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WATER: Prepare to face shocks
lead photo
LONDON, 1 August 2012 (IRIN) - Is the world ready to face water shocks?
For water shocks are certainly coming; water shocks, in fact, are
already here.
A meeting of ecologists, policymakers and water professionals gathered
recently at London's Chatham House to contemplate the prospect. Asia,
they heard, was the continent where problems were already most acute.
Pavel Kabat of Vienna's Institute for Applied Systems Analysis told
IRIN: "We have been worried about water in other parts of the world -
it's still a very important issue in Africa - but we were forgetting
that the because of the economic growth and the population growth, the
surge in food demand will come in Asia. Already now the fresh water for
agriculture is being consumed at very high rates. Asia is the hotspot.
and I would say that the first big issues will have to be faced by 2020
or 2030."
Seventy percent of the global use of water is for agricultural
purposes, and that is where the crisis is likely to show itself. "In
India, 75 percent of all irrigation water comes from groundwater," says
Kabat, "and we are kind of assuming that it will stay like this." But
he points to Europe and the USA, which have seen groundwater levels in
some areas dropping by as much as five metres a year, and laws have had
to be introduced to restrict the lifting of groundwater for
agriculture; the same thing, he says could happen in Asia.
There is also the issue of water quality. With reduced flows of fresh
water from Asia's great rivers reaching the coast, and with sea levels
rising, the Brahmaputra, Ganges and Mekong deltas are suffering
increasing salt water intrusion, with salinity in some places reaching
levels at which normal crops will not grow. Some coastal areas of
Bangladesh are already unfarmable.
Developed countries are certainly not immune from the impending
problems. In some areas of the USA ancient aquifers have been tapped to
allow agriculture in naturally desert areas. This "fossil water" is now
depleting fast and not able to be replenished. One speaker told the
meeting he could see areas where there would soon be no more
groundwater, which means no more agriculture, and, since people only
settled there because they could grow irrigated crops, no more
viability as a populated area - a prospect so alarming that, he said,
"it causes policymakers not to want to tackle that problem."
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Across the border in Mexico, it is the capital city which is threatened
by an unsustainable situation. Already Mexico City has a serious water
deficit and is facing a drop in rainfall of something like 30 percent.
The situation has been made worse by the fact that Mexico subsidizes
public services in the capital; water is cheaper there than in the
countryside, and the population is growing very fast. And once
consumers are used to subsidies it becomes very hard to introduce a
realistic price.
Polioptro Martinez Austria, director of the Mexican Institute of
Hydrology, says water managers cannot solve this problem on their own.
"Today there are huge subsidies for water in the area," he told IRIN,
"and as a result, the aquifers are overexploited, and the public
awareness of water use is not enough to save water. I believe we need a
new policy of urban development if we are going to solve the water
problem."
In India and Bangladesh, the arid areas of the USA and Mexico City, the
impression is of a dreadful inevitability, like a slow-motion car
crash. And politicians are not good at dealing with this kind of slow
onset event. "We know it has to come," says Kabat, "but there is a
general lack of ability of governments globally to look beyond the next
election period, I am sorry to say. We have a lot of studies, as
scientists, of the scenarios for the next 10, 20, 30 years, but it is
simply too far ahead for politicians to act."
Policy tools
The Chatham House meeting did offer some policy tools that could
address water issues. There was discussion of tariffs and the creation
of water markets, where water rights can be bought, sold and leased.
A market of that kind is now working quite successfully in Australia's
Murray Darling Basin. There the government "unbundled" land rights from
water rights, so that just having water on your land, in the form of a
river or groundwater, no longer gives you automatic rights to use it.
And allocated water rights can be sold, permanently or on a temporary
basis. During the recent severe drought, the result was that farmers
stopped growing thirsty but lower-value crops like rice. They sold
their water allocations to growers of higher value, less demanding
crops like grapes, and the income they received helped them through the
drought period until they could resume their normal farming.
A discussion of tariffs revealed that many countries still do not
charge for water at all, and some give a kind of buy-in-bulk discount,
so that the more water you use, the cheaper the unit cost.
'' We have a lot
of studies, as scientists, of the scenarios for the next 10, 20, 30
years, but it is simply too far ahead for politicians to act
''
China, which has traditionally sold water very cheaply, is starting to
charge more, and has begun moving to so-called "increasing block
tariffs" where water gets increasingly expensive the more you use. With
different cities currently using different systems, a recent
comparative study was able to show that tariffs did have an effect.
Beijing, which now has higher prices and a sharply rising tariff,
showed a real drop in consumption, while usage is still rising in some
other cities.
At the international level there was some discussion of the fact that
water was "everywhere and nowhere", affecting many other agendas, but
with no UN agency dealing with water alone, perhaps reflecting the fact
that, while the world has one climate and one atmosphere, it has many
separate systems of river basins and aquifers, some of which are
severely depleted, while others are well supplied.
Negotiated usage
But water systems do cut across political boundaries and as water
shortages increase, the use of the water will have to be negotiated by
both sides. Tariq Karim, Bangladesh's ambassador in Delhi, is a veteran
in negotiating water-sharing agreements with India, but he told IRIN
that there had to be a change of approach. "When you talk about
sharing," he said, "you are talking about dividing something up, and
whenever you come to dividing up, it's like dividing the spoils. There
is going to be contention. And you can't physically divide a river, and
you can't manage it in segments. It makes better sense if you talk in
terms of managing the river together.
"In Bangladesh our land space is not increasing but our population is,
and for 80 percent of our population their source of livelihood is
agricultural, so for us this is absolutely crucial."
eb/cb
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[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United
Nations]
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