Water, Ecosystem Services, and Food Security: Avoiding the Costs of Ignoring the Linkage

This paper talks of the emerging paradigm of water management that acknowledges critical ecosystem services, and challenges the linear and positive relation between water availability and food security. The ways water used to be managed, globally, are changing rapidly. The existing engineering modes of water management entail constructing large structures intervening into the natural hydrological flows, and exploiting the water for human use. A large component of demand for water emerged from the need of the agricultural sector in various parts of the developing and developed world to ensure food security. Over time, the developed nations began realizing that such traditional engineering ways of water management entailing large constructions are not sustainable in the long run, and can have serious impacts on ecosystems. Since large parts of livelihoods are dependent on the ecosystem services, negative impacts on ecosystems affect livelihoods negatively, too. Hence, a new paradigm of water management recognizing the ecosystems livelihoods linkages is emerging. This new paradigm is known as Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) and, when applied at the level of a river basin, is referred to as Integrated River Basin Management (IRBM). This new paradigm delinks economic growth and food security from increasing water use, and provides for an ecosystemic definition of food security. However, this changing paradigm is yet to be recognized in policy documents of the developing world, especially India. For India to embark upon a low-carbon growth trajectory, it must embrace the new paradigm of water management.