The Ven Te Chow Memorial Lecture: Environment and Development: Urgent Need for a Water Perspective

Abstract

This paper contains the text of the Chow Memorial Lecture, delivered at the VIIth World Congress on Water Resources Rabat, Morocco, May 13–18, 1991. The paper addresses water-cycle related environmental problems. Three essential water functions are crucial for the disturbances introduced by the interventions in life-support systems known as “environmental problems”: water as a necessity of life on all scales from the cell to the planet: water as a solvent continuously moving above and below the ground surface, and the water-wetting of the landscape due to partitioning disturbances. The second part of the paper analyzes water-cycle related development problems, demonstrating that drought-proneness is today at the core of the problems in the most poverty-stricken countries. There, development is equivalent to challenging water scarcity (seasonal, interannual, or local), and environmental vulnerability. Particularly fatal is rapid population growth, especially as there are few models dealing with high population pressure on a finite, scarce, and highly seasonal water resource that may be copied from the industrialized world. The paper concludes that water is at the core of both the dominating environmental problems of today and of the development problems. Consequently, it is urgent to bridge the gap between the environmental lobby, preparing for the Brazil Conference, and the water specialists acting from on inherited platform of water knowledge to which Ven Te Chow skillfully and abundantly contributed, but which he also completely summarized and described in classical works.