First published by The Truth Pursuit- The Future of the Gulf

BP has promised to emerge from the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico “smaller and wiser”. And with the replacement of CEO Tony Hayward with self-professed ‘Son of the Gulf’ Bob Dudley, announced on Monday, a new mood has swept through BP, one focused on pushing to the future. Starting anew.

But the disaster in the Gulf is not over. BP’s recovery may be measured by its bottom line, but for the population of the Gulf the process of rebuilding is fraught with obstacles and there is no clear line to map its progress.

Nervousness hovers unnaturally within the vibrant communities of Louisiana. It has swept in with the tide of oil, along with confusion, distrust and misinformation, and has done little to help the image of the British oil giant who promised to “make whole” the communities and the environment of the Gulf. The same promise Exxon made 21 years ago to the communities of the Prince William Sound in Alaska.

Exxon employed an army of 23,500 to clean up the oil that washed up on the rocky shoreline of Alaska after the Exxon Valdez hit Blythe Reef in the early hours of Good Friday 1989 spilling its cargo into the pristine waters of the Prince William Sound. It was the biggest environmental disaster in US history, until the disaster still unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico eclipsed it after 37 days.

The story of the cleanup effort dominated the headlines during the summer of 1989. But when the press slouched away as the looming threat of Alaska’s harsh winter brought the cleanup to a close, Exxon’s legal might revved into action. The dance that Exxon choreographed through the courts lasted 19 years with the final punitive damages settlement only reached two years ago. Exxon fought the original damage settlement of $5 billion for 14 years until the amount was cut to $507 million. Exxon was also fined $150 million under the Clean Water Act, but only paid $25 million. Both amounts were reduced in recognition of Exxon’s cooperation in cleaning up the spill.

BP doesn’t have the “appetite” for litigation that Exxon has, said an industry insider, and frequently chooses to settle out of court. But cooperation, as well as the amount of oil actually spilt, are key factors in deciding BP’s liability when this disaster moves out of the cleanup phase.

The emotions from the summer of 1989 remain raw in Alaska and the protracted legal battles have kept the wounds open. In the years after the spill the small town of Cordova, with a population of less than 2,000, saw a massive rise in domestic violence, drug abuse and alcoholism. There were divorces that happened post spill and the promise of the compensation from the litigation was written into the divorce settlements, leaving them hanging over people for 20 years. There were also suicides.

“I think because we made the conscious decision not to be the victims of the spill, we were able to see other opportunities and we left,” said Sylvia Lange, a fisherwoman from Cordova, Alaska, who together with her husband and new baby, left Cordova half way through the summer of 1989 to fish out West. “Some people got real active. Some people got real rich. And some people just ruined their lives and just sat here and couldn’t let go.”

The spill of 1989 offered a short-term boom as spending on the cleanup jump-started the Alaskan economy out of recession. Locals still refer to “spillionaires” who were paid small fortunes to help clear up the mess, and stories circulate of people who traveled to Washington State to buy new boats to hire them out to Exxon. They made their money back in three months the story goes.

“That fall you saw brand new pick up trucks and Cadillacs on the roads, and new boats in the harbour,” said Joanne LeRue, a long time resident of Valdez.

Sylvia Lange recalls a conversation with a fisherman that summer. “I asked him, ‘Are you going to go work for Exxon?’ and he said, ‘Are you kidding me? I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone this rich to fuck up this badly’.” He got rich that summer. Spent it. Then he left.

Cracks appeared in the small communities of the Prince William Sound; divisions between those who wanted to help and those who wanted money. Between the outsiders and the residents. Between the fishermen and the oil industry. Between Exxon and the local government.

John Devens who was mayor of Valdez in 1989, remembers fighting to get into Exxon’s “information loop” that summer. “It was like someone coming into your home and spilling something nasty on your carpet. And then saying, ‘Get out of the house, I’ll clean it up and you better be satisfied with what I do’,” said Devens, “I think they felt they could muscle the communities into line and it probably cost them millions of dollars more by being that arrogant.”

As the cleanup response progressed, Devens’ frustrations grew as he found himself repeatedly coming into conflict with Exxon and Federal officials. Sitting next to Ted Stevens, Alaska’s long serving Republican Senator, at a press conference, Devens recalls Stevens turning to him. “John, you don’t understand, your priorities are different from ours. You’re worrying about the locals. We’re worrying about the reputation of the country,” he said.

But the disconnect between local concerns, government priorities and corporate motivation is a byproduct of a deeper disconnect inherent within today’s cleanup effort in the Gulf, as it was in Alaska in 1989: That an oil spill can be cleaned up. That the environment can be made right.

“They would have done more good flying over in a 747 and dumping the $2.2billion right over the top of the oil spill itself,” says Dune Lankard, an Eyak native and fisherman from Cordova, Alaska who in 1989 joined the cleanup effort, “They haven’t learnt a damn thing from the Exxon Valdez. They haven’t learnt that everything that we’ve gone through, everything that we’ve learnt, is that everything their doing doesn’t work. There’s no way that they can clean it up. There’s no way that they can make our lives whole again. They’ve no way.”

As Exxon endeavored to make right the Prince William Sound, they focused on rebuilding the size of the salmon population that sustained the local economy. And within 5 years the area had regained its position as the largest fish producer in US, and the fifth largest in the world. But the Alaskan waters are producing larger quantities of lesser quality hatchery salmon with fewer, bigger boats. The size and diversity of the wild salmon populations have never returned, neither have the herring. The natural cycle of the fishing season that defined the year for much of Alaska’s coastal population has never been restored.

John Devens Jnr, son of Mayor John Devens, worked for Exxon cleaning up the Sound’s oiled shoreline during the summer of 1989. “We knew the cleanup was going to be evaluated not on what was actually done but how many man hours and how much money they spent on it,” he said. And likewise, the long-term restoration effort in Alaska has been focused on quantifiable goals.

Today trailers, motor homes and boats adorned with ‘For Sale’ signs litter the parking lots throughout Valdez, the namesake town of the now-infamous tanker. ‘For Rent’ signs bleached of their color hang in the windows of long empty shops. The campaign banners line the streets in preparation for the midterm elections in November as if demanding a better future.

Everyone in Prince William Sound has a story to tell about the summer of 1989. “My father missed my birth,” says Jen Smith, 21. She was born a month after the Exxon Valdez hit Blythe Reef. “He was cleaning oil.”

In the Gulf the uncertainty of what’s to come hangs over the coastal communities.

Walter Gisclair, 52, stands on the dock with one rubber booted foot on a crate of crab. “I usually have 70 boxes by now,” he says gesturing at the 14 boxes that surround him, “But I hope I don’t get any more. I can’t sell them. Who wants to eat fish from where the oil’s at?” He says he doesn’t think the oysters will return in his lifetime.

Amanda Domangue, owner of a specialist oil trucking company called Justice Transport in Houma, Louisiana, is barely making ends meet since the moratorium cut business by 80 per cent. Oil industry workers fall into a grey area. They don’t qualify to file a claim under the $20 billion escrow fund or $100 million claims program specifically set up for rig workers. The only option left to Amanda is a lawsuit, but Kenneth Feinberg, the administrator of the escrow fund, admitted at a town hall meeting in Houma on July 15 that they were unlikely to win a case against the federal government.

“There’s no option. There’s really nothing,” said Amanda, “File a lawsuit that he [Feinberg] says there really no chance of winning. So that’s nothing. And we have no recourse. We have nothing.” 330,000 people fall into this grey area in Louisiana alone.

In August the permits that Amanda requires to operate her business, including a $20,000 down payment for insurance, come up for renewal. She has to make the decision now whether to make that investment, or write off the entire year.

“2010 was going to be all about change,” said Lorrie Grimaldi, of St Bernard, Louisiana, as she cracks open a crab with the practiced dexterity of a fisherman’s wife. Lorrie and her family moved into a new house in March of this year. They had lived in a FEMA trailer for five years since Hurricane Katrina destroyed their home. “I thought it was going to be the best year of my life, ever. And then, guess what. But the hardest part is not knowing what’s going to happen next.”

Reports suggest that BP may be close to stopping the flow of crude oil into the Gulf. With the flow abated one of the worst unknowns in this disaster, how long it’s going to go on for, will start to come into focus. This may serve as small consolation to the residents of the Gulf coasts many of whom felt unable to start picking up the pieces of their shattered way of life and economy until they knew what they had lost.

The battle between BP and the Macondo well has seen man pitted against the elements as scientists and engineers fought to overcome a force greater than their shared intellectual might. And if man has now vanquished the well congratulations and a huge feeling of relief will rightly follow.

But with the most dramatic thread of this disastrous story over, a few lessons need to be learnt from the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 to make sure that from here on the focus is on rebuilding communities and restoring the environment, and not on the legal strength of BP.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was different from the events surrounding the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe on many fronts. The amount of oil spilling into Alaska’a Prince William Sound was from a finite source, and estimates quickly settled 11 million gallons as the total. In the first days after the spill, the cause seemed clear: a drunk Captain had absconded his duties and left an under qualified third mate in charge of an off course tanker that was traveling too fast. This lead to Captain Hazelwood becoming the most vilified man in the US and international media.

But after the first few weeks, when the cleanup effort had started, the flow of dramatic photos of oiled otters had ebbed and comparisons between Alaska’s bright blue-white glaciers and the dark invasion of crude oil in the Sound had been exhausted, the media started to slouch away. And with their focus gone, public pressure was diverted elsewhere and the most devastating damage to the communities of Prince William Sound and the people who came to help restore it was done.

The federal government was notable only in their silence over the Exxon Valdez disaster. And as the outside media turned away (local papers remained and were central in exposing the full implications of the disaster), the federal government was able to continue its line of disinterest.

The feds only reared their heads when it came time to divide up responsibility for overseeing a fund set up by Exxon to restore the natural environment at the instigation of a State of Alaska led court battle against the oil company. The federal government then demanded that a large proportion of the final settlement reached in 1991 to be administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for further environmental studies.

The State of Alaska victory against Exxon, was followed by a 19 year legal battle between Exxon, the State and the victims of the oil spill. The final settlement reached in 2008, after repeated appeals by Exxon, demanded $25 million from the oil giant that recorded $45.2 billion profits that year.

This drawn-out complex legal dance that Exxon choreographed was allowed by a lack of governmental strength, which was in turn permitted by a rapid decline in public pressure.

Fast forward 21 years and the Obama administration secured a $20 billion escrow fund from BP on June 16, 58 days after the blow out preventer failed on the Macondo well, putting them $20 billion ahead of their counterparts in 1989.

Obama has received no end of criticism for his handling of the disaster in the Gulf, but, as I’ve said in pervious posts, the current administration is in a very difficult position. Although concrete action is what the public might want to see, there is little Obama can deliver beyond rhetoric. The Escrow fund was a clear victory for the government and the victims of the disaster, but this was quickly overshadowed by niggling questions: Is it enough? Who will administer the fund? Will it be done fairly?

The Obama adminstration sought to answer all of these questions and concerns (which are absolutely valid). He put Kenneth Feinberg in charge, who handled post 9/11 compensation, and made it clear that the $20 billion amount, to be paid in $5 billion installments over the next four years, does not represent a final settlement. Obama also managed to demand the oil giant maintain the $20 billion in US assets to make sure that the money was readily available.

The root of the discounted over Obama’s handling of the Escrow fund episode may be the apparent ease with which he procured a deal from BP: it lacked the ‘ass kicking’ the president had repeatedly promised the public.

But ass kicking, despite it ability to sell papers and it appeal to public consciousness (I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to know exactly how Obama would kick someone’s ass- a slice to the side, a boot from the back or a high kick?), is not the most productive approach when trying to bring about a solution. The federal government, largely through the Coast Guard, has to forge a constructive relationship with BP.

The importance of pursuing a unified approach to the Gulf situation has frequently made it appear that the Coast Guard and the Federal government are limply following BP’s lead, as the same rhetoric appears in all of their statements. But rather than taking the cynical approach, how about viewing that as a positive: they’re talking to each other!

This was lacking in the response to the Exxon Valdez. Although the Coast Guard and Exxon repeatedly appeared as if they were cut from the same cloth, the coast guard was lacking the support of the federal government to actually put itself in a controlling position.

The web of failure that lead up to the Exxon Valdez is disturbingly similar to the failings that created the current disaster in the Gulf: a slow economy and lax regulation proceeded by eight years of a Republican government. But today’s government recognized the public relations nightmare that BP is trapped in and understood that now while public pressure is palpable is the best, if not the only, moment that they can demand that BP step up to the plate financially.

A change in the status quo that the oil industry enjoys can only come through tougher regulations, and the introduction of citizen oversight councils. The latter is happening, and the most successful oversight group in Alaska, Prince William Sound Regional Citizen’s Advisory Council (PWS-RCAC), which monitors the tanker terminal in Valdez, is in close talks with the Gulf states to set up similar groups. This is with the strong support of the White House.

If public pressure continues, and the Republicans don’t sweep the table at the Midterms, then a true and lasting change to the way the oil industry is allowed to operate in this country may be on the table.

Scientists today are hoping that the Macondo well is still under high enough pressure for them to put the containment cap in place. High pressure means the structure of the well is still sound, while low pressure would indicate that oil is leaking through many smaller gaps. High pressure is essential to see progress on all aspects of the Gulf disaster. It is only as pressure drops and time elapses from a disaster that monitoring slackens and corners are cut.

Correction:
I incorrectly referred to the spill from the Exxon Valdez as totally 11 million barrels- it is in fact 11 million gallons. 14 July 2010

Update:
The total amount of oil that leaked into the Prince William Sound from the grounded Exxon Valdez Tanker is still under dispute. The actual figure could be as much as 3 times the 11 million gallon figure. Exxon counted all the liquid they lightered off the stricken Exxon Valdez onto three other tankers as 100% oil when in fact it contained large amounts of sea water (tankers are balanced with sea water). The Exxon Valdez allegedly had 54 million gallons on board before hitting the reef, and Exxon claimed to have lightered off 43 million gallons of “oil”, leaving 11 million spilled. Probably half what they lightered off was sea water, and hence the more likely 30 + million gallons of oil spilled. The size of the Exxon spill came from Exxon and its contractors. It never received a complete investigation from state or federal regulators. 14 July 2010

The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oilrig that killed 11 men and unleashed a torrent of oil into the gulf is a tragedy.

A Greek tragedy is a play in three acts. Act one sets the scene, act two brings it to a climax, and act three sees the final catastrophic resolution. All of this unfolds antagonist versus protagonist. As the drama develops the audience is meant to gasp with pity and cry in fear as they recognize the unmerited misfortune of the everyman hero.

But where are we in that tragedy? And why do the roles of antagonist and protagonist seem to be as difficult to define as the amount of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico?

Until this week pushed the political circus in Washington into supercharge, the tragedy was about the Gulf coast. The protagonist was the people of the four Gulf States, shocked and hurt by the environmental catastrophe that the oil was spelling for their home while recognizing the importance and necessity of the oil industry. The antagonist was BP. The catastrophe of act three was still yet to unfold, but the impending hurricane season was casting a dark shadow over the stage.

But this week a new tragedy has begun. A tragedy that is threatening to, and arguably already has, taken primacy over the afore mentioned performance.

Act one was Obama’s address to the nation. Act two, the climax, the congressional hearing on Thursday. And act three continues to develop with the final resolution coming in November with the midterm elections. Whether that contains the catastrophic resolution required of a tragedy will depend on which side of the political fence you sit on.

As this is the problem. This new tragedy, The Tale of Two Parties lets call it, has continued to obscure the issue at hand.

When Joe Barton apologized to Tony Hayward at the congressional hearing this week, Tony Hayward was the most awkward figure in the room. He had prepared to be defensive (he actually didn’t say anything the whole day apart from ‘I don’t know’) and was wholly unprepared to be suddenly thrust into the role of embattled protagonist. And the role didn’t stick. Even if it had, the characterization would have been momentary as photos of a man who looked suspiciously like Hayward on board Hayward’s yacht at the Isle of Weight Yacht Race yesterday emerged. It is vice, as apposed to frailty of character, that distinguishes the antagonist from the protagonist in a Greek tragedy.

Barton’s performance maybe pushes the show to becoming a farce, as the neatly coifed Republican Representative returned to the stage hours after his first soliloquy to apologize for his apology. This time his hair was in disarray and he looked like he had been subjected to the Chicago style shakedown he had earlier accused the Obama administration of inflicting on BP. But his performance contains a serious message for the state of Washington in the way both Democrats and Republicans seized upon it.

Barton’s performance, commented NPR’s Ken Rudin, has come in the kick of time to rescue the Democrats: “Game, set, match,” said Rubin. White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, quickly brought the issue round to the midterms when he tweeted: “Who would the GOP put in charge of overseeing the energy industry & Big Oil if they won control of Congress? Yup, u guessed it – JOE BARTON”.

But if Barton’s apology is a great victory for the Democrats, it spells a terrible tragedy for the state of Washington politics.

In the run up to the midterms most expected the two parties to be rivaling for first prize in the ‘who can be hasher on BP’ competition. But this competition appears to have fallen by the wayside to be replaced by the battle between the parties. And the fact that oil continues to pour into the Gulf of Mexico appears to have become an incidental sub narrative to the entire affair.

On Tuesday, Republican Representative for Louisiana Anh “Joseph” Cao called on Tony Hayward to fall on his own sword. “Mr. Stearns asked you to resign. In the Asian culture we do things differently. During the Samurai days we just give you a knife and ask you to commit hara-kiri,” said Cao, who is of Vietnamese descent. Hara-kiri is considered a noble death. The only way for a warrior to regain respect and pride when he has committed a serious wrong.

Hayward is not the only figure in this performance who should take heed of Cao’s words. A Greek tragedy ends with the protagonist’s final undoing as he realizes too late the frailties of his own character. That kind of self-awareness is still a long way from the stage in this performance, but every character, the Democrats and Republicans, the Obama administration and BP, could do with a little self-analysis.

The Guarani Project

Developing nations have reacted furiously to a leaked draft agreement on climate change at the Copenhagen Climate Summit, once again raising questions as to whether a lasting agreement can be reached in Denmark.

The document was leaked to a British newspaper, The Guardian, on Tuesday, and outlines a response to climate change that gives greater power to developed nations while marginalizing the UN’s role within the debate.

The G77 bloc of developing nations have responded angrily to the text, accusing the West of “carbon colonialism”. The G77′s chair, Lumumba Stanislaus Di Aping of Sudan, told journalists in Copenhagen that the so-called Danish Text “seemed to secure 60 per cent of the global atmospheric space for 20 per cent of the world’s wealthiest nations”.

However, conflicting reports have emerged about the importance and accuracy of the document. The Guardian newspaper reported that it was a “finalized draft agreement” written by a group of rich nation, known as the “circle of commitment”. But the head of the UN Climate change Secretariat said that the document was out of date and was unlikely to constitute part of the final agreement.

This leaked document is the second text that has emerged in recent weeks that has threatened to derail talks in Copenhagen. On November 17, a series of hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK, a leading climate change research centre, were published online. The emails appeared to show that scientists had manipulated data to prove that the climate was heating up.

Vocal Climate change skeptic, Republican senator Jim Inhofe, seized on the emails as proof that climate change was a lie. “Now we see that that science has been pretty well debunked,” Inhofe told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room.

Respected climate change author, George Monbiot, in an interview with The Real News Network said that while the emails don’t disprove climate change suppressing skeptics was unacceptable.

Possibly taking Monbiot’s cue, Sarah Palin, aired her opinion in The Washington Post and accused climate scientists of playing a dangerous highly politicized game that threatened to ruin the American economy.

New York Times commentator, Thomas L. Friedman, took the opposite tack. In an op-ed on Wednesday derisively titled “Going Cheney on Climate”, Friedman stated that “even if Climate change turns out to be a hoax… a clean power economy… is stronger, more innovative and more energy independent.”

Chris Horner of the Washington Examiner described “Climategate”, as the leaked emails have become known, as a highly politicized action, and this latest leak in Denmark appears to be of the same political vein.

A press release today from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has warned that current UN estimates regarding the cost of climate change are way below what the actual cost will be. This warning comes 3 months before the Copenhagen Climate Change conference. IIED suggest that the UN climate negotiations should aim for substantially more funding.

LONDON – 27 August 2009. Scientists led by a former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will warn today that the UN negotiations aimed at tackling climate change are based on substantial underestimates of what it will cost to adapt to its impacts.

The real costs of adaptation are likely to be 2-3 times greater than estimates made by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), say Professor Martin Parry and colleagues in a new report published by the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London.

The report adds that costs will be even more when the full range of climate impacts on human activities is considered.

Parry and colleagues warn that this underestimate of the cost of adaptation threatens to weaken the outcome of UNFCCC negotiations, which are due to culminate in Copenhagen in December with a global deal aimed at tackling climate change.

“The amount of money on the table at Copenhagen is one of the key factors that will determine whether we achieve a climate change agreement,” says Professor Parry, visiting research fellow at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London. “But previous estimates of adaptation costs have substantially misjudged the scale of funds needed.”

The UNFCCC has estimated annual global costs of adapting to climate change to be US$40-170 billion, or the cost of about three Olympic Games per year.

But the report’s authors warn that these estimates were produced too quickly and did not include key sectors such as energy, manufacturing, retailing, mining, tourism and ecosystems. Other sectors that the UNFCCC did include were only partially covered.

“Just looking in depth at the sectors the UNFCCC did study, we estimate adaptation costs to be 2-3 higher, and when you include the sectors the UNFCCC left out the true cost is probably much greater,” warns Parry, who co-chaired the IPCC working group on impacts, vulnerability and adaptation between 2002 and 2008.

The new report’s key findings include:

• Water: The UNFCCC estimate of US$11 billion excluded costs of adapting to floods and assumes no costs for transferring water within nations from areas of surplus to areas of deficit. The underestimate could be substantial, according to the new report.

• Health: The UNFCCC estimate of US$5 billion excluded developed nations, and assessed only malaria, diarrhoea and malnutrition. This could cover only 30-50% of the global total disease burden, according to the new report.

• Infrastructure: The UNFCCC estimate of US$8-130 billion assumed that low levels of investment in infrastructure will continue to characterise development in Africa and other relatively poor parts of the world. But the new report points out that such investment must increase in order to reduce poverty and thus avoid continuing high levels of vulnerability to climate change. It says the costs of adapting this upgraded infrastructure to climate change could be eight times more costly than the higher estimates predicted by the UNFCCC.

• Coastal zones: The UNFCCC estimate of US$11 billion excluded increased storm intensity and used low IPCC predictions of sea level rise. Considering research on sea level rise published since the 2007 IPCC report, and including storms, the new report suggests costs could be about three times greater than predicted.

• Ecosystems: The UNFCCC excluded from its estimates the costs of protecting ecosystems and the services they can provide for human society. The new report concludes that that this is an important source of under-estimation, which could cost over US$350 billion, including both protected and non-protected areas.

The report calls for detailed case studies of what adaptation costs will be, and points out that the few that already exist suggest that costs will be considerable.

It adds that the UNFCCC estimates do not include the cost of bearing ‘residual damage’ that will arise from situations where adaptation is not technically feasible or simply too expensive.

“Finance is the key that will unlock the negotiations in Copenhagen but if governments are working with the wrong numbers, we could end up with a false deal that fails to cover the costs of adaptation to climate change,“ says Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, which co-published the report.

Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, which co-published the report, says: “The costs of adapting to live with a changing climate are very uncertain. However, this new report suggests that previous attempts to figure out the costs have drastically under-estimated how expensive this could be. With such large sums potentially involved, the pressure to act now to reduce the extent of climate change is greater than ever.”

The new report was reviewed by seven of the world’s foremost adaptation scientists, including the lead authors of the original UNFCCC study. Following this, close to 100 adaptation policy and research experts were invited to comment on the pre-publication draft.

The report’s authors are: Professor Martin Parry (Imperial College London), Professors Nigel Arnell (University of Reading), Richard Tiffin (University of Reading) and Tim Wheeler (University of Reading), Dr Pam Berry (University of Oxford), Drs David Dodman and David Satterthwaite (International Institute for Environment and Development), Dr Sam Fankhauser (London School of Economics), Dr Chris Hope (University of Cambridge), Dr Sari Kovats (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), Professor Robert Nicholls (University of Southampton).

The report will be launched on 27 August at a press conference, which will be attended by Professor Martin Parry (Imperial College London), Professors Nigel Arnell, Richard Tiffin, Dr Pam Berry (University of Oxford), Drs David Dodman and David Satterthwaite (International Institute for Environment and Development), Dr Sam Fankhauser (London School of Economics), Dr Chris Hope (University of Cambridge).

Juliet:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Over the years, the World Bank’s policy of promoting water privatisation has been met with strong opposition. And today, the word privatisation is considered a bad word (in relation to public services).

But rather than changing tack and thinking up a new way to tackle the world’s water problems, the World Bank has merely renamed water privatisation “mulitple contract schemes” or sometimes, “private public partnership”, PPP for short.

In 2007, Mumbai’s residents fought against the World Bank’s plan to privatise Mumbai’s water supply. The privatisation scheme would have lead to higher tariffs and little improvement in the distribution of water to the city’s residents.

The World Bank and the French consultancy firm Castalia were accused by the local population and water activists of presenting a report based on inflated data in order to push through water privatization. “Castalia’s findings supported privatization, but were based on insufficient research, unreliable technology, inaccurate methodology and specious logic,” said Afsar Jafri, a research assistant with Focus on the Global South.

But Mumbai’s victory against the privatisation scheme has been short lived, and the World Bank has returned to Mumbai now advocating “multiple contract schemes” as a solution to Mumbai’s water problems. Currently only the pipe maintenance of Mumbai’s water system is looked after by multiple different contracts, and Afsar said that this scheme is costing Mumbai far more than when the system was maintained by the municipal government. Despite this evidence, the World Bank is pushing for other areas of Mumbai’s water system to be shared by multiple contracts.

Over the last five years, the World Bank has encouraged and supported the signing of 97 water utility contacts with 28 governments from developing countries. This brings the total number of people reliant on private water companies for their water and sanitation needs to 545 million.

Despite the World Bank’s push of water privatization schemes, there has been little improvement in water access in developing countries. Based on the World Bank’s current policy on water issues, the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people without access to clean water by 2015 will not be reached, according to research by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

The World Bank has advocated water privatization since the 1990s as a means of improving access to clean water and sanitation in developing countries. And despite overwhelming evidence exposing the failings of water privatization schemes, the World Bank continues to encourage privatization, often requiring government in developing countries to sign onto privatization schemes as a condition a loan.

In recent years, the number of water privatization schemes in developing countries has dropped as high profile cases, such as the Bolivian water wars, have sullied the general public’s opinion of the private sector. The World Bank’s response to this seems to be to just rename the policy and try again!