Aditi Mukherji
is theme leader "Water and Air" at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu, Nepal. Prior to joining ICIMOD, Dr Aditi was a Senior Researcher at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), based at Colombo, Sri Lanka and then at New Delhi, India. She has also worked briefly at ICRISAT — another CGIAR center based in Hyderabad, India. She has over 12 years of research experience and her research revolves around institutions and policies of water resources management. She has worked in South Asia, Nile basin and in Central Asia. She has published over 50 peer reviewed research papers, including two edited books by Taylor and Francis. She was the Associate editor of Hydrogeology Journal till 2011 and regularly peer reviews articles for journals including World Development, Economic and Political Weekly, Agricultural Water Management, Irrigation Science, Journal of Environmental Management, American Journal of Water Resources, Energy Policy, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Ecological Economics among others. She is currently an executive committee member of the Permanent Consultative Committee on Groundwater set up by the GEF and FAO. She has attended over 40 international conferences, mostly as invited and keynote speaker. In 2012, she was awarded the Inaugural Norman Borlaug award for Field Research and Application, endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation and given by the World Food Prize Foundation for her policy work in West Bengal, India. Her work has been widely covered by media and she has been interviewed by all leading newspapers in India as well as by the BBC, Le Monde and National Geographic.
This blog is a repost from the {http://www.icimod.org/?q=13147|ICIMOD website} and reproduced here with kind permission by the author.
#box It is obvious that water and energy are interconnected in more ways than one. The most obvious connection is hydropower — the production of energy using water. But an equally important, but often overlooked, aspect of this nexus is the use of energy to produce water. This is exemplified by the pumping of groundwater. Groundwater is now the most important source of irrigation in the region — South Asia has roughly 25 million wells and tubewells, all used for agriculture. In Bangladesh and the plains of Nepal, much of the population depends on groundwater, which is often pumped with relatively expensive diesel fuel due to lack of electricity. The same holds true in the neighboring Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal. Both water and energy are needed to produce, process, and transport food — the third dimension of this nexus. The approach of looking at water, energy, and food within an interconnected nexus is now widely accepted and used to improve our understanding of their interlinkages at global, regional and local scales. I would like to highlight how this important nexus plays out in a mountain context. From a mountain perspective, there are at least three different, yet interrelated, ramifications of this nexus. First is the issue of upstream-downstream linkages within a shared, transboundary river basin. Mountains are the source of water, which then flows downstream to be used for various purposes, the most important of which is food production. Given the scarcity of land and uneven and often inhospitable terrain in the mountains, mountains cannot grow enough food to meet its needs, often sourcing its food from the plains. The plains, on the other hand, derive energy security from the hydro-electricity generated in mountain areas. This energy is used for many things, including the pumping of groundwater to grow crops. One key issue here is: how do we ensure that mountain communities are able to derive benefits from the services (water and energy) that they provide to downstream users? This calls for an integrated approach the spans entire river basins where nexus principles have been internalized by all key decision makers. This also needs to be underpinned by a framework for regional cooperation that ensures that energy and other services derived from the mountains are adequately paid for by downstream users. Another issue is that of the seasonality of water and energy demands. How does one meet the energy needs of dry season irrigation in the plains at a time when river water levels are running low? The obvious answer is to construct hydropower dams with storage. While such dams are indeed needed, the inherent fragility of mountain ecosystems makes them environmentally problematic. Here again, the nexus approach provides a less obvious, but equally appealing solution. The transition zone between mountains and plains happens to be an active recharge zone for groundwater. In the plains just below this transition zone, say in parts of Nepal Terai and in Indian Bihar, there is a large unmet irrigation demand during the summer season — a demand that is unmet even though groundwater is available in plenty. This is due to the lack of access to affordable energy. Electricity produced through hydropower schemes upstream can be used to exploit groundwater and bring down groundwater levels in the summer season and then the aquifer storage can be effectively recharged using monsoon flow. Again, this requires an integrated approach where surface and groundwater are co-managed. Finally, there is the issue of water, food, and energy security at a local scale in mountain regions. This calls for local solutions. Solar pumps are increasingly used in the mountains to transport water up from streams to settlements, which are often located on ridges high above deep river gorges, for household use. Furthermore, there are examples of dedicated small hydropower plants being used to generate electricity locally to pump up surface water from rivers to irrigate farms in the flat lands, or tar, in the mountains. Himalayan river systems play a significant role in downstream agriculture and food security in South Asia. The global community must look to mountains to resolve issues of energy, water, and food security, and to help people cope. To date, the conservation efforts of mountain people remain unrewarded, yet we have all reaped the benefits. Institutional mechanisms need to be established and strengthened to secure payment and reward mechanisms for mountain ecosystems services including surface and groundwater, water storage, and others relating to energy and food security. What happens to the mountains is of global concern — whether or not there will be enough food and energy for all will depend in part on what happens in mountain regions.