Watch: Understanding Peak Water Can Help Us “Avoid the Worst Disasters,” Says Peter Gleick

Kate Diamond

“The advantage of the idea of peak water is that it lets us think differently about the limits that face us,” said MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and Pacific Institute President Peter Gleick in this short interview with ECSP. Gleick, who launched the latest edition of The World’s Water at the Wilson Center last week, has been talking about peak water since 2009 when he and Pacific Institute colleague Meena Palaniappan first wrote about the concept in that year’s water report (see our interview from then too).

Renewable vs. Non-Renewable

Peak water is “the idea that we are effectively running into constraints and limits on our water use,” said Gleick, in part because of population growth. “It lets us think differently about the limits to the water that’s available for us to use, and about the water that it’s appropriate for us to use, and about the policies to put in place to avoid the bad things that happen when we reach or exceed peak constraints.”

Gleick breaks the concept into three categories:

Peak renewable water: “Where we can no longer increase the amount of water we’re taking out of rivers – when we take all of it.”
Peak nonrenewable water: “Where, very much like oil, we’re over-pumping a non-renewable ground water supply – a nonrenewable aquifer – and it becomes more and more expensive and more and more damaging and more and more difficult to pump ground water.”
Peak ecological water: “Where the use of additional water causes more ecological harm than it provides economic benefit.”

“Without a Doubt We Are Exceeding Limits”

Across all three categories, said Gleick, we are very bad at understanding limits. “We don’t measure peak water carefully, we don’t collect the data necessary to understand when we’re approaching or exceeding peak water limits.”

“But without a doubt we are exceeding peak water limits in more and more regions of the world,” he said. “And that’s going to have implications for our economies. It’s going to have implications for our environment.”

“Understanding and applying the idea of peak water is the first step toward developing strategies and institutions to avoid the worst disasters associated with overuse and inappropriate use of our water resources.”