• COMMENT & ANALYSIS: Low water: If rivers and lakes are drained further, many parts of the world may experience increased political tension, food shortages and environmental damage, writes Vanessa Houlder.

• INTERNATIONAL ECONOMY: Billions face threat of water shortage

  Financial Times; Aug 14, 2001

  By NICHOLAS GEORGE

  As many as 2.7bn people, almost one-third of the world's population, will live in regions facing severe water scarcity by 2025, delegates to the annual Stockholm Water Symposium were told yesterday.

  Figures issued by the International Water Management Institute show that Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will be the most severely affected regions, with the shortage likely to extend well beyond semi-arid and arid regions.

  Increasing demand for water from both industry and agriculture is indentified as the leading cause of the threatened shortage. Environmentalists have also warned that water usage must be reduced in order to protect rivers, lakes and wetlands.

  Margaret Catley-Carlson, chair of the Global Water Partnership, yesterday gave the 1,100 delegates to the conference a stark assessment of the problems already being faced.

  "Water tables are declining, many rivers no longer reach the sea, more than 1bn people do not have consistent access to freshwater and more than twice that number lack access to sanitation," she said.

  Population growth and urbanisation mean water is needed for the cities, but it has also created more demand for water in agriculture, with pressure to irrigate farm land increasing.

  According to Ms Catley-Carlson, the way forward is to find more efficient methods of irrigation, to improve financing of water schemes and to create more integrated forms of water management.

  Professor Takashi Asano of the University of California at Davies, said that through the right recycling techniques industry could cut its use of water by between 40 and 90 per cent.

  To achieve this, regulators must raise the standard for how clean water should be before it can be discharged by an industrial user. A higher standard would encourage industry to attempt to re-use the water. Higher taxes on polluted discharges would have a similar effect, Mr Asano said.

  Industry should also be encouraged to use recycled water from other sources, he argued. This had been the case in California where water used in cooling towers at refineries was now often recycled from sewage plants.

  

• COMMENT & ANALYSIS: Low water: If rivers and lakes are drained further, many parts of the world may experience increased political tension, food shortages and environmental damage, writes Vanessa Houlder:

Financial Times; Aug 14, 2001

By VANESSA HOULDER

The world is getting drier. Climate change and irrigation have reduced Lake Chad, the African freshwater lake, to a twentieth of its size in the 1960s. Nine-tenths of the "fertile crescent", the Mesopotamian marshlands near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, has been lost through drainage and damming. The natural flows of rivers such as the Colorado, Yellow and Amu Darya (Turkistan) no longer reach the sea in the dry season.

For the world's water experts, who gathered in Stockholm for a symposium on water scarcity yesterday, there is no doubt as to the gravity of the issue. Nearly a third of the world's expected population will live in regions facing severe water scarcity by 2025, according to findings released yesterday at the symposium by the International Water Management Institute.

The main reason for the global scarcity of water is increased demand. Growing the crops needed to feed the world's expanding population accounts for about 70 per cent of all water withdrawals. But increases in pollution are also taking a toll. In many parts of the world, rivers and lakes are so polluted that their water is unfit even for industrial use. In some countries, problems are likely to be exacerbated by future climate change.

Many observers believe there is a risk that future water shortages will lead to more famine and war. The message from the UN's Global Environment Outlook last year was stark: "The world water cycle seems unlikely to be able to cope with the demands that will be made of it in the coming decades," it said. Hans van Ginkel, UN under-secretary- general, has warned that conflicts over water could become "a key part of the 21st-century landscape".

Not everyone is so pessimistic. William Cosgrove, vice-president of the World Water Council, an international think-tank, believes that the issue is about management of water, rather than absolute scarcity. "There is a water crisis. But it is not about having too little water to satisfy our needs. It is just that we don't manage it well enough," he says.

Tony Allan, professor of geo-graphy at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, also finds some grounds for optimism. He says that there is sufficient water to satisfy people's personal needs almost everywhere. But agriculture is a different story. Growing food for an individual requires a thousand times as much water as it takes to meet that person's need for drinking water. Water-deficient economies balance their water budgets by importing "virtual water" in the form of grain and other food staples, he says.

Many commentators remain sanguine about the world's continuing ability to produce enough food. Growth in food production substantially outpaced the growth in population between 1960 and 2000. The main problems will be experienced by arid countries, which are often extremely poor, that may be forced to move away from self-reliance in food production.

But some experts question the underlying sustainability of global food production. Attention is increasingly focused on groundwater, the water stored in underground aquifers, which is being depleted in parts of China, India and the western US. Sandra Postel of the Worldwatch Institute, the US research group, believes farmers are overpumping 160bn cubic metres of groundwater a year - enough to produce nearly a tenth of the world's current grain supplies. The problem is worsening and "represents one of the largest threats to future food production", she says.

There are also concerns about the environmental and social costs of irrigation. It has inflicted significant damage on freshwater ecosystems, which provide sustenance for fish and other animals and millions of people. "The protection of rivers and lakes is vital. Many people, especially in poor rural communities, depend directly on the food, timber and fish these ecosystems provide," says Ger Bergkamp of IUCN, the World Conservation Union.

Weighing the needs of agriculture against those of the environment is a complex matter, according to the organisers of the Stockholm conference. Agricultural scientists argue that farm water use, especially irrigation, must be increased 15-20 per cent in the coming 25 years to maintain food security and reduce hunger and rural poverty. But environmental scientists say that water use will need to be reduced by at least 10 per cent to protect rivers, lakes and marshes.

As well as debating the conflicting needs of agriculture and environmental protection, the Stockholm conference will discuss practical measures to improve water use. The scope for improvements is significant.

More than half the water entering irrigation distribution systems never makes it to the crops because of leakage and evaporation.

Several techniques, such as the use of drip irrigation systems and precision sprinklers, can improve efficiency. Other innovations being developed include water-saving techniques for growing rice, the development of drought-resistant maize and low-cost irrigation technologies that produce higher crop yields because of more intensive cultivation.

Some water experts think the key to improved water management lies in setting prices that reflect the cost of supplying and distributing water. "A major reason for growing water scarcity and freshwater ecosystem decline is that water is undervalued the world over," according to a paper in Science by researchers at the World Resources Institute, a US think-tank.

The WRI acknowledges that pricing water to reflect its true cost is likely to run into stiff opposition from the public. But it argues that policymakers can win the support of farmers and urban residents if they offer a more reliable service.

There are already a number of agreements in which users make payments to preserve the source of their water. Since 1998, water users in Quito, Ecuador, have paid fees towards the protection of the high-elevation "cloud forests", which extract water from the atmosphere.

Such deals may increasingly have to take place on an international basis. In the past 20 years, the number of river basins shared by more than one country has increased from 214 to 261, according to Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security. He believes that water is likely to be a continued source of conflict and political tensions, even though it is rarely the sole source of violent conflict.

But some analysts think that there is exaggerated concern about the risk of conflict. In an article published by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Thomas Homer-Dixon of the University of Toronto argues that wars over river water are likely only in a narrow set of circumstances. The upstream country must be able to restrict the river's flow, there must be a history of antagonism between the countries and the downstream country must have sufficient military forces to think it worth starting a battle.

Such conditions apply in relatively few river basins. The most obvious is the Nile, where on several occasions Egypt has threatened military action to ensure an adequate supply of water. Even where there is the potential for international conflict, countries have tended in practice to opt for co-operation rather than conflict. "My experience has been that once people begin to share information and look for ways to find solutions they will find them," says Mr Cosgrove of the World Water council.

But many of the experts meeting in Stockholm believe the world cannot afford to be too sanguine about the problems water shortages may bring. If water resources are managed badly, some parts of the world may experience an escalation in political tension, food shortages and environmental degradation. "Pessimists are wrong but useful," says Prof Allan. "Optimists are right but dangerous because they allow politicians to treat water as a low political priority."