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The Soft Path for Water
In the last century, most water managers focused on finding and developing new supplies of water by building large, centralized infrastructure. such as dams, aqueducts, and centralized treatment facilities. While this approach – the “hard path” – brought many benefits, it left much of the world with critical unresolved water challenges, including billions of people without basic safe water and sanitation, and significant ecological devastation. As we move into the 21st century, it is time for new thinking and new approaches to global and local water problems – it is time for a “soft path” for water.
The “soft path,” as described by Peter Gleick and colleagues at the Pacific Institute, is a comprehensive approach to water management, planning, and use. It utilizes water infrastructure, but combines it with improvements in the overall productivity of water use, the smart application of economics to encourage efficiency and equitable use, innovative new technologies, and the strong participation of communities and local water users in making decisions. Rather than seek endless sources of new supply, the soft path matches water services to the scale of the users’ needs. It also takes environmental and social concerns into account to ensure that basic human needs and the needs of the natural world are both met.
Underlying the soft path for water is the insight that people don’t want to “use” water – they want to drink and bathe, produce goods and services, grow food, and generally meet human needs. Trying to achieve this goal can be done the traditional “hard” way by building more dams, pipelines, and environmentally destructive infrastructure. Or it can be done in a more integrated, sustainable, and effective way.
The soft path can be distinguished from the traditional, hard path to water in six main ways:
1) Ensures water for human needs. The soft path directs governments, companies, and individuals to meet the water needs of people and businesses, instead of just supplying water. People want clean clothes or to be able to produce goods and services – they do not care how much water is used and may not care if water is used at all.
2) Ensures water for ecological needs. The soft path recognizes that the health of our natural world and the activities that depend on it (like swimming, water purification, ecological habitat, and tourism) are important to water users and people in general. Often times, by not returning enough water to the natural world, the hard path harms humans and other ecological users downstream.
3) Matches the quality of water with its use. The soft path advances water systems that supply different qualities of water for different uses. For instance, storm runoff, gray water, and reclaimed wastewater, although not of the highest quality, are well-suited for landscape irrigation or for certain industrial purposes.
4) Matches the scale of the infrastructure to the scale of the need. The soft path for water recognizes that investing in decentralized infrastructure can be just as cost-effective as investing in large, centralized facilities. There is nothing inherently better about providing irrigation water from a massive reservoir instead of using decentralized rainwater capture and storage.
5) Includes public participation in decisions over water. The soft path requires water agency or company personnel to interact closely with water users and to engage community groups in water management. The hard path, governed by an engineering mentality, is accustomed to meeting generic needs.
6) Uses smart economics. The soft path recognizes the public and economic aspects of water and uses the power of water economics to encourage the equitable distribution and efficient use of water.
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