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Water Security Copyright 2017 by Rhett B. Larson Printed in U.S.A. Vol. 112, No. 2 Articles WATER SECURITY Rhett B. Larson ABSTRACT—Climate change, as the dominant paradigm in natural resource policy, is obsolete and should be replaced by the water security paradigm. The climate change paradigm is obsolete because it fails to adequately resonate with the concerns of the general public and fails to integrate fundamental sustainability challenges related to economic development and population growth. The water security paradigm directly addresses the main reasons climate change ultimately matters to most people—droughts, floods, plagues, and wars. Additionally, this new proposed paradigm better integrates climate change concerns with other pressing global sustainability challenges—including that economic development and population growth will require 50% more food and energy and 30% more water by 2030 regardless of climate change. The water security paradigm orients all natural resource policies toward achieving a sustainable quantity and quality of water at acceptable costs and risks. Water security improves upon the climate change paradigm in several ways: it (1) replaces carbon footprints with water footprints as the metric for sustainability monitoring and reporting, (2) restructures natural resource governance at the watershed level with regional, rather than hierarchical, leadership, (3) integrates security and public health concerns into natural resource policies, (4) encourages investment in infrastructure for drought and flood resilience, and (5) facilitates the sustainable implementation of human rights. AUTHOR—Morrison Fellow in Water Law and Associate Professor of Law, Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. I would like to thank Nadia Ahmed, Lisa Benjamin, Dan Bodansky, Deborah Boorman, Karen Bradshaw, Adam Chodorow, Laura Coordes, Jason Czarnezki, Dan Farber, Victor Flatt, Michael Gerrard, Zachary Gubler, Lisa Heinzerling, Andy Hessick, Carissa Hessick, Bruce Huber, Eric Johnson, Kit Johnson, Beth Kinne, Zachary Kramer, Kaipo Matsumura, Sarah Morath, Carolina Núñez, Uma Outka, Jessica Owley, Margot Pollans, J.B. Ruhl, Troy Rule, James Salzman, Erin Scharff, and Mary Sigler for helpful comments and suggestions. Special thanks as well to the 139 N O R T H W E S T E R N U N I V E R S I T Y L A W R E V I E W editors of the Northwestern University Law Review for their outstanding editorial work. I would also like to thank the faculty of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law and the participants and supporters of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Colloquium on Innovative Environmental Law Scholarship. This Article is the culmination of a long- term project developing the water security paradigm and therefore incorporates ideas from several of my previously published articles in Parts II and III. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 140 I. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CLIMATE CHANGE PARADIGM................................... 148 A. The Evolution of Natural Resource Policy Paradigms ............................... 148 B. Climate Change as the Dominant Natural Resource Policy Paradigm. ..... 154 C. The Inadequacy of the Climate Change Paradigm ..................................... 159 II. WATER SECURITY: THE RISING PARADIGM .......................................................... 164 A. Defining the Water Security Paradigm ....................................................... 164 B. Why Water Security Should Replace Climate Change ................................ 169 C. Governance Under the Water Security Paradigm ...................................... 174 III. WATER SECURITY AND THE LAW .......................................................................... 180 A. Recognizing a Sustainable Human Right to Water ..................................... 180 B. Integrating Public Health Concerns into Water Law ................................. 186 C. Encouraging Investment in Water Innovation and Infrastructure .............. 190 IV. THE PROMISE AND CHALLENGES OF THE WATER SECURITY PARADIGM................ 194 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................ 199 INTRODUCTION Climate change should be deemphasized in law and policy. Not because the science behind climate change is bad (it is not)1 and not because climate change is not important (it is).2 Climate change should be 1 See Sheila Jasanoff, Serviceable Truths: Science for Action in Law and Policy, 93 TEX. L. REV. 1723, 1741 (2015) (noting the scientific “consensus on the anthropogenic origins of climate change and some of the dire implications of unchecked global-mean-temperature rise”); see also Naomi Oreskes, The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, 306 SCI. 1686 (2004) (summarizing the prevailing scientific consensus surrounding the causes and implications of global climate change). For a detailed discussion of climate change science and background on how anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions impact global climate patterns, see generally INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE, CLIMATE CHANGE 2001: THE SCIENTIFIC BASIS (J.T. Houghton et al. eds., 2001). 2 Daniel C. Esty, Good Governance at the Supranational Scale: Globalizing Administrative Law, 115 YALE L.J. 1490, 1493 (2006) (including “climate change” in a list of “critical issues” that national governments alone struggle to address); Daniel A. Farber, Uncertainty, 99 GEO. L.J. 901, 907 (2011) (stressing the “importan[ce]” of “[i]ssues like climate change”); Jody Freeman & Andrew Guzman, Climate Change and U.S. Interests, 109 COLUM. L. REV. 1531, 1531 (2009) (“This Essay shows that 140 112:139 (2017) Water Security deemphasized and indeed replaced as a policy paradigm because it is incomplete and ineffective.3 Instead, the new paradigm for natural resource law and policy should be centered on water security, a paradigm that avoids the limitations and inadequacies of the dominant climate change discourse.4 The climate change paradigm is inadequate for three reasons. First, climate change does not sufficiently resonate with the general public.5 Even the phrase climate change evokes leaves changing colors in the fall and flowers blooming in the spring; global warming evokes long summer days. Talk of rising sea levels sounds only like the promise of living closer to the beach. To the average person, a problem framed in terms of a few degrees Celsius or a few feet of sea level rise does not sound very serious, and a problem framed in terms of ice caps or polar bears does not sound very relevant.6 Furthermore, carbon footprints and greenhouse gas emissions are performance metrics so unfamiliar to most people that they struggle to assess both the severity of the problem and the likelihood of success of proposed solutions.7 Efforts to make climate change more accessible have been moderately successful,8 and the climate change paradigm has the United States has reason to take prompt and aggressive action to address climate change, not out of benevolence or guilt, but out of self-interest.”). 3 Cf. Orr Karassin, Mind the Gap: Knowledge and Need in Regulating Adaptation to Climate Change, 22 GEO. INT’L ENVTL. L. REV. 383 (2010) (noting that existing regulatory approaches to climate change adaptation incompletely address long-term sustainability challenges); John D. Sterman & Linda Booth Sweeney, Understanding Public Complacency About Climate Change: Adults’ Mental Models of Climate Change Violate Conservation of Matter, 80 CLIMATIC CHANGE 213, 235–36 (2007) (documenting prevalent misunderstandings of basic climate science among science-educated subjects and discussing how public discourse regarding climate change has been ineffective in generating public support for climate change mitigation and adaptation policies). 4 See, e.g., Nathan Richardson, Greenhouse Gas Regulation Under the Clean Air Act: Does Chevron Set the EPA Free?, 29 STAN. ENVTL. L.J. 283, 319 (2010) (providing an example and critique of the dominant approach to climate change mitigation—through regulatory measures aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions). 5 See Sarah E. Light, Valuing National Security: Climate Change, the Military, and Society, 61 UCLA L. REV. 1772, 1788–89 (2014) (proposing that reframing climate change discourse in terms of national security may improve the resonance of climate discourse with certain segments of the public, as compared to framing the discourse in terms of environmental and sustainability concerns); Cass R. Sunstein, On the Divergent American Reactions to Terrorism and Climate Change, 107 COLUM. L. REV. 503, 507 (2007) (“Climate change generally does not trigger strong emotions, and people are willing to consider whether significant harm is probable.”). 6 See Anthony A. Leiserowitz, American Risk Perceptions: Is Climate Change Dangerous?, 25 RISK ANALYSIS 1433, 1438 (2005) (finding that, among those tested, climate change was most commonly associated with images of “melting glaciers and polar ice,” and that “[Americans] think the impacts [of climate change] will mostly affect people and places that are geographically and temporally distant”). 7 See infra Section I.C. 8 See generally Tien Ming Lee et al., Predictors of Public Climate Change Awareness and Risk Perception Around the World, 5 NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE 1014, 1014–20 (2015) (discussing the 141 N O R T H W E S T E R N U N I V E R S I T Y L A W R E V I E W advanced
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