Global Water Ethics: Towards a global ethics charter

Scholarly interest in water ethics is increasing, motivated by the urgency of climate change, water scarcity, privatization and conflicts over water resources. Water ethics can provide both conceptual perspectives and practical methodologies for identifying outcomes which are environmentally sustainable and socially just. This book assesses the implications of ongoing research in framing a new discipline of water ethics in practice.

Contributions consider the difficult ethical and epistemological questions of water ethics in a global context, as well as offering local, empirical perspectives. Case study chapters focus on a range of countries including Canada, China, Germany, India, South Africa and the USA. The respective insights are brought together in the final section concerning the practical project of a universal water ethics charter, alongside theoretical questions about the legitimacy of a global water ethics.

Overall the book provides a stimulating examination of water ethics in theory and practice, relevant to academics and professionals in the fields of water resource management and governance, environmental ethics, geography, law and political science.

Rafael Ziegler is Head of Research at GETIDOS (Getting things done sustainably), based in Greifswald, Germany. He has worked as a lecturer at McGill University, ECLA and FU Berlin, and as a Deputy Professor of environmental ethics at the University of Greifswald.

David Groenfeldt is Director of the Water-Culture Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA. He is the author of Water Ethics: A Values Approach to Solving the Water Crisis (Routledge, 2013).