What Is Water Worth?

Opinion piece by Ben Cooper

We have a tendency to try and define numerical values to both tangibles and intangibles, especially in the form of currency. But water is not a natural resource in the same way that diamonds or natural gas are.

Water is life, not just for humans, but habitats, plants and animals, and without it, we lose everything.

So in trying to come up with the “worth” of freshwater, or some way of quantifying and qualifying, it’s difficult to argue that currency is enough. We can certainly measure the economic usage of water in money, but a duck couldn’t care about the value of a promissory note. They value the water as their home, feeding grounds and direct sustenance, and in turn, we value the ecosystems to which ducks and other living things belong. In much the same way, we can quantify the power that the sun’s rays provide to a solar cell or the wind provides through a turbine, but migrating birds don’t care about kilowatts, they care about riding the winds to their breeding and feeding grounds in time for the change of season. Natural resources like the sun and water are requirements for life to exist on our planet, so why do we almost universally treat water as a commodity?

I believe the answer is that we place impact on humans at the centre of value offerings most of the time, and it’s understandable, we value what we can see as an immediate effect on ourselves. There is, however, a growing need for us to expand the way we view our natural world.

First of all, we should value water as it is, because the value of life doesn’t rest on whether or not it serves humanity, and second we should value water because the degradation of the quality of water and associated ecosystems (which is all of them) affects humanity, us being the water-reliant, not-invincible animals we are.

In 2023, a member of the Morphum GIS team visited California to give a presentation on this exact topic. As many that attended spent a lot of energy measuring water in currency, we have learned a lot about how important it is to take a more holistic approach to the way we treat water. In 2017, the Whanganui River was given legal personhood, a huge step in recognising the rights and the worth of water. In 2019, Bangladesh gave all of its rivers legal personhood. It will be interesting to see how this affects legal exchanges around pollution and other discharges in the future.

There is one way that understanding water through currency seems to work, and that is understanding how much it will cost to repair a waterway. This is a bit of catch though, as it doesn’t dictate the worth of the water so much as the cost of the pollution.

The predominantly economic and utilitarian view of the worth of water is commonly a pākehā interpretation, as Māori have huge cultural significance placed on the health and mauri of water. For those unfamiliar, mauri is the life force or essence that exists in all living things, it applies to water systems as well, and it is something to be protected and cared for.

When we, and other organisations, discuss restoring the mauri of water, this is what we mean.

Restoring the health of waterways and all life that the waterways uphold.

Understanding that water means more than the utility it provides to humans and worth more than we could possibly quantify, is the first part of embracing a universal culture shift in New Zealand to where all Kiwis, irrespective of ancestry, begin to value the health and the mauri of our most valuable resource and interconnected ecosystems.

If you’d like to take a look at the work that we do in this space, feel free to have a browse through our recent projects here:

Morphum Projects

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