Putting The BP Oil Spill Into Context: A Governance Challenge

Mike Magee MD

Next week, at the direction of the Commissioner of Health and Human Services, the Institute of Medicine will be convening a two day conference to assess the human health effects of the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. (1) After listening to all the experts, I’ll be moderating a panel exploring how best to communicate the findings to the general public. In complex communication challenges such as these words and images matter a great deal. But so does context. What is the context for this catastrophe?

Until the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, no natural disaster in our lifetime had generated more powerful and destructive images than did the tsunami that struck Asia and Africa in December of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans in 2005. (2) All three of these cases well illustrate both the power of water and the vulnerability of coastal and river basin populations in the face of weak regulations and poor policy on the one hand and the absence of early warning and disaster preparation and response capability on the other.

The toll can not be measured simply in the numbers of living creatures destroyed, nor just in the overwhelming and lasting destruction of dwellings and habitats. The more important question is whether we can learn from our own mistakes and chart a better and safer future for ourselves, other species and our planet. In the cases of the Indonesian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, early warning systems did not exist, infrastructure was ill conceived, communication systems were wholly inadequate, safe havens were non existent, and that’s just the short list. Long term impact on quantity and quality of water, how best to prevent secondary epidemics of water borne diseases, destruction of what infrastructure had existed, homelessness, abandonment of property, environmental losses, and economic, social and political impact are still being tabulated.(2) The same of course will be true for the BP Oil Spill.

What the tsunami and Katrina did do was to greatly expand awareness that water borne disasters are not inconsequential. There were 2200 water related disasters in the last decade of the 20th century. 30% occurred in Asia, 29% Africa, 20% in the Americas, 13% in Europe and 3% in Oceania. 89% of the natural disasters were water related including floods (50%), drought (11%) and water related epidemics (28%). Only 9% were due to landslides, earthquakes or avalanche, and just 2% from famine. Economic losses from water related disasters approximate 20% of GNP. (3)

What the BP Oil Spill has done is make us realize that our definition of “water disaster” must expand. In the past the term referred to the destruction to all forms of life that result from too little or too much water. But now we realize that the term “water disaster” must include events that are, at least initially, a disaster, an offense, to the water itself. In this case human negligence – both corporate and governmental – created a one way path for destructive forces of monumental proportions. And it remains unclear how to reverse these events. There is no simple “cap” on energetic power plays which our planet , over billions of years, has figured how to segregate and neutralize. Gas drilling next to natural reserves of surface and ground water could easily create a similar insult.

It is not as if we haven’t had fair warning that this was coming. Drivers for water disasters include national conflict, global warming related weather events, deficient economic, social and political policy, and human error. The fact that water planning has been largely non-integrated has amplified the risks and the population vulnerability. The number of natural catastrophes has been steadily growing for a half century. Economic losses in 1999 were pegged at 70 billion, up from 30 billion in 1990. Population impacted rose from 147 million to 211 million during the same period. (4)

The lasting impact of these natural disasters derives from their 3 prong attack on economics, environment, and social structure. Just looking at the economics can be sobering. The 1990 drought in Zimbabwe, recent floods in Mozambique and the 2000 drought in Brazil decreased GNP by 11% and 23% in the first two and cut annual projected growth in halve in the third. (4) Integrated water resource management mitigates the triple risks and addresses uncertainty in a proactive way.

Managing risk is about knowing the risk, defining and implementing measures to reduce the risk, and spreading the risk through financial systems like insurance. The cost of such instruments decrease as good policies and planning eliminate that portion of the risk under human control. For example, in flood risk reduction there are structural and non-structural adjustments that can decrease risk. Structural change may include construction of dams, channels, flood ways and flood reservoirs, flood dikes, early warning systems, stockpiling of supplies, and temporary shelters. A non-structural approach might be land zone planning within natural flood plains. Approaches and contributions are somewhat colored by one’s position and point of view. If you are the WHO, there is a focus on emergency related health hazards. If you are the UN World Food Program (WFP) post-disaster food relief and rehabilitation support is your likely emphasis. If you are the UN Development Program (UNDP) disaster avoidance, prevention and preparedness are your center points. If you are the World Bank, unique financial instruments that mitigate risk and define water resource variability forecasting are special areas of emphasis. And if you are the Global Water Partnership, it’s all about Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM). (2)

This is not to ignore political realities. Tust and Netanyahu in “Conflict and Cooperation on Trans-boundary Water Resources” in 1998 put it this way, “Politicians have the incentive to balance allocations of budgets in a way that preserves political support. Political sustainability is important, and security and stability, together with distributional goals, make up important aspects of political agendas and are often given higher priority than efficiency. Losses to society, and the micro costs imposed on the public could therefore be substantial, but are often disregarded. In the political environment therefore, policy often responds to shorter-term concern than to the long-term consequences to society.” (5)

Who is responsible makes a big difference. In smaller, more traditional settings, users have historically been hands on involved in all types of water issues including climactic and economic. (6) But as population and support systems have expanded, and – as is the case in energy – fossil fuels have become less accessible, we have relinquished control to non-transparent public/private coalitions and have seen responsibility shift in some locations for day-to-day operations to outsourced services under the control of the private sector. Under these circumstances, risk management predictably falls between the cracks. Clearly when it comes to threats that are unpredictable and invisible, there is a tendency to defer responsibility and favor action and profitability.

The long and short of it is that risk of water related disasters is growing as a result of poor policy and short-sightedness. Absent preparedness, as we have seen, losses are complex and considerable, measured in human life and the loss of social, economic and environmental capital. Such disasters are increasingly magnified through human error, can occur out of nowhere, and generate highly dis-coordinate responses. A decade ago, the emphasis was on the flood and drought itself. Today, the focus is more squarely on those affected by water related disasters, and on their representative governments. If there is a single take-away from the BP Oil Spill, it should be this: the unwillingness or inability to effectively govern water in the short and long term will ensure certain disaster for all living creatures and for our planet Earth.

References:

1. Institute of Medicine. Assessing the Human Health Effects of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: An Institute of Medicine Workshop, 22, 2010. New Orleans.http://bit.ly/aZNo44

2. Magee M. Healthy Waters: What Every Health Professional Should Know About Water. 2005. Spencer Books. NY, NY. www.spencerbooks.com

3. CRED (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters). 2002. The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database. Brussels, Université Catholique De Louvain.
http://www.unesco.org/water/wwap/facts_figures/managing_risks.shtml

4. United Nations. 2003. Water For People, Water For Life. The United Nations World Water Development Report. Paris: UNESCO Publishing. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001295/129556e.pdf

5. Tust R. and Netanyahu S., “Conflict and Cooperation on Trans-boundary Water Resources”. Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1998 http://bit.ly/b8aU2K

6. www.healthy-waters.org