Water in the World

Water- Some Facts

27% of the urban population in the developing world does not have piped water in its house.

827.6 million people live in slums often lacking adequate drinking water and sanitation facilities.

Water-related diseases kill a child every 8 seconds, and are responsible for 80% of all illnesses and deaths in the developing world.

Water-related diseases kill more than 5 million people every year, more than ten times the number killed in wars.

884 million people (one in five people) do not have access to improved water sources.

2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation facilities.

(www.un.org)

World Water Wars

How To Avoid Water Wars

SINCE men fight over land and oil and plenty of other things, it would be odd if they did not also fight over a commodity as precious and scarce as water. And they do. The Pacific Institute in California has drawn up a list of conflicts in which water has played a part. It starts with a legendary, Noah-and-the-flood-like episode about 3000BC in which the Sumerian god Ea punished the Earth with a storm, and ends, 202 incidents later, with clashes in Mumbai prompted by water rationing last year. Pundits delight in predicting the outbreak of water wars, and certainly water has sometimes been involved in military rows. But so far there have been no true water wars.

Could that change as populations grow, climates change and water becomes ever scarcer? Since 61 of the 203 incidents have taken place in the past ten years, a trend might seem to be in the making—especially as some recent water disputes fail to make the list even though their results look grave. One example is the competition for water in Bharatpur, a district of the Indian state of Rajasthan, which has led local farmers to cut off water supplies to the Keoladeo national park. This was, until a few years ago, a wonderful wetland, teeming with waders and wildfowl. Thousands of rare birds would winter there, endangered Siberian cranes among them. Now it is a cattle pasture.

China abounds with instances of water-induced disputation. The people of Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, are far from happy that their water is now taken to supply the capital in a canal that will eventually form part of the South-North Water-Transfer Project. So are others affected by that grandiose scheme. Dai Qing, an investigative journalist who is an outspoken critic of the Three Gorges dam and other Chinese water projects, draws attention, for example, to the complaints of those living along the Han river, who will lose water to the huge reservoir formed by the Danjiangkou dam.

Similar disgruntlement can be seen in India, where over 40 tribunals and other panels have been set up to deal with disputes, mostly without success. The bone of contention is often a river, such as the Cauvery, whose waters must be shared by several states. Strikes and violent protests are common. Indians, however, have yet to reach the levels of outrage that led Arizona to call out its National Guard in 1935 and station militia units on its border with California in protest at diversions from the Colorado river. To this day, American states regard each other with suspicion where water is concerned. Indian states are equally mistrustful, often refusing to share such water information as they have lest it be used to their disadvantage.

Violent incidents over wells and springs take place periodically in Yemen, and the long-running civil war in Darfur is at least partly attributable to the chronic scarcity of water in western Sudan. That is probably the nearest thing to a real water war being fought today, and may perhaps be a portent of others to come. If so, they will be dangerous, because so many water disagreements are not internal but international affairs.

Arid disputes

The world has already had a taste of some. The six-day war in the Middle East in 1967, for example, was partly prompted by Jordan’s proposal to divert the Jordan river, and water remains a divisive issue between Israel and its neighbours to this day. Israel extracts about 65% of the upper Jordan, leaving the occupied West Bank dependent on a brackish trickle and a mountain aquifer, access to which Israel also controls. In 2004 the average Israeli had a daily allowance of 290 litres of domestic water, the average Palestinian 70.

Turkey’s South-Eastern Anatolia Project, intended to double the country’s irrigated farmland, involves the building of a series of dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; one of them, the Ataturk dam, finished in 1990, ranks among the biggest in the world. Iraq and Syria downstream are dismayed. Similarly, Uzbekistan views with alarm Tajikistan’s plan to go ahead with an old Soviet project to build a huge barrage across the River Vakhsh. This, the Rogun dam, will be the highest in the world, at least for a while, and was expected in 2008 to cost about $2.2 billion, or 43% of the country’s national income. The dam will, it is hoped, generate enough power for all Tajikistan’s needs and have plenty over to export as far afield as Afghanistan and Pakistan. But since it may take 18 years to fill the dam (compared with 18 days, in principle, for China’s Three Gorges), there may be no water left over, or at any rate not enough for Uzbekistan’s cotton-growers.

International river basins extend across the borders of 145 countries, and some rivers flow through several countries. The Congo, Niger, Nile, Rhine and Zambezi are each shared among 9-11 countries, the Danube among 19. Adding to the complications is the fact that some countries, especially in Africa, rely on several rivers; 22, for instance, rise in Guinea. And about 280 aquifers also cross borders. Yet a multiplicity of countries, though it makes river management complicated, does not necessarily add to the intractability of a dispute.

One arrangement now under strain is the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan. This agreement was the basis for the division of rivers after India’s partition in 1947. Having withstood Indo-Pakistani wars in 1965, 1971 and 1999, it is usually cited as a notable example of durability in adversity, but it is now threatened by three developments.

First, India proposes to build a water-diversion scheme in Indian Kashmir that would take water from the Kishanganga river to the Jhelum river before it could reach Pakistani Kashmir. Second, India, which already has more than 20 hydro projects on the three western rivers allocated to Pakistan in its part of Kashmir, is now building at least another ten and has more planned. Each of these conforms to the letter of the treaty, since it does not involve storage but merely run-of-the-river dams, in which water is returned downstream after it has been used to generate power. However, Pakistan is worried about the cumulative effects. When, in 2005, it complained about another Indian hydro project, the dispute went to arbitration. That resulted in a ruling broadly favourable to India which left Pakistan unhappy. It feels that the spirit of the agreement has been breached and the treaty needs revision, partly because advances in technology make it possible to build dams that were not foreseen when the deal was signed.

Third, Pakistan badly needs more reservoirs. Storage is essential to provide supplies in winter (two-fifths of the Indus’s flow comes from the summer melting of glaciers) but Pakistan’s two big dams are silting up. It would like to build a new one in Pakistani Kashmir, but India has objected, and the money is not forthcoming.

Another example, the Nile, looks more worrying but is perhaps more hopeful. The Blue Nile rises in Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands, the White Nile in Lake Victoria in Uganda (into which flow rivers from Rwanda and Tanzania). The two Niles meet in Sudan and flow through Egypt, which gets almost no water from anywhere else. For years most of the territories that now form the riparian countries were under the direct or indirect control of Britain, which was fixated on Egypt. Britain stopped any development upstream that would reduce the flow of water to Egypt and, in 1929, allotted 96% of the water flowing north from Sudan to the Egyptians and only 4% to the Sudanese.

Thirty years later Gamal Abdel Nasser had to make a new treaty with Sudan in order to build the Aswan high dam. It would have made more sense to build a dam in the Ethiopian mountains: not only would the flow have then been easier to control but it would also have been cheaper and environmentally less damaging—and with less evaporation. But demagogues like their own dams. The waters were split 75% to Egypt and 25% to Sudan.

The other riparian states have been unhappy ever since, Kenya and Ethiopia particularly so, and all efforts to draw up a new treaty, fairer to all, have failed. They have not, however, failed to achieve anything. On the contrary, for the past 11 years the ten riparians have been amicably meeting in an organisation called the Nile Basin Initiative, and since 2001 have had a secretariat that deals with technical matters and holds ministerial gatherings.

In this group, irrigation and other projects are agreed on, many with World Bank support. Ethiopia is building three dams, two of them large and one controversial, for environmental reasons; and Egypt will take some of the electricity generated, via Sudan. In this way will two old antagonists yoke themselves together with water, the very commodity that has so long driven them apart. No one would say that a new agreement among all the interested parties is imminent, but, after more than 100 trips to Egypt and Ethiopia to help promote harmony, Mr Grey, World Banker turned Oxford professor, is hopeful. He believes that, in time, Ethiopia could be an exporter of electricity to Europe.

A third neuralgic dispute concerns the Mekong, one of at least eight rivers that rise on the Tibetan plateau, fed partly by melting glaciers in Tibet. The Mekong then runs through China’s Yunnan province, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Recently, though, it has been running thinly. Sandbanks have appeared, navigation has slowed, fishermen complain of derisory catches, and the 60m people whose livelihoods directly or indirectly depend on the river are worried. The worst drought in southern China for 50 years is partly, perhaps mainly, to blame, but the downstream users also blame the Chinese government, and in particular the three dams it has built and its blasting of rapids to ease navigation.

China has plans for more dams. It is hyperactive in the world of water, not only at home but abroad—building dams in Africa and Pakistan, looking for land in Mozambique and the Philippines, diverting rivers for its own purposes. Neighbouring states, notably India, are uneasy. Yet the row over the drop in the Mekong seems under control. At a meeting of the Mekong River Commission last month—all the riparian states except China and Myanmar are members—China sent a vice-minister of foreign affairs, who was fairly forthcoming about hydrological data. This was something of a breakthrough, even if he did not offer compensation to fishermen. The neighbours’ resentment has not disappeared, and China will not stop building dams. But a water war seems unlikely.

The most hopeful development is the success of other river-basin organisations like the Nile and the Mekong groups. Such outfits now exist for various rivers, including the Danube, the Niger, the Okavango, the Red, the Sava and so on. In the Senegal river group, Mali, Senegal, Guinea and Mauritania have agreed to disagree about who is entitled to how much water, and instead concentrate on sharing out various projects, so that a dam may go to one but the electricity generated, or a part of it, to another. This has worked so well that the president of the group has established considerable authority, enough to enable him to broker unrelated agreements among squabbling tribesmen.

The co-operative approach has also been successful elsewhere. Thailand, for instance, has helped pay for a hydro scheme in Laos in return for power; South Africa has done the same with Lesotho, in return for drinking water in its industrial province of Gauteng; and, in the Syr Darya grouping, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan compensate Kyrgyzstan in return for supplies of excess power.

The way such organisations work, when they work, is to look for the benefits that can be gained from organising water better, and then to share them. An arrangement can usually, though not always, be found that benefits each state. It may be hard to achieve in a group that includes a dominant member, such as Egypt. And it will also be more difficult in groups that bring together officials appointed politically rather than competitively, on their technical qualifications. In the case of the Indus the two sides’ representatives get along well. The reason the treaty is under strain is that it starts with the water and then tries to divide it equitably. The secret is to look for benefits and then try to share them. If that is done, water can bring competitors together.

Water (II)

THE overthrow of Madagascar’s president in mid-March was partly caused by water problems—in South Korea. Worried by the difficulties of increasing food supplies in its water-stressed homeland, Daewoo, a South Korean conglomerate, signed a deal to lease no less than half Madagascar’s arable land to grow grain for South Koreans. Widespread anger at the terms of the deal (the island’s people would have received practically nothing) contributed to the president’s unpopularity. One of the new leader’s first acts was to scrap the agreement.

Three weeks before that, on the other side of the world, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California declared a state of emergency. Not for the first time, he threatened water rationing in the state. “It is clear,” says a recent report by the United Nations World Water Assessment Programme, “that urgent action is needed if we are to avoid a global water crisis.”

Local water shortages are multiplying. Australia has suffered a decade-long drought. Brazil and South Africa, which depend on hydroelectric power, have suffered repeated brownouts because there is not enough water to drive the turbines properly. So much has been pumped out of the rivers that feed the Aral Sea in Central Asia that it collapsed in the 1980s and has barely begun to recover.

Yet local shortages, caused by individual acts of mismanagement or regional problems, are one thing. A global water crisis, which impinges on supplies of food and other goods, or affects rivers and lakes everywhere, is quite another. Does the world really face a global problem?

Water, water everywhere…

Not on the face of it. There is plenty of water to go around and human beings are not using all that much. Every year, thousands of cubic kilometres (km³) of fresh water fall as rain or snow or come from melting ice. According to a study in 2007, most nations outside the Gulf were using a fifth or less of the water they receive—at least in 2000, the only year for which figures are available. The global average withdrawal of fresh water was 9% of the amount that flowed through the world’s hydrologic cycle. Both Latin America and Africa used less than 6% (see table). On this evidence, it would seem that all water problems are local.

The trouble with this conclusion is that no one knows how much water people can safely use. It is certainly not 100% (the amount taken in Gulf states) because the rest of creation also has to live off the water. In many places the maximum may well be less than one fifth, the average for Asia as a whole. It depends on how water is returned to the system, how much is taken from underground aquifers, and so on.

But there is some admittedly patchy evidence that, given current patterns of use and abuse, the amount now being withdrawn is moving dangerously close to the limit of safety—and in some places beyond it. An alarming number of the world’s great rivers no longer reach the sea. They include the Indus, Rio Grande, Colorado, Murray-Darling and Yellow rivers. These are the arteries of the world’s main grain-growing areas.

Freshwater fish populations are in precipitous decline. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, fish stocks in lakes and rivers have fallen roughly 30% since 1970. This is a bigger population fall than that suffered by animals in jungles, temperate forests, savannahs and any other large ecosystem. Half the world’s wetlands, on one estimate, were drained, damaged or destroyed in the 20th century, mainly because, as the volume of fresh water in rivers falls, salt water invades the delta, changing the balance between fresh and salt water. On this evidence, there may be systemic water problems, as well as local disruptions.

Two global trends have added to the pressure on water. Both are likely to accelerate over coming decades.

The first is demography. Over the past 50 years, as the world’s population rose from 3 billion to 6.5 billion, water use roughly trebled. On current estimates, the population is likely to rise by a further 2 billion by 2025 and by 3 billion by 2050. Demand for water will rise accordingly.

Or rather, by more. Possibly a lot more. It is not the absolute number of people that makes the biggest difference to water use but changing habits and diet. Diet matters more than any single factor because agriculture is the modern Agasthya, the mythical Indian giant who drank the seas dry. Farmers use about three-quarters of the world’s water; industry uses less than a fifth and domestic or municipal use accounts for a mere tenth.

Different foods require radically different amounts of water. To grow a kilogram of wheat requires around 1,000 litres. But it takes as much as 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilo of beef. The meaty diet of Americans and Europeans requires around 5,000 litres of water a day to produce. The vegetarian diets of Africa and Asia use about 2,000 litres a day (for comparison, Westerners use just 100-250 litres a day in drinking and washing).

So the shift from vegetarian diets to meaty ones—which contributed to the food-price rise of 2007-08—has big implications for water, too. In 1985 Chinese people ate, on average, 20kg of meat; this year, they will eat around 50kg. This difference translates into 390km³ (1km³ is 1 trillion litres) of water—almost as much as total water use in Europe.

The shift of diet will be impossible to reverse since it is a product of rising wealth and urbanisation. In general, “water intensity” in food increases fastest as people begin to climb out of poverty, because that is when they start eating more meat. So if living standards in the poorest countries start to rise again, water use is likely to soar. Moreover, almost all the 2 billion people who will be added to the world’s population between now and 2030 are going to be third-world city dwellers—and city people use more water than rural folk. The Food and Agriculture Organisation reckons that, without changes in efficiency, the world will need as much as 60% more water for agriculture to feed those 2 billion extra mouths. That is roughly 1,500km³ of the stuff—as much as is currently used for all purposes in the world outside Asia.

The other long-term trend affecting water is climate change. There is growing evidence that global warming is speeding up the hydrologic cycle—that is, the rate at which water evaporates and falls again as rain or snow. This higher rate seems to make wet regions more sodden, and arid ones drier. It brings longer droughts between more intense periods of rain.

Climate change has three big implications for water use.

First, it changes the way plants grow. Trees, for example, react to downpours with a spurt of growth. During the longer droughts that follow, the extra biomass then dries up so that if lightning strikes, forests burn more spectacularly. Similarly crops grow too fast, then wilt.

Second, climate change increases problems of water management. Larger floods overwhelm existing controls. Reservoirs do not store enough to get people or plants through longer droughts. In addition, global warming melts glaciers and causes snow to fall as rain. Since snow and ice are natural regulators, storing water in winter and releasing it in summer, countries are swinging more violently between flood and drought. That is one big reason why dams, once a dirty word in development, have been making a comeback, especially in African countries with plenty of water but no storage capacity. The number of large dams (more than 15 metres high) has been increasing and the order books of dam builders are bulging.

Third, climate change has persuaded western governments to subsidise biofuels, which could prove as big a disaster for water as they already have been for food. At the moment, about 2% of irrigated water is used to grow crops for energy, or 44km³. But if all the national plans and policies to increase biofuels were to be implemented, reckons the UN, they would require an extra 180km³ of water. Though small compared with the increase required to feed the additional 2 billion people, the biofuels’ premium is still substantial.

In short, more water will be needed to feed and heat a world that is already showing signs of using too much. How to square that circle? The answer is by improving the efficiency with which water is used. The good news is that this is possible: vast inefficiencies exist which can be wrung out. The bad news is it will be difficult both because it will require people to change their habits and because governments, which might cajole them to make the changes, are peculiarly bad at water policy.

…nor any drop to drink

Improving efficiency is doable and industrial users have done it, cutting the amount of water needed to make each tonne of steel and each extra unit of GDP in most rich countries (see first chart). This can make a difference. The Pacific Institute reckons that, merely by using current water-saving practices (ie, no technological breakthroughs) California, a water-poor state, could meet all its needs for decades to come without using a drop more.

Still, industry consumes less than a fifth of the world’s water and the big question is how to get farmers, who use 70-80%, to follow suit. It takes at least three times as much water to grow maize in India, for example, as it does in America or China (see second chart). In some countries, you need 1,500 litres of water to produce a kilo of wheat; in others, only 750 litres. It does not necessarily follow that water is being used unsustainably in the one place and not the other; perhaps the high-usage places have plenty of water to spare. But it does suggest that better management could reduce the amount of water used in farming, and that the world could be better off if farmers did so. Changing irrigation practices can improve water efficiency by 30%, says Chandra Madramootoo, of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage. One can, for example, ensure water evaporates from the leaves of the plant, rather than from the soil. Or one can genetically modify crops so they stop growing when water runs dry, but do not die—they simply resume growth later when the rains return.

The world might also be better off, at least in terms of water, if trade patterns more closely reflected the amount of water embedded in traded goods (a concept called “virtual water” invented by Tony Allan of King’s College London). Some benign effects happen already: Mexico imports cereals from US which use 7 billion cubic metres (m³) of water. If it grew these cereals itself, it would use 16 billion m³, so trade “saves” 9 billion m³ of water. But such beneficial exchanges occur more by chance than design. Because most water use is not measured, let alone priced, trade rarely reflects water scarcities.

To make water use more efficient, says Koichiro Matsuura, the head of UNESCO, the main UN agency dealing with water, will require fundamental changes of behaviour. That means changing incentives, improving information flows, and improving the way water use is governed. All that will be hard.

Water is rarely priced in ways that reflect supply and demand. Usually, water pricing simply means that city dwellers pay for the cost of the pipes that transport it and the sewerage plants that clean it.

Basic information about who uses how much water is lacking. Rainwater and river flows can be measured with some accuracy. But the amount pumped out of lakes is a matter of guesswork and information on how much is taken from underground aquifers is almost completely lacking.

The governance of water is also a mess. Until recently, few poor countries treated it as a scarce resource, nor did they think about how it would affect their development projects. They took it for granted.

Alongside this insouciance goes a Balkanised decision-making process, with numerous overlapping authorities responsible for different watersheds, sanitation plants and irrigation. To take a small example, the modest town of Charlottesville in Virginia has 13 water authorities.

Not surprisingly, investment in water has been patchy and neglected. Aid to developing countries for water was flat in real terms between 1990 and 2005. Within that period, there was a big shift from irrigation to drinking water and sanitation—understandable no doubt, but this meant less aid was going to the main users of water, farmers in poor countries. Aid for irrigation projects in 2002-05 was less than half what it had been in 1978-81. Angel Gurría, the head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, talks of “a crisis in water financing”.

As is often the way, business is ahead of governments in getting to grips with waste. Big drinks companies such as Coca Cola have set themselves targets to reduce the amount of water they use in making their products (in Coke’s case, by 20% by 2012). The Nature Conservancy, an ecologically-minded NGO, is working on a certification plan which aims to give companies and businesses seals of approval (a bit like the Fairtrade symbol) according to how efficiently they use water. The plan is supposed to get going in 2010. That sort of thing is a good start, but just one step in a long process that has barely begun.

(From The Economist)

Water (I)

THE Chinese word for politics (zhengzhi) includes a character that looks like three drops of water next to a platform or dyke. Politics and water control, the Chinese character implies, are intimately linked.

Such a way of thinking contrasts with the usual view around the world, which argues that since humans cannot live without water, it should be a basic human right, available to all, preferably for nothing. The Chinese character points to a more useful approach. In many places water is becoming scarcer. Treating it as a right makes the scarcity worse. Some of the world’s great rivers no longer reach the sea. In many cities water is rationed. Droughts and floods are becoming more extreme. These problems demand policies. Ideally, efficient water use would be encouraged by charging for it, but attempts to do so have mostly proved politically impossible. A more practicable alternative is a system of tradable water-usage rights.

What used to be seen as separate, local difficulties—in California, the desiccated Aral Sea, the Sahel—now look more like manifestations of a global problem. As our article explains, many water problems have global causes: population growth, climate change, urbanisation and, especially, changing diets. It takes 2,000 litres (530 American gallons) of water to grow a kilo (2.2lb) of vegetables but 15,000 litres to produce a kilo of beef—and people are eating more meat. The problems also have global implications. Without a new green revolution, farmers will need 60% more water to feed the 2 billion extra people who will be born between now and 2025.

Yet there is, globally, no shortage of water. Unlike other natural resources (such as oil), water cannot be used up. It is recycled endlessly, as rain, snow or evaporation. On average, people are extracting for their own uses less than a tenth of what falls as rain and snow each year.

The central problem is that so much water is wasted, mainly by farmers. Agriculture uses three-quarters of the world’s water (urban use is trivial: most people drink two or three litres a day, on average, but 2,000-5,000 litres are used to make the food they eat). Because water is usually free, thirsty crops like alfalfa are grown in arid California. Wheat in India and Brazil uses twice as much water as wheat in America and China. Dry countries like Pakistan export textiles though a 1kg bolt of cloth requires 11,000 litres of water.

Any economist knows what to do: price water to reflect its value. But decades of trying to do that for agriculture have run into powerful resistance from farmers. They reject scarcity pricing for the reason that water falls from the skies. No government owns it, so no government should charge for it.

Cap and trade

There is a way out. Australian farmers have the right to use a certain amount of water free. They can sell that right (called a “usufructuary right”) to others. But if they want more water themselves, they must buy it from a neighbour. The result of this trading is a market that has done what markets do: allocate resources to more productive use. Australia has endured its worst drought in modern history in the past ten years. Water supplies in some farming areas have fallen by half. Yet farmers have responded to the new market signals by switching to less thirsty crops and kept the value of farm output stable. Water productivity has doubled. Australia’s system overcomes the usual objections because it confirms farmers’ rights to water and lets them have much of it for nothing.

Tradable-usage rights have another advantage: they can be used in rough and ready form in huge countries such as China and India that do not have meters to measure usage, or strong legal systems to enforce usage rights. Instead of sophisticated infrastructure, they depend on local trust and knowledge: farmers sell a share of their time at the village pump. A system like that works in parts of Pakistan’s Punjab.

Usage rights have flaws. At first, they confirm existing patterns of use that are often inefficient. Farmers can cheat, as Australians have found. They are, at most, a good start. But they would be better than what exists now, which is sporadic rationing and the threat of a giant crisis. Or what may come next, a mandatory mass conversion to vegetarianism.

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