Beyond Basins?

Should we always manage water using hydrological basins as our basic organizational focus?

I ask this question — a very provocative one for water people — because I think we are limiting our thinking relative to what we actually see on the ground. We’re making our work harder than it should be. If water and climate are really aligned, we need to actually see how water moves over landscapes.

The water community for more than a century has a clear theory of change: we need to manage water in hydrologic basins. I’m not sure how old this theory is — a few managers were promoting the alignment of political boundaries with hydrological boundaries for arid regions as long ago as the 1880s. I suspect the idea goes back farther though.

When I entered the water community professionally in the 2000s, one of the first truisms I was presented by my betters was the concept of basin-scale managment. Seeing basins, catchments, and watersheds is arguably the most shared concept across the water community, from technical disciplines like hydrology to governance and economics. Basins, I was repeatedly told, are our unit of focus: “Start with the basin.”

There were always some limitations of this model that were politely left silent. Aquifers, for instance, often exist in recharge and discharge basins that have complex relationships with what is happening on the surface with rivers and lakes. The water footprint movement demonstrated clearly that key economic elements like energy or data can “contain” a huge amount of water, and energy or data networks may travel through their own type of “watershed.” Thus, managing water embedded in energy could span many basins — and could be a hidden risk for all of those basins.

I would like to go a little further today to burst this bubble, at least a little, with a prick from a resilience needle.

I’ve come to feel like the climate community has more insight here than with many water people. They don’t assume that a pattern from the nineteenth century still holds true. Most of us, especially if we live in a large city, do not actually live in basins that are defined by hydrology (“water flows towards money”). In some cities and regions, we have profoundly altered hydrology. Rivers even flow backwards — like the Chicago or Breede rivers (at least at times). And water transfers and pumps have replumbed our surface landscapes in dramatic ways that have little to do with hydrology. The classic Dutch image of a windmill is, in fact, a silent testament to the ability of water to flow uphill, over and over again. The Low Countries of Europe are powerful examples of how we view hydrology as deeply plastic.

If you don’t identify as a water person, the importance of my message might seem a little mystifying. 

A basin is the natural hydrological structure for a region, so not just the mainstem of the Amazon, Yangtze, or Nile rivers per se but all of the small-order streams and little rivers that feed into those big rivers. The Mississippi river, if you count all of those littler rivers and creeks, occupies about 40 percent of the lower 48 states in the US. Basins can be big.

Decision makers such as John Wesley Powell in the nineteenth century, head of a US federal agency called the US Geological Survey (USGS), saw basin management as so important that political boundaries should be aligned with hydrological boundaries. According to Powell, water-scarce regions whose administrative boundaries did not align with hydrology were building in needless conflict and competition. A look at the bizarrely straight lines on national boundaries in Africa or the Middle East, especially if overlaid with an awareness of interstate and regional tensions and hydrological basins, suggests that Powell was onto something, even if he was referencing subnational boundaries for states, counties, and cities in the western US, Canada, and Australia.

That said, I think that the resilience community has something important to teach us in water: systems thinking. How do we actually see water systems organized? Hydrology is always important. But hydrology is not always supreme.

From space, Pakistan’s Punjab province is the largest, densest web of irrigation systems in the world, dating back at least two hundred years. Punjab means five rivers, but in effect that region has been thoroughly replumbed and repiped into dozens or hundreds of rivers. These rivers are no longer independent.

Powell would surely be shocked by the western US today, where a city like Los Angeles receives water from hundreds of kilometers away, mostly through pumping and transfer systems that have nothing to do with natural hydrology (and with some intervening mountain ranges). Something like half of the water in Beijing now flows from the Yangtze far to the north, hundreds of kilometers away, spanning several large transversal basins in the process. India has had extensive plans for decades to replumb major rivers there, while Brazil is actively and fundamentally altering the hydrology of major basins such as the Pantanal at a transboundary level. At a meeting a few weeks ago, I recently heard that a collection of western US states have revived an old idea for moving water from the North American Great Lakes halfway across the continent to the Colorado River. Some water transfer schemes are also transport pathways, such as multi-thousand kilometer canal systems. 

Systems thinking challenges hydrological basins by looking at how water (and other vectors) actually moves — that “system” could be a city, ecosystem, a farmer’s field, a factory. In simpler systems, the hydrological basin is the system. But in many places, it’s not — or won’t be in the near future. A hydrological-only focus would obscure or confuse what is actually happening. 

The next level of organization is also important: visualizing how different systems may be creating layers of hidden tradeoffs or even conflict between sectors or institutions. Surface, groundwater, and water-intensive inputs like energy or key steps in a supply chain, for instance, are very likely to overlap in ways that might not be intuitive.

The reason the climate community thinks in terms of systems, of course, comes from their understanding that these connections are dynamic and not fixed, and that disruptions can spiral across these layers in unexpected ways unless we can see the relationships.

Are you sure you’re in a basin and not in a “system”?

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA