“Global freshwater consumption rose six-fold between 1900 and 1995 - more than twice the rate of population growth. About one third of the world’s population already lives in countries considered to be ‘water stressed’ — that is, where consumption exceeds 10 percent of total supply. If present trends continue, two out of every three people on Earth will live in that condition by 2025.”
Kofi Annan; “We The Peoples,” 2000
Given the closed ecosystem that constitutes our planet, the water on it is all that we have. It is a finite resource. Of the water on the planet, 97.5 percent is saline and 2.25 percent is in the polar icecaps.
As population increases exponentially water use increases with it. Rain recharges some underground water reserves, but some only very slowly, well below the rate of extraction. Changes in the global climate will affect that. Estimates of the recharge rate in Saudi Arabia for example vary from one to six percent per annum of the extraction rate. As the Kingdom relies on ground water for 75 percent of its needs — and almost all of that goes into agriculture use — depletion of the finite resource of groundwater is an increasingly pressing problem.
“The World Water Development Report” compiled by UNESCO’s World Water Assessment Program in 2003 put a figure on the problem saying that the average water supply per person is expected to drop by one third over the next 20 years. The report identified population growth, pollution and global warming as the three main causes for the decline.
Climate change, which is speeding up the world’s hydrological cycle, will account for 20 percent of the decline. Humid areas will see more rain; arid areas will experience a decline in and increasingly erratic precipitation.
Seven of the ten territories in the world with the lowest per capita water reserves are in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) area; four of those, including Saudi Arabia, are on the Arabian Peninsula.
The report suggested that “resolving the crisis is a political decision” — arguing that while resources are finite, distribution, supply side and demand side management were areas that could be addressed politically. Unless political leaders address the problem, the scarcity of fresh water will affect up to 75 percent of the projected population of 9.3 billion people.
The coordinator of the UN’s Water Assessment Program said when the report was produced that spending $50 to $100 billion annually on water would solve many of the world’s health problems. For comparison, some $30 billion is spent on activities such as golf that use huge amounts of water.
Ten years after the Rio Summit of 1992, the United Nations Environmental Programmed (UNEP) published a report, “Vital Water Graphics.” UNEP monitors and analyzes water resources on a global scale and over the last 20 years has established some useful foundations on which to assess the threat of water shortages.
The conclusions were:
1. Freshwater resources are unevenly distributed, with much of the water located far from human populations. Many of the world’s largest river basins run through thinly populated regions. There are an estimated 263 major international river basins in the world, covering — 231 059 898 km2 or 45.3% of the Earth’s land surface area (excluding Antarctica).
2. Groundwater represents about 90% of the world’s readily available freshwater resources, and some 1.5 billion people depend upon groundwater for their drinking water.
3. Agricultural water use accounts for about 75% of total global consumption, mainly through crop irrigation, while industrial use accounts for about 20%, and the remaining 5% is used for domestic purposes.
4. It is estimated that two out of every three people will live in water-stressed areas by the year 2025. In Africa alone, it is estimated that 25 countries will be experiencing water stress (below 1,700 m3 per capita per year) by 2025. Today, 450 million people in 29 countries suffer from water shortages.
5. Clean water supplies and sanitation remain major problems in many parts of the world, with 20% of the global population lacking access to safe drinking water. Water-borne diseases from faecal pollution of surface waters continue to be a major cause of illness in developing countries. Polluted water is estimated to affect the health of 1.2 billion people, and contributes to the death of 15 million children annually.
Traditionally, the remedy to water shortage was supply management. That involved the building of water storage facilities and controlling the supply to users. Demand management — the control of water consumption and waste reduction and increased efficiency augment the supply management side of the equation.
Professor Tony Allan, head of the Water Research Group at King’s College London, approaches the remedy to water deficit from a different angle. He posits three remedies to water deficit in the MENA region; none of them is concerned with supply management.
“Some supply management will be needed and there will also be substantial resort to desalination for domestic and industrial use. But supply management is not among the major solutions.”
Allan suggests that the combination of reduction in population growth rates, changes in the patterns of food consumption and the socio economic development of regions for with that “comes the adaptive capacity to deal with the challenge of water scarcity.” (“Hydropolitics in the Developing World” Ed. Turton and Henwood)
It takes 16 times as much water to produce a kilogram of beef as it does to produce a kilogram of wheat. Allan suggests that the water deficit regions import “virtual water” — in the form of meat from regions where water is readily available — rather than use the scarce local resources. However, very often political directives — such as “food self sufficiency” prevent what appears to be a very practical answer to food security and the conservation of a scarce resource.
Water scarcity has two orders, Allan says; the first order is simply fresh water scarcity. The second, and in his view the more important order, which is “the lack of capacity to deal with such scarcity.”
The use and conservation of water has become very much more to the fore of political thinking. There have been conflicts over water throughout history and recent saber-rattling by President Mubarak of Egypt have raised the issue once again.
However, the Kingdom is not at the tipping-point where water has run out and the alternatives are too painful to contemplate. What is clear though is that the profligate use of water for agriculture in a desert region is probably going to have to be curtailed. Desalination plants will not be able to supply enough if and when reserves of underground water run out — as in time, they will.
No one quite knows when; some estimates put the tipping-point as close as 2025, others talk of huge aquifers under the Rub Al Khali. Abdullah Al Hussayen, Minister for water says that no one really knows, because a survey has not been carried out for over 20 years.
But fresh water is a finite resource and it is simply a matter of time.
