Tundi Agardy, Ph.D.
The Great Promise of Watershed Management
Regional cooperation to address issues of water use and allocation, as well as threats to freshwater systems originating from pollution, over-fishing, and changes in riparian landscapes, holds great promise for effectively manage river systems and watersheds, but the way regional ecosystem-based management provides a ray of hope for ocean management19.
There are good examples of watershed / waterbasin management frameworks and institutions already in existence around the world, from the Mekong River Commission (Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia) to the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (Austria, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine ), to the drought-parched Murray/Darling Basin in Australia (involving the states of South Australia, New South Wales)20. However, this large scale, top down, command and control form of management has its limitations, without effective local involvement at much smaller scales.
A telling example is provided by the Protection of Ecoservices Project undertaken by the City of New York to safeguard the city’s drinking water supply. The City made an investment of $300,000 to facilitate sustainable farming practices in the New York City watershed, enlisting the help and entrepreneurial spirit of farmers in the Catskills Mountains to implement measures to preserve water quality. These measures included establishing riparian/stream buffers on private lands, reducing fertilizer/pesticide use, and conserving wetlands that naturally filter water flowing through them. This Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES, as such initiatives are called in the market-based conservation world) initiative really paid off – it saved the City literally billions of dollars in water treatment costs, and it rewarded farmers financially, allowing them to maintain their traditional, small scale farming livelihoods.
Such combinations of public sector management and private sector market-mechanisms may be the best hope we have for conserving freshwater biodiversity and services. And if we are to succeed at that, we will have come a long way in conserving marine ecosystems and services as well, for the lifeblood of seawater is, after all, freshwater — pure, clean freshwater that is the elixir of life.
19 See Agardy, T. 2008. Casting off the chains that bind us to ineffective marine management: the way forward. Ocean yearbook 22:1-24; also Kimball, L. 2001. International Ocean Governance. IUCN, Gland Switzerland.
20 See www.mrcmekong.org; www.icpdr.org;
