Insight

For billions of years Nature has eliminated contaminants that enter the Water Cycle to maintain a sustainable Renewable Water supply. Urbanization, population growth and the engineered water logistics infrastructure we have created since the Industrial Revolution have overloaded Nature to the point where the Renewable Water model is collapsing and Nature can no longer maintain water quality in the Water Cycle.

Water quality in rivers, waterways, lakes, dams and reservoirs is becoming so compromised with high Total Organic Carbon (TOC) and algae and Cyanobacteria blooms that processing plants cannot process it to produce drinking water, resulting in what we term “water shortages”.

But there is no shortage of water – this is not a quantity problem. It is a quality problem.

And it is becoming a Global Water Crisis.

It will not worsen in a gradual linear manner. That is because the Water Cycle and every body of water, or water processing unit contained within it, is a “biotic system” or biome. This means that its behavior is governed by Systems Theory not conventional Newtonian science.

What this means is that degradation initially takes place gradually “at the margin”, and then suddenly and catastrophically as a tipping point is reached and the defining characteristics of the biome are fundamentally transformed. The Global Water Crisis is therefore a race against time.

For this reason, it is critical that we incorporate the principles of Systems Theory into solutions to the Global Water Crisis.

The process by which bulk water resources (rivers, lakes, dams, reservoirs etc) are degraded in this way is called “Eutrophication”. Eutrophication is essentially a process by which excess contaminant / nutrient loads are taken up to produce Biomass in the form of algae and Cyanobacteria to the point where they dominate the biome at the expense of the “requisite variety” of life-forms necessary to maintain a healthy biodiversity.

This misappropriation of Nutrients is a result of a displacement of the natural balance in the output from the Energy of the sun driving photosynthesis in Water to produce Biomass. It is therefore critical to understand the factors at play at this Water-Energy-Biomass Nexus in order to develop effective interventions and solutions to this displacement and how it impacts the Water Cycle.

We hope in this section to provide some insight into understanding the Global Water Crisis in a Systems Theory paradigm, and in the context of the Water-Energy-Biomass (WEB) Nexus.

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