 So welcome everybody, today we're going to be discussing the value of water and to do that, I have brought in several colleagues. Why don't we start with, why don't you all start with introducing yourselves? And maybe Irene, you could start. Then Harriman, then Graham and then Jung, please. Yeah, okay, good morning. My name is Rene Leonardelli. I'm a union researcher and PhD fellow at IC Delft in the Department of Water Governance. And I'm also part of the WIGO Network, which is a network of scholars and activists who work around a grounded understanding of feminist political ecology. And my background is in social sciences, anthropology and sociology, and my research specifically focuses on processes of agrarian change and water reallocation in Maharashtra, India from a feminist perspective. Okay, thank you. Hello, I'm Hermann Schmidt. I'm a senior lecturer and researcher in the Water Governance Department. I'm interested in the politics of valuing water and that is about how it matters whose values end up in valuation studies and also whose do not. Okay, thank you. Graham. I'm Graham Jurt. I'm a professor of hydrology at IC Delft and the head of the Department of Water Resources and Ecosystems. And I think that gives you a bit of an indication of my background in largely in landscape hydrology. There's a lot of experience from Southern Africa where I spent 20 years at the University of Pasadena before joining IHE about two and a half years ago. Thanks, Anne Young, please. Hello, my name is Yong Jiang. I'm a senior lecturer of water resource economics at IC Delft. My background is environment and resource economics. But now my research and education focus is on water. So how should we use economic approach to better understand the water and to better manage water resource. Before I joined IHE, I studied and worked for several years in the U.S. And at this moment, my main education course is water resource economics. But I also do research related to water and environment economics and policy. Okay, thank you. So to go to our first question, I would like to ask from your perspective, what does valuing water mean to you? And maybe Yong, maybe you can kick us off. Valuing water to me means how we should understand the importance of water to different users, to different stakeholders. And it's very important to take those different perspectives, different understanding of the importance of water. And I think in our societies, that kind of understanding of water values and importance can be very different across users, across also stakeholders. And also it means directly and also indirectly. And it can be means by how we manage water, how we regard water. And here I wanted to give some examples in our societies. Everybody understand water has a big value. But when it comes to management and the practice, the valuing water doesn't automatically translate into understanding the importance of water. For example, in a society we still see a lot of waste of water, no efficiency use of water, a lot of leakage of water or water pollution. So that also means we're not appropriately valuing water in the way we should do. And also I wanted to say something about the economic perspective. In economics, valuing water means we need to understand the economic value of this water. And the economic value is really refers to the importance of water for contributing to human well-being and contributing to the utility of human society. So everything is valuable from human perspective. We think that there is an economic value. Okay. Thanks, Joan. Herman, could you also provide your perspective and what does valuing water mean to you? Yes, sure. Thanks. For me it's very important that we engage in discussions about valuing water. It's a long time ago, since the dominant view in universities and institutes like IHE, that we consider water as a free gift of nature. We don't do that anymore. But what do we have now? And now often water is conceptualized as a scarce resource for global development. And I think it's important to realize that this is a very powerful way, but not the only way. And also I think that it's often a very social way. Behind it is often a very simplistic notion of property rights in which one thing has only one owner. I think it's important to think about whose values are discussed and what value of water. What values of water is there? And for whose problems are these values, whose actualizations mobilized? So if we take a particular framework of valuing water, who does that serve? And I think these frameworks that we use and the studies we do have real implications and how do these different frameworks and values interact, that's very important to me. And that's what I'd like to think about further and discuss further in this interview. Okay, great. Thanks. And could you also provide your perspective on valuing water? Yes. Thank you. So, yeah, as I mentioned, I also believe that the value of water is not just a matter of scarcity or abundance or of efficiency, or definitely it's not just related to service provision to fulfill human needs. But it is very much related to cultural and spiritual meaning, symbols and uses, roles and power relations related to water. So how we value water is very much context-specific and also shaped very much along lines of gender, class, ethnicity and other social factors. So it is something very subjective and situated. And of course these multiple ways of using, experiencing and knowing water relates to different ways of valuing water, but also beyond society or humans. I also think it's important to reflect on how water is essential for all human but also non-human life. So if you think about a river or a lake or any other water body, it is somehow anthropocentric and limited to think just about it in terms of human needs or about which human needs it can fulfill. But we should think which other living beings, animals, trees, plants, fungi, trees are dependent on that body of water. So considering the well-being of both human and more than human beings in relation to that water is also very important to really value water. Okay, thank you. Dana, maybe Graham, you can continue. Well, I think the other speakers have covered the topic very nicely. So I can just add to what they've said. Water has multiple values. And to me, obviously it has a value in its utility for washing for drinking. And I pay for that as it comes out of a tap because I'm lucky I live in a place where water comes out of a tap. But I'm also a kayaker. So water has a recreational value to me. So that's another value. And the interesting thing about water is I think it has all these values for different people. And it also changes in space and time. So often we say about water too much, too little, too dirty. And it has a different sort of value in each of those circumstances. I think what's happened quite a lot over the past few years is we've seen a real drive towards the monetization of water. It was Oscar Wilde who originally said we know the price of everything in the value of nothing. And that seems to be a message that a lot of people are driving at the moment. I think that the World Water Day on valuing water is apt in that sort of context because it's really trying to bring across the different ways in which water can be valued to society. And as Arena pointed out, not only to human society. Yeah, thank you very much for that as well. So World Water Day concentrates on valuing water also to start up this discussion. What water means to different people. So what purpose, academically speaking, does discussing or studying the value of water serve? Joel, maybe you could start off on this and I have unmuted you so I will unmute you now. In terms of purpose, I think knowing the value of water is very important because if we do not know the value of water and then things can go wrong. And water will receive no attention in policy decision making. And I wanted to give an example. In the case of water allocation, some uses will receive high attention in decision making. For example, those economic use of water and for industrial use of water. Because those uses can generate a lot of market value and generate a lot of money. And so the water used in those sectors, business sector, can get a lot of attention. But however, in terms of environment, for example, nowadays we understand the environmental flow is highly important to support the ecosystems. But somehow the economic value of water in supporting the environmental flow does not have a market value. Because people do not normally buy the environmental flow in a market setting. So that's why the environmental flow often get in attention, receive no attention, receive no priorities in policy decision making process. So that's why value of water in the correct way is very important. We need to bring up the economic value of the environmental water use. And so another example I would like to give is about wastewater treatment. Because we need to treat wastewater because water pollution can generate a lot of damage and also to the health, to the property. And if we do not understand the damage amount that then people, the policy makers will put a lower priority on wastewater treatment effort. And in terms of budget allocation, in terms of government actions. So that's why the value in water is very important in this case. Okay, thank you. Herman, could you elaborate on this? And I will also unmute you. Yeah, sure. Thanks. For me, the purpose is to contribute to more just and sustainable water distributions. And the big question, of course, is for whom? And I'll also give an example of a project I worked in with colleagues. I actually engaged with partners along the Nile in a project called Accounting for Nile Waters. And in that project, we presented different ways of valuing water. And one of the projects we studied is a small holder irrigation scheme in Sudan. And that was on top of that, so it was removed and was a new efficient pivot irrigation scheme was built. So there's now these two parts sitting together. And then we presented these different ways of valuing water. So one way, a very powerful way, was in water productivity maps. And they have an implied message. So in these maps, the water productivity, so the amount of crops produced per drop is displayed. So there's high values, which the message is, okay, this is valuable here. And there's low values. So this is not valuable. So the other way of valuing water we displayed or explored is through storylines with stories and pictures of those who lived in the different irrigation schemes. And they included like their experience with water, which included a violent history of how they got the land and the associated water rights. So it's a very different image of valuing water. And I think if we indeed, if we want to have more just and sustainable water use, it's important to discuss which of these images we use and for which purpose. I think in the university's knee jerk reaction, that happened also in that project, is that, okay, we can now translate these storylines and images into some values in individual grid cells. And then we have kind of a social water accounting system. But that's problematic for a couple of reasons. One is that many of the relations in these stories are not so easily fitable in grid cells. But more important perhaps is that in that way the values of the users are converted into the values of the developers. And that's a tremendously powerful, in a way you could say also a colonial move. So perhaps we should more often turn this around and find creative ways to do that as well. And that's what excites me. So to see also how we could maybe turn those values in the map and get them into these stories. And then we have, for me, that is an exciting dimension of advancing this discussion of valuing water. Okay, thanks very much. Irene, could you also talk a little bit about what the purpose of discussing the value of water serves in your eyes? Yes, I mean, of course, as we said, where and how much and which water flows is not just related to geographical or geomorphological reasons, but it's very much shaped by politics. And yeah, I also grew up in a place where water is very abundant. And I gave having fresh, safe, clean water for granted for a long time during my life. But for instance, where I conduct research in Maharashtra in India, water there is very scarce and also very unequally distributed. So for me, for instance, during my fieldwork and I conducted most of my research, most of my fieldwork in one village in Maharashtra. And there water has always been very scarce. So the people there always had to use ground water, the little ground water available very carefully. And a sign of how they value water for me is how, for instance, they gave a name to the drinking water well of the village. They called it Sakarbhai, which in Marathi in the local language means sugar lady because they used to say, okay, we always had very little water available. But that was the purest, the cleanest in the area. So for them, kind of giving a character of personification to this village was a way of valuing the little water that was available. And this changed nowadays because since like starting a few years ago, they started using wastewater to irrigate their farms. Wastewater that is transported through an infrastructure from the city of Pune to the village. So now water scarcity is less of a problem, but this wastewater partly contaminated the aquifer of the village. So it contaminated the drinking water well, the Sakarbhai well. So now they say how the water of this drinking water well is not so sweet, is not so pure as they used to be. So looking at how people perception way of knowing water and also navigating water contamination changed throughout time. And also how it changes according to their roles and relations. But it was Herman was saying, right, like a woman farmer that is used to go and fetch water at this drinking water well every day, looks at it very differently from a man farmer who uses that water only for irrigation purposes, for instance. Or from a child who goes with the mother or an elderly person that has seen the story of this well changing very much throughout his life or her life. So yeah, looking at these stories from an anthropological perspective, political ecology perspective in my case is a way of exploring in a different way the value of water. Thanks. Beautiful stories. Graham, do you have anything to add to these perspectives, please? Yeah, you know, it's a real dilemma as to how you value water and to get that message across to society. And I've sort of come to accept that the economic approach is useful. If it's properly contextualized, and it's certainly the type of language that a lot of the policy and decision makers use. So, I think it is useful to follow that approach and within some restrictions and parameters and guidance. So maybe an example I can give of that is work that I did in South Africa before I got to IHE was we really looked at water security and the catchment and where water comes from. And for many people water comes from a tap. Water doesn't come from a tap. It comes at its source from the hydrology of the landscape. So the interaction between rainfall, vegetation, soil, all of those things contribute to that bulk water supply or the aquifer or whatever the cases that people ultimately use. So we thought, okay, people discount this value completely to zero. They don't even think about it. So how do we get a message across that producing the water from the landscape is valuable. And ultimately we went and monetary route with that. And the way we did it was actually to look at restoration cost, because these landscapes become degraded. Now we've actually just entered the United Nations decade on restoration, which is also quite an interesting sort of theme that we can pick up at some stage. But what we could show with this work was that the cost of restoration through in this case restoring grasslands to their better state by removing invasive alien vegetation or sorting out over grazing. We could come up with a cost per cubic meter of doing that, of water that the landscape produced. And what we could see from that work was that cost of the cubic meter from restoration work was actually very comparable with some of the large infrastructure development projects that we were seeing to supplement water supply in that catchment. And in South Africa, the landscape and the way that it's producing water has become known as ecological infrastructure. So it highlights the link between natural systems providing goods and services to people and the built infrastructure that does that. So the other interesting thing about that work was one we showed that the cost of producing this water was comparable with these projects. But then we extended that work beyond just restoration and we highlighted maintenance because of course it's cheaper to maintain than repair. We do it with our cars. We should do it with our bridges, our pipelines, all of these things. So we need to maintain ecological infrastructure as well. But it doesn't cost nothing. There's a cost to looking after the landscape. But what we could see is that that cost is very, very low. And a small amount of contribution by water users would maintain those landscapes for a long, long time in a very good condition. So through that sort of process, we were able to really value the landscapes that produce the water in monetary terms. Now, of course, those landscapes have multiple values, not just water producing. So from a water perspective, they were clearly valuable. But what we could also then highlight was the multiple values associated with those landscapes, including biodiversity, things like that. And also the other opportunities for valuing water, which are non-monetary. Thanks for that as well. So as we can see, the term of valuing water varies greatly also in the projects that you've done and in the work, the research that you've been doing. How does being part of IHE Delft, the community, how does that advance these kinds of discussions, like discussion about valuing water? Who would like to say something about that? I'm just going to open the floor. Well, I can say something about that. I think we can see just in this discussion, I've learned a whole lot from my colleagues. And obviously in the COVID times, we missed those lunchtime discussions where we could take that bit further. But I think it's really interesting what I've heard today, and some of it I know about, but a lot I didn't. The other thing about IHE, I think, is that because we work with developing countries with very strong partnerships with institutes in the South, and that we have a multinational staff who've come from all over the world, we bring different perspectives on the value of water into the institution. And together with our students, we share those and also learn from our students who also come from places in the world where there are very different ways of valuing water. Well said, beautiful. Anybody else have any additions to that? Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, we haven't been at IHE for a long time now. And I miss that a lot because definitely it's a place where many water worlds meet. And it's not always easy. I mean, there are sometimes discussions and clashes. They don't always understand what engineers say about water and they don't always understand what I say about water. But it's definitely interesting to learn from one another, to listen about so many different stories and learn from a great amount of experiences and knowledges that come together within one place or so. Yeah, I think it's a nice place to be and value water together in different ways. Yes, Herman, do you also want to add something? Yes, thanks. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with Graham and Irene. I think the diversity in our institute is a big treasure and it brings with it and in it is a wealth of ideas and realities of valuing water. And that's the beauty, I think, of IHE that we are all tapping into this treasure and that drives our creativity and it helps us to achieve our mission, I think, of indeed working together for more sustainable and just futures. Thanks for this debate. Yes, you're most welcome. And Jung, I don't know if you have a final thing to say as well. Yeah, I want to say something. I think IHE Delft is a unique place, attracting people from all around the world, folks under water and environmental issues. And when they come to IHE, they bring different perspectives, different knowledge, also different personal experiences. That's a treasure. All of us appreciate very much and value very much. And also here we have a great education program running from all aspects of water, from science, engineering, all the way up to management and governance and policy. I think it's a unique place to learn all those different perspectives. And the most importantly, we value both disciplinary knowledge but also interdisciplinary collaborations to address the most important issue for sustainable development. Thank you very much for that as well, Jung. And I have to admit I can't agree with you all more. And I think that's why I enjoy my work in communications at the Institute so very much throughout all these years. So thank you all very much for agreeing to collaborate in this interview. It was really nice listening to all of your stories. And I also hope that the audience who's watching this video enjoys this. So thank you very much. And I hope to see you in person soon. Okay, bye. Thank you. Bye.