Mauritius experienced a water shortage for months in 2011 when the anticipated summer rains failed to arrive. Credit: Nasseem Ackbarally/IPS

By Betsy Otto and Kitty van der Heijden
WASHINGTON, Mar 20 2015 (IPS)

Suppose money was being deposited and withdrawn from your bank account, but you didn’t know how much. And suppose you knew you had bills coming due, but you didn’t know when or what amount would be required to cover them.

Worse, what if you discovered that money was being siphoned from your retirement account to cover the shortfall in your checking account? How confident would you feel about your financial stability?While challenging to implement, the new SDGs could bring unprecedented action to mitigate the world’s water demand and supply crises.

This situation plays out every day when it comes to freshwater. We don’t know how much water we are withdrawing and consuming. In many places, we don’t even know how much groundwater and surface water we have.

But we do know this unequivocally: People, ecosystems, food, energy and cities can’t exist without water. Already, water resources are being strained to the breaking point – in Sao Paulo, northern China, the western United States, northwestern India and many other places. And the world’s water needs are rising inexorably.

Yet this World Water Day, we also find ourselves at a watershed moment. There is a powerful opportunity that may help countries move toward better water management: the United Nations’ proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Walking the Talk through Targets, Measurement

The SDGs will replace the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015, and set the international development agenda for the next 15 years. For the first time ever, the goals could offer new transparency and accountability in how the world uses its water resources. Goal 6 of the proposed SDGs has specific targets related to sustainable and efficient water use, water and sanitation, water quality and protection of critical natural infrastructure.

Beyond a dedicated goal on water, the issue is also mainstreamed across the 17 goals – in goal 3 on health, goal 11 on cities, goal 12 on sustainable consumption and production and goal 15 on terrestrial ecosystems.  These targets will focus political attention, resources and stakeholders on water management more than ever before.

This fall, the international community will finalise the SDGs and the metrics to measure and track water use at a country level. These targets could help hold countries accountable for better water management. Importantly, the SDGs would apply to both developed and developing countries, forcing all countries to “walk the talk.”

Where companies lead, others follow

Many companies already understand that the world is on an unsustainable path. They’re experiencing it in their bottom lines, and investors are asking tough questions. The 2015 World Economic Forum listed “water supply crises” as the top global risks affecting businesses.

Industry leaders are taking steps to reduce their risk exposure and making investments to lessen watershed-level stress, devoting resources to urban water efficiency, aquifer recharge and reforestation and other strategies. For example, Heineken committed this year to create source water protection plans for all of its production units located in water-stressed areas, while MillerCoors has a five-part water stewardship strategy in place.

The private sector and civil society will be useful allies in raising awareness in countries facing particularly high competition for water resources. Hopefully this, combined with the SDGs, will motivate governments to take positive action to reduce water stress – from more rational water pricing, to regulating groundwater withdrawal rates to incentivizing efficient irrigation and reducing water intensity in energy extraction and production.

It starts with good data

This first-of-its-kind SDG system will depend on strong metrics and data. A first step will be establishing a baseline to track sustainable water use against the target.

This challenge will require the best efforts of experts on global water data systems. These discussions are already underway across the world’s professional water communities.

The World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct tool is a good place to start. The open-source platform provides the most up-to-date, globally consistent water supply and demand data publicly available today. Many companies, investors, governments and others are already using the Aqueduct tool Forthcoming water stress projection maps will also provide scenarios for future demand and supply for 2020, 2030 and 2040, helping the private sector and government create forward-looking water management policies.

An unprecedented opportunity

We can move from a picture of frightening scarcity, uncertainty and competition to one of abundance. Strategies to reduce water stress and use water more efficiently have been successfully applied by countries on virtually every continent. Awareness drives action, and transparency drives accountability.

The international consensus embedded in the new SDGs could be a game-changer. While challenging to implement, the new SDGs could bring unprecedented action to mitigate the world’s water demand and supply crises. And done well, they will foster growth, reduce poverty and build resilient ecosystems – delivering a more sustainable future.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

The water table is falling in Egypt's desert oases, raising questions of sustainability. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS

By Cam McGrath
BAHARIYA OASIS, Egypt, Jul 12 2014 (IPS)

Using a hoe, farmer Atef Sayyid removes an earthen plug in an irrigation stream, allowing water to spill onto the parcel of land where he grows dates, olives and almonds.

Until recently, a natural spring exploited since Roman times supplied the iron-rich water that he uses for irrigation. But when the spring began to dry up in the 1990s, the government built a deep well to supplement its waning flow.

Today, a noisy diesel pump syphons water from over a kilometre below the ground. The steaming-hot water is diverted through a maze of earthen canals to irrigate the orchards and palm groves that lie below the dusty town of Bawiti, 300 kilometres southwest of Cairo.

“The deeper source means the water is hotter,” Sayyid explains. “The hot water damages the roots of the fruit trees. It also evaporates quicker, meaning we have to use more water to irrigate.”

Bahariya, the depression in which Bawiti is situated, is one of five major oases in Egypt’s Western Desert. While Egyptians living in the densely populated Nile River Valley and Delta depend on the Nile for their freshwater needs, communities in this remote and arid region rely entirely on underground sources.“This [water drawn from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer] is fossil water, which means it was deposited a very long time ago and is not being replenished. So once you pump the water out of the aquifer, it’s gone for good” – resource management specialist Richard Tutwiler

Since ancient times, freshwater has percolated through fissures in the bedrock, making agriculture possible in the otherwise inhospitable desert. Water was once so plentiful in the five oases that they were collectively known as a breadbasket of the Roman Empire on account of their intensive grain cultivation.

Ominously, where groundwater once flowed naturally or was tapped near the surface, farmers must now bore up to a kilometre underground, raising fears for the region’s sustainability.

“Historically, springs and artesian wells supplied all the water in the oases,” says Richard Tutwiler, a resource management specialist at the American University in Cairo. “But water pressure is dropping and increasingly it has to be pumped out, particularly as you go from south to north.”

The water is drawn from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer, an underground reservoir of fossil water accumulated over tens of thousands of years when the Saharan region was less arid than it is today. The vast aquifer extends beneath much of Egypt, Libya, Sudan and Chad, and is estimated to hold 150,000 cubic kilometres of groundwater.

But it is a finite resource, says Tutwiler.

“This is fossil water, which means it was deposited a very long time ago and is not being replenished,” he told IPS. “So once you pump the water out of the aquifer, it’s gone for good.”

Extraction is intensifying in all of the countries that share the aquifer. In Egypt alone, an estimated 700 million cubic metres of water is pumped from deep wells each year.

The increase in water usage is the result of agricultural expansion and population growth. Nearly 2,000 square kilometres of desert land has been reclaimed by groundwater irrigation in the last 60 years. Farmers employ flood irrigation, a traditional technique in which half the water is lost to evaporation and ground seepage before reaching the crops.

Since the 1980s, government programmes aimed at alleviating population pressure on the Nile Valley have encouraged Egyptian families to relocate to the desert. Existing oasis communities have grown while new ones have sprung up around deep wells.

One of these settlements, Abu Minqar, was founded in 1987 and now boasts over 4,000 residents. The isolated community only exists because of its 15 wells, which draw groundwater from depths of up to 1,200 metres.

“Water management in (places like) Abu Minqar must be sustainable,” says Tutwiler. “Because if the wells dry up, it’s game over.”

The number of wells in the Western Desert has increased immensely since the first appearance of percussion drilling machinery 150 years ago. Records show that in 1960 there were less than 30 deep wells in all the oases – today there are nearly 3,000.

In Dakhla Oasis, 550 kilometres southwest of Cairo, natural springs and 900 wells provide water for the 80,000 inhabitants of the oasis, as well as orchards that produce date palms, citrus fruits and mulberries. This was traditionally one of Egypt’s most fertile oases because of the proximity of the aquifer to the surface – less than 100 metres throughout the depression.

But here, as elsewhere, water sources that flowed freely less than a generation ago now only flow with the aid of mechanical pumps. Groundwater extraction has exceeded 500,000 cubic metres a day and the water table is dropping, in some places by nearly two metres a year.

“There are too many straws in the same glass of water,” remarks hydrologist Maghawry Diab

While Diab estimates the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer may hold enough water to last the next 100 years, Egypt’s desert communities could have a lot less time.

Over-pumping has created localised “dry pockets” in the aquifer, which behaves more like a layered damp sponge than a pool of water. Tightly-spaced deep wells are drawing down the water table, while their overlapping well cones intercept upward flowing groundwater before it can recharge the shallower wells.

“All the wells are tapping the same larger cone of depression,” Diab told IPS. “To gain years, we’ll have to find even deeper groundwater sources or (come to terms with) using saline water.”

In an effort to reduce pressure on groundwater resources, Egypt’s government has set restrictions on the drilling of new wells and reduced the discharge rates of certain high-productive ones.

At government wells, a formalised system of water sharing is in place. But farmers thirsty for more water have drilled their own wells, concealing them from authorities or bribing local officials to turn a blind eye.

“We have tried to control the drilling, but there is a lot of resistance from farmers,” says one former irrigation ministry official. “Every time we capped (an unlicensed) well, two more would appear.”

A man hauls water at the Chico Mendes landless peasant camp in Pernambuco, Brazil. Credit: Alejandro Arigón/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 21 2013 (IPS)

Everyone knows water is life. Far too few understand the role of trees, plants and other living things in ensuring we have clean, fresh water.

This dangerous ignorance results in destruction of wetlands that once cleaned water and prevented destructive and costly flooding, scientists and activists warn."We have accelerated major processes like erosion, applied massive quantities of nitrogen that leaks from soil to ground and surface waters and, sometimes, literally siphoned all water from rivers." -- GWSP's Anik Bhaduri

Around the world, politicians and others in power have made and continue to make decisions based on short-term economic interests without considering the long-term impact on the natural environment, said Anik Bhaduri, executive officer of the Global Water System Project (GWSP), a research institute based in Bonn, Germany.

“Humans are changing the character of the world water system in significant ways with inadequate knowledge of the system and the consequences of changes being imposed,” Bhaduri told IPS.

The list of human impacts on the world’s water – of which only 0.03percent is available as freshwater – is long and the scale of those impacts daunting.

“We have accelerated major processes like erosion, applied massive quantities of nitrogen that leaks from soil to ground and surface waters and, sometimes, literally siphoned all water from rivers, emptying them for human uses before they reach the ocean,” Bhaduri said.

On average, humanity has built one large dam every day for the last 130 years, which distorts the natural river flows to which ecosystems and aquatic life adapted over millennia. Two-thirds of major river deltas are sinking due to pumping out groundwater, oil and gas. Some deltas are falling at a rate four times faster than global sea level is rising.

More than 65 percent of the world’s rivers are in trouble, according to one study published in Nature in 2010. Those findings were very “conservative” since there was not enough data to assess impacts of climate change, pharmaceutical compounds, mining wastes and water transfers, Charles Vörösmarty of the City University of New York previously told IPS.

Recently, China’s First National Census of Water discovered they’d lost more than 28,000 rivers compared to just 20 years ago. Most experts blame the loss on massive overuse and engineering projects to shift water from one region to another.

“We treat symptoms of environmental abuse rather than underlying causes…by throwing concrete, pipes, pumps, and chemicals at our water problems, to the tune of a half-trillion dollars a year,” said Vörösmarty, who is also co-chair and a founding member of the GWSP.

As these problems continue to mount, the public is largely unaware of this reality or its growing costs, he said in a release.

Protecting and investing in natural infrastructure is far cheaper than concrete and pipes, representing the smarter solution to water security. This approach also benefits tourism, recreation and cultural benefits, improved resilience and biodiversity conservation.

World experts are meeting in Bonn, Germany this week to consolidate this understanding and offer policy makers solutions to prevent ongoing damage to the global water system.

The Water in the Anthropocene conference will also make recommendations on how decision makers can adapt to the multiple challenges of growing water use, declining ecosystems and climate change.

The public and policy makers are not aware of these huge water challenges, said water expert Janos Bogardi, senior advisor to GWSP. Education aside, there is an overwhelming need to have well-defined global water quantity and quality standards that meet the needs of people, agriculture and healthy ecosystems.

The upcoming U.N. Sustainable Development Goals are expected to include “water security”, which is huge step forward, Bogardi told IPS.

“Defining these interrelated needs is huge challenge for scientists and politicians alike,” he said.

Reasonable daily water use to meet sanitary needs and drinking is 40 to 80 litres, but U.S. per capita daily use is over 300 litres, while Germany is 120 litres. In urban Hungary, where water is relatively expensive, consumption is 80 litres/day.

But how much water does nature need?

GWSP scientists’ best guess at this point is that taking 30 percent to 40 percent of a renewable freshwater resource constitutes “extreme” water stress which could tip an ecosystem into collapse. This can be mitigated if water is returned and recycled in good quality. Mining fossil groundwater resources is by definition non-sustainable.

“We have to be careful that the water security goal is truly sustainable for ecosystems,” Bogardi said.

It is not clear that the Sustainable Development Goal on water will “simultaneously optimise water security for humans as well as for nature”, said Vörösmarty.

“The water sciences community stands ready to take on this challenge. Are the decision makers?” he asked.

More than 100 environmental, social and indigenous organisations protested Monday in the Chilean capital to demand that the state regain control over the management of water, which was privatised by the dictatorship in 1981.

More than 6,000 people took part in the peaceful, colourful “great carnival march for the recovery and defence of water” in Santiago, according to the organisers, one of whom was former student leader Camila Vallejo, who plans to run for parliament for the Communist Party.

The demonstrators also delivered a letter to right-wing President Sebastián Piñera, complaining that the water shortages affecting local communities were not only due to persistent drought but also to structural problems in the policies governing the exploitation of natural resources.

“We have discovered that there is water in Chile, but that the wall that separates it from us is called ‘profit’ and was built by the (1981) water code, the constitution, international agreements like the Binational Mining Treaty (with Argentina) and, fundamentally, the imposition of a culture where it is seen as normal for the water that falls from the sky to have owners,” the letter says.

“This wall is drying up our basins, it is devastating the water cycles that have sustained our valleys for centuries, it is sowing death in our territories and it must be torn down now,” it adds.

The mining industry, which uses significant quantities of water, is one of the pillars of the Chilean economy, with copper exports alone accounting for one-third of all government revenue.

“There is a water crisis at the national level,” indigenous leader Rodrigo Villablanca, president of the Diaguita Sierra Huachacan Community in northern Chile and spokesman for the “Hope of Life” Ecological and Cultural Committee, told IPS.

The movement is fighting for the repeal of the water code, adopted by the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which made water private property by granting the state the right to grant water use rights to companies free of charge and in perpetuity.

The code also allows water use rights to be bought, sold or leased, without taking into consideration local priorities for water use, the organisations complain.

“Our main demand is the repeal of the water code that is denying us the right to have water to live,” Teresa Nahuelpán, an activist with the Movement for the Defence of the Sea in Mehuín, 800 km south of Santiago, told IPS.

The code “favours profits and the wealthy,” she argued.

The organisations are also demanding the repeal of the bilateral mining treaty signed by Chile and Argentina in 1997 which, they say, hands foreign mining corporations all of the water and energy they need for their operations along the border between the two countries.

The treaty states that the public institutions of the two countries will act in a coordinated manner with a view to facilitating mining investment and the development of the industry. It goes on to say that towards that end, public authorities will permit the use of “all kinds of natural resources, inputs and infrastructure”.

Villablanca said “the binational mining treaty hands over 4,000 kilometres of (Andes) mountains to transnational corporations.”

The community leader said the agreement “allows the extraction of natural resources and the use of water to be granted practically free of charge to companies.

“In Latin America, the biggest concentrations of freshwater are in the Andes mountains,” home to 80 percent of Chile’s indigenous communities, who “depend on these sources of water for survival,” he said.

Furthermore, “these mining and water use concessions (to private interests) are inheritable; they are forcing the highlands communities to retreat. Indigenous people have been moving out and small-scale mining and livestock-raising, which the communities depended on for subsistence, have been hurt,” Villablanca added.

“The aim of the march was to have an impact on public opinion, in Chile as well as at an international level,” he said.

Nahuelpán said “the march is a wakeup call for people, and a demand for water that allows us to continue living, that gives us life.

“Logging companies in the south have also caused a great deal of damage” to Mapuche communities, she added. “The territories are drying up; there are many communities that have no water, and that are getting water from tanker trucks.”

The Mapuche are Chile’s largest indigenous group, numbering about one million in a country of nearly 17 million people. They represent 87 percent of the native population, and live mainly in the south of the country, where Mapuche communities frequently clash with logging companies over land and water.

The latest setback in the organisations’ struggles was an early April Supreme Court verdict ruling that it is not illegal for a mining company to not pay for extracting groundwater on land it was granted under concession because it is merely “exploring” for minerals in the water, rather than “exploiting” the water.

Environmentalists warn that the ruling could serve as a legal precedent for mining corporations to use water without any controls, even until a water source has been exhausted.

The ruling was in favour of the Sociedad Legal Minera NX Uno de Peine company, which the Dirección General de Aguas, Chile’s water authority, had denounced for using groundwater without a permit.

But the Supreme Court ruling stated that the groundwater pumping operation in question was authorised by the exploration concession and did not require a permit from the water authority, as stated in article 58 of the water code.

“We’re talking about water that was in the basins, which enables Chile’s valleys to survive,” said Villablanca. “In a word, they are leaving all of Chile without water.”

Safe drinking water is even now at a premium in northern Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Peninsula. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS.

By Amantha Perera
JAFFNA, Sri Lanka, Nov 10 2012 (IPS)

War is seldom good for anything, especially protracted conflicts like the one in Sri Lanka, which dragged on for over three decades and claimed between 80,000 to 100,000 lives.

But in a strange twist, this island nation’s civil war seems to have been a blessing in disguise for the precarious water resources in the northern Jaffna Peninsula, the region that bore the brunt of the fighting.

The political and cultural nerve centre of the island’s minority Tamil population, Jaffna became the de facto capital of the separate state claimed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which fought successive Sri Lankan governments from 1983 to 2009 for control over the north-east of the country.

Many civilians, caught between the LTTE and the armed forces of the government of Sri Lanka (GoSL), began fleeing Jaffna en masse. Thus agricultural crops scaled down to the subsistence level, businesses remained small and large-scale development projects became a kind of endangered species.

With the defeat of the LTTE in 2009 came a new wave of development that is steadily transforming Jaffna into a bustling metropolis working overtime to make up for the ‘stagnation’ that prevailed during the war years.

While many observers have hailed these plans to put Jaffna into development overdrive, environmental experts are warning that the region’s water supply, which remained relatively untouched during the war, will not withstand an all-out offensive in the name of economic growth.

A recent study undertaken by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) found that Jaffna’s delicate underground water table could easily be polluted from rampant use of fertiliser, or disturbed by extraction efforts that could allow seawater to seep into the shallow freshwater supply.

“The opening up of Jaffna after the war is putting enormous pressure on the water resources,” IWMI Country Head Herath Manthrithilake told IPS.

No rivers run through the 1000-square-kilometre peninsula, which is comprised primarily of limestone. Water for agriculture and human use has hitherto been drawn from dug wells, though some parts of Jaffna now have access to pipe-borne water.

“It is an urgent issue. We need to take note of (Jaffna’s precarious water situation) and put adequate measures in place before it’s too late,” Thushyanthy Mikunthan, a senior lecturer in the Department of Agriculture at the Jaffna University, told IPS.

The scientist added that if Jaffna wishes to rely on the existing rain-fed waterbed for its needs, it must stick to minimal consumption, not extract more water than the limestone is holding. She believes water extraction should be below 50 percent of the annual recharge by rain.

Alarmingly, a study carried out by Mikunthan a year before the war ended found that, even then, extraction levels were almost 20 percent higher than the recharge rate, despite the region receiving an above-average rainfall that year due to Cyclone Nisha.

“Results of the water balance study clearly show falling trends in groundwater storage, thereby demonstrating over-exploitation of the groundwater aquifer,” according to the study.

Manthrithilake voiced similar concerns. “We are not calling for a shut-down of Jaffna, simply a more holistic approach to development, where water management is also considered,” he told IPS.

The IWMI country head warned that if the water is contaminated, it would be impossible to get it back to safe levels. “Once salt water seeps in, it is next to impossible to clean the water,” he said.

Mikunthan told IPS that despite the serious nature of the problem, very few people at the decision-making level were paying attention to it. “The situation must surely have changed for the worse from the time when I did my research,” she said.

Her research found that the most severe cause of exploitation was the use of mechanised pumps to extract groundwater, especially for agricultural needs.

Now with new markets opening up, agricultural production, which had hitherto relied on organic farming techniques, is increasing by huge margins.

Christine Kurukularajah, a small-scale farmer in the region, confirmed that production has increased due to the free availability of fertiliser and pesticides, which had been banned by the LTTE during the war years.

“There are no restrictions at all now,” she told IPS.

The shallow waterbed in Jaffna means an overuse of fertilisers could easily seep into the fresh water.

“My research has indicated that there is link between nitrate in drinking water and the rise in cancer in the region,” Mikunthan said.

Mikunthan also warned that Jaffna was at the mercy of changing weather patterns. The region has seen fluctuating weather, with short bursts of high intensity rains followed by extended periods of drought.

In fact, a long drought that began early this year was broken only by a cyclonic storm during the last three days of October.

For the time being, the best hope for Jaffna is the new water scheme, whereby water will be pumped in from the Iranamadhu tank, located about 50 kilometres south of the Peninsula.

Though work on the project has begun, this supply is not expected until at least 2015.

Manthrithilake told IPS that there was the possibility of increasing Jaffna’s water outlets by excavating the roughly 1000 large ponds found in the region and digging new ones.

He said some government authorities were also looking at new extraction sites in the southern part of the Peninsula. “But everything is in the planning stages,” he said.

“Until we can add to the available water resources, Jaffna will have to manage with what it has and manage the resource diligently,” Mikunthan stressed.

(END)