Rosa Guzmán harvests tomatoes on her family farm in San Pedro, in the municipality of Quillota, 126 kilometers north of Santiago, the Chilean capital, where she is unable to extend her crops due to lack of funds, which prevents her from drilling deeper wells to obtain water and combat the drought. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
QUILLOTA, Chile , Apr 30 2024 (IPS)

Lack of water threatens the very existence of family farming in Chile, forcing farmers to adopt new techniques or to leave their land.

The shortage is caused by a 15-year drought and exacerbated by the unequal distribution arising from the Water Code decreed in 1981 by the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which turned water into a tradable commodity and gave its owners rights in perpetuity.

In addition, there are problems such as the accumulation of water rights in the hands of large agro-export companies and real estate speculation with the land of small farmers who are forced to sell.

“We have no water for human consumption,” Julieta Cortés, 52, president of the Rural Women’s Association of the municipality of Canela, told IPS. “In Canela, more than 80 percent of the population depends on the water truck that delivers 50 liters of water per person per day. It’s hard to get by with that amount.”

Located in the Coquimbo region, 400 kilometers north of Santiago, Canela, with a population of just over 11,000, was known for its goat herds, now reduced by half. Local farmers also used to grow wheat and barley. Today, the fruit trees are drying up and the livestock are dying of thirst.

In contrast, the extensive plantations of avocados for export are irrigated and green on the slopes of the dry valleys.

Chile’s agro-exports are one of its major sources of income, together with mining. In 2023, the agro-export sector accounted for 3.54 percent of GDP, or 10.09 billion dollars.

Water problems are concentrated in isolated rural areas that lack technical, economic, and infrastructure capacities.

“Family and small farmers do not have access to water rights controlled by those who have money and can buy and transfer them,” Cortés said in a telephone interview.

“The lower part of the Choapa River flows through my municipality and none of us who live here have access to the water that is used upstream in the Los Pelambres mine and the large agro-industries along the way,” she said.

Hills stand out for their greenery in Quillota, north of Santiago, Chile, with avocado plantations that reach to the top, covering many hectares. They are able to avoid water shortages thanks to water use rights held by large agro-exporters, which allow them to evade the effects of the drought and send their abundant production abroad. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The Issue Is Not Lack of Water, but Inequality

In the publication Guardianas del Agua (Guardians of the Water), published by the German Heinrich Boll Stiftung Foundation, Macarena Salinas and Isaura Becker reported that 47.2 percent of the rural Chilean population had no formal drinking water supply or irrigation.

In this South American country, some 950 communities are not part of the Rural Drinking Water Program (RWP) and obtain water from informal sources such as wells, springs and water trucks. “We have a privatized water model where the focus and priority has always been to maintain the right to property over the human right of access to water.” -- Evelyn Vicioso

The publication reported that between 2016 and 2021, the State invested 150 million dollars to use water trucks to supply the areas suffering from scarcity.

“While the RWP committees and cooperatives need drinking water and are supplied through emergency measures, there are individuals and companies that have surplus water and can profit from the sale of water using tanker trucks,” write Salinas and Becker.

Therefore, they point out, “rather than a lack of water, there is an unequal distribution of the resource.”

The drought in Canela has been repeated in other areas of this long, narrow country of 19.5 million people living between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

The shortage of rainfall has lasted for 15 years, with a brief respite in 2023. It is unclear what will happen in 2024.

In Canela, farmers survive by using recycled water from washing machines and bathrooms, water harvested from rooftops or with fog catchers, systems used to capture or trap microscopic water droplets from mist, which are widely used in Chile.

“We have been reinventing ourselves. We have even rescued water from the dew. Many of us have adopted new techniques; others have moved away,” Cortés said from her community, Carquindaña.

Rosa Guzmán, 57, and her three brothers own a 40-hectare property in San Pedro, a community of some 5,000 inhabitants in the municipality of Quillota, 126 kilometers north of Santiago in the Valparaíso region.

They only grow four hectares of vegetables and 2.5 hectares of avocados because they do not have the money to expand their crops.

“Sometimes we run out of water for the house because the wells are 10 meters deep. They are filled from two canals that rarely have water,” she said during a tour of the family’s farm with IPS.

Guzmán is director of the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (Anamuri) and president of her community’s environmental organization, San Pedro Digno.

Anamuri is an organization founded in 1998, composed solely of women, which organizes and promotes development among rural and indigenous women in this country. It also builds relationships of equality, regardless of gender, class, and ethnicity, on the basis of respect between people and nature.

“I used to collect medicinal herbs on the banks of the canal, but now there are none. The natural springs have dried up. This is a serious problem, and there are people who have no water to drink, which is a grave issue,” she said.

According to the rural activist, the State has abandoned small-scale agriculture.

“It would be very different if the State were to put more of a priority on small-scale agriculture and give us soft credits or subsidies. It has to pay attention to what is happening because, at this rate, it pains me to say it, family farming could disappear in Chile,” she said.

Water stored in a small reservoir allows the Guzmán siblings to maintain vegetable production on their 40-hectare plot of land, of which only 10 percent is planted due to a lack of resources. It is one of the few surviving family farms in the municipality. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Agro-export Model in the Spotlight

Water scarcity directly affects farmers’ livelihoods and way of life and often leads to complex environmental problems.

“The lack of safe water impacts household and community economies, especially for families who depend on small-scale family farming for their food,” write Salinas and Becker.

Guzmán criticized the agro-export model and called for a return to planting wheat, lentils and chickpeas, products that form part of Chile’s food security. But, she stressed, in order to do so, soft loans or subsidies are needed.

“We need food sovereignty. But if small farmers suffer losses every year, many end up selling their land. We want to live well without losing our identity and our know-how,” she underlined.

Sociologist Evelyn Vicioso, executive director of Sustainable Chile, criticized the agro-export model because “it is super intensive in water use and is extremely irresponsible with regard to crops. But above all, because it does not solve a problem nationally: the availability of water for many communities,” she said.

“We particularly depend on small-scale family farming for food, and if it disappears, we have a problem of costs and distribution. The big farmers think about ensuring food sovereignty for any country except their own communities,” she told IPS in Santiago.

Hernán Guzmán, one of four siblings who own a plot of land in Quillota, inspects a small area dedicated to growing basil that is destined, along with other vegetables, for the market in the nearby port city of Valparaíso, in central Chile. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Watershed Management Slow To Take Off

To advance climate justice in a scenario of water scarcity, many experts agree on the need to manage watersheds with representative councils.

“Our country has a gigantic mass of mountains, but today we do not have a management system that allows us to link what happens in the headwaters with what is happening further downstream,” said Vicioso.

She listed a string of failures to create watershed councils, as there have been 25 attempts since 1994 and only one is functioning.

There is no will to create them, especially among water rights owners.

“We have a privatized water model where the focus and priority have always been to maintain the right to property over the human right of access to water,” said Vicioso.

Salinas and Becker regret that the 2005 reforms to the Water Code are not retroactive.

“This generates the conditions for the holders of water use rights to exploit the water with a strictly economic focus, thus discouraging the development of uses not involving extractive industries, such as ancestral and ecological uses,” they argue.

The regulation hinders integrated management of the water cycle, as it does not consider the river basin as the minimum unit, does not establish mechanisms to jointly manage surface and groundwater, and allows rivers to be sectioned off.

Evelyn Vicioso, executive director of the non-governmental organization Sustainable Chile, sits in her office in Santiago, where she monitors the water situation among small farmers and coordinates actions to defend the human right to water. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Land speculation

In Quillota there is a growing sale of agricultural land to real estate companies that resell it as non-productive family recreational plots.

Thus, native trees disappear and the hope of reviving family farming is waning.

“Land has become a business. It sells for 60 million pesos (60,000 dollars) per half a hectare that sometimes does not even have water. That value attracts people to sell,” Guzmán said.

These plots will increase the demand for water and deforestation because the government’s Agriculture and Livestock Service (SAG) has no oversight capacity.

“All the hills are being parceled out and water is brought to these people with water trucks,” said Guzmán.

Migration from the countryside has been driven by climate change.

In Canela, said Cortés, it used to be young people who moved away. But now it is entire families who go to nearby cities in search of access to water.

According to Guzmán, “young people do not want to stay in the countryside and women say that it is not even profitable to raise chickens.”

Cortés is grateful for the water from trucks, but stresses that the underlying problem is restoring watershed management.

“To rebuild this, resources must be allocated. And for that, we need forestation to make barriers to retain the scarce rainfall and restore the hydrological system,” she said.

Vicioso complained that “there is a lack of protection of the glaciers, which are the headwaters of the basins where the water comes from.”

The sociologist also urged a rethinking of the intensive use of water in productive activities.

“We have an underlying political problem with water that has a high market value and a State that does not dare, does not want, and does not seek the tools to intervene in this deregulated market, just like in drug trafficking,” she said.

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Excerpt:

María José Valenzuela, Director of the Environment of the Chilean municipality of María Pinto, stands next to Mario Rojas, caretaker of the Miyawaki project, a pilot experience of this technique that works with little water and only requires irrigation for the first two years. A native forest has been created that improves the biodiversity of the area, in a municipality that defines itself as sustainable. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Oct 30 2023 (IPS)

A return to nature is the main solution being promoted by communities and municipalities to avoid the water shortage that threatens to leave Santiago, the capital of Chile, home to more than 40 percent of the 19.5 million inhabitants of this South American country, without water.

The water supply in Greater Santiago depends on the Maipo River, whose waters run for some 250 kilometers from the Andes Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, near the port of San Antonio, some 130 kilometers north of Santiago."We must move towards greener or nature-based solutions in the conservation, restoration and protection of ecosystems involved in the water cycle. Wetlands, swamps, headwaters forests, native trees. This generates a greater impact in terms of water supply, in less time and at a lower cost. " -- Gerardo Díaz

In the Andes mountains, the Volcán, Yeso and Colorado rivers are tributaries of the Maipo River. The Maipo ranks ninth among the 18 most water-stressed rivers in the world and is the only South American river in this ranking.

Chile is experiencing an unprecedented drought that has dragged on for 15 years, caused by climate change and other phenomena such as El Niño and La Niña.

This year 2023 there was more rainfall. The Maipo even flooded and caused turbidity in the water and all the outlying districts were threatened with a total lack of supply for three days. But the authorities warn that the drought is not over and are preparing contingency plans to cope with its increasing effects now that the southern hemisphere summer is approaching.

Of the groundwater wells measured in Santiago and its surrounding region, 72 percent show a significant decline because extraction exceeds the natural recharge capacity.

In the basin, the current water gap – the difference between available water supply and demand – is 63.5 cubic meters per second. But by 2050, the water gap will be 92.1 cubic meters per second, if demand does not increase.

This water stress is caused by the high summer temperatures and rainfall that is scarce and concentrated in a short period of the winter, which has been happening since the onset of the current drought in 2008.

Gerardo Díaz of the Chile Foundation mans a stand set up at the Mapocho Station Cultural Center in Santiago, during a public event to educate and raise awareness about the need to take care of household water. Banners explain the water crisis and illustrate ways to deal with it. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

According to Water Scenarios 2030, an innovative initiative promoted by the Chile Foundation, in a collaborative effort with different stakeholders, water efficiency would contribute 73 percent of water within the set of solutions for this basin, while the conservation and protection of its ecosystems would contribute 18 percent.

The incorporation of new water sources would contribute nine percent to the solution, but requires an excessively high investment, says the study led by the Chile Foundation, a public-private organization dedicated to working for sustainable development.

These studies indicate that in the basin there are 35 percent more groundwater rights granted than the natural recharge capacity of the aquifer. This overexploitation has repercussions on the availability of groundwater in the present and the future.

Gerardo Díaz, head of projects at the Chile Foundation’s sustainability department, told IPS that no solution has been ruled out, but said “we are focusing on looking at how nature and strengthening natural water systems can help us resolve the crisis we are in.”

IPS visited several localities in Greater Santiago, which is made up of 52 municipalities, to observe some nature-based solutions and the water improvement they bring.

Fabian Guerrero, director of the San Mateo Park in the Chilean municipality of Curacaví, walks through the 14-hectare open space in the center of town that was once a garbage dump where the trees have signs identifying their species and the trails are marked for visitors. Five compost bins operate on site to receive organic matter that is turned into compost to nourish the gardens, trees and seedlings. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Miyawaki technique to grow trees in rural municipality María Pinto

In the rural municipality of María Pinto, with a population of 14,000 people, located 40 kilometers from the center of Santiago, a technique created by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, which accelerates the growth of native forests by up to 10 times, was successfully implemented for the first time in Chile. Trees are planted at low density in soil fertilized with nutrients.

It is a method of ecological restoration based on the potential natural vegetation of a given area, reproducing in an accelerated manner the landscape that would exist if there had been no human presence and turning it into a refuge for native biodiversity and its many different forms of life.

“We are carrying out an ecological restoration of the hillside to replace a 40-year-old radiata pine plantation that dried out due to a plague,” María José Valenzuela, the municipality’s environmental director, told IPS.

The restoration was carried out on one of the seven hectares of the San Pedro Sports Field and involved numerous volunteers from the Liceo Polivalente, a municipal high school, who called themselves Forjadores Ambientales (roughly, environmental creators).

Forests generate conditions for greater water infiltration for the trees, which are also fog trappers. And they help to prevent rainwater from running off quickly and to infiltrate the soil instead.

“Global warming is manifesting with more fog and that is something that is noticeable,” Valenzuela explained.

Campo San Pedro also points to a problem with the hillsides in the center of this long narrow country, which arises from monoculture farming.

The Miyawaki lot now has 3500 trees of 10 native species on 500 square meters.

It functions as a laboratory of sclerophyllous forest, typical of Chile, where the Miyawaki technique provides an example for recovery of the remaining forests in central Chile. This kind of forest is characterized by species with hard evergreen leaves that enable them to withstand droughts.

“Many monoculture farms after exploiting the wells leave hills converted into deserts, with infertile soil due to so many agrochemicals and all the times they were plowed and not covered,” explained Valenzuela, a civil engineer specializing in sustainability and social ecology.

She was alluding to the repeated abandonment of hillsides in central Chile that are dedicated to monoculture, mainly avocado and fruit trees, and then deserted when they become wastelands due to lack of water.

In Chile, agriculture accounts for more than 60 percent of water consumption, in a country with a dynamic agro-export sector that expanded with few controls.

And as in most of Chile’s rural areas, the municipality is full of “loteos”, the name given locally to divisions of land without infrastructure services or regulatory plans. Added to this are the sale of water rights and the excessive use of water by digging irregular wells to fill swimming pools or maintain lawns.

In this country, water has been largely privatized after water rights were separated from land tenure during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). This resulted in water rights being traded on the market as a commodity, restricting public access to water.

Nearly 40 percent of Chile’s population lives in the Maipo River basin, because it is home to Greater Santiago and its 52 municipalities. A new study warns that it is under maximum pressure, while the inhabitants have little awareness about the stress of their drinking water supply. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Ecological recovery in Curacaví

In the rural municipality of Curacaví, 53 kilometers from downtown Santiago and home to 33,000 inhabitants, the community mobilized in 2018 to recover 14 hectares of hillside that had turned into an open-air landfill.

Alarmed by a fire, in January of that year local residents removed 50 tons of garbage and organized themselves in the San Mateo Park to reforest and plant, to date, 5,000 native trees.

Fabian Guerrero, general director of the park, told IPS that the municipal government provides them with 40,000 liters of water per week. It also supplies machines to remove the soil, and to use guano (the excrement of seabirds) and organic matter to prepare a Miyawaki forest with native species planted at high density in a small space.

“We have drip and sprinkler irrigation techniques to use water efficiently. In the park there are organic vegetable gardens, compost bins, trails and guided tours for students and families, to whom we teach how and which trees to plant, in which location, which one gives more shade or withstands more sunshine,” he told IPS.

The community won seven reforestation projects and their dream is two other initiatives: to have their own water, with a dam or pond, and to create a nursery with all kinds of trees, medicinal plants, vegetables and flowers.

“We plan to create a green lung so that people see this place as a space for family recreation, connected to nature, a place to come and reflect and learn about trees. We aim for education and for people to learn to take care of the trees,” said Guerrero, a computer programmer who describes himself as a “passionate organic farmer and nature lover.”

Local residents can plant and harvest in the organic community vegetable gardens, and they can also sponsor trees.

On Las Industrias Avenue, in the south of the Chilean municipality of San Joaquín, a section of the Permeable Pavement project was built, consisting of concrete in a grid pattern that allows water to drain and infiltrate the soil. The project was tested in a sloped bike path area where water can be captured to go directly into the soil. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Water supply initiatives in San Joaquín

The municipality of San Joaquín, population 94,000 located 12 kilometers southwest of the capital, is one of the poorest in the Greater Santiago area.

It is promoting water projects and protecting two parks and will create a third, called the Victor Jara Flood Park, which will be ready by 2025.

“It is the bank of the Zanjón de la Aguada, a canal that is very problematic for Santiago because it received industrial runoff and stank,” said environmental engineer Claudia Silva, in charge of environmental management and control for San Joaquín.

The Flood Park has underground sections and is designed so that, in case of heavy rainfall, it can receive and contain the water. It includes plans for a swimming pool and vegetation on its banks capable of withstanding a flood.

A Rain Garden was created in Mataveri, a street that flooded every time in rained. It consisted of removing cement structures to channel water to plants grown there. And Permeable Pavement, with a reticular pattern, was installed in a bicycle lane to capture water that previously drained into the sewer and thus facilitate its infiltration into the ground.

The Victor Jara Flood Park, to be completed in 2025, covers the municipalities of San Miguel, San Joaquín and Pedro Aguirre Cerda and is promoted by the government of the Metropolitan Region of Santiago. It has underground sections and is designed with plants suitable for areas with heavy water runoff. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

The Water Scenarios 2030 study found that another cause of the water crisis is the dispersal of the governance process, with more than 52 institutions at the national level involved in water management.

Díaz also criticized the fact that the measures adopted are heavily oriented towards new sources of water through desalination or accumulation in reservoirs.

“Our view is that we must move towards greener or nature-based solutions in the conservation, restoration and protection of ecosystems involved in the water cycle. Wetlands, swamps, headwaters forests, native trees. This generates a greater impact in terms of water supply, in less time and at a lower cost,” he said.

According to the Chile Foundation expert, the first step is to implement solutions based on nature and then move forward in demand management to reduce water consumption through greater efficiency in agriculture and irrigation of green areas, among other aspects.

“And finally, we must move towards new sources such as the use of treated wastewater or desalination to close the water gap. But nature-based solutions and demand management should address more than 50 percent of the territorial gap in the basins analyzed,” he asserted.

During the first three months of the year, the Quebrada Santander Rural Sanitation System supplied three to four truckloads of water daily to supply the empty tanks in the neighboring town of Pichasca - solidarity typical of these systems in Chile, which did not endanger the supply of its members and was supported by special subsidies to cover the water emergency. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
RENGO, Chile, Aug 16 2022 (IPS)

Local leaders of the Rural Sanitation Services (RSS) warn that the digging of illegal wells by large agro-export companies in Chile is aggravating the effects of drought and threatening drinking water supplies and social peace.

Leaders of these programs also emphasize that the new constitution that may emerge from the Sept. 4 plebiscite would guarantee the human right to water, which would strengthen its management and that of river basins, in addition to facilitating a response to the water crisis to prevent it from triggering protests and social conflict.

Water rights were commercialized during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, and between 1994 and 2006 the governments in power during the democratic transition sold the large water utilities to foreign companies, which have controlled the water supply in Chile’s cities since then.

The water supply in rural areas, considered unprofitable by these companies, was left in the hands of the country’s 2,306 RSS, which were institutionalized and transformed into Rural Sanitation Services in 2020 by a legal reform. They operate throughout this long narrow South American country of 19.5 million people and have 7,000 leaders and 6,000 workers.

The RSS, made up of cooperatives, local residents’ committees and other social organizations of different sizes, have the role of guaranteeing the drinking water supply in rural areas, with the State as supervisor and infrastructure provider. It is possible that in the future they will also take on responsibility for sanitation.

These systems benefit 2.1 million people, to whom they provide water at a lower price than the distribution and sanitation companies.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, 90 percent of the RSS never stopped serving their users, and despite the quarantine most of them paid their monthly fees, to maintain the system.

The Directorate of Hydraulic Works (DOH) of the Public Works Ministry told IPS that during the 2021-2022 period it will invest some 57 million dollars in seeking new sources of supply, and in the conservation and integral improvement of the systems. For 2023 the projected investment is 14 million dollars.

Maintenance is an ongoing job at the La Alianza RSS in the town of Choapino, some 105 km south of Santiago, Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Relief for growing water stress

The Chilean economy is based on mining, especially copper, and large agricultural exports, two industries that require large amounts of water in a country with limited water resources.

The result is growing water stress, which accentuates the tension between powerful industries and human consumption and small-scale agriculture, aggravated by the private management of an essential resource such as water.

Against this backdrop, the RSS have alleviated access to water, but as recurrent droughts and other climatic impacts accentuate the water deficit, their role is becoming more difficult, without a substantial change in the right to water.

Francisco Santander, treasurer of the RSS in Quebrada Santander, in the Andes foothills 450 km north of Santiago, told IPS that “the first well we drilled by hand with 20 members in 1999. Now there are 45 of us.”

“The largest 50-meter well was dug five years ago. It is one of the deepest in the municipality of Río Hurtado. We bought a piece of land and applied for a drilling project. The money was provided by the DOH,” he said in an interview from his hometown.

The investment included pumps, a solar panel for energy, gabions (a basket or container filled with earth, stones, or other material), a well and a 50,000 liter tank.

“Last summer, faced with the drought crisis, we sold water to Pichasca (a neighboring town). They asked us for help. We gave them up to four truckloads a day for their tanks and they paid with an emergency subsidy. Our well is holding up well under a moderate level of consumption,” Santander proudly explained.

The solar panel was the first in Rio Hurtado and reduced energy costs by one-sixth. It contributes to the low price charged for water: 1.3 dollars per cubic meter and 2.2 dollars as a basic service fee.

Gloria Alvarado with the RSS in El Patagual, which serves 800 members in Pichidegua, a municipality of 18,000 inhabitants 165 km south of Santiago, was president of the National Federation of Rural Drinking Water and was a member of the Constitutional Convention that drafted the new constitution that voters will approve or reject in next month’s plebiscite.

Speaking to IPS from El Patagual, as a national expert, she warned about the critical water situation caused by climate change and drought, which is aggravated by overuse, poor distribution of rights and deficient watershed management.

A view of the 75-cubic-meter water storage tank installed at La Alianza, in Choapino, where the office also operates to attend to the needs of members and receive payment of their bills. The users of these rural sanitation systems, which are common in Chile, are not usually late with their payments, because thanks to these systems they have water in a country where water management has mostly been privatized. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

“Petorca (a municipality 205 km north of Santiago) has a very green side with avocado plantations, but has another where the people have no water to drink and are supplied by water trucks. It is difficult for a 50-meter RSS well to compete with a 200-meter well,” she said, complaining about the agro-export companies.

She also alluded to the heavy use of water by forestry companies in southern Chile and mining companies “which until recently had no obligation to report their water use,” as they now do thanks to Article 56 of the new Water Code.

In Chile’s central valley, the plantations of fruit exporters have expanded exponentially, without any limits on their expansion, which has left many areas at water risk, Alvarado said.

“There is no land use planning or protection of the ecological function of the land. Today rural drinking water is at serious risk because there is unequal competition between those who extract for human consumption and those who extract for commercial and industrial use,” she said.

“Seventy-nine percent of water rights are in the hands of one percent of Chileans. It is inequitable and many families suffer the consequences,” she said, complaining that an essential resource has been transformed in Chile into a tradable commodity.

José Rivera is the administrator of the 500-family RSS in La Alianza in Choapino, in the municipality of Rengo, 105 km south of Santiago.

The town is part of the central region of O’Higgins, the largest exporter of fruit, wine, pork and chicken, “which basically means it exports water,” he said during a visit by IPS to the La Alianza facilities. As a result, he said, “we used to make 30-meter wells here, today we dig 100-meter wells, and in the nearby municipality of Machalí we dig 200 meters.”

According to Rivera, who is secretary of the National Federation of RSS Chile, another problem in O’Higgins is that for the last 10 years wells have been dug stealthily and without oversight.

“Farmers have so many plantations that they began to extract groundwater and make clandestine wells. There are thousands of wells” that nothing is known about and which are subject to no controls, he said.

Their RSS has two wells: one is 80 meters deep and the other 100. One collects water in a 75,000-liter metal tank and the other in a 200,000-liter concrete tank. A third 200,000-liter tank is planned.

“Before, we were basically the only ones who used groundwater. Today the agribusiness companies are replacing river water with groundwater and we have no inspectors in the General Water Directorate. They have no resources and no authorization to enter a farm,” Rivera said.

One solution, in his opinion, would be the use of drones to investigate unregistered wells.

“The biggest problem, and I’m speaking for the association, is that there is a war of wells. If I dig a 40-meter well, the farm will dig a 100-meter well and so on and so forth. The State will not have resources and neither will we. And there will be another outbreak of social unrest,” he predicted.

Rivera calls the situation “a silent water earthquake,” after touring the region and seeing the thousands of hectares of land planted.

“The coastal dry land is full of olive trees, where there were none before. Pichidegua is full of avocado trees. It is a crime because we have no water. The powerful, who own 500 or 1000 hectares, take water from here and transport it to the hills, where there are more and more plantations,” he said.

Meanwhile, “there are small farmers with five or six hectares who are without water,” he said, describing the situation as “serious, a powderkeg.”

José Rivera, administrator of the La Alianza RSS, checks the instruments of the new flow measurement system that indicates, second by second, how much water is in the tank and how much is being consumed in the water starters installed in the houses of each of the members of this rural sanitation system, a social organization unique to Chile, which alleviates the water deficit in the country. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Water as a human right

Alvarado said the solution to water management lies in the new constitution.

The text approved by the Constitutional Convention “will redistribute the right to use water,” she said. “It will put an end to the ownership of rights, which will be converted into use authorizations.”

She said that one of the origins of the water crisis is that there is an over-granting of rights that exceed the actual water sources and that there are very few water inspectors.

“An autonomous National Water Agency will be created and there will be integrated basin management in which users will be on an equal footing,” she said.

Rivera said the large landowners deceive small farmers by telling them that if the new constitution is approved they will be left without water, while “the constitutional proposal actually states that water is a public good.”

A step in the right direction

He highlighted, as a positive step, the promulgation in April of this year, under the government of leftwing President Gabriel Boric, of the reformed Water Code “for which we fought for 15 years.”

“The new law is very good because it protects rural areas and indicates that no one can ask for a concession in a rural area. They cannot privatize. Urban sanitation companies cannot enlarge their area of operation,” he stressed.

“We were recognized as RSS and today we can dig wells and draw water if it is for survival and basic consumption,” he added.

“Nobody wanted to change the Water Code, nobody wants to change the constitution…who is ‘nobody’? the economic powers-that-be. They do not want to change. We have to change,” he argued.

Houseboats line the Nile bank in Cairo. Some 85 million Egyptians depend on the Nile for water. According to the United Nations, Egypt is currently below the U.N.’s threshold of water poverty. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS.

By Maged Srour
ROME, Sep 27 2018 (IPS)

Local residents in Cairo are becoming concerned and discontent as water scarcity is reaching a critical point in the capital and the rest of the country.

Although not all areas of the country are affected in the same way, many Cairo residents say they don’t have water for large portions of the day. And some areas are affected more than most.

“Where my grandmother lives, in a central area and near a hospital, water is almost never missing, but where I live with my family in a more peripheral area, water is missing several times during the week if not during the day,” one local resident from Cairo, who did not want to be named, tells IPS.

According to the United Nations, Egypt is facing an annual water deficit of around seven billion cubic metres and the country could run out of water by 2025, when it is estimated that 1.8 billion people worldwide will live in absolute water scarcity.

The U.N. World Water Development report for 2018, warns that Egypt is currently below the U.N.’s threshold of water poverty, it is currently facing water scarcity (1,000 m3 per capita) and dramatically heading towards absolute water scarcity (500 m3 per capita).

“The water goes away all the time, we don’t know how to handle this issue. The other day I even opened the tap and the water that came out was stinking of sewer,” the Cairo resident adds.

As highlighted in the ‘Egyptian Journal of Aquatic Research’, problems affecting the Nile River’s flow are many and range from inefficient irrigation to water pollution. In addition, the uncontrolled dumping of anthropogenic waste from different drains located along the Nile River’s banks has significantly increased water contamination to a critical level, warns the research. 

The pollution of the river—considered the longest river in the world—is an issue that has been underestimated over the past few decades. “Most of the industries in Egypt have made little effort to meet Egyptian environmental laws for Nile protection, where, the Nile supplies about 65 percent of the industrial water needs and receives more than 57 percent of its effluents,” the study says. 

As so many people rely on the Nile for drinking, agricultural and municipal use, the water quality is of concern. 

The reality is that the Nile is being polluted by municipal and industrial waste, with many recorded incidents of leakage of wastewater and the release of chemical waste into the river. 

But Dr. Helmy Abouleish, president of SEKEM, an organisation that invests in biodynamic agriculture, says there is increasing awareness in the country about its water challenges.

“I can see the awareness towards the water insecurity challenge is now spreading in society more than before,” Abouleish tells IPS. “We all should be quite aware of the fact that whatever we are doing today, our children will pay for it in the future. None of the current resources will be available forever,” he adds.

SEKEM has converted 70 hectares of desert into a green and cultivated oasis north east of Cairo, which is now inhabited by a local community.  

These futuristic innovations is what Egypt needs more of, considering that water availability is progressively worsening in the country.

“In Egypt rainfall is limited to the coastal strip running parallel to the Mediterranean Sea and occurs mainly in the winter season,” Tommaso Abrate, a scientific officer in the Climate and Water Department at the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), tells IPS. 

“The amounts are low (80 to 280 mm per year), erratic and variable in space and time hence rainfall cannot be considered a reliable source of water.”  

“Climate models indicate that Egypt, especially the coastal region, will experience significant warming and consequent substantial drought by the end of the century, while rainfall is expected to show just a small decrease in annual means,” Abrate says. 

He warns that other factors like abstraction (removal of water from a source) and pollution, have major effects on water quality. 

Another concern is the fact that the country uses 85 percent of its water resources for agricultural activities—with 90 percent of this being used for conventional agriculture. 

But agricultural wastewater, which carries the residual of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, is drained back into the Nile River.

It is a vicious cycle that is worsening the quality and the sustainability of Egypt’s farmlands.

However, this year the Egyptian government and partners announced the allocation of about USD4 billion in investment to address the water shortage.

“Major efforts are being invested in the desalination of water from the Red Sea and the Mediterranean (for example the mega scale project in Ain Sokhna, which will purify 164,000 cubic litres per day). A regional centre unit will be established to follow water movement using the latest remote sensing techniques to combat this problem,” Abouleish adds.

SEKEM says that it is working to develop a “sustainable and self-sustaining water management system in all of Egypt.” 

“We foster several research projects that are developed by the students and the research team at Heliopolis University to realise this mission. For instance, researching water desalination models from salt water, recovery systems for water from the air as well as waste water recycling systems is now considered in our core focus,” says Abouleish. 

The U.N. agrees that in the next few years Egypt will face a water crisis of considerable size, which will require a more effective management of the available, scarce resources. This should involve a modernisation of the irrigation systems to avoid the current waste. 

If water scarcity is not addressed by those accountable, there is a risk that in the coming decades, a country of nearly 80 million people could run out of water. It could result in a humanitarian crisis that would probably destabilise the entire Mediterranean region with unpredictable consequences.  

Kottayam in the southern state of Kerala. India's water bodies and fresh water sources are threat from pollution, industrialization, human waste disposal and governmental neglect. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

By Neeta Lal
NEW DELHI, Mar 16 2018 (IPS)

As Cape Town inches towards ‘Zero Hour’ set for July 15, 2018, the real threat of water scarcity is finally hitting millions of people worldwide. For on that day, the South African city’s 3.78 million citizens — rich and poor, young and old, men and women — will be forced to queue up with their jerry cans at public outlets for their quota of 25 litres of water per day.

Who knew things would come to such a sorry pass for the rich and beautiful metropolis, ironically lapped by the aquamarine waters of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans? An ominous cocktail of deficient rainfall, devastating droughts and poor planning, say conservationists, have made Cape Town the first major city to run out of fresh water.By 2040, there will be no drinking water in almost all of India.

The issue of water scarcity was first raised in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. Since then, each year, March 22 is observed across the world to shine the spotlight on different water-related issues. The theme for World Water Day this year is — ‘Nature for Water’ — Exploring nature-based solutions to the water challenges we face in the 21st century.

But even as the world is letting out a collective sigh for Cape Town, spare a thought for India. By 2040, there will be no drinking water in almost all of India. A UN report on water conservation published in March 2017 reveals that due to its unique geographical position in South Asia, the Indian sub-continent will face the brunt of the water crisis and India would be at the epicentre of this conflict.

By 2025, the report predicts, nearly 3.4 billion people worldwide will be living in ‘water-scarce’ countries and that the situation will become even more dire over the next 25 years.

With the planet’s second largest population at 1.3 billion (after China’s 1.4 billion), and expectant growth to reach 1.7 billion by 2050, India is struggling to provide safe, clean water to most of its populace. According to data from India’s Ministry of Water Resources, though the country hosts 18 percent of the world’s population, its share of total usable water resources is only 4 percent. Official data shows that in the past decade, annual per capita availability of water in the country has plummeted significantly.

If that isn’t scary enough, a glance at the World Bank’s latest statistics reveals the magnitude of the problem: 163 million Indians lack access to safe drinking water; 210 m have no access to improved sanitation; 21 percent of communicable diseases are linked to unsafe water and 500 children under age five die from diarrhoea each day in India.

Experts say India’s gargantuan population increases the country’s vulnerability to water shortage and scarcity. Further, the country’s exponentially growing middle-class is raising unprecedented demands on clean, safe water. Long dry spells — with the temperamental monsoons (the seasonal rains that visit south Asia between June and August) — only aggravate this paucity.

In 2016, a whopping 300 districts (or nearly half of India’s 640 districts) were under the spell of an acute drinking water shortage across India. The government then had to operate special trains at great expense just to carry water to the affected places.

Surface water isn’t the only source reaching a breaking point in India. The country’s freshwater is also under great stress. This is largely because State policies have failed to check groundwater development. With continued neglect and bureaucratic mismanagement and indifference, the problem has intensified.

Grassroots efforts like those led by Rajendra Singh, who won the prestigious Stockholm Water Prize, presented annually by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), in 2015, have had a positive effect. His pioneering work in rural development and water conservation, starting in the 1980s, brought some 8,600 rainwater storage tanks, known as johads, to 1,058 villages spread over 6,500 sq km in nine districts of Rajasthan. Five seasonal rivers in the state which had nearly dried up have since become perennial.

But adverse fallouts from water shortage aren’t just limited to people. They impact the Indian economy too.

“As an agrarian economy, India relies heavily on agriculture. There is aggressive irrigation in rural areas where agriculture provides the livelihood for over 600 million Indians, However, technological advances in agriculture haven’t kept pace with the population explosion,” explains economist Probir Choudhury of Reliance Capital.

As a result, he says, even as much of the world has adopted lesser water-intensive crops and sophisticated agricultural techniques, India still uses conventional systems and water-intensive crops. An excessive reliance on monsoons further leads to crop failures and farmer suicides.

The country’s industrialization has brought its own set of woes, say market analysts. Contamination of fresh water sources by industrial waste has sullied the waters of all major rivers. Over 90 percent of the waste water discharged into rivers, lakes, and ponds is untreated that leads to further contamination of fresh water sources.

Wastage by urban population is already a great challenge in Indian cities. By far the greatest waste occurs in electricity-producing power plants which guzzle gargantuan amounts of water to cool down. More than 80 percent of India’s electricity comes from thermal power stations, burning coal, oil, gas and nuclear fuel.

Now researchers from the US-based World Resources Institute, after analysing all of India’s 400 thermal power plants, report that its power supply is under threat from water scarcity.

The researchers found that 90 percent of these thermal power plants are cooled by freshwater, and nearly 40 percent of them experience high water stress. The plants are increasingly vulnerable, while India remains committed to providing electricity to every household by 2019.

“A severe lack of regulation, over privatization and entrenched corruption are the salient reasons pushing the country to a water crisis,” says Dr. Chintamani Reddy, a water expert and former professor of geography at Delhi University.

Worsening the situation, adds Reddy, are regional disputes over access to rivers in the country’s interior. Clashes with neighbours — Pakistan over the River Indus and River Sutley in the west and north and with China to the east with the River Brahmaputra — have become increasingly common.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Thankfully, some measures are underway to improve the scenario. Indian farmers are being sensitized about the latest irrigation techniques such as drip irrigation, and utilizing more rainwater harvesting to stem the loss of freshwater sources. Modern sanitation policies are being drafted that both conserve and prudently utilize water sources.

Massive investments in wind energy and solar energy, along with rejection of fossil fuel facilities in water-stressed places, are also being vigorously pursued. India has a target for 40 percent of its power to come from renewables by 2030 under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

Water conservationists say if these steps are followed strictly, India may be able to minimize its water scarcity. Otherwise, the apocalyptic scenario currently bedeviling South Africa may well become India’s fate.

Excerpt:

The link between women in climate change is a cross-cutting issue that deserves greater recognition at climate negotiations. It is pervasive, touching everything; from health and agriculture to sanitation and education.

Women from developing countries witness the nexus between climate change and gender issues on a first-hand basis. They are oftentimes highly dependent on the land and water resources for survival and are left in insecure positions. Climate change is not just an environmental issue, but links to social justice, equity, and human rights, all of which have gender elements.

A female perspective is critical to the success of the 2015 Climate Conference (COP21), which strives to find a global agreement to tackle climate change. In order for it to be effective, it must integrate gender equality, particularly women’s empowerment and gender responsiveness to the vulnerability of rural women.

During the back-and-forth iterations of the climate agreement’s draft, of which several versions were published in the last two weeks, gender was treated as an accessory element that could be removed and bargained with, and all but a handful of parties ignored it. They are wrong.

Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa are three of the most climate vulnerable continents in the world and although they contribute the least to climate change, the women in their countries endure the brunt of its severe impact.

Millions of people in Asia are extremely vulnerable to climate change, especially women because of their traditional, gender-prescribed roles. In many rural areas the mobility of women is very limited, as women working outdoors is often frowned upon due to conservative social perceptions. So while men from climate change-affected areas often migrate to cities and less climate vulnerable regions in search of work, women are left to take care of the homes and children. This confinement to houses translates to economic dependence and lack of access to information such as early warning, which contributes to increasing women’s vulnerability.

Women in Asia usually have more climate sensitive tasks, such as fetching water and preparing food, which increases their vulnerability in the context of climate change. The UN Development Program (UNDP) field research has shown that fetching water involves women and girls commuting over long distances. With the increasing frequency and intensity of floods, women regularly have to navigate through waterlogged areas for fetching water and cooking, which exposes them to the risks of drowning, snakebites, and skin diseases.

Halfway around the globe, women face similar climate-related issues. Caribbean households are largely matriarchal and women find themselves at the frontline of the need for climate adaptation and mitigation.

Women have the prime responsibility of taking care of everyone in the home and are affected by food security and water scarcity. Rural women are particularly vulnerable, especially smallholder producers, marginalised farmers, and agricultural workers living in rural areas.

Whether the food or water shortages are due to the increased amount and intensity of hurricanes or drought, their chances of living decent lives are not high and aren’t getting better. Understanding this point of view is important for successful formulation and execution of climate adaptation strategies.

According to Mildred Crawford, President of the Jamaica Network of Rural Women Producers,” Agriculture needs more visibility in the negotiations. Women are actors in the food chain and need finance to assist small farmers to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Women groups are already organised; so incentives can be given to them to control carbon from waste in their community.”

The Caribbean is in its worst drought in the past five years. According to Mary Robinson, former Prime Minister of Ireland, and also former head of t UN’s High Commission on Human Rights, the climate draft needs to have a sharper gender focus in order to ensure that women have greater access to climate finance, renewable technologies and adaptation capacity. Indeed, climate campaigning should not be narrowed to emissions reductions, carbon trading and transfer of technology, but it should strive to go beyond.

Along with these, it should take note of the fact that most farmers in developing countries are women and therefore adaptation applies strongly to them. Gender applies across the board, it is not something to be used conveniently.
Women from developing countries need to be empowered to play major roles in the climate change fight as they stand to lose so much.

Kalyani Raj, member in charge of All India Women’s Conference, argues that it is crucial to give vulnerable women a voice and include them in policy planning.

“A lot of women have developed micro-level adaptation approaches, indigenous solutions and traditional knowledge that are not being replicated at the macro level,” she said. “So policies should be focused on upscaling these instead of proposing one-size-fits-all measures for climate change adaptation.”

In Africa, the climate change impact on gender issues is mainly linked to agriculture, food security and natural disasters. According to the 2011 Economic Brief of the African Development Bank (AFDB), out of Africa’s 53 countries, women represent 40 percent or more of the agricultural workforce in 46 of them. This sector is characterised as vulnerable because generally it does not comprise formal sector jobs with contracts and income security.

“The poor are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and the majority of the 1.5 billion people living on $1 a day or less are women,” pointed out UNFPA in the 2009 State of World Population report. Furthermore, in a sample of 141 countries over the period 1981–2002, it was found that gender differences in deaths from natural disasters are directly linked to women’s economic and social rights. In inequitable societies, more women than men die from disaster.

As young women from these three vulnerable continents, we are calling for proper representation of women in the climate agreement. The cry of the rural woman is a reality that we must all face. However, we must recognise that women are not just victims, we are powerful agents for change. Therefore, women need to be included in the decision-making processes and allowed to contribute their unique expertise and knowledge to adapt to climate change, because any climate change intervention that excludes women’s perspective and any policy that is gender blind, is destined to fail.

(End)

Mangrove forests, like this one in western Sri Lanka, can store up to 1,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare in their biomass, yet they are being felled at three to five times the rate of other forests. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 6 2015 (IPS)

By 2050, we will be a world of nine billion people. Not only does this mean there’ll be two million more mouths to feed than there are at present, it also means these mouths will be consuming more – in the next 20 years, for instance, an estimated three billion people will enter the middle class, in addition to the 1.8 billion estimated to be within that income bracket today.

These changes are going to put unprecedented pressure on the world’s natural resources, according to a new report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)’s International Resource Panel (IRP).

Entitled ‘Policy Coherence of the Sustainable Development Goals: A Natural Resource Perspective’, the report warns that maintaining and restoring healthy ecosystems will be critical for the successful realisation of the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda.

Unless the new development blueprint is centered on protecting and respecting the earth’s limited bounty, the goals of poverty eradication and ensuring decent lives for current and future generations will fall by the wayside, experts predict.

For instance, IRP studies have shown that annual global extraction increased “by a factor of eight in the 20^th century” from seven billion tonnes of material in 1900 to 68 billion tonnes of resources by 2009.

Based on current trends, resource use and extraction could hit 140 billion tonnes by 2050 – three times what was extracted in the year 2000, according to UNEP data.

“Due to declining ore grades, depending on the material concerned, about three times as much material needs to be moved today for the same ore extraction as a century ago, with concomitant increases in land disruption, groundwater implications and energy use,” UNEP said in a press release on Jul. 6.

Meanwhile, pressures on biotic resources are also on the rise, with 20 percent of cultivated land, 30 percent of the world’s forests and 10 percent of its grasslands being degraded at a rate that far outstrips the ability of such earth systems to replenish themselves.

Deterioration of ecosystems also threatens to worsen the impacts of climate change, contribute to water scarcity and exacerbate world hunger, with environmental experts fearing that 25 percent of total global food production could be lost by 2050 as a result of converging land and resource issues.

“The core challenge of achieving the SDGs will be to lift a further one billion people out of absolute poverty and address inequalities, while meeting the resource needs – in terms of energy, land, water, food and material supply – of an estimated eight billion people in 2030,” U.N. Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said Monday.

“The fulfillment of the SDGs in word and spirit will require fundamental shifts in the manner with which humanity views the natural environment in relation to human development,” he added.

Representing over 30 renowned experts and scientists, and as many national governments, the IRP today called for the “prudent management and use of natural resources, given that several Goals are inherently dependent on the achievement of higher resource productivity, ecosystem restoration and resource conservation”.

The report also urged policy makers to introduce practices based on a ‘circular economy’ approach, whereby reusing, recycling and remanufacturing products and other materials reduces waste by “decoupling” natural resource use from economic progress.

While the SDGs represent a bold and wide-reaching framework for ending some of the world’s most pressing problems – among them hunger and extreme poverty – avoiding counter-productive results will depend on a “commitment to maintaining the integrity of the Earth’s systems while addressing the resource demands driven by individual goals,” UNEP experts cautioned.

As the world’s population increases, and more people climb into the ranks of the middle class (defined by increased income and a corresponding rise in consumption), it will become crucial for individuals to adopt consumption patterns – and governments and corporations to adopt production systems – that contribute to human well-being “without putting unsustainable pressures on the environment and natural resources”, the report said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

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:

A forward osmosis desalination plant at Al Khaluf in Oman. Credit: Starsend/cc by 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 29 2013 (IPS)

The Arab world is widely perceived as blessed with an embarrassment of riches: an abundance of oil (Saudi Arabia), one of the world’s highest per capita incomes (Qatar), and home to the world’s tallest luxury building (United Arab Emirates).

But it lacks one of the most finite resources necessary for human survival: water.Scientists are now warning of "Peak Salt" - the point at which the Gulf becomes so salty that relying on it for fresh water stops being economically feasible.

“The average Arab citizen has eight times less access to renewable water than the average global citizen, and more than two thirds of surface water resources originate from outside the region,” says the U.N.Development Programme (UNDP) in a new study released this week.

Titled “Water Governance in the Arab Region: Managing Scarcity and Securing the Future,” the report warns that water scarcity in the region is fast reaching “alarming levels, with dire consequences to human development”.

The region accounts for five percent of the world’s more than seven billion people, and 10 percent of its area, but accounts for less than one percent of global water resources.

Its share of annual renewable water resources is also less than one percent, and it receives only 2.1 percent of average annual global precipitation.

Over 87 percent of the region’s terrain is desert and 14 of the world’s 20 most water-stressed countries are in this region, the study notes.

Maude Barlow, a former senior U.N. advisor on water and author of “Blue Future, Protecting Water for People and the Planet Forever”, told IPS the Middle East is in “a water crisis.”

Desertification is a sweeping problem in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Iran.

The greatest culprits, she pointed out, are unsustainable agricultural practices that guzzle the last of the area’s groundwater.

“Dams and diversions for heavy irrigation are destroying water sources at an alarming rate,” she warned.

A recent satellite study by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) found the region has lost, since 2003 alone, far more groundwater than previously thought – an amount the size of the Dead Sea, said Barlow.

At an international water conference in Abu Dhabi last January, Crown Prince Gen. Sheikh Mohammed bi Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a major oil producer, said: “For us, water is [now] more important than oil.”

Threatened by future scarcities, several Arab countries, including the UAE, have expanded their use of non-conventional water resources including desalination; treated wastewater; rainwater harvesting; cloud seeding; and irrigation drainage water.

Currently, the Arab region leads the world in desalination, with more than half of global capacity.

Desalinated water is expected to expand from 1.8 percent of the region’s water supply to an estimated 8.5 percent by 2025.

Most of the increase is expected to concentrate in high-income, energy-exporting countries, particularly the Gulf countries, because desalination is energy- and capital-intensive, according to the UNDP study.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned that water shortages cause social hardships and impede development.

In an implicit reference to the Middle East, he said, “They create tensions in conflict-prone regions. Too often, where we need water we find guns. There is still enough water for all of us – but only so long as we keep it clean, use it more wisely, and share it fairly.”

The UNDP study  notes that major challenges for the water sector in the region include fragmented institutions with unclear and overlapping responsibilities; inadequate capacities; insufficient funding; centralized decision-making; lack of compliance with regulations and ineffective enforcement; and limited public awareness.

Speaking during the launch of the new report in Bahrain, UNDP assistant administrator and director of the Regional Bureau for Arab States, Sima Bahous, said, “The water crises must be dealt with as a matter of priority and urgency.”

And it deserves increased political attention and commitment even amid the challenging political environment of the region today, Bahous said.

Barlow told IPS the Arab region’s oil wealth has allowed some states to mask their water poverty, giving them the false impression they can buy their way of out of the coming crisis.

“Wealthy Arab states of the Persian Gulf such as the UAE, with the highest per capita water footprint in the world, are over-extracting the waters of the Gulf with massive desalination projects, using their scarce water supplies to build cities and irrigate deserts,” Barlow said.

She also noted that 70 percent of the world’s desalination plants are in this area, and scientists are now warning of “Peak Salt” – the point at which the Gulf becomes so salty that relying on it for fresh water stops being economically feasible.

Moreover, she pointed out, most of the area’s wastewater – including that of the wealthy countries – is not properly treated and in some cases, not treated at all.

“As a result, rivers and the Gulf are heavily polluted. With growing water demands, dwindling supplies and pervasive pollution, the Arab world has a serious water problem,” she added. “While I applaud this [UNDP] report and many of its findings, particularly the warnings about climate change and bad agriculture practices, it does not touch on the more sensitive and political issues of water priority and accessibility enough.”

She said promoting privatisation of water services as being more efficient is not only wrong in and of itself – municipalities all over the world are reclaiming their water services after disastrous experiments with privatisation – but would place the decisions about access even more into the very hands of those who hold the power now and who have enough water for all the golf courses and mansions they can build.

“Only a concerted effort to fiercely protect the region’s water as a public trust and human right together with strict laws to prevent over-extraction and pollution and outright water theft will avert the crisis coming to the Arab world,” Barlow said.

Irrigation canal, Mchinji. Credit: FISD/IPS

By Thalif Deen
ROME, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

Since food and water are so closely interlinked, there is a lingering fear based on the assumption, if there is no water, there will be no food.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) underlines the strong links between the two when it declares that agriculture accounts for over 70 percent of global water use.

Meanwhile, the share of water available for agriculture is expected to decline to 40 percent by 2050, warns an FAO report released here for the agency’s 38thsession, currently underway. “Water is becoming scarce not because the volume of water is reduced but because demand from society is increasing.” - Prof. Jan Lundqvist, Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI)

The figures are based on statistics released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The availability of fresh water resources shows a similar picture to that of land: sufficient resources at the global level are unevenly distributed, and an increasing number of countries, or parts of countries, are reaching critical levels of water scarcity, according to FAO.

The FAO also says many of the water-scarce countries in the Near East and North Africa, and in South Asia, further lack land resources.

Due to their vulnerability, coastal areas, the Mediterranean basin, the North East and North African countries and dry Central Asia appear as locations where investment in water management techniques should be considered a priority when promoting agricultural productivity growth.

Asked if the link between agricultural productivity and water scarcity is real, Prof. Jan Lundqvist, senior scientific advisor at Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), told IPS, “Yes and No”.

If there is no water (e.g. in deserts), food cannot be produced, he pointed out. But water is a renewable resource and the hydrological cycle, which is driven by the sun, will continue also in the future.

The amount of renewable freshwater in terms of precipitation falling over the continents is about 110,000 km3 per year, he said. But with an increasing population, the amount of water per capita is inevitably reduced.

It is increasingly difficult, costly and dangerous, according to Lundqvist, to divert more water from rivers and lakes and to pump water from groundwater reserves.

“At the same time, with economic development, the per-capita demand increases. It is, indeed, a tricky equation,” he noted.

Since everything humans eat requires water to be produced, the paradox of the “water we eat” was best illustrated by an exhibition at a SIWI conference last year, which pointed out that the production of an average hamburger – two slices of bread, beef, tomato, lettuce, onions and cheese – consumes about 2,389 litres of water, compared to 140 litres for a cup of coffee and 135 for a single egg.

An average meal of rice, beef and vegetables requires about 4,230 litres of water while a chunky, succulent beef steak, a staple among the rich in the world’s industrial countries, consumes one of the largest quantum of water: about 7,000 litres.

Vincent Casey, technical support manager at the London-based WaterAid, told IPS that irrigated agriculture accounts for the vast majority of water withdrawals in many countries.

A great deal can be done to prevent water scarcity through changes to thirsty agricultural practices.

Crop types, irrigation methods and water tariffs can be changed to reduce demand. These actions require political commitment, which can be difficult to get, he noted.

Two things are required for water security: well-managed water resources and well-managed water supply services (pumps, pipes taps, storage tanks).

Water scarcity is already a daily reality for over 760 million people right now – not because irrigation farmers are drinking all of their water, Casey said, but because of a lack of the water supply services required to make use of available water.

“If we didn’t have reservoirs, pipes and taps in the UK, we would be water scarce too”.

Management of the water supply crisis will involve demand management in areas where there is pressure on the resource, he added, and supply management where people lack any kind of access to water — not because it isn’t there but because it requires investment to develop it.

If there is a scarcity of water, Lundqvist told IPS, food production will be a victim for two main reasons.

Firstly, other sectors will require a large share of water supply. With urbanization both industry and households will be able to articulate their demands and they are in a better position to pay for additional water.

“Water is becoming scarce not because the volume of water is reduced but because demand from society is increasing,” he said.

A second reason is that precipitation pattern will be more stochastic as a result of global warming. Risk will increase for farmers, since uncertainty will increase.

This is particularly problematic, he pointed out, for rain-fed agriculture. But with an increasing frequency and amplitude of droughts and floods, and with the increasing demands from other sectors, the timing of supplies for irrigation during the agricultural seasons will be more tricky.

Higher temperature will speed up the return flow of water back to atmosphere with complications for the farmers.

Under these circumstances –and considering the fact that enough food is produced to feed the entire world population properly– it will be crucial, he said, to make sure that the food produced is beneficially used to the degree feasible and reaches the consumers, including the poor.

Between one-third and half of the food produced is lost, wasted or converted. This means a tremendous waste of resources.

“We must walk on two legs into the future, ensure that enough is produced and make sure that the produce is accessed and used in a most worthwhile manner,” he declared.

The real predicament is regional. The population continues to increase in many areas where water availability is already quite limited.

Even more challenging: the rainfall pattern is becoming more unreliable, while temperature is increasing, he noted.

There will thus be seasons and periods when a growing number of people will experience prolonged droughts (they may last over several years) while in other places, floods will have devastating consequences, he warned.