THE latest triennial World Water Forum which concluded yesterday in Mexico City is very far from being another international jamboree for jet-setting officials and ministers. Clean and abundant water, long taken for granted in parts of the world, is in fact a scarce and sometimes dangerous commodity for fully two-thirds of humanity. According to Loic Fauchon, the head of the France-based World Water Council which, with the Mexican government, sponsored this latest meeting, poor-quality water or the lack of any water at all, kills ten times as many people as are killed in all world conflicts.
This is an appalling statistic. It moved some of the 140 country delegations to seek a declaration enshrining the absolute right of everyone to water. The wider political implications of such a commitment appear, however, to have persuaded many delegates to oppose it. Whether or not this is a missed opportunity is debatable. In the end, what matters more than lofty statements of intent are practical steps on the ground to bring clean safe water to all those who do not have it.
Such a drive is not unfortunately simply a matter of helping local communities dig wells and clean up disease-ridden waters. The world’s climate is undergoing accelerating change. Widespread aridification is occurring in sub-Saharan Africa as the desert moves inexorably southward. Though local help was one of the themes of the weeklong forum in Mexico City, the harsh truth is that a wider strategy is also necessary. Much of the world’s fresh water is hard to access. Past water projects such as the old Soviet Union’s profligate waste of the waters of the Aral Sea to irrigate vast cotton crops have had devastating consequences. Other endeavors, such as Libya’s tapping of the largely unreplenishable freshwater aquifers beneath the desert to water alfalfa fields and bring water to the coast in the Great Man-Made River, have raised serious concerns.
It is clear that existing available fresh water resources must be exploited for the long rather than the short term; otherwise the world today is preparing a tragic inheritance for its children and grandchildren. Saudi Arabia, which sent a large delegation to Mexico, finds itself making a unique contribution to the future of water. The Kingdom is the world’s largest producer of desalinated water as a byproduct of power generation. Compared with the siphoning of rivers or underground aquifers, the cost per gallon is certainly higher but surely water is an issue where economics must now take a secondary role. Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is covered by salt water. Properly funded and applied, the advances in desalination, pioneered in part here in the Kingdom, can be applied in many other places and have the added benefit of increasing power generation.
Meanwhile the most pressing message to come out of Mexico City is that water must no longer be taken for granted. Massive efforts have to be made to catch and conserve it and then avoid wasting it. Now the message must be turned into actions.
