21 june 2018

London, Prague, Radolfzell, Vienna  – Representatives from the Save the Blue Heart of Europe campaign to save Europe’s last remaining wild rivers handed in a petition endorsed globally by more than 120,000 people, calling on international development banks to rein in financial support for hydropower projects in the Balkans.

Delivered to the London headquarters of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the petition targets the funding of the EBRD, the World Bank and the EU’s European Investment Bank, which together have funded at least 82 hydropower plants across the Balkans – of which 37 are located in protected areas – with EUR 727 million in total investments.

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Given the impasse in climate politics, maybe it is time to reframe the problem and start again. One way of doing this is to focus on how global warming is tied into our habitual abuse of water. In fact, it can be argued that climate change will never be rolled back unless the crucial link between local and global water cycles is restored.

People all over the world are coming to an ecocentric awareness of the integral dynamics of water—in human bodies, in plants, in soils, and as an agent of Earth cooling. Grassroots movements are demanding re-municipalisation, although a socialist solution of public ownership is only half the story, because it remains anthropocentric. Alternative philosophies of water are coming from Indigenous peoples, ecological feminists, even unconventional lawyers and engineers. These visions replace the mindset of water extractivism with water commoning. The Water Paradigm overtakes both corporate water marketing and state-managed technological fixes. Key priorities are self-reliance with water for food sovereignty and re-skilling with hands-on care of bioregional catchments.

Here is a synergistic politics that can be at once post-patriarchal, post-capitalist, postcolonial and ecocentric. How so? A good part of the answer lies in uncovering a set of premises that are basic to all four of these movement struggles.

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As part of the Global Sur and Hasankeyf Action Day in almost 30 cities actions have been organized on April 28, 2018. Activists and civil organization raised awareness on the ongoing destruction of the two antique cities Sur and Hasankeyf at the Tigris River in North (Turkish) Kurdistan. In the last years Sur and Hasankeyf have become synonyms for the repressive and exploitative policy of the Turkish government against nature, culture und people.

The 12.000 years old town Hasankeyf and the surrounding Tigris Valley are threatened by the Mega-Dam Ilisu Dam in construction which is one of the most controversial dam projects in the world nowadays. It would destroy the livelihoods of up to 80.000 people in North Kurdistan and probably much more in Syria and particularly in Iraq.

Sur is the old town of Diyarbakir which has been attacked brutally by the Turkish government with military after the war in Kurdistan has restarted in summer 2015. Although part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Diyarbakir the state destroyed systematically half of Sur, 23.000 people have been displaced and a culture of thousands of years eliminated.

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Last year Thames Water was hit with a £20m fine for polluting the waterways of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire with a billion and a half litres of raw sewage between 2012 and 2014.

The judge cited a “failure to report incidents” and a “history of non-compliance” by the company. Equipment was unmaintained. Warnings from employees went unheeded by management. Thames’s conduct was branded “disgraceful”, justifying the largest financial penalty for pollution in UK corporate history.

While all that was going on Thames’s boss, the aptly named Martin Baggs, received a 60 per cent pay rise, taking his total annual remuneration to above £2m.

Now Thames (along with three other private water companies) has let down its customers again, leaving them high and uncomfortably dry after pipes burst in last week’s big freeze. And, once again, it’s apparently corporate incompetence at work rather than just bad luck.

“Water companies have been warned time and again that they need to be better at planning ahead to deal with these sorts of situations,” fumed Rachel Fletcher, the head of the regulator, Ofwat, today.

So presumably, if history is a guide, Thames’s current chief executive can look forward to a bumper payday.

Owning a water company isn’t a licence to print money. But the cash does flow extraordinarily freely in this sector. In the financial year ending in 2017, according to data collected by Ofwat, the private water companies raked in total revenues from households and businesses of £11.7bn.  Their profits before tax were just under £2bn.

Read more on the website of The Independant