ENVIRONMENT-UAE: Falling Levels, Wastage Make Water Scarce

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Meena Janardhan

DUBAI, Mar 22 2004 (IPS) - Water consumption in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is the highest in the world, but here and elsewhere in the Gulf, it may soon become a very scarce commodity.

”We really had such a problem last month when water supply stopped due to some annual maintenance,” said Shirley, an Indian homemaker who lives in Sharjah, one of the seven emirates.

”We have taken our water supply for granted and have got used to consuming gallons of water. I shudder to think what would happen if we were to face such shortages everyday,” she added in an interview. ”No wonder the government keeps issuing notices about wastage.”

Figures by the Emirates Industrial Bank say the UAE, with a population of 3.7 million people, has the highest per capita consumption of water in the world at 500 litres a day. In Britain, the figure is 330 litres a day, Spain 300 litres, France 215 litres and Jordan 150 litres. The UAE’s water consumption is growing annually by eight to 10 percent.

Equally alarming, groundwater levels have also dropped at a rate of one metre every year for the past 30 years. The estimated annual recharge for groundwater in the UAE is 20 million cubic metres and the rate of groundwater extraction has been around 880 million cubic metres a year.

Similar situations exist in the other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. A recent report revealed that consumption of drinking water in member states rose from 1.9 billion cubic metres in 1958 to 3 .9 billion cubic metres in 1999 and that the volume of potable water consumption would total 8.8 billion cubic metres by the advent of 2010.

In order to meet this growing demand, governments in the region are turning toward desalination.

The six members of the GCC have collectively spent more than 40 billion U.S. dollars on building seawater desalination stations over the last 25 years. There has been an expansion in the construction of water desalination plants on the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea, where countries consume more than 60 percent of the total capacity of water desalination plants in the world.

Demand for desalinated water in the UAE is expected to double by 2010 while the demand for irrigation water is set to double by 2020.

”In the last two decades, rapid economic development, sharply rising population levels and the promotion of agricultural development to achieve self-sufficiency in food supplies have led to an increasing reliance on unconventional water resources such as desalination, and the development of alternative conventional water supply measures,” said Essam Al Muhairi, a researcher at a Dubai-based desalination company.

In Dubai, another emirate, alone, water supply now stands at 210,000 cubic metres per day and is projected to rise to 660,000 cubic metres per day by 2020.

Demand from irrigation and greening requirements is 180,000 cubic metres per day, and is expected to jump to 560,000 cubic metres by 2020, according to Dubai municipality estimates.

”It is time the people realise the worth of getting regular water supply. The amount of water that gets wasted is shocking. No one seems to understand the effort and money that the government has to put in,” said an official at Dubai municipality.

”The country has seen little rain for the past few years and the groundwater level is also falling sharply. And yet, taps are left running and leaky pipes are common sights in many residential buildings,” he said.

However, tenants blame the landlords. ”We complain time and again to the watchman about leaking taps and cisterns. But our words fall on deaf ears,” said Ashraf, a Pakistani graphic designer from Dubai.

”It is this ‘who will take the blame’ syndrome that leads to shocking wastage,” said the Dubai municipality official.

A blueprint for conserving the UAE’s natural resource has warned that the country may be headed for a major drought.

”There has been an added fallout,” said Essam. ”A lot of the falling groundwater resources has become saline, especially in coastal areas. Water wells on more than 15 percent of East Coast farms in mountainous areas have completely dried up, and water in wells on more than 20 percent of the farms located along certain coastal strips are saline now and are no longer useful for irrigation,” he added.

Proof of falling water reserves is the sight of drought killing even hardy date palms. Low rainfall in the past five years has caused some palm trees, known as the trees of life, to die on farms on the East Coast.

Over a thousand million cubic metres of water have been exhausted, Essam added. Less than a fifth of that was consumed by the population, and the remaining 800 million cubic metres was used for irrigation. ”It is estimated that up to 79 percent of the UAE’s underground water reserves are not being adequately replenished by rainwater,” he said.

While authorities already have many schemes to tackle the problem, more and more innovative solutions appear to be needed.

So far, the government has developed a water resources management strategy plan for the emirate of Abu Dhabi and awareness campaigns, including one on a ‘Rethink Your Lifestyle’ theme.

There is a massive, first-of-its-kind project by the Dubai municipality where 10 million gallons of treated water will be injected into the ground each day to raise the depleted water table.

There are experiments on growing crops that can flourish in saline water and survive drought.

Dr Mohammed Hassan Al Attar, director general of the Dubai-based International Centre for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA), believes that developing biosaline agriculture to replace freshwater-grown crops is key to safeguarding the economy in the future.

”This is of the utmost importance in the Arab world where freshwater supplies are used for farming,” he pointed out.

”We have around 300 flats in our building and we never realise the effort behind supplying basic amenities to such a large number of people,” added Henry James, a Sharjah-based photographer.

”In fact we create a racket even if the supply stops for even 10 minutes. If this insensitive attitude continues, then the ugly fact that we are living in a desert country will soon rear its head, in spite of all the measures that the government adopts,” he added. ”It has to be a joint effort and the sooner we realise that the better.”