The South African born and educated recipient of the 2014 Stockholm Water Prize, effectively the ‘Nobel Prize for water’, believes growing up in semi-arid settings helped inculcate in him an acute sense that water security was not necessarily a given. In fact, Professor John Briscoe – who schooled at Christian Brothers College Kimberley, before studying civil engineering at the University of Cape Town and later obtaining a doctorate in environmental engineering at Harvard University – says there was always a sense that water should not be wasted, that it was expensive and that taps should be turned off.

As a young engineer in the Department of Water Affairs, too, he was involved in projects designed primarily to transfer water from areas of plenty to resources-heavy hinterland nodes many hundreds of kilometres away, where the absence of water had become the main constraint to economic growth and development.

This sensibility, together with an exposure to apartheid inequality (primarily through his mother’s work at an orphanage and day-care centre in Soweto) inspired a desire to integrate the quest for human rights with the right of people to develop.

This twin objective found practical expression during Briscoe’s time at the World Bank, where he was central in crafting the bank’s water strategy, through a process that, for the first time in the bank’s history, gave emerging economies the decisive voice on the board..

Currently a Harvard academic, Briscoe believes he receives the prize on behalf of a category of water industry professionals who have one foot in the “practical” world of engineering and the other in the “thinking” world of policymaking and academia.

He tells Engineering News Online that he was fortunate to have learned the importance of both infrastructure and institutions from a “great generation” of South African engineers, such as Theo von Robbroek, Paul Roberts and Bob Pullen, as well as the director of water resources in Mozambique, Arnaldo Lopes Pereira.

Understanding the importance of building both institutions and infrastructure remains critical to addressing contemporary water problems, including managing variability between floods and drought, which has always been and remains “the water challenge”.

Inadequate institutional and infrastructural capacity in many developing countries results in the so-called ‘water platform for growth’ remaining weak. It also means that it becomes difficult to extract hydropower and guarantee water supply for agriculture, industry and cities. “Walking on these two legs – the infrastructure and the institutional legs – I think is critical.”

The two components will also be important for dealing with future variability, possibly as a result of climate change. But Briscoe believes that many developing countries are being asked to “put the cart before the horse” with the current emphasis on the potential effects of climate change. Instead, he would prefer the focus to be on dealing with “known variability”, which will help equip societies more adequately with “both hydrological non-stationarity and the many unknown unknowns which lurk out there”.

Briscoe will be presented his prize on September 4 by King Carl XVI Gustaf, of Sweden, who is patron of the Stockholm Water Prize.

Coincidentally, Briscoe has been named Stockholm Water Prize Laureate in the same year that eThekwini Water & Sanitation, which serves South Africa’s Durban metropolitan area, has been named the 2014 winner of the Stockholm Industry Water Award. The award recognises outstanding and transformative water achievements by companies in improving production, managing risks, finding solutions and contributing to wise water management.