Op-Ed: Water Missing in Climate Talks

In a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, James G. Workman, a journalist, author and adviser to national water ministers around the world, laments the glaring absence of water in international climate talks.

We covered the removal of water from the Copenhagen negotiating text a few weeks ago when Circle of Blue ran an article on the topic.

Workman’s piece for the LA Times, called Copenhagen’s missing ingredient: water, does a great job making the case for how critical water is in climate change talks and I hope that his polemical prose will help spur our leaders to make water a central topic of discussion. As Workman decries, you can’t talk about greenhouse gas emissions without talking about water:

We know fossil fuel emissions matter immensely. But the most volatile chemical compound isn't methane, nitrous oxide or even carbon dioxide. It's water.

Scientists stress water's profound link with climate change, and how wise water management could bind global efforts to cool our warming planet with local efforts to absorb its unavoidable shocks. Even the public gets it. Yet our delegates wallow in denial. In a misguided effort to avoid dissent, they have erased water from their working draft, forgetting how water is the planet's one common denominator.
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Water is also the medium for adapting to those greenhouse effects that are well underway. Virtually every effect we dread -- urban heat waves, melting snowpack, longer droughts, increased wildfires, drying reservoirs, rising sea levels, desiccating soils -- boils down to the loss of fresh water. Even regions feeling more sudden, torrential rain can't use their extreme runoff; to absorb unpredictable floods, dam operators must empty their reservoirs.

So whenever we say climate volatility, we really mean water volatility.

Workman goes on to describe how the lack of water in climate negotiations, coupled with poll showing far greater public concern over water shortages than global warming, reveals three things: 1) including water can help reestablish the legitimacy of climate negotiations in the eyes of the public, 2) climate resilience must emerge from a bottom up approach that focuses on water, and 3) even climate skeptics see the risks of water scarcity, therefore water could be a catalyst for political cooperation.

For more details on Workman’s insights, check out Copenhagen’s missing ingredient: water.