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Water Ethics

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Handbook of Water Resources Management: Discourses, Concepts and Examples

Abstract

The growing appreciation for the diversity of water values—ranging from the spiritual to the economic—highlights the challenge of making water management decisions that do justice to different and often conflicting values. Water ethics offers a systematic approach to making water management decisions consistent with society’s values, while at the same time holding up the values themselves for critical examination. While the term “water ethics” is rarely encountered in the water literature, water governance best practice reflects key normative value principles including integrity, stewardship, social and environmental justice, ecosystem services and rights of nature. The added value of a systematic approach to water ethics is to render existing norms of water governance more explicit and identify value gaps and synergies. This has been the focus of a recent initiative to formulate a Water Ethics Charter, building on earlier work by UNESCO and the Botin Foundation, and a parallel campaign by Indigenous water protectors to elicit international recognition of culturally diverse ontologies of water. As climate change brings keener awareness of values-based water conflicts, there will be a growing need for new tools of mediation and resolution. The developing field of water ethics can contribute to new solutions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.fmyn.org/event/orme-dam-victory-days/.

  2. 2.

    The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the US Department of Health and Human Services.

  3. 3.

    See Llamas (2012) and Delli Priscoli (2012) for an overview of the 2010 seminar.

  4. 4.

    Following the Rio + 20 meetings in 2012, the United Nations launched a “Harmony with Nature” website featuring examples of national legislation aimed at protecting nature, https://harmonywithnatureun.org/.

  5. 5.

    The ethics of water exploitation is often couched in terms of freedom from national-level environmental regulations in favor of more easily captured local regulatory bodies. For example, the 2016 Platform of the US Republican Party states, “We must never allow federal agencies to seize control of state waters, watersheds, or groundwater. State waters, watersheds, and groundwater must be the purview of the sovereign states….We firmly believe environmental problems are best solved by giving incentives for human ingenuity and the development of new technologies, not through top-down, command-and-control regulations that stifle economic growth and cost thousands of jobs.”

  6. 6.

    A second edition of this book was published in 2019 (Groenfeldt 2019).

  7. 7.

    https://www.waterintegritynetwork.net.

  8. 8.

    https://waterethics.org/the-water-ethics-charter/.

  9. 9.

    https://www.iwa-network.org/projects/water-wise-cities/#the_17_iwa_principles_for_water-wise_cities.

  10. 10.

    https://washcharter.wordpress.com.

  11. 11.

    The full text is available on the website of the International River Foundation, https://riverfoundation.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/THE-BRISBANE-DECLARATION.pdf.

  12. 12.

    This definition is taken from the 2010 Echuca Declaration, which can be found at https://culturalflows.com.au.

  13. 13.

    https://canadians.org/bluecommunities.

  14. 14.

    Agroecology in France: Changing production models to combine economic and environmental performance: https://agriculture.gouv.fr/changing-production-models-combine-economic-and-environmental-performance

  15. 15.

    See the website of the “Berlin Water Table” (https://berliner-wassertisch.net/), or download the English text of the Berlin Water Charter at https://berliner-wassertisch.net/assets/Charta/Berlin_Water_Charter2015.pdf.

  16. 16.

    https://www.greenpeace.org/international/act/detox/.

  17. 17.

    https://chm.pops.int.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Water-Culture Institute, Santa Fe, NM, 87505, USA

    David Groenfeldt

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    David Groenfeldt

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  1. David Groenfeldt
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Development Research, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Janos J. Bogardi

  2. University of Amsterdam and IHE-Delft Institute for Water Education, Delft, The Netherlands

    Joyeeta Gupta

  3. Department of Civil Engineering, University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka

    K. D. Wasantha Nandalal

  4. Lawyer, Conflict Resolution Specialist, Paris, France

    Léna Salamé

  5. Department of Water Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Ronald R.P. van Nooijen

  6. Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Navneet Kumar

  7. Water Engineering and Management, Asian Institute of Technology, Pathum thani, Thailand

    Tawatchai Tingsanchali

  8. Sustainable Water Future Programme, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

    Anik Bhaduri

  9. Delft Center for Systems and Control, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Alla G. Kolechkina

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Groenfeldt, D. (2021). Water Ethics. In: Bogardi, J.J., et al. Handbook of Water Resources Management: Discourses, Concepts and Examples. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60147-8_5

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