The impact of water on the world

By Julian Sudre

Is humanity facing a looming crisis
that will extinguish the human race or
the solutions to quench our first are hidden deep into mankind's psyche?


The profligate use of water does not raise too many eyebrows in the western world. Its abundance flows systematically through our pipes and feeds graciously our golf courses and magick fairyland cities into being in the most inhospitable corners the world. But the tap is started screeching under the insatiable demand of our thirst and the Beijing Olympics have recently made their strangling urge for water felt over in the Shaanxi province.

China's construction of a huge network to divert water to the North is a timely manoeuvre that is about to sound the death knell of our limitless supply of water. Its synchronisation was no less well timed with the World Water Day on March 20 which also coincides with the International Year of Sanitation.

Access to water is one of humanity's biggest challenges, and in 2o00, the United Nations set a goal of halving the proportion of people without access to safe water by 2015. While toilet flushing is taken for granted for most of us, almost half the population of the world has consigned this very act to the realms of dreams.
There are 6 billion people on the planet with 1.2 billion people having no access to water and 2.6 billion without proper toilets. The arising climate warming issue is precipitating the alteration of hydrologic regimes throughout the world with impacts on water supply, water quality and water management. The effects on climate changes on water resources will vary regionally because of differences in climate impacts, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity, requiring widely societal and governmental responses.

According to a senior Chinese government official, social upheaval and environmental harm could be caused in the north-western provinces of China as those provinces are being required to pump clean water to Beijing in time for the Olympics. Unfortunately The Hebei province, which lies next to Beijing, is suffering from severe drought and the extra 300m cubic metres of back-up supplies to Beijing's 16m residents is already exacerbating the farmers' anger over the already lack of water which has a pivotal role in their agricultural land.
The entire project is expected to run up to $60bn, far exceeding the cost of the Three Gorges Dam. Hence, negative sentiments are running high as it could induce the relocation of ten of thousands of people, draining their farmlands and subsequently affecting the quality of the water.
The latter is an important point to highlight in conjunction with the International Year of Sanitation; UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon conveys the fundamental message of tackling urgently the sanitation of water and voices his resentment about the lack of political will. He goes on to add that every 20 seconds, one child dies as a result of abysmal sanitation.

On a socio-ecological level, water is a driving force that expedites productivity and provides indispensable "capital" for a healthy economy. About a quarter of the world's population lives in area of "physical water shortage" and rivers such as the Colorado and the Yellow are drying up. Australia is faced with major water scarcity in the Murray-Darling Basin as a result of diverting large quantities of water for use in agriculture. If the Nile were to disappear, an exodus of climate change refugees will trigger fantastic political and economical waves throughout the world. And this is no more so than a snippet of visionary possibilities whereby possibilities are imminent realities.

The UN recommends that people need a minimum of 50 litres of water a day for drinking, washing, cooking and sanitation. So when we for instance, look at Italy that spends about 3,300 litres of water a day to produce each person's food, of which about half goes on making ham and cheese and a third to pasta and bread and Thailand is very much nip and tuck with its counterpart, those statistics don't paint a rosy picture of our water management.

As the world's population is growing and thus is our food production, water becomes part of the element that needs adding to the equation. Seventy per cent of the water used worldwide is used for agriculture and with a prediction of 8.9bn people by 2050, scarcity will without question become part of everyone's vocabulary. Although shortages are already biting in Australia, water regulations are put into place, but the lack of awareness or rather our throwaway society does not stimulate a philosophy of safe-guarding in the wider context. Again, wastages are blatantly conspicuous and if immediate actions to use water sparingly were wide-spread, we certainly would prevent the proliferation of water-stressed countries.

Restrictions should be imposed on birthrate growth to start with
thereby the food production could be stemmed partially, which would reduce the exposure on world markets. Water diversion to agriculture and the expansion of areas used for growing crops and livestock perhaps should be more regulated by governments but sadly those platitudes remain at odds with driving a country's economy forward. Hence our thirst for water won't be tamed any time soon. While we know deep down , which policies to implement, our political system itself lack in conviction and the keen disposition to utilise our resources hand over fist and mismanage commodities in general never the less is accelerating a crisis instead of diverting it.