Dried OutWater, not oil, is the most precious fluid in our lives, the substance from which all life on the earth has sprung and continues to depend. If we run short of oil and other fossil fuels, we can use alternative energy sources. If we have no clean, drinkable water, we are doomed. We are falling short of the most basic humanitarian goal: sufficient and affordable clean water, food and energy for everyone. On a planet that is 71% water, less than 3% of it is fresh. Most of that is either in the form of ice and snow in Greenland and Antarctica or in deep groundwater aquifers. And less than 1% of that water -.01% of all the earth’s water – is considered available for human needs; even then, much of it is far from large populations. At the dawn of the 21st century, more than 1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water. Some 2.4 billion – 40% of the world’s population – lack adequate sanitation, and 3.4 million die each year from water-related diseases. “We are facing a world water gap right now, this minute,” the World Commission on Water has warned, “and the crisis will only get worse. The consequences of failing to bridge the gap will be higher food prices and expensive food imports for water-scarce countries that are predominantly poor.” Hunger and thirst are also linked to political instability and low rates of economic growth. The crisis is partly due to natural cycles of extreme weather. But human activity has been playing an ever-greater role in creating water scarcity and “water stress” – defined as the indication that there is not enough good-quality water to meet human and environmental needs. Like so much of the earth’s bounty, water is unevenly distributed. While people in some parts of the world pile up sandbags to control seasonal floods or struggle to dry out after severe storms, others either shrivel or die – like their livestock and their crops before them – or move on as environmental refugees. In Canada – which has about the same amount of water as China, but less than 2.5% of its population – the resource has been labeled “blue gold”. In parched Botswana, dominated by the Kalahari Desert, water is so precious that the national currency is called pula – “rain” in the Setswana language. The planet is not actually running out of water, of course. But its people are having an increasingly difficult time managing, allocating and protecting the water that exists. In some areas the hydrological cycle – by which the fresh water of rain and snow evaporates, condenses in clouds and falls again – may be taking longer to complete as humans use water faster than nature can renew it. As governments, international agencies and local officials grapple with the situation, research findings and conflicts over water rights illustrate the immensity of the task. For example: · In many sub-Saharan countries, according to a report by the World Water Council, the average per capita water-use rates are 10 to 20 liters a day, which is called “undesirably low.” By contrast, per capita residential use in Europe runs as high as about 200 liters. Beset by agricultural failure, fragile ecosystem, erratic weather, war and other factors, 18 sub-Saharan countries face the severest problem in feeding their people. · In some places, water that is shared by nations has been poisoned – sometimes accidentally, as in Romanian cyanide spill in the Tisza and Danube Rivers, and sometimes naturally, as in arsenic poisoning of groundwater in India and Bangladesh in recent years. More than 200 river basins are shared, and about half of them are in Europe and Africa. As a 21st century issue, freshwater scarcity was ranked second only to global warming in an International Council for Science survey of environmental experts in more than 50 countries. Next on the list were the related topics of desertification and deforestation. Desertification is a feature of every continent, and it seriously threatens the livelihoods of more than 1.2 billion people in more than 110 countries. Stemming from a variety of factors – including climatic variations, overgrazing of livestock, tilling land unsuitable for agriculture and chopping trees for firewood – desertification has made its greatest impact in Africa. The continent is two-thirds desert, and nearly three-quarters of its extensive agricultural drylands are degraded to some degree. While much of the focus is on Africa, developed but semiarid European countries along the northern Mediterranean also are suffering from desertification and deforestation. Much of the soil of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal has become saline and sterile as a result of fire, drought, floods, overgrazing, overtilling and other factors. Such degradation can be irreversible. As the world begins to address the situation more seriously, a range of proposals, old and new, are coming to the fore. They include: reducing waste in irrigation, desalinating, recycling, making appropriate local choices of crop and grain-fed animals (growing corn rather than wheat in areas where water is not plentiful), employing low-cost chlorination and solar disinfectant techniques; increasing water “harvesting” – from sources like rain. Access to adequate, unpolluted water is increasingly being viewed as a basic human right, something the governments must ensure. For billions of people, that – like water itself – is a matter of life and death. (From ‘Time’, abridged)
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