The concept of the soft path was first used for energy resource management and was developed by
Amory Lovins
Amory Bloch Lovins (born November 13, 1947) is an American writer, physicist, and former chairman/chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute. He has written on energy policy and related areas for four decades, and served on the US Nationa ...
shortly after the shock of the
1973 energy crisis in the United States. This concept has now been refined and applied to water, most notably by water experts
Peter Gleick
Peter H. Gleick (; born 1956) is an American scientist working on issues related to the environment. He works at the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California, which he co-founded in 1987. In 2003 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his work ...
and David Brooks. The soft path is often framed as a more integrated and effective alternative to supply-side water resource management. Supply-side water management focuses on meeting demands for water through centralized, large-scale physical infrastructure, and centralized water management systems. In the 20th century, this approach focused on constructing bigger dams and drilling deeper wells to access more water to meet projected demands of consumers. More recently, a focus on demand-side management has emerged in regions where water supply is increasingly constrained (see, for example,
Peak water
Peak water is a concept that underlines the growing constraints on the availability, quality, and use of freshwater resources.
Peak water was defined in a 2010 peer-reviewed article in the ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'' by ...
), and it focuses on managing demand and making current practices more efficient. The soft path integrates both supply and demand concepts but in a broader context by recognizing that water is a means to satisfy demands for goods and services and asking how much water, of what qualities, is actually required to satisfy those demands efficiently and sustainably. Soft path water planning also requires broader institutional approaches to water management including the application of smart economics, the potential for distributed rather than centralized water systems, and more democratic participation in water policy decisions. Others have described the soft path as "unleashing the full potential of demand-side management.",
[ Saturday, 13 March 2021 ]
Publications
The Soft Path for Water in a Nutshell. 2005. Oliver M Brandes and David B Brooks. Friends of the Earth and POLIS Project on Ecological Governance. University of Victoria, Victoria, BC.G. Wolff and P.H. Gleick, "The Soft Path for Water" in The World's Water 2002-2003 (Island Press, Washington D.C., pp. 1-32.P.H. Gleick, 2003. ''Science'', Volume 302, November 28, 2003, pp. 1524-1528.P.H. Gleick, 2002. Nature, Volume 418, pg. 373, July 25, 2002.Manitoba Water Soft Path 2006.* The Energy Controversy: Soft Path Questions and Answers (1979)
A New Path to Water Sustainability for the Town of Oliver, BC - Soft Path Case Study by Oliver M Brandes Tony Maas Adam Mjolsness Ellen Reynolds. Uvic Printers. Feb 2008.
See also
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Soft energy path
In 1976, energy policy analyst Amory Lovins coined the term soft energy path to describe an alternative future where energy efficiency and appropriate renewable energy sources steadily replace a centralized energy system based on fossil and nucle ...
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Backcasting
Backcasting is a planning method that starts with defining a desirable future and then works backwards to identify policies and programs that will connect that specified future to the present. The fundamentals of the method were outlined by John B. ...
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Ecological governance
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Pacific Institute
The Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security is an American non-profit research institute created in 1987 to provide independent research and policy analysis on issues of development, environment, and security, with a ...
References
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Water supply
Water and the environment