Peter Gleick was in Kathmandu this month to attend an international conference on Water Resource Human Rights and Governance organised by Nepal Water Conservation Foundation and Institute for Social and Environmental Transition. He spoke to Nepali Times about the need to make more efficient use of the water we have.

California and many parts of the developed world have built the main infrastructure for water supply and energy, and there is now the luxury of having a choice of options. But basic infrastructure for water supply is lagging in places like Nepal. Don't we need to address these issues first, and think about efficiency and cutting waste later?
Nepal has many options too. Basic water infrastructure is certainly needed, but it would be a mistake to ignore waste and improving efficiency. You have to decide what you need water for, and find the best way to provide it. You have to look at infrastructure from the ecological, hydrological and social points of view. The trouble is that we tend to look at only the supply side, and that is what we did in California in the early days: how can we bring ever-increasing amounts of water from the mountains to provide an ever-increasing demand in the cities. We built the physical infrastructure and we got the water, but we paid an ecological price for it. We found that although you have to meet the people's need for water, we also need to do it in a way that is comprehensive. We don't need water at a basic level, but we need it for waste disposal, for energy, for sanitation. Why build large, expensive dams to provide water that will be wasted?

Here in Kathmandu Valley there may well be a need for more basic infrastructure. I believe that water should be paid for, but when individuals and communities do not have even the most basic requirement of water for reasons of poverty, emergency or circumstance it is the responsibility of local communities and governments to work to provide basic water needs through subsidies or outright entitlement.

Most countries in the world have now given up building large dams, and in some countries even existing dams are being demolished. Here in the subcontinent, we see that there are flood-control and hydropower benefits of dams, but we also don't want to make the same mistakes as the West. Is there a way out?

Dams have brought benefits, and also brought great costs. In many parts of the world, the economic, ecological and political cost of building dams is now too high. In other parts of the world, we should not build dams the way we built them before. The World Commission on Dams worked two years on a report reviewing successes and failures in building dams. It doesn't say stop building dams. But it says if you want to build dams, you have to look at their true ecological, economic and other costs and benefits. We have to be conscious also about how decisions are made to build dams, are they inclusive, are they consultative with the people who will be affected. Then maybe the ones we do build will benefit the people. There is a right way and wrong way to go about dams. There are people who say all dams are bad, they are as wrong as those who say all dams are good. The truth is somewhere in between.

Here, in Nepal, we are looking at the role of pricing as a demand-side intervention in projects like Melamchi. How well has this worked in other countries?

This is a very important factor. Water should be properly priced, it is not a free good. But the reality in many countries is that the poor pay more for water than the rich, and they often get poor quality water. This brings up questions of equity, justice, governance, and even human rights. Water, if properly priced, will be used more efficiently. We can also do better by matching needs with different types of water. If you need safe drinking water, why use it to flush toilets? If you need it for irrigation, industrial use then you work on the supply accordingly. You have to match quality with type of use.

Your institute has done a lot of work on climate change. What are the latest findings, especially as it pertains to mountain regions?

We carried out a two-year study in the United States. Without doubt, the most important finding of that study was that mountain regions where there is perpetual snow, ice, and glaciers are more vulnerable to rising temperatures. Glaciers around the world are receding at a rapid rate. By 2050, we estimate that the Glacier National Park in the United States will have no glaciers left. There has been a warming trend since the last ice age, but it has accelerated in the last 100 years. Our main concern is how this will affect the dynamics of water in a changing climate regime. It is no longer a question of whether there is climate change, but how, by how much, and what we are going to do about it. It is time to begin planning for a changing climate.