Climate change has become a hot topic – overnight, one might think. Scientists have been collecting data for decades and suddenly, with the help of regional pranks pulled by the weather, sometimes on a catastrophic scale, climate has entered public awareness. Not that every head of state really knows what is at stake and how critically important it would be, for instance, to conserve water and to propose bills to that effect or to promote technology and a different attitude toward this vital element in the first place. Without potable water, humanity is badly off. This spring, the Australians saw the prolonged drought in their breadbasket Murray Darling Basin drove their Prime Minister John Howard to ask his citizens to pray. But what is really funny is that it actually started to rain.

Australia is about to hold its first election in which climate change is a prime issue. Seventy percent of water consumption in Australia is for irrigation and only ten percent each for household and industrial consumption. Here technology and discipline can adjust the balance to some extent. But in other regions of the world, water scarcity will certainly have a major impact on society. The indications are more than clear: in West Africa more and more people are crowding onto the coast in their search for a chance of survival. In northern Mexico and southwestern USA the situation is similar. Ghost towns bear witness to long years of drought, the Rio Grande and Colorado River carry far too little water.

Water management is urgently needed, even in areas where no one can make any definite forecasts yet, either about the cyclical occurrence of periods of drought or the man-made fate that is statistically becoming increasingly probable. The consequences go beyond water shortage, which is dramatic enough as it is. Drought causes lasting changes in ecosystems. Insects proliferate, large expanses of trees fall victim to pests, and fires multiply, spreading farther into developed areas, which is not unusual in California and Texas even now. In the dry zones of the USA as well, most of the water goes to agriculture. But the urbanites are thirsty: in the suburbs sprawling into the desert around Phoenix, Arizona, residents use 1,500 litres of water a day, reports the American urban sociologist and critic Mike Davis. The first water-gulping cotton and alfalfa fields no longer receive their government-subsidised irrigation because the owners of these water rights can make huge profits by selling the expensive article water to the cities.

Water management as an integrated task should therefore become a major objective in all planning fields.

Editorial Topos 59. Water – Design and Management. New parks, waterfronts and comprehensive planning projects for cities; see www.topos.de

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