Water crisis? What water crisis?
Today, I'm chairing a discussion on water access in the developing world, organised by the charity
WORLDWrite. The discussion will be very topical, given that last Thursday was World Environment Day, and the UN made water access the centrepiece of the day.
There is a very conservative streak running through discussion of water access. Discussions invariably state that the world is using too much water and that many of the current sources of water are running out fast, particularly groundwater supplies in many rapidly expanding urban areas. In other parts of the world, water provision has never been good and isn't getting any better.
Yet, there is no absolute shortage of water in the world. How can there be, when two-thirds of the planet is covered in it? Nor is there any technical difficulty in getting clean water to people. All sorts of projects, big and small, show that water can be moved, collected, purified and desalinated, depending on the needs of the area concerned. The barrier is invariably poverty - or, at least, it has been up until now.
The trend is away from attempting development to conservation of water, using very small schemes that have little impact on local environments. But all such schemes can do is make more reliable the current levels of water provision. There is no possibility of them providing the levels of water that could qualitatively change the way people live. Meanwhile, big schemes like the Three Gorges project and the North-South project in China are condemned as ecologically unsustainable, as illustrated in
New Scientist this week:
'[A] series of mega-projects [is] now being promoted from India to Spain to central Africa, aimed at replumbing the planet at costs that make even the largest dams look puny. We don't need these projects. It is increasingly clear that the real water problems around the world are about managing demand rather than boosting supply. They are about the failure to adopt even the most basic water conservation measures... the cheaper, more peaceful and more rational path leads in quite another direction.'
A human-centred vision of water provision would make sure that the needs of people came first. That means not just clean and reliable supplies of water, but in sufficient quantities to allow them convenient access and proper waste disposal. Why should people spend huge chunks of their lives just trying to supply their water needs?
World's water supply 'running low', BBC News, 5 June 2003