Global Water
Crisis Worsening
Glaciers are melting, aquifers are drying out, droughts are
worsening...and what's worse, the world's population keeps on
growing
By Joan Delaney
Epoch Times Victoria Staff
Dec 02, 2006
The amount of water needlessly leaked from faucets in the western
world would be enough to sustain 1 billion people in developing
nations. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
For years, experts have been warning that the world is facing a
freshwater crisis of unprecedented proportions. As populations
grow, demand for fresh water is soaring, yet there is less water on
earth now than there was 2,000 years ago, when the population was 3
percent of what it is today.
While the crisis is already well underway in Sub-Saharan Africa and
South Asia, the freshwater shortage isn't just confined to a
particular regionit's a worldwide issue. The World Bank has said
that the scarcity of freshwater is likely to be one of the major
factors interfering with economic development in the coming
decades.
A third of the world's population lives in "water-stressed"
countries. Cities such as Bangkok, Jakarta, and Mexico City have
heavily overdrawn from their groundwater aquifers. Hydrologists say
large areas of northern China and Africa, and parts of the Middle
East, India, Mexico, and North America are on the brink of severe
water shortages.
Green Revolution
In the 1960s, experts sounded an alarm bell of a different kind.
They predicted that if the world's population doubled in 30 years
as anticipated, famine on a mass scale would occur, resulting in
billions of deaths. The population did indeed double, but the
famine never materialized because scientists developed
high-yielding crop varieties which basically met the food needs of
developing nations.
It was called the Green Revolution, and it saved the day to a large
extent. But it had a downside in that these newly designed crops,
besides needing copious amounts of pesticides and fertilizers, had
an extremely high demand for water. Huge irrigation projects as
well as small dams and wells were built, and farmers began
withdrawing massive amounts of water from underground
reserveswater that in many cases is not being replenished. Some
countries, such as India, implemented a system called "double
cropping," whereby crops were grown during the dry season as well
as in the wet season, resulting in added water demands.
"As a result, now 30 years on, we're growing twice as much food but
we're using three times as much water to do it," says Fred Pearce,
Environmental Consultant with the U.K.-based New Scientist
magazine. "The current generation of crops we've got are very
thirsty indeed."
While researching his book When the Rivers Run Dry , Pearce
traveled the world to investigate the fresh water situation. He
discovered that dozens of the earth's great rivers are running dry
before they reach the sea, including the Colorado and the Rio
Grande in the United States, the Nile in Egypt, the Yellow River in
China, the Indus in Pakistan, the Murray in Australia, the Jordan
in the Middle East, and the Oxus in Central Asia.
While climate change and pollution are contributing factors, Pearce
says the main cause of the freshwater shortage is over-extractions;
some for cities, some for industry, but the largest amounts by far
have been for agriculture, especially in dry areas.
"We're just taking more water than the rivers can provide," says
Pearce. "The real reason they're drying up in those places is we're
taking the entire flow outthere's just nothing left."
Canadian Prairies Becoming 'Water-Stressed'
The drying trend in Canada is manifesting mainly in the Prairie
Provinces where many farms depend on water that is pumped from
underground aquifers. In Alberta, most of the large rivers have
been dammed for the purposes of irrigation. And thanks to global
warming, dwindling snow packs, less rainfall, and more evaporation
are exacerbating the problem.
According to Dr. David Schindler, Professor of Ecology at the
University of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Alberta have been in a
drying trend for 30 to 40 years, with the South Saskatchewan River
System being heavily impacted. A rapid surge in population growth
due to Alberta's booming economy is adding a further strain to the
province's water supply.
"In the South Saskatchewan we're already seeing fish kills, low
oxygen rates, and poor water quality," says Schindler. "With the
increase in industrial use and population that we have, and the
warming climate, these problems are only going to get worse."
South of the border, recurring droughts are a feature in the U.S.
West, and some farms along the Rio Grande in Texas that have been
in existence for several hundred years are lying fallow for lack of
water. In Europe, some southern regions have been getting drier,
with parts of Spain, Greece, Malta, and Cyprus starting to become
desertified.
Parts of Australia have been in the grip of a severe drying trend
for the past five years, with more than half of the country's ranch
land now drought-stricken. The Australian government recently
announced a compensation package for 72,000 farmers who are
eligible for emergency relief.
Pearce says "water wars" could easily be seen in the future unless
action is taken, as many of the world's major rivers run through
several countries. Egypt has threatened war on any country that
takes water from the Nile without its permission, and India has
been wrangling with Bangladesh over the Ganges, and with Pakistan
over the Indus. The British Foreign Office has identified water as
one of the most probable sources of future conflicts in Central
Asia.
Water Apartheid
A United Nations report released in November called attention to
the practice of "water apartheid": Slum dwellers and the poorest of
the poor in developing nations often have to pay as much as 10
times more for water than their wealthy counterparts. The report
found that more than 1.1 billion of the world's people don't have
regular access to clean water, and that contaminated water results
in the deaths of 1.8 million children under five globally each
yearmore than are killed by war, malaria, HIV/AIDS, or traffic
accidents.
The report said that access to clean water should be considered a
basic human right. It recommended that governments recognize this
right by providing access for all to a minimum of 20 litres of
clean water per day, and that those who can't afford it should get
it for free.
Jegan Geetha, executive director with Gramalaya, an NGO that
provides micro-loans to India's poor to help them install water
connections and toilets, says state governments in India do not
have any "effective machinery" at the village level to maintain
water sources. The group is trying to educate people about water
quality and sanitationtwo of the major reasons people are getting
sick. In areas where there are only community toilets, Gramalaya
trains women's self-help groups to maintain the toilets. But it's
an uphill battle in some places.
"In many of the northern areas of India the water supply is bad,"
says Geetha. "For instance, in an area in Mumbai, one toilet is
serving 5,440 people."
The water situation is so dire in Peru that the new president, who
took office in July, has put water at the heart of his domestic
agenda. President Alan Garcia is promising to provide drinking
water to 2.5 million people by July 2009. Basic sanitation and
clean drinking water are out of the reach of a third of Peru's
urban dwellers and two-thirds of its rural population. The UN
estimates that Peru could cut the child mortality rate by 60
percent if a properly functioning sewage system was installed
across the country.
Blue Revolution
Pearce says scientists are now looking into a "Blue Revolution,"
which would include breeding crop varieties that don't need much
water as well as being drought-resistant.
"Their drive 30 years ago was crops on a given amount of land that
could produce more tonnage. But now they're thinking how much
tonnage could be produced for a given amount of water, because in a
lot of the world, water rather than land is the real constraint on
crop production."
With global water use expected to increase by about 40 percent over
the next two decades, action needs to happen soon.
It has been estimated that the amount of clean water wasted in rich
countries would be enough to meet the needs of all those in the
developing world who lack access to drinking water. The leakage
rate in Montreal currently stands at 40 percent, while in Singapore
it's only 5 percent.
Pearce says in most countries, improving water management has been
a low priority for too long, and governments are loath to invest in
expensive improvements. "The good news," says Pearce, "is there are
plenty of things that can be done. The bad news is that people
haven't got around to doing it yet."
"With any of these things, it usually takes a crisis before people
act."