Opinion: Harvard’s big money understands the value of water
By Robert Gusentine
When the world’s largest academic endowment makes a multi-year, $60 million investment in agricultural land, trend watchers tend to sit up and take notice. Harvard’s landholdings in the Paso Robles and Santa Barbara wine regions are now large enough to reconstruct the university’s three existing campuses in Boston 17 times over.
The move by the Harvard Management Company, the Harvard endowment’s namesake, can be viewed as an investment in irrigable areas of the wine industry or as an especially shrewd real-estate play that appreciates water as an emerging catalyst for land value appreciation. In any event, big money understands the value of water.
Western water rights have always been complex and contentious, but as demand has soared and supplies have dwindled, the issues of “who” and “how much” are increasing. However water scarcity is not limited to the Salinas River Valley. Georgia and Florida are before the U.S. Supreme Court over issues of apportionment. Globally, water is a source of increasing friction. In the Middle East, the fact that the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates originate in Turkey and pass through Syria before reaching Iraq is understood well by ISIS. In Asia, tensions are already rising between China and its neighbors as China begins massive water transfer projects that will draw more heavily from the Tibetan headwaters of Asia’s most important rivers.
For the first time, water crises took the top spot in the World Economic Forum’s annual global risk report. Water was one of four risks—along with interstate conflict, the failure to adapt to climate change, and chronic unemployment—that were deemed likely and highly devastating. Nonprofit leaders, chief executives and heads of state now see water as the most serious threat to human security. Future prosperity will chase water.
Without a new water management paradigm here at home, parts of the United States will remain in long-term drought or, inevitably, run out of water. In California, look to the Central Valley for one possible future. Years of groundwater pumping has resulted in land subsidence of over 30 feet and a permanent reduction in the ability of the Central Valley to store water. Local water issues are less geopolitical in scale, but just as volatile. Water is truly the oil of the 21st century.
We need a broader vision that draws on a clearer understanding of the changes to our freshwater supply. One that views our global supply of freshwater systemically as a global resource and not just a local commodity. This starts with better information from looking at large amounts of data to create a more holistic understanding of freshwater and its physical, political, economic and social dimensions. Better information, better understanding, better decisions.
The future is calling. Only time will reveal Harvard’s intentions for stewardship of the water it now controls, but shaping the future vitality of the Paso Robles region begins today with better understanding.
Robert Gusentine is co-founder and chief operating officer of Global Sounding.
