There is a deadly dichotomy between the growing success of international campaigns to improve the survival, health and longevity of the world’s poor and the rising struggle to feed, educate, house and find work for these same people. With ever more stomachs to fill and hands to employ, the environment faces continuous degradation, most prominently with the steady loss of rain forests, both plundered for timber and firewood and cleared to create new farmland of often short-lived fertility. However, as a new report from the Geneva-based World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) makes clear, fresh water is also under threat as the world’s rivers are increasingly dammed, diverted and obstructed for irrigation, power, industry and drinking.
The top ten threatened rivers include the legendary Nile, Yangtze and Ganges in Egypt, China and India respectively. Their mighty flows with seasonal flooding once sustained agriculture and fisheries on which great and powerful empires were built. But the rule of Pharaohs and emperors has been swept away by the imperatives of economic growth and profit. With less water allowed to flow along their full courses, the quality of water deteriorates, man-made pollutants dumped into the river concentrate to dangerous levels, fish and plant life is damaged, siltation occurs and an entire ecosystem that once sustained millions is, so we are warned, now being driven into potentially irrecoverable decline. In the United States, the once awesome Colorado River has been so dammed for power and sucked out by agriculturalists, industry and urban centers, that not a single drop of its water any longer flows into the sea. The rising concern over the world’s most well-known rivers comes after decades when small flows have been reduced to mere trickles which dry up completely in hot summer months. This is happening throughout North America and Europe and is particularly notable in southern UK.
In states such as Saudi Arabia, where fresh water has always been a precious resource, it was traditionally treated with great respect. No more, unfortunately, as this still underpriced commodity is used to give daily baths to vehicles and is sprayed wastefully onto gardens during the hottest period of midday heat. Such profligate use of water is unfortunately duplicated worldwide. There is also, at the same time, a significant number of people whose abuse of diminishing quantities of fresh water is a case of survival. Larger families need more food which requires more water to produce. As traditional rural economies are tipped into rigorous commercial exploitation, water channeled from a passing river may seem the least expensive of inputs when compared with the cost of seed, fertilizer and modern farm machinery.
In fact though, as this startling new WWF report makes clear, fresh water is one of the most precious assets for the whole world. Unless coordinated ways can be found to protect and sustain its flow, the loss of fresh water will prove to be an expensive, irreversible and potentially deadly international mistake.
