No time to waste: “The hurrier we go, the behinder we get”
By Nikolai Sindorf. This essay is from AGWA’s August issue of the AGWA Guide Newsletter.
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These are not the times to waste water. I completely agree. Yet I find myself wondering about how our understanding of water 'wasted' might evolve in future. There is a certain relativity and directionality in who defines what is considered as 'waste', and at what 'time'? What is considered waste by one sector, might be considered gain by another. While water that is considered lost in one system, might be used to recharge another. In this, there should be a distinction on what is considered to be systemic losses, and where they end up. When considering systemic water resilience, feedback mechanisms and circularity will have to be included in the water use that is under consideration. This relativity becomes particularly evident in defining what 'water efficiency' is, or, how the singular focus on water efficiency could help to build resilience?
In Kyrgyzstan, I worked on introducing environmental flows into river basin planning, only to find out that government agencies considered any water left in the river as an inefficiency. A river with water still flowing in it is clearly a missed opportunity, and a dry riverbed is a good indicator of upstream water use efficiency. In the end, my most convincing argument to keep (some) water flowing in the river throughout the year was that the dry river beds were smelly and dirty with sewage, and created unhealthy conditions. These stagnant waters needed to be flushed, which meant maintaining some flow of clean river water throughout the year. There is some circularity in reasoning here, which justifies my reference to Alice in Wonderland.
In Egypt, I once supported the monitoring of water flowing out of Fayoum Oasis, both in amount and in quality of the water. This water was still of use to the lakes and protected areas at the downstream of the large oasis. Though the overall project focused on increasing water efficiency inside the oasis, this would inevitably result in a dwindling of flows and water quality into the lakes. Yet, after a couple of years, we discovered a sudden increase in water flows and improved water quality into the lakes, much to the delight of the protected area managers. It took some weeks to discover that this was the result of farmers secretly introducing paddy cultivation in the oasis. Paddy cultivation is illegal in Egypt because it requires maintaining a continuous layer of water across the fields throughout the growing season, which consumes excessive amounts of water in a desert climate and is considered highly water inefficient. The need for minimal but continuous water flow through these fields sends water downstream, which is considered as an irretrievable loss. Because of this, rice cultivation is prohibited, resulting in significantly higher prices of rice at the local markets. This situation created a dilemma: should water be allowed to be 'lost' through downstream flow—thereby sustaining the lakes and protected areas that depend on this water—or should the Fayoum Oasis maximize water efficiency by consuming all available water resources for agricultural production? ...Alice in Waterland...
When I started writing on this blog, I had to guard myself not to blame economic reasoning for the singular focus on water efficiency. My critical vision has always been that economic reasoning on itself will not save the world, after all, economics got us into this mess in the first place. There have been some good developments from hybrid economic approaches, with real strengths that we all benefit from, right? But, I flew into a passion when I learnt that SDG indicator 6.4.1 on water efficiency is expressed in dollars. Let me spell that out again: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations members in 2015, created 17 world Sustainable Development Goals. Goal number 6 is on clean water and sanitation; indicator 6.4.1, is on water efficiency and is expressed in United States Dollars.
T h a t m a k e s n o s e n s e a t a l l.
Hellegers and Van Halsema (2021) constructively highlight shortcomings in this approach. One of the issues they raise concerns that water is valued differently in each country's three sectors: agriculture, services, and industry, with the agricultural sector always receiving the lowest value. Though not encouraged in the guidelines, countries can improve their water efficiency by transferring water use from one sector to another. In such a setup, it would be a major distortion to bring in SDG water efficiency considerations into the water-food-energy nexus; as this will always go at the expense of agriculture. On top of this, environmental purposes are not even considered for water efficiency dollars. The authors raise many more shortcomings of the approach and propose to include water balances as an indicator for water efficiency. Including water balances would indeed be an improvement to the approach, but I still believe that the singular focus on water efficiency is mismatched and will not lead to progress on overall water resilience; neither in dollars or in cubic meters. In John Matthews blog on water efficiency (2021) the same concern is raised when introducing Jevon's Paradox; it argues that even within economic reasoning, a singular focus on efficiency of a resource will ultimately lead to its overexploitation. The idea is that when every water user invests in water efficiency, all must have prizes.
Yet, there is space to enforce water efficiency when considering resilient, adaptive water management. In this space, water efficiency becomes a modus operandi under predefined water scarcity conditions. This efficiency modus would require more intensive, more centralized management and the ability to enforce the system's infrastructure to secure efficiency. It requires a higher level of control and governance than under conditions when water is not scarce. It would require hybrid systems that could switch from flexible to efficient management. Systems that always operate under an efficiency regime cannot be resilient, since all water will be allocated or accounted for, no real flexibility is possible, and the system would collapse either under pressure of enforcement or under external shocks, such as extreme weather events, or climate change. When there is no water scarcity, the systems' water should flow more flexibility. Under such conditions, users can experiment and explore effective solutions, they experience a more secure resource use, which would allow for systems to transform and progress towards resilience. Just as there are more types of scarcity, there need to be more types of efficiency, for example: economic, technical, productive, allocation, ecological, social, thermodynamic, etcetera. The types of efficiency should facilitate and address the types of scarcity, just as the right key only fits the right lock.
So, from my perspective, this addresses the main question: How could a singular focus on water efficiency help build resilience? Perhaps it could; in the same way that pumping the last drop from a dry well is clearly the gold standard of resource optimization. Yes, adversity builds resilience, but surely we can find more constructive paths forward. Maybe the real question we should be asking is not 'How can we be more efficient?' but rather 'How can we build systems robust enough to be efficient when they need to be?' - systems that can maintain environmental flows in Kyrgyzstan rivers or allow beneficial 'losses' to sustain Egypt's downstream lakes. The answer to that question might just determine whether our water systems can evolve given the uncertainties ahead. After all, in our Alice in Waterland, sometimes the hurrier we go toward efficiency, the behinder we get from resilience, and that's one rabbit hole we'd be wise to avoid.
Nikolai Sindorf
Delft, Netherlands
August 2025