DATE=09-08-03

TYPE=English Programs Feature

NUMBER=7-37827

TITLE=RIVERS FOR LIFE

BYLINE=Rosanne Skirble

TELEPHONE=(202) 619-2806

DATELINE=Washington

EDITOR=Rob Sivak

CONTENT=

ATTENTION: ENVIORNMENT

INTRO: Rivers around the world are in serious trouble. Dam construction and other diversions have altered river flow, destroyed the hydrologic connection between river and flood plain habitat, and depleted aquatic species populations.

Most of the efforts to deal with these problems address water quality and water shortages.

"Rivers for Life," a new book by water experts Sandra Postel and Brian Richter calls for a shift to a new mind set, one that makes ecosystem health a goal of water development and management.

VOA's Rosanne Skirble spoke with co-author Sandra Postel:

AUDIO CUT: SANDRA POSTEL/SKIRBLE

SANDRA POSTEL: "We have seen over the last half century a dramatic change in the hydrologic environment, globally. We have seen the number of large dams, which is a good measure of impact on rivers, we have seen the number of large dams increase from 5,000 in 1950 to 45,000 today, which means roughly a nine-fold increase in human impact on rivers. And this is a major cause of the alteration and flows that we are taking about. And we are seeing the evidence of declining river health in all kinds of ways. One of the most obvious is the numbers of freshwater species that are now in risk of extinction. These include 20 percent of the 10,000 fresh water fish species around the world. In the United States we see 37 percent of freshwater fish at risk of extinction, 69 percent of freshwater mussels, which have a lot to do with aquatic ecosystem health at risk of extinction. So there are many signs of these problems in addition to the more obvious indications of many rivers no longer reaching the sea for large portions of the year because of being over tapped and over extracted."

RS: "You talk about rivers and how they have been exploited for human needs - for agriculture, for cities, for industries, for electric power, for expanded shipping routes, flood protection. How dependent has our society become on taming our rivers?"

SANDRA POSTEL: "We are very dependent on controlling rivers to some degree. If you look worldwide now we get nearly one-fifth of our electricity from hydropower dams, which are coming from rivers. About 15 percent of our world food production depend directly on large dams and the reservoirs behind them. So we are getting great benefits from them. But what we haven't taken into account is the ecological cost of not protecting the important ecological functions that rivers provide. And, so in some cases now more water development, more dam building, more river diversions has greater costs than it does benefits because we are not accounting for those costs properly. So these ecosystem values really need to be put into the decision making, about how we use rivers, how we manage rivers and how we choose to develop rivers."

RS: "How are human needs the water for agriculture, the cities, industries, shipping etc., how does your book suggest that you balance that against the health of the ecosystem?"

SANDRA POSTEL: "What we are really proposing is that instead of following the 20th century approach which was really to constantly find more water for agriculture, industries and cities and industries and divert as much as we need without really taking the environment into account. What we really need to do is to establish an allocation of water - timing quality and quantity - to protect these important ecological functions and to say to ourselves, this is water that really needs to be reserved for our environment. This needs to be reserved to protect ecosystem functions. And then we know how much water we have to work with to supply irrigated agriculture and industries and cities. And when we do that what we are really doing is unleashing the potential of conservation, and efficiency and water markets and all kinds of other ways to increase water productivity and maximize the total value we are getting out of rivers because we are protecting ecosystems and we are still meeting human needs. But until we draw that boundary and say this is what the ecosystem needs. This is what is left for us, we are really going to keep making inroads into that ecological allocation and see ecosystems continue to decline."

RS: "You talk a lot about the natural flow. How do you get the flow right? Does this mean tearing levees down or dikes or dams?"

SANDRA POSTEL: "It can mean tearing dikes and levees down. We have laid out a number of priorities for doing this. Probably the largest one is considering how we can operate large dams differently because it is really large dams that have the most impact on water flow. And these are primarily operated for flood control, hydropower, irrigation and water supply, but there are ways we can alter the release of those flows for those purposes in ways that better serve ecological needs without doing too much harm to those other important economic need. And so thinking about how we can re-operate these large dams is an important one (priority),. And some cases taking a dam down usually a smaller dam makes a lot of sense because we getting minimum economic benefits and it would improve, for example, fisheries to a great extent. We have seen a lot of small dams coming down around the world, in the United States, in North America in general and in other parts of the world too and then levees. We have tended to dike and levee rivers in order to protect floodplain areas and put them into use for agriculture. Many times these rivers over top their banks in terrible floods and reclaim their flood plains in the flood disaster events. And we are learning now that reconnecting the river with its floodplain can produce a lot of ecological benefits too (as in the case of) restoring fisheries, aquatic diversity, drought mitigation, groundwater recharge and so on. That kind of reconnection is a very important thing we can do too."

RS: "In the (book's) epilogue you ask, 'Can we save earth's rivers? What is the answer to that question?"

SANDRA POSTEL: "Our answer is that we can, but there is a very narrow window of opportunity to do it. Once you lose species they are gone. Once they are extinct we can't get them back. The very optimistic message of our book is that given a chance rivers do heal and we have seen around the world that people are very, very interested in their rivers, in their watersheds. //OPT//ADD// So, there is a lot of reason to be optimistic, but what gives me concern is that the pace of action to achieve those goals is very slow."

RS: "What can be done to speed up that process?"

SANDRA POSTEL: "Well, I think that one of the first steps is education on this issue. We have been really very focused on water quality and water shortages and not enough on river health more generically. And river flow issues have not really popped up on the radar screen very often and yet there is really great opportunity to do something. All around the world we see watershed groups popping up. END ADD OPT/// So, this is an area where citizen activism can really made a big difference to make policy makers do something to protect river health and to restore rivers that are in their communities."

TEXT: Sandra Postel says more than 230 rivers around the world are currently undergoing some degree of flow restoration.

Ms. Postel is director of the Water Policy Project in Amherst, Massachusetts.

NEB/RS