Issue 24: March-April 2003

COMMENT

A Glass Half Empty?

It has become an almost unchallenged assumption that the 21st Century will be scarred by the threat of water wars as communities and countries become increasingly thirsty, increasingly desperate for the world’s most precious and most fundamental natural resource.

Alarming statistics and forecasts of the impending calamity proliferate.

A third of the world lives in water stressed areas, where consumption outstrips supply. By 2025,  two thirds of people will be trapped in this appalling plight, if current trends continue unchecked.

A fifth of the world’s population is without access to safe water supplies.  6,000 people, mainly children and mainly in developing countries, die every day as a result of dirty, contaminated water. Annually, it is the equivalent of the entire population of central Paris being wiped out.

Sewage pollution of the seas has precipitated a health crisis of massive proportions. The eating of contaminated shellfish is causing an estimated 2.5 million cases of infectious hepatitis annually, resulting in 25 000 deaths and a further 25 000 people suffering long-term disability due to liver-damage.

Around half of the world's rivers are seriously depleted and polluted. About 60 per cent of the world's largest 227 rivers have been strongly or moderately fragmented by dams and other engineering works.

Some of the globe’s most important wetlands and inland waters, including the Aral Sea and the Marshlands of Mesopotamia, have shrunk, triggering environmental calamities for people and wildlife and the fisheries upon which they mutually depend.

Two billion people, around one-third of the world's population, depend on groundwater supplies. In some countries, such as parts of India, China, West Asia, including the Arabian Peninsula, the former Soviet Union and the western United States, groundwater levels are falling as a result of over-abstraction.

Small wonder that few could be forgiven for concluding that the Earth’s glass is half empty, rather than half full. That inter-communal, international, conflict and disputes over water resources will inevitably occur as the population climbs by two billion to over eight billion by 2050 and the spectre of global warming takes hold in the form of more extreme weather events including droughts.

But, if history is our guide, then we have quiet optimism for hope that we can steer the world’s water policy away from the rocks of inevitability.

Research, to be presented at the 3rd World Water Forum taking place in Kyoto, Japan, this month, and to coincide with World Water Day, has analysed the history of freshwater agreements stretching back 4,500 years.

It indicates that cooperation rather than conflict has been the norm over recent centuries in terms of managing rivers and their catchment areas.  Indeed the work shows that, when push comes to shove, nations and communities more often than not take the path of peace and share rather than hoard water resources, whether it be for drinking water supplies, wildlife protection or more recently hydro-power.

There are other signs of hope. Up until the middle of the last century, many of the rivers on Continents like North America and Europe and especially those running through big industrial areas were so polluted they were classed as “dead”.  Some were so polluted that the water could be used as ink and noxious gases, bubbling up from their depths, could be ignited by a match.

Today, after billions of dollars of investment in water treatment works and agreements with industry on effluents, fish are again spawning and migrating to their upper reaches through these now relatively clean estuaries and tributaries.

The Thames in Britain was officially declared a dead river half a century ago, save for a few mud worms. Today, some 120 species including migrating salmon can be found.

Improvements are also being seen in the developing world, contrary to popular belief.  In the South Asian region for example access to improved sanitation systems between 1990 and 2000 has benefited some 220 million people. Unfortunately the progress has been overwhelmed by population growth, meaning that over 800 million still do not have the safe and healthy systems they deserve.

But it shows that, given political will, diplomacy and investment, real changes can be made, real hope can replace helplessness.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg has given the world the blueprint for how sustainable development, development that lasts, development that respects people and the planet, can be achieved.

We do not need any more declarations. What is needed now is action to implement WSSD’s Plan of Implementation and the myriad of voluntary partnerships, between industry, non governmental organizations, governments and the United Nations.

Many of these concern water and the goal of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015, a target that is closely linked to improving the living conditions of the poor who are without adequate shelter or basic services in slums an squatter settlements.

 World Water Day is a focus for this action and the Forum a pump for turning the texts of Johannesburg from a trickle into a torrent of activity. 2003 is also the International Year of Freshwater. It must play its part in maintaining momentum.

A great deal of goodwill, of imagination and resolve is needed. We do not want the forecasts of disaster, the prophets of doom, to be proved right. So we also need funds to build up the infrastructure needed for cleaner, healthier and more abundant supplies of water.

So the pledges and promises made in Monterrey, Mexico, last year at the Finance for Development conference to reverse the decline in overseas aid, must be met.

Too much water is being wasted. That over 50 per cent of water in some African cities is lost in leaky, decrepit, pipes is a disgrace.

Agriculture, where 70 per cent of freshwater is used, is wasteful. Drip technologies or underground pipes are cheap and simple. Let’s make them more widely available.

We must give water value, both spiritual and economic. This cannot, however, be at the expense of the urban poor who already pay a high price for this resource. So we must be creative in the way water is priced and offer inexpensive, water-saving, alternatives for farmers, industry, cities and consumers.

History may teach us that cooperation over freshwater resources, such as rivers, is the norm. It also teaches us that complacency is not an option. There are over 150 river basins where there are no cooperative agreements. Many of these could become potential flash points.

So another urgent need is for international organizations to apply the lessons of the past, for the benefit of the present and future parties. To act as the water equivalent of marriage guidance counselors, amicably resolving differences between countries and communities who may be straying apart, or acting as go-between for those who are flirting with cooperation but are too coy, too unsure, about how to proceed.

We have, at the beginning of the new century, all the intellectual, financial and technological resources we need to overcome the current and future water crises.

Like the water we all prize so much, let’s not waste it.

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