Speech for the World Water Day event hosted by The Light Millennium on March 21^st, 2022.

Good morning from Mexico to His Excellencies and my fellow panelists and artists. It is a privilege to be here. I want to thank Ms. Bircan Ünver for the kind invitation to this amazing celebration and I want to thank Arpit Chaturvedi, CEO of GPODS, for connecting us.

Tomorrow is World Water Day and the beginning of the Plan Water for Everyone in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, the second largest metropolitan area of our country. This plan addresses the current water shortage. Interestingly, on the supply side of their strategy, their efforts have focused on the deployment of groundwater wells to close the surface water gap, while the storms arrive. The current situation in Monterrey is representative of what is happening in many cities in the world. In the context of climate change, desertification, and water scarcity, groundwater is our source of resilience.

I would argue that groundwater is invisible because of how we perceive it in terms of space, time, value, and how we tend to disregard its interrelationships with other ongoing problems.

The global groundwater crisis is an expression of the global water crisis we are facing. Simultaneously, the water crisis is encompassed by a broader one, which is the nature crisis, where other problems interwind: biodiversity loss, nutrients flow disruption, climate change, and pollution. We can be more ambitious and argue that many issues apparently not related to the nature crisis, like political flareups in some countries are actually interconnected with it.

If we go in reverse scale, we will find that we have a lot of expressions within the groundwater crisis. Depletion is one of them, but we also have the ubiquity of arsenic, salinization, and chemical pollution, to name a few. The emergence of these interconnected, multi-scale issues forces us to address groundwater issues with a systemic approach.

I believe that in parallel to formulating policies and creating institutions, we must perceive groundwater problems adequately and adapt everything we create to both solve the problems while understanding deeper the groundwater system.

For explaining in terms of value, let me borrow the parable of the blind men and the elephant for a moment. There is an elephant and some blind men that are touching different parts of the elephant. The one that touches its leg argues that the elephant is like a tree while the one that touches the tail, argues that it is a rope and so on. All of them were correct but mistaken at the same time. We all can agree on the value of a glass of freshwater, a plate of food, and the possibility to wash our hands, especially during the occurrence of a pandemic.

Some countries, including Mexico, have even sacred the human right to water in their Constitutions. On the other hand, defendants of nature point out that water is critical for the survival of ecosystems.

Meanwhile, indigenous communities teach us about the intimate relationship they have with water and how it is important for their spirituality. Other people are convinced that water is a natural resource necessary to satisfy our craving for development, whether it is used for electricity production or manufacturing processes. Which of them is correct? The fact that physically, water is a rival-in consumption resource forces us to believe that these ways to see water features are irreconcilable and unconsciously, discourages dialogue, locking cooperation initiatives that in the end, maybe fruitful for all stakeholders.

In terms of time, when I was a child, I was told that water was a renewable resource and that it keeps replenishing until the end of time and I kept that belief until I realized that in Mexico City, water was being pumped beyond the capacity of the aquifer and that the water balance was already negative. How was that possible? Where was water coming from? Now, I understand that unrenewable water exists, and we are borrowing it from the Mexico City aquifer. We need to come up with creative ideas to make this distinction in our laws and policies.

Communicating the spatial scale of aquifers is also hard. There is a tendency to think of aquifers as if they were underground cisterns because we associate them with what we can see. Likewise, it is tough to tell someone that there are aquifers that are larger than entire countries or that some of them have hundreds of meters in depth. We need to come up with ideas to communicate our mental model of the aquifers to decisions makers and the public, without compromising the rigor of the sciences that inform it.

As an engineer, I am convinced that technology is critical for promoting the sustainable use of groundwater. There are plenty of technologies for groundwater exploration, monitoring, remediation, and extraction but also for its treatment and reuse. We can take advantage of digital technologies: blockchain, digital twins, Internet of Things, 5G, Artificial Intelligence, and smart irrigation for example. We must embrace them, but at the same time, be aware that we are not going to find a silver bullet but that the bigger the toolbox we have, the better. The more offer we have, the more inclusive technology may be, according to local capacities to produce and implement it. However, we do not only need research and development for “hard” sciences and technology but also to create institutions and policies that can embrace the interdisciplinary nature of the water problems.

We need national science policies to boost research and development for groundwater that forces professionals to leave the echo chamber of their disciplines and meet new perspectives. In addition, there is the emergent concept of science diplomacy that is appealing to groundwater resources, especially in transboundary contexts.

Besides the value of water, we share the value of pursuing the truth. Cooperation between, not only disciplines but countries that have different cultural heritages and perspectives of groundwater, will be beneficial to the parts involved. There are many opportunities for bilateral and multilateral cooperation to make a more efficient allocation of natural resources without compromising food and water security. If these agreements can include technology transfer but especially, capacity building, we will be able to make sustainable use of natural resources, including groundwater.

I believe that the most difficult issue in policymaking is to find coherence between global, national, and subnational policies and simultaneously, between water and other “sectorial” policies. The greater responsibility that government, industries, communities, and the public, have with the sustainable management of groundwater is to work under the Aristotelian principle that the whole is to be greater than the sum of its parts. Given our constraints as individuals and organizations, we are forced to reduce the scope of what we do, but that does not mean that the impact of our work is going to be limited to what we see. Just like with groundwater, what we value may be invisible to us.

Thank you very much for your attention.

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Other related links on this website:

• Keynote speech delivered by Ambassador Taye Atske-Selassie Amde
https://www.lmglobal.org/2022/04/17/keynote-speech-by-ambassador-taye-atskeselassie-amde-on-our-groundwater-how-can-we-work-together-to-manage-it-sustainably/

Virtual Event Invitation & Tentative Program
https://www.lmglobal.org/2022/03/11/wwd2022-groundwater-celebration-of-water-virtual-event-on-march-21-at-12pm-et/

Concept Note – Description
https://www.lmglobal.org/2022/01/31/2022wwd-our-groundwater-how-can-we-work-together-to-manage-it-sustainably/