| You'd think living in Ireland I'd be safe against say, drought? Well, think again. There was an article yesterday in the Irish Times. Unseasonal monsoon weather conceals the fact that eastern population centres are only one drought away from water rationing, writes Harry McGee, Irish Times contributor.
The twin pressures - dwindling resources and an increased demand from population growth - makes water a premium product that could be considered analogous to oil. "Just from population growth alone, Dublin city needs to find alternative sources of supply. It will need an extra 350 million litres a day to be brought to Dublin by 2015,"
In a previous water diary I related the UN prediction: by 2025, two thirds of the global population will experience water shortages, with severe lack of water affecting the lives and livelihoods of 1.8 billion.
Cross-posted on the Big Orange |
The current New Scientist has its lead story on water: How to Stop Water Becoming the Next Global Catastrophe. So just who is water stressed in the developing world? Well, most of the Middle-East is, as is Singapore, the Czech Republic, Poland and, who would have thought, Denmark, among others. You don't want to know the situation in some parts of the least developed world such as the sub-Saharan Africa, and the world in general, in which desertification is as thus: About 3,6 billion of the world's 5.2 billion hectares of useful dryland for agriculture has suffered erosion and soil degradation. In more than 100 countries, 1 billion of the 6 billion world population is affected by desertification.
One of the main dangers is the switch from natural water to sewage as people in developing countries are facing growing health risks caused by the widespread use of raw sewage to irrigate crops, according to a study presented at a global water conference in Sweden (pdf).
The report, by the International Water Management Institute, says more than half of farmland near 70 percent of cities in Third World countries is watered with sewage that threatens to spread epidemics.
"Irrigating with wastewater isn't a rare practice limited to a few of the poorest countries," said Liqa Raschid-Sally, a researcher at the institute. "It's a widespread phenomenon, occurring on 20 million hectares (50 million acres) across the developing world, especially in Asian countries, like China, India and Vietnam, but also around nearly every city of sub-Saharan Africa and in many Latin American cities."
Closer to the United States we have this: Scientists, researchers, and others warn that the U.S. is entering a new era of water scarcity. A General Accounting Office (GAO) report from 2003 projected that 36 states could face water shortages by 2013. Five years sooner than forecast, the report has proved disturbingly prophetic.
Someone in Turkey is doing the right thing: Environment and Forestry Minister Veysel Eroglu of Turkey announced a nationwide reforestation campaign, saying that it was the only way to combat desertification, repair the damage from recent wildfires and protect the country from the effects of global warming. The campaign - the biggest ever launched in Turkey - aims to replant at least 2,300,000 ha of land by 2012. This is an area nearly the size of Belgium.
I don't have any answers to all these mounting problems except to repeat my mantra: political will is sorely needed, all else is futile. We can always hope that human ingenuity will save the day, as this system may offer: Reverse Osmosis but that is not going to solve water scarcity.
And don't forget you can figure out your own water footprint using the calculator at waterfootprint.org |
