia, threatening to reach the environmentally sensitive mangroves, AAP reported.

The U.S. Energy Department has reduced its estimate for the natural gas reserves in the Marcellus shale formation by 66 percent, citing improved data on drilling and production, Bloomberg reported.

Britain’s rivers a drying up, according to an Environment Agency study into the potential impact of climate change on the flow of rivers in England and Wales by 2050, the Guardian reported.

The Stream is a daily digest spotting global water trends. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.

Clean Water Act
Four Republican members of Congress—Sens. James Inhofe (Okla.) and Jeff Sessions (Ala.) and Reps. John Mica (Fla.) and Bob Gibbs (Ohio)—wrote a letter to the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, claiming that, in negotiating settlements for several lawsuits, the agency is exceeding its authority under the Clean Water Act. The letter requests the EPA to justify its actions. At issue are settlements over groundwater regulation and water pollution from nonpoint sources.

Water Infrastructure
In a letter to the White House budget director, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, urged Jacob Lew to allocate more money in the fiscal year 2013 budget to two federal loan programs for water and sewer infrastructure. Gillibrand called for a nearly 50 percent total increase to the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund and the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. The text of the letter follows the press release from the senator’s office.

Air Quality, Energy and Water
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory released a study on the effects of stricter air pollution controls for a key Arizona power plant. The EPA is considering haze-reduction technology for the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station, which provides some 92 percent of the low-cost power to pump Arizona’s share of the Colorado River.

NREL found that the two proposed options—selective catalytic reduction (SCR) and SCR plus baghouses and sorbent injection—would cost less than shutting the plant down and replacing the power with existing spare capacity. The study also found that using SCR controls, water rates for agricultural users would increase between 13 percent and 16 percent; using SCR technology with baghouses and sorbent injection would double the effect.

Weather 2011 and Consolidation
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published its review of the year’s weather events and climate trends. All sorts of records were broken. Texas had its second warmest and its driest year on record. The data from the September to December period, however, has not yet been made final.

As part of a broader government re-organization, President Barack Obama proposed moving NOAA from the Commerce Department to the Interior Department, the Wall Street Journal reports. Many environmental groups opposed the move, arguing NOAA’s mission and culture does not fit with Interior’s focus on natural resources development.

Climate Adaptation
The Obama administration released a draft plan for adapting to the effects of climate change on fish, animals and plants. The national strategy is directed toward all resource management decisions, not just those made by the federal government. A public comment period is open through March 5. The final plan will be released by early summer.

Water to the Supreme Court?
A Texas water district asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its lawsuit to gain access to water in Oklahoma, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports. The Tarrant Regional Water District, which serves nearly 2 million customers west of Dallas, sued the state of Oklahoma in 2007 to acquire water. The Supreme Court has yet to decide whether it will hear the case.

The Motion of the Ocean
The U.S. Department of Energy released assessments of the power potential of wave energy and tidal energy in the United States. The west coast has greater recoverable resources than the east coast—though Alaska beats them both. Alaska also does well in tidal energy.

Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.

Video © PBS Frontline

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In the above video, Feliciano dos Santos is described as “one of Mozambique’s best known musicians,” though his lyrics are a bit unconventional. Santos uses his music to, among other things, teach villagers about good hygiene, because he knows firsthand what can result from waterborne illnesses.

That’s because Santos is not just a musician — he’s also the executive director of ESTAMOS, a wonderful non-profit, that focuses on HIV/AIDS, as well as water supply, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). ESTAMOS, under the decisive leadership of Santos, has transformed many lives in the far northern Niassa Province, commonly known as the “Siberia of Mozambique.”

I spent 7 years in Mozambique, working and learning from Santos. I remember once when he stopped a show in a village, because an older man was having health problems. Santos knew that he himself was the only person who had an available vehicle to get the man to a clinic, and the show no longer mattered anymore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ned Breslin is the CEO at Water For People, a nonprofit that implements drinking water and sanitation solutions in 11 developing countries. He is author of Rethinking Hydrophilantropy.

But I’ve also connected with Santos on a personal level. I have shared many meals and watched many soccer matches with him and his family, and his deep love for his children is apparent. Taking after Santos’ talent for music, his son is a promising drummer in a band that Santos mentors. This is just one of the ways that he stays connected, though he cannot run and play with his children as he might like to.

Santos, who lost part of his leg to polio when he himself was a young boy, seems at peace, because he has faith that his children will not have to endure the same adversity as he had growing up. He told Frontline in 2008 of the challenges that he faced growing up, of the stigma associated with polio, and of how difficult it was for his future father-in-law to get over that stigma.

But, fortunately, polio is a disease that is fast receding from our global landscape.

The WASH sector could learn a great deal from the international effort to eradicate polio — spearheaded by Rotary International, the World Health Organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and many other organizations — which began by setting a clear outcome that was achievablee at a global level. They targetted the complete eradication of this dreaded disease, and they measured success/results based on the sustained movement towards that outcome.

In other words, these organizations were not willing to settle for anything less than everyone in the world being safe from polio: and, frankly, their work is the inspiration for Water For People’s Everyone Forever initiative.

I humbly suggest that the WASH sector look to polio eradication as a model of how to improve our impact considerably.

• One Collective Outcome: Polio-eradication agencies programmed, coordinated, and were judged on one collective outcome: to eradicate polio. They stayed focused on their programming and fundraising, proving that together it is possible to achieve a result and to demonstrate significant impact over time. Conversely, the water sector, in general, tends to focus on inputs, even though we all have mission statements that speak of eradicating water poverty — we talk about the need for more projects, more loans, more aid with vague notions of the outcome but with no real, systematic strategy to achieve that outcome. No one is truly saying, “We are putting our reputations on the line by eradicating water poverty in this region of the world.” The Sanitation and Water For All initiative is possibly a step in the right direction for the WASH community, but it needs to start moving to actionable, outcomes-based work soon or, I fear, it will lose credibility. Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) could make the case that it is trying to systemmatically achieve full coverage outcomes, as well.
• Partnerships: For the polio community, a clear focus on one collective outcome led to complementarity, sharing, and partnership that — while far from perfect — represents a significant step ahead of where we are in the WASH sector.
• Achieving That Outcome Over Time: The polio-eradication initative did not begin by establishing all the rules and approaches to polio eradication, nor did they wait until all the pieces needed to succeed were clear or fully in place. They did not have perfect policy. They did not have all the implementation partners in place. They did not even know how Africa was different from Asia or who would be needed in each place to make the program a success. They did not say “my approach is best,” but rather they realized that there would be different roads to the outcome, because, ultimately, it was reaching the outcome that mattered most, not who was best at getting there. Yes, common principles emerged over time, but no one group had a monopoly on an approach.
• Valued Monitoring: Monitoring has been essential to the polio-eradication program and has driven the initiative forward. All parties valued monitoring as a way to track results over time, and they tweaked their monitoring systems as they learned what were the better questions to ask and what were the bigger challemges to address. They did not get bogged down in the endless discussions on the “right indicators,” like that which dominates the WASH dialogue. Some may argue that the Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) is an attempt at a common diagnosis for the state of water and sanitation worldwide, but JMP results do not inform WASH programming as well as a sound global monitoring program could.

For example, the polio community monitored cases very closely. Here’s a wonderful Tweet that sums it up well:

@gatespolio FACT: Reported cases of #polio in #India in 1985: 150,000. Reported cases in 2011: 1

(Last week, we also learned that India had its first year without any new polio cases!)

Some, of course, would argue that polio eradication is completely different from water supply and sanitation, which is of course true —; but that response is simply defensive and misses the point.

The real question is whether or not the WASH sector is willing to take that leap to a commitment of full coverage, where investments made today are rigorously monitored over time — regardless of what impact that may have on an organization’s brand or reputation — so that the words contained in all of our mission statements move from the page to actual actions on the ground.

Click here to learn more and to sign the Everyone Commitment.

Ned Breslin
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Polio eradication may also shed light on a new type of philanthropy, where outcomes over time will be far better valued than short-term activities, such as completing project A or B or making X number of loans and having Y% of people repay those loans: I will continue on with this subject in a future blog.

Water Pollution
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will test the water at about 60 homes in a small town in northern Pennsylvania where residents say natural gas drilling has polluted wells, Reuters reported.

Reuse of municipal waste water has increased substantially over the past 30 years, according to a recent report by the National Research Council in Washington, D.C. The Economist summarizes some little known facts about water recycling.

Is the illegal dumping of toxic waste to blame for the surge in cancer cases in Italy’s Campania region? The Independent investigates.

Climate
A huge pool of fresh water in the Arctic Ocean could lower the temperature of Europe, according to British scientists.

Thailand
Thailand’s rice production may climb to an all-time high as Thai farmers expand plantings to offset losses from last October’s heavy floods, according to Bloomberg.

The water in many dams in northern Thailand is at dangerously high levels, Bangkok Post reported.

The Stream is a daily digest spotting global water trends. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.