Water Security and Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change is the dominant paradigm in natural resource policy. It is also obsolete and should be replaced by the water-security paradigm. The climate change paradigm is obsolete because it does not resonate sufficiently with the general public and because it does not adequately integrate sustainability challenges related to population growth and economic development. The water-security paradigm addresses these deficiencies by speaking directly to the reasons climate change ultimately matters to most people—droughts, floods, plagues, and wars. Additionally, water security integrates climate change concerns with economic development and population. The water-security paradigm reorients all natural resource policies toward achieving a sustainable quantity and quality of water at acceptable costs and risks. The water-security paradigm improves upon the climate change paradigm by replacing carbon footprints with water footprints as the metric for sustainability monitoring and reporting, and by restructuring natural resource governance at the watershed level with regional, rather than hierarchical, leadership.