What is less understood is that our collective abuse and displacement of fresh water is also a serious cause of climate change and global warming. If we are to successfully address climate change, it is time to include an analysis of how our abuse of water is an additional factor in the creation of global warming as well as solutions that protect water and watersheds.

There are two major factors. The first is the actual displacement of water from where it is sustaining a healthy ecosystem as well as healthy hydrologic cycles. Because humanity has polluted so much surface water on the planet, we are now mining the groundwater far faster than it can be replaced by nature. New Scientist reports of a “little-heralded crisis” all over Asia as a result of the exponential drilling of groundwater. Water is moved from where nature has put it in watershed and aquifers (where we can access it) to other place where it is used for flood irrigation and food production – where much of it lost to evaporation – or to supply the voracious thirst of mega cities, where it is usually dumped as waste into the ocean.

AUTHOR: Maude Barlow, former senior advisor to the UN on water issues, is co-author of the bestseller Blue Gold (New Press) and chairperson of the Council of Canadians.

Water is also lost to ecosystems through global trade – water used in the in the production of crops or manufactured goods that are then exported (known as virtual trade in water). Over 20% of daily water used for human purpose is exported out of watersheds in this way. Water is also piped across long distances for industry leaving behind parched landscapes.

The second factor is the removal of the vegetation needed for a healthy hydrologic cycle. Urbanization, deforestation and wetland destruction greatly destroy water-retentive landscapes and lead to the loss of precipitation over the affected area.

Slovakian scientist Michal Kravcik and his colleagues explain that the living world influences the climate mainly by regulating the water cycle and the huge energy flows linked to it. Transpiring plants, especially forests, work as a kind of biotic pump, causing humid air to be sucked out of the ocean and transferred to dry land. If the vegetation is removed from the land, this natural system of biosphere regulation is interrupted. Soil erodes, reducing the content of organic material in the ground, thus reducing its ability to hold water. Dry soil from lost vegetation traps solar heat, sharply increasing the local temperature and causing a reduction in precipitation over the affected area. This process also destroys the natural sequestration of carbon in the soil, leading to carbon loss.

Of course, these two factors are deeply related. Just as removing vegetation from an ecosystem will dry up the soil, so too will removing water from an ecosystem mean reduced or non-existent vegetation.

Taken together, these two factors are hastening the desertification of the planet, and intensifying global warming. Even if we successfully address and reverse greenhouse gas emissions and our dependence on fossil fuels, Kravcik says, we will not be able to stop climate change if we do not deal with the impact of our abuse of water on the planet.

Unless we collectively address the crisis of fresh water and our cavalier treatment of the world’s water systems, we will not restore the climate to health.

Restoration of Watersheds

The solution to the water half of this crisis is the massive restoration of watersheds. Bring water back into parched landscapes. Return water that has disappeared by retaining as much rainwater as possible within the ecosystem so that water can permeate the soil, replenish groundwater systems, and return to the atmosphere to regulate temperatures and renew the hydrologic cycle. All human, industrial and agricultural activity must become part of this project, which could employ millions and alleviate poverty in the global South. Our cities must be ringed with green conservation zones and we must restore forests and wetlands – the lungs and kidneys of fresh water. For this to be successful, three basic laws of nature must be addressed.

1) It is necessary to create the conditions that allow rainwater to remain in local watersheds. This means restoring the natural spaces where rainwater can fall and where water can flow. Water retention can be carried out at all levels: roof gardens in family homes and office buildings; urban planning that allows rain and storm water to be captured and returned to the earth; water harvesting in food production; capturing daily water discharge and returning it clean to the land, not to the rising oceans.

2) We cannot continue to mine groundwater supplies at a rate greater than natural recharge. If we do, there will not be enough water for the next generation. Governments everywhere must undertake intensive research into their groundwater supplies and regulate groundwater takings before these underground reservoirs are gone. This may mean a shift in policy from export to domestic and local production.

3) We must stop polluting our surface and groundwater sources – and we must back up this intention with strict legislation. Water abuse in oil and methane gas production and in mining must stop. We must wean ourselves of industrial and chemical-based agricultural practices and listen to the many voices sounding the alarm about the rush toward water-guzzling bio fuel farming. We need to promote “subsidiarity,” whereby national policies and international trade rules support local food production in order to protect the environment and promote local sustainable agriculture. Such policies also discourage the virtual trade in water. Countries should also limit or ban the mass movement of water by pipeline. Government investment in water and wastewater infrastructure would save huge volumes of water lost every day. Local laws could enforce water-harvesting practices at every level.

Toward a Water Secure World

Clearly, for this rescue plan to be successful, governments around the world must acknowledge the water crisis and the part the role water abuse plays in the warming (and drying) of the planet. This in turn means that a nation’s water resources must be considered in every government policy at all levels. Nations must undertake intensive studies to ascertain the health of watersheds and groundwater reserves. All activities that will impact water must conform to a new ethic – backed by law – that protects water sources from pollution and over-pumping. This will likely mean a strong challenge to government policies that favour unlimited global economic growth.

Nearly two billion people live in water-stressed regions of the earth. Until now, the UN has addressed this terrible reality with a program to give them access to groundwater sources. But current levels of groundwater takings are unsustainable. To truly realize the universal right to water, and to protect water for nature’s own uses, means a revolution in the way we treat the world’s finite water resources. There is no time to lose.

And a key topic under discussion during the deliberations in Copenhagen— environmental service payment programs— will be important to the people living in the closest connection to a commons-based way of life: indigenous people and rural communities in the developing world. . What’s the fair way to compensate indigenous and rural communities for their important role in stabilizing the climate?

Colonialism and its more modern forms haven’t been kind to rural communities and their ecosystems. Globalization and its trade agreements have tended to steamroll rural enterprises by flinging borders open to imports and making it cheap and easy to extract natural resources. With their land and water gobbled up by energy, mineral and crop exports, communities’ forests and soils have been transformed into things like hydroelectric power, gold and baby carrots.

Insult to injury, this style of extractive economic development is half-justified by scapegoating communities for being lousy stewards of their natural resources, recklessly planting cornfields on steep hillsides or burning too much wood for cooking fuel. The logic has been something like: Instead of (unsustainably) growing food for family consumption, why don’t small farmers and foresters cash in on their comparative advantage and grow melons for export or lease land to transnational timber companies?

Yet, consensus is building that the gains for poor countries following this development advice have been few or negative. Now along comes another idea to help them.

The global market in climate change mitigation is still taking shape through environmental service payment instruments like carbon sequestration credits and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD). Rural communities are on the cusp of being injected with a volume of foreign investment the likes of which may even surpass centuries of coffee plantations and gold mines. These new products not only offset the carbon footprint of unsustainable economic growth but will purportedly chip away at rural poverty. Many hurting communities – bleeding from failed farms, broken ecosystems and their youth migrating away to find work – are happy to take the man’s dollars to plant his eucalyptus trees on their farmland.

As with the Native Americans going to work at casinos, however, communities may have to exchange traditional livelihoods – which had put feeding the family and the nation first – for something different, say working for a wage at a biofuel or carbon sequestration plantation. Impulses towards autonomy and food sovereignty may dissipate as communities become integrated into this new economy.

It’s ugly out there at the climate change trough. On the opening day of the Copenhagen talks, a $10 billion mitigation fund was described on BBC by a developing country representative as only “enough to buy our children coffins” In preparation for the rain of resources, some countries are legislating how monies will flow – from environmental ministry to forest agency to landowners. Intra-governmental agency competition for the monies is shaping up to be fierce. Corruption antennae are perking up to detect misuse of funds as has been alleged in Mexico’s Pro Arbol reforestation program, in which up to 90% of planted trees have died and politically connected landowners received large cash payments.

International environmental NGOs are presenting their programs at the same time that corporate interests draw up their plans. It seems likely that farm and forest organizations will be secondary beneficiaries after governmental, business and non-governmental intermediaries decide what activities and which actors qualify for the funding. Grassroots associations and their federations of producers may get scraps – but not before the big boys get fat.

With power relations so askew, it’s not hard to spin pessimistic scenarios. Is there a winning scenario for rural communities and the planet?

Conservation research is showing that rural communities that live in and around them in forests are the best stewards for protecting them. It’s becoming increasingly clear that we can provide rural communities with the technical and financial tools they need to better preserve both their livelihoods and ecosystems.

The Holy Grail of climate payments would be for communities to be compensated for what they do and know already – more or less. More or less because technological improvements are clearly essential – ones that many farm and forest organizations would be eager to make if they had the support.

And there’s no reason to count only on the forest sector for its contribution, even as environmental payment programs tend to be singularly focused there. Greening the food system through agroecology can make a substantial contribution to mitigating climate change – advances that land reform networks like the Via Campesina seek to make the norm. Inter-mixing annual crops with trees, reforesting watersheds, supporting local markets, reducing tillage and backing off of petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers all diminish agriculture’s substantial contribution to global warming. It is now widely believed that the same technologies that are good for climate stabilization are good for the soil.

Likewise, managing our water as a permanent commons and public trust will have a profoundly stabilizing impact on the climate. Global justice advocate Maude Barlow proposes declaring not only water, but watersheds themselves, as a commons.

These more thoughtful resource management systems and sustainable technologies might have been standard if the green revolution, water privatization and U.S. agriculture policies hadn’t provided such perverse incentives and turned things so topsy-turvy. The repair will be costly – a perfect use of climate stabilization monies. Importantly, ensuring stable land tenure, including collective titles, is part of the repair. Implementing land reform programs, often discarded as failed and anachronistic, is a friend to climate stabilization.

This then is one scenario in which climate change monies could help rural producers and the environment – without pushing farming families off the land or turning them into forest rangers for a transnational plantation.

Are the chances good that climate change mitigation programs will play out this way? Despite the long odds, I’ll roll the dice, hoping against hope that rural communities can negotiate a fair deal here. It’s the winning ticket for rural communities and the planet.

Water binds all of nature and humanity together in one big (ailing) ecosystem. In our current legal framework, future generations of people and animals have a hard time getting their voices heard about how water ought to be managed with their health in mind. Public debates are essential. Recent articles on the public health disaster of sewage overflows, California’s new water barons and India’s watershed stewards inspire both head-banging outrage and hopeful ways forward.

In a recent National Geographic article Crispino Lobo of India’s Watershed Organization Trust (WOTR), describes basic steps for watershed repair. By constructing earthen dams and terraces, the WOTR slows down water so that it can be absorbed into the ground rather than wash away the soil. “Where the rain runs, we make it walk; where it walks, we make it crawl,” explained Mr. Lobo. Groundwater reserves are in turn recharged. “If people are able to improve the land and restore the soil,” Lobo said. “You start seeing a change in how they see themselves.” Imagine the ecological and spiritual remediation, not to mention staggering economic savings, when our watershed management practices follow this simple advice.

WOTR’s work is a close cousin to that of Rajendra Singh’s, the rain gatherer, whose work is described in a series of case studies entitled “Local Control and Management of Our Water Commons: Stories of Rising to the Challenge,” complied by Our Water Commons The Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS) movement with which Ragendra works in arid Rajasthan has constructed similar dirt dams called johads and reforested the Alwar region’s watersheds. Just as ecology would predict, flow has returned to the area’s rivers as has groundwater availability.

While the WOTR and TBS stories might make water justice dreams seem within reach, Yasha Levine in How Limousine Liberals, Water Oligarchs and Even Sean Hannity Are Hijacking Our Water Supply, tells a story that gets your bile boiling.

In the mid 90s, behind closed doors, a large underground water reservoir in Southern California was privatized and became the property of the Kern County Water Bank, an entity principally owned by billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick. These Beverly Hills “farmers” also own Paramount Agribusiness and Fiji Water. Levine reports that, “After the water enters the Kern County Water Bank, it stops being a public resource that could otherwise be used to irrigate crops locally.”

Lubricating the deal was the creation of a “paper water” trading mechanism, a crazy Wall Street-type instrument not terribly different than those economy-exploding mortgage-backed securities. Paper water ended up fueling much of Southern California’s subdivision sprawl, satisfying developers’ requirements to show that water existed to satisfy families’ household needs even when there was no real water.

The Resnicks have added to their nearly $2 billion fortune by selling publicly subsidized water back to the state at a very nice profit. This modern-day horror story is beautifully reported in Levine’s story as well as in Public Citizen’s report, Water Heist: How Corporations Are Cashing in on California’s Water, The Public Citizen report recommends sensible steps to manage California’s water as a commons: return the Kern County Water Bank to public control, banish the paper water market, and ensure citizen oversight of water and irrigation districts.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Brooklyn’s sewage system overflows after just a 20 minute rain. Urbanization and sprawl has paved over so much earth that rain waters end up in storm sewers rather than reabsorbed in the ground. The old infrastructure just can’t handle the surge. Nationwide, such overflows result in 20 million water-borne illnesses each year. So tells an excellent report in the New York Times, Sewers at Capacity, Waste Poisons Waterways, part of a series entitled Toxic Waters: A series about the worsening pollution in American waters and regulators.

New York City officials warn that it would cost $58 billion to upgrade systems so that the overflows won’t occur, raising water and sewage bills by 80 percent. Is that a scare tactic, a feeble excuse not to do the work or just uncreative officials talking? I have no reason to believe the price tag is incorrect, but what about some imagination here with pro-environmental and pro-equity payment schemes? The article provides some terrific ideas — requiring parking lots to include landscaped areas to absorb rainwater and requiring porous pavement on sidewalks and roads. And what about pursuing more conventional policies like raising development taxes to pay for water infrastructure and cross-subsidizing rates?

Hmm, create jobs through upgrading antiquated sewer systems, restore ailing watersheds through the patient and persistent participation of community organizations or privatize our most precious liquid in a convoluted wealth-fare scandal? Readers are smart; I say bring the stories on and watch citizens water activism grow like a well-watered corn stalk. The grassroots revolt reclaiming our water commons won’t be far behind.

Daniel Moss is co-coordinator of Our Water Commons and currently lives in Oaxaca, Mexico with his family. He served on the media team for the Peoples’ Water Forum held in Istanbul in March, 2009. This post originally appeared on Grist on November 23, 2009.