Water for people.pdf - WHO Thailand Digital Repository

1 7 8 / C H A L L E N G E S T O L I F E A N D W E L L - B E I N GCities: Competing Needs in an Urban EnvironmentBox 7.4: New York City – maximizing public participation while protecting water qualityNew York City (NYC) has one of the largest public watersupply systems in the world, providing water to over 8 millioncity residents. The water is under the public jurisdiction ofthe city’s Department of Environment. However, as 73 percentof the watershed was privately owned, the NYCDepartment of Environmental Protection (DEP) developed astrategy to integrate private landowners into the planningprocess. As part of this strategy, the city works withfarmers to foster understanding of how their behaviouraffects downstream water quality and to provide incentivesfor implementing protection programmes (DEP, 2001).DEP’s current success in implementing watershed controlhas relied extensively on this kind of public and privateinvolvement in management decisions.NYC has developed an innovative set of economicalternatives for protecting water quality for one of theworld’s largest public water systems. The DEP’sprogramme includes the following six measures.■ Watershed Agricultural Programme: NYC funds thedevelopment and implementation of best managementpractices for the watersheds’ farmland, including thedesign, implementation and subsidizing of Whole FarmPlans that address environmental issues on a farm whileupholding farm business.■ Land Acquisition: of the total 480,000 hectares of watershedland, NYC has identified approximately 101,250 as especiallyvital to protecting future water quality. As of 2001, NYC haspurchased more than 3,650 hectares of this land.■ Watershed Regulations: a set of stricter standards passedin 1997 regulates development and projects in thewatershed.■ Environmental and Economic Partnership Programmes: NYChas funded partnership programmes to encouragecooperation among watershed stakeholders.■ Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) Upgrades: thirty-fourof the watershed’s total fifty-seven WWTPs are privatelyowned and operated. All have agreed to DEP-approvedupgrades. NYC has also upgraded the city-owned plants.■ Protection of Kensico Reservoir: both the Catskill andDelaware aqueducts drain into the Kensico Reservoir, whichfunnels 90 percent of NYC’s water supply. The DEP isaiming to reduce the local non-point source pollution inthis reservoir.Source: Prepared for the World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) by V. Srinivasan,P.-H. Gleick and C. Hunt at the Pacific Institute, 2002.related to water and sanitation provision have been poorlymanaged. Existing freshwater resources remain unprotected and areoften continuously degraded or depleted. Surface water sources areoften polluted; very few cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America haverivers flowing through them that are not heavily contaminated, andmuch the same applies to nearby lakes, estuaries and seas.Watersheds are often degraded because of ineffective controls onindustrial and urban developments. Although most nations have theenvironmental legislation in place to limit water pollution, it is rarelyenforced (Hardoy et al., 2001). It is also common for urbanexpansion to take place over ecologically important areas such aswetlands and mangroves. Meanwhile, for many large cities,powerful industrial and commercial interests, allied to the higherincomegroups that have piped water, can appropriate freshwaterresources from other watersheds, often drawing on them from largedistances with negative consequences for the ecology and thewater users in these areas.Although the need for additional international funding is oftenstressed, without improved local governance, additional resourcesmay bring few benefits to low-income groups and little improvementin overall water management.Effective monitoring is critical to support an ongoing process ofimproving governance and management. The WHO/UNICEF JMP hasmade important quality advances, but is limited by what a globalassessment can achieve. Part of its merit is to assist member statesin the building of local monitoring capacity. There is a need forcomplementary, locally-driven assessments that serve local serviceproviders and reveal the equity issues at the local level.There are many innovations that show more effective approaches,from sophisticated basin-wide water governance systems thatincorporate all stakeholders (see the Seine-Normandy case study,chapter 19) to simple innovations in a particular squatter settlementthat cheapened water costs while greatly improving access. Some aredescribed below. Their relevance is more in the application of ‘good