ENVIRONMENT: Experts to ‘Think Water’ in Kyoto

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Feb 27 2003 (IPS) - So much of living is about weathering those storms, and new studies show it is becoming more so.

Also, it is about weathering droughts. Losses from floods and droughts have risen tenfold over the past 50 years, the World Water Council says in a report published Thursday.

There is often too much water or too little and water experts will meet in the Japanese city of Kyoto March 16 to 23 to see what they can do about it. About 10,000 officials and experts are due there for the World Water Forum.

Kyoto is becoming something of a weather office for the future. This is where it was agreed in 1997 to control carbon dioxide emissions with the intention of checking global warming, in what has come to be called the Kyoto protocol. And now the world will think water at Kyoto.

“That is really a coincidence but there are very close links between the two,” William Cosgrove, vice-president of the World Water Council told IPS in London Thursday. “The very first session after the opening ceremony will be devoted to climate,” he said.

“Water scarcity is really a problem created by population growth and increasing consumption,” he said. “It is areas that are seeing high population growth that are also facing a lack of water. But problems in those areas are increasing also because of floods and droughts due to global warming.”

Managing water around the world has to be addressed “very urgently,” Cosgrove said. The floods and droughts that result at least partly from mismanagement of water “can set developing countries back by years,” he said.

Disaster relief agencies like the Red Cross are recognising that “it is more cost-effective to work on prevention by way of better preservation and storage of water, and to use the better tools available now to forecast floods,” he said. This will not stop storms, but can reduce the cost of coping with the damage they bring.

That damage can be immense. “From 1971 to 1995, floods affected more than 1.5 billion people worldwide, or 100 million people per year,” says the report from the water council. “This total includes 318,000 killed and more than 81 million left homeless. Major floods that left at least 1,000 people dead and caused more than a billion dollars in damages per episode have been the most destructive.”

The number of major flood disasters has grown from decade to decade since 1950, the report says, with six cases in the 1950s, seven in the 1960s, eight in the 1970s, 18 in the 1980s, and 26 in the 1990s.

A flood in Bangladesh in April 1991 killed 140,000 people. Two floods in China, one in 1996 and the second in 1998, caused the highest material losses of the decade, of the order of 30 billion dollars and 26.5 billion dollars respectively.

Hurricane Mitch that hit Central America in 1998 killed 11,000 people. It left behind thousands of others missing. More than three million people were either homeless or severely affected.

Cosgrove says all this has still not persuaded governments to think water. “What we would like to see at Kyoto is commitments to taking action, not just talk and debate,” he said. “We get all sorts of statements at occasions like the World Summit for Sustainable Development. But there are hardly any budgets for putting water development into government plans.”

The United Nations estimates that by 2025 half the world will be living in areas that are at risk from storms or other weather extremes.

Droughts are also becoming more severe and widespread, says the World Water Council report. “Up to 45 per cent of reported deaths from natural disasters between 1992 and 2001 resulted from droughts and famines,” the report says. “The most vulnerable communities are impoverished peoples occupying marginal rural and urban environments.”

The report says: “A direct consequence of drought is crop loss that can, in turn, cause starvation among humans if alternative food sources are not available.” Indirectly, water shortage contributes to the proliferation of diseases, and if a drought persists, people are often forced to migrate.

The water council cites estimates that “every dollar spent on protection from natural disasters can save from four to ten dollars in relief.” It is now asking governments to spend that dollar.