A world without water?
IN MY OPINIONKlaus Doring
As the world marked again the UN’s World Water Day last March 2016, global residents are still struggling to access fresh water. Water scarcity has long been a problem. But climate change, a growing global population and economic growth are putting the natural resource under even more stress. A world without water? Sounding impossible and crazy, while in some parts of the world, especially in Asia, the monsoon rain keeps large areas land-under.
One example of many: since the late 1950's, the Aral lake in Uzbekistan, once the world’s fourth largest, has been rapidly shrinking. Water that had flowed into the lake was diverted to provide irrigation for Uzbekistan’s ‘white gold’, cotton plantations spread across the arid region, while hydro power facilities and reservoirs across Central Asia have also taken their toll.
It is one of the major environmental disasters of the last half century with animal and plant life in the region dying out as a result. But it is not the only place where water has been disappearing. Bolivia’s second-largest lake, Poopó has all but vanished, with severe consequences for both wildlife and people.
Scarcity of water all over the world is becoming an increasing problem. And it’s only going to get worse, said Richard Connor, editor-in-chief of the United Nation’s World Water Development Report 2016 (WWDR), released last month.
“Water has already been relatively scarce,” he explained in German Television. “It’s just that populations are growing and economies are developing, so demand for water keeps increasing, but the quantity of water that is available does not.”
More than 70 percent of the freshwater that is taken from natural re-sources is used in agriculture, for food crops like wheat and rice, but also for plants like cotton. Energy production ac-counts for 15 percent of water usage and another 5 percent is for household usage.
But with the population expected to grow – the WWDR predicts that by 2050 there will be 9.3 billion people, 33 percent more than in 2011 – the world’s water resources are likely to come under increasing pressure. Regions like Central Asia, the Arab world, parts of China, India and the western United States, already suffer from a physical shortage of water. But storage and infra-structure enable countries to collect water and keep it ready in times of drought.
“The magnitude will be proportional to its vulnerability,” said Connor. “Developed countries are much less vulnerable because they have the storage capacity – dams and reservoirs.” But in the developing world, water scarcity is having the greatest impact. There are already more than 1.8 billion people, who only have access to water that is not safe for human consumption, according to the WWDR. And even in areas where there is an abundance of water, like in Sub-Saharan Africa, economic factors mean that people are not getting enough access to the natural resource.
“The water resource is there, but it doesn’t get to the fields, the factories and the cities because infrastructure and institutions are lacking there,” said Connor, adding that crops there are rain-fed because water cannot be used for irrigation. “When there is a drought, like in Ethiopia, they have serious problems that lead to food crises.”
Without improved efficiency measures, agriculture is expected to need 20 percent more water in the coming years to feed the growing population. And let’s face it again: climate is expected to exacerbate the problem, with some countries becoming drier and hotter, while others experience extreme weather in the form of storms and flooding.
A world with less water translates into hardship for unknown millions. Solution must be find. Or is it already too late?
It is only better water management that will help deal with increasing water scarcity, according to experts worldwide. .
Better irrigation techniques that don’t see water wasted through runoff from flooded fields are one way of saving the resource. But any changes in measures would have to be introduced by individual governments and in some cases individual farmers and other stakeholders.
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