Humanity's Access to Fresh Water in Peril, Conference of 500 Water Scientists Says [VIDEO]

A global summit of 500 of the world's leading water scientists concluded their four-day conference in Bonn, Germany with a stark message: Without major reforms, within two generations the majority of the people on Earth will "be living under the handicap of severe pressure on fresh water." The scientists said the handicap will be self-inflicted and entirely avoidable.

Access to water has defined where civilizations have flourished, and now mismanagement, overuse and climate change threaten the world's fresh water supply, the scientists said in a report titled "The Bonn Declaration."

The thrust of the Bonn Declaration is that human activity plays a central role in the behavior of the global water system. The quest for short-term water solutions, such as building dams, is seen as a detriment to long-term water securty for the planet.

"Faced with a choice of water for short-term economic gain or for the more general health of aquatic ecosystems, society overwhelmingly chooses development, often with deleterious consequences on the very water systems that provide the resource," the scientists wrote in the declaration.

Anik Bhaduri, Executive Officer of the Global Water System Project, a water security think tank that spearheaded the four-day conference, said humans have hijacked the planet's water system.

"We have altered the Earth's climatology and chemistry, its snow cover, permafrost, sea and glacial ice extent and ocean volume-all fundamental elements of the hydrological cycle. We have accelerated major processes like erosion, applied massive quantities of nitrogen that leaks from soil to ground and surface waters and, sometimes, literally siphoned all water from rivers, emptying them for human uses before they reach the ocean. We have diverted vast amounts of freshwater to harness fossil energy, dammed major waterways, and destroyed aquatic ecosystems."

The water scientists stressed that the world has entered a new era: the Anthropocene. The recently-coined term describes the geological epoch characterized by humans' growing dominance of the Earth's environment. The Anthropocene, scientists say, is a planetary transformation as profound as the last epoch-defining event - the retreat of the glaciers 11,500 years ago.

Bhaduri said that the Anthropocene underscores the point that human activities and their impacts have a global significance for the future of all living species, including humans.

"Humans are changing the character of the world water system in significant ways with inadequate knowledge of the system and the consequences of changes being imposed," Bhaduri said.

For water security for all, the scientists said chronic mismanagement and overuse of water must be addressed. The conferences issued six recommendations as a "blueprint" for a global initative to ensure that humans have access to fresh water in the future:

1) Make a renewed commitment to adopt a multi-scale and interdisciplinary approach to water science in order to understand the complex and interlinked nature of the global water system and how it may change now and in future.

2) Execute state-of-the-art synthesis studies of knowledge about fresh water that can inform risk assessments and be used to develop strategies to better promote the protection of water systems.

3) Train the next generation of water scientists and practitioners in global change research and management, making use of cross-scale analysis and integrated system design.

4) Expand monitoring, through traditional land-based environmental observation networks and state-of-the-art earth-observation satellite systems, to provide detailed observations of water system state.

5) Consider ecosystem-based alternatives to costly structural solutions for climate proofing, such that the design of the built environment in future includes both traditional and green infrastructure.

6) Stimulate innovation in water institutions, with a balance of technical- and governance-based solutions and taking heed of value systems and equity. A failure to adopt a more inclusive approach will make it impossible to design effective green growth strategies or policies.

Without such a framework, the scientists concluded, "we anticipate highly fragmented decision-making and the persistence of maladaptive approaches to water management."