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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Is water the new oil?
  • Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:31:04 -0700



Is water the new oil?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/02/water
It's the world's most precious commodity, yet many of us take it for granted.
But that's all about to change... Special report by Juliette Jowit
 
 
It's hard to imagine why humans would have chosen the achingly arid stone
desert of Wadi Faynan for their first settlement. But water would have been
one important reason, says archaeologist Steven Mithen. When Neolithic men
and women arrived 11,500 years ago, things were very different: the climate
was cooler and wetter; the landscape was covered in vegetation including wild
figs, legumes and cereals, and there would have been wild goats and ibex for
meat.
 
Initially WF16, as it's now called, would have been a seasonal camp. But
Mithen, professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading, and his
fellow archaeologist Bill Finlayson believe that, gradually, people stayed
longer. Sifting evidence from so long ago, the archaeologists can't be sure,
but remains of food from different seasons and the scale of 'rubbish' piles
suggest that about 10,000 years ago the inhabitants stopped moving
altogether. If they are right, it would make this one of the oldest sites
ever found where humans made a permanent settlement, learned to farm, and
changed the course of human civilisation. But the tiny community drawn to
water, which attracted successive waves of settlements, would eventually all
but destroy the resource which made life possible. It is a pattern that's
been repeated for millennia, around the world, and it now threatens us on a
global scale.
 
First people cut trees for shelter and fuel, until rains swept away the soil
instead of seeping into shallow aquifers, and the springs dried up. At least
as long ago as the Bronze Age, farmers began mankind's obsession with
diverting water for crops to feed the growing population. Meanwhile, the
moist, cool climate which encouraged the first settlement was naturally
becoming drier and hotter.
 
At least twice, historians believe, Wadi Faynan was abandoned. The first time
possibly because of a sharp change in the climate, and later because it
became too polluted. Today, Bedouin who survive in the valley have laid pipes
down the dry stream bed to suck what is left of the spring in order to
irrigate fields of tomatoes they have scratched out of the dry soil. But it's
getting harder. According to local water lore, good rains now come in less
than every other year.
 
The farmers in Wadi Faynan are not alone. Like communities around the world,
they are paying the price for thousands of years of exploitation of our
environment. Already, 1bn people do not have enough clean water to drink, and
at least 2bn cannot rely on adequate water to drink, clean and eat - let
alone have enough left for nature. Lack of water is blamed for many of the
world's most distressing crises: millions of deaths each year from disease
and malnutrition, chronic hunger, keeping children away from schools which
offer hope of a better life. Mostly it is the poor who suffer, but
increasingly rich nations are struggling, too. Australia has endured so many
dry years that a leading climatologist has said it's time to stop saying
'gripped by drought' and accept that the lack of rain is permanent.
 
In parts of the US supplies are so vulnerable that last autumn the Red Cross
delivered water parcels to the town of Orme in Tennessee. 'I thought, "That
can't be the Red Cross. We're Americans!"' resident Susan Anderson told a
reporter. In California, some farmers abandoned their crops this year as
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared the first state-wide drought for 17
years. Meanwhile Barcelona was so desperate that it began importing tankers
of water from cities along the coast. Even in the notoriously wet UK, water
has become such a problem in the crowded southeast that one company plans to
build a desalination plant, the sort of desperate measure associated with
oil-rich desert states.
 
The Stockholm International Water Institute talks about 'an acute and
devastating humanitarian crisis'; the founder of the World Economic Forum,
Klaus Schwab, warns of a 'perfect storm'; Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations
Secretary General, has raised the spectre of 'water wars'. And, as the
population keeps growing and getting richer, and global warming changes the
climate, experts are warning that unless something is done, billions more
will suffer lack of water - precipitating hunger, disease, migration and
ultimately conflict.
 
In a bid to avert this catastrophe, politicians, economists and engineers are
pressing for dramatic changes to the way water is managed, from tree planting
and simple storage wells, to multibillion dollar schemes to replumb the
planet with dams and pipes, or manufacture freshwater from sewers and the sea.
 
The water crisis is an expression of the environmental catastrophe of human
over-exploitation. This is the age the Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul
Crutzen has called 'the Anthropocene', because the natural system has been so
fundamentally altered by human activity. And it all began when people settled
down and began to chop wood and farm.
'The start of sedentary communities is the start of the need to manage fresh
water supplies,' says Steven Mithen. 'This is a starting point for our whole
modern dilemma. It's gone from the concerns of individual settlements, to
cities, to nations, and it's now a global issue.'
 
There is, in theory, plenty of water on the earth to sustain its 6.5bn
people. More than 97 per cent of all the water on the planet is salt water,
and most of the freshwater is locked up in the Antarctic and Greenland ice
sheets. But that still leaves 10m cubic kilometres (km3) of usable water,
circulating in cycles of evaporation and precipitation between the atmosphere
and earth, where it appears in underground aquifers, lakes and rivers,
glaciers, snowpacks, wetlands, permafrost and soil. Each km3 is equivalent to
1,000bn litres, or 1bn tonnes, of water - about the remaining annual flow of
the River Nile.
 
On the other side of the equation, the UN says individuals need five litres
of water a day simply to survive in a moderate climate, and at least 50
litres a day for drinking and cooking, bathing and sanitation. Industry
accounts for about double the average domestic use. But agriculture needs
much, much more - in fact, 90 per cent of all water used by humans. The water
is not 'lost' from earth, but over-abstraction by irrigators means it is
often moved from where it is needed. Tony Allan, of King's College London,
estimates that, together, 6.5bn people need 8,000km3 of water each year - a
fraction of what is theoretically available. 'There's certainly enough water
for every person on the planet, but too often it's in the wrong places at the
wrong times in the wrong amounts,' says Marq de Villiers, author of the 2001
book Water Wars
 
Three hours north of Wadi Faynan is the much greener Wadi Esseir, where Salah
Al-Mherat and his family are one of millions of households in Jordan who feel
the daily effects of inhabiting one of the driest countries on earth. Once a
week, Al-Mherat gets water from the local irrigation co-operative for his
fig, lemon, olive and grenadine trees and vegetables. For the rest he relies
on rain. But since the Nineties the springs have been drying, sapped by
demand from the nearby capital, Amman, and rain has been declining.
 
On a hot morning in April, Al-Mherat comes in from picking petits-pois,
hitches up his smock and settles on to a pile of cushions. Fidgeting with a
pot of scented tea he explains that the crops now barely cover their costs;
he has to work as a security guard to supplement his income. 'When I started
it was very good compared to now,' he says. 'The first impact was that the
size of the irrigated area became reduced. People also changed what they
irrigated, so the water now goes mainly to the trees - some farmers stopped
completely from doing vegetables.' Al-Mherat says he keeps hoping things will
improve, because he will pass the land to his sons. 'It's my life,' he says.
'But even if I'm positive, the reality is it's like the wish of the devil to
go to paradise.'
 
Global population, economic development and a growing appetite for meat,
dairy and fish protein have raised human water demand sixfold in 50 years.
Meanwhile, supplies have been diminished in several ways: an estimated
845,000 dams block most of the world's rivers, depriving downstream
communities of water and sediment, and increasing evaporation; up to half of
water is lost in leakage; another 1bn people simply have no proper
infrastructure; and the water left is often polluted by chemicals and heavy
metals from farms and industry, blamed by the UN for poisoning more than 100m
people. And still the rains are getting less reliable in many areas.
 
Underlying these problems is a paradox. Because water, and the movement of
water, is essential for life, and central to many religions, it is
traditionally regarded as a 'common' good. But no individuals are responsible
for it. From Wadi Esseir to the arid American Midwest, farmers either do not
pay for water or pay a fraction of what homeowners pay, so they have less
incentive to conserve it and might deprive suppliers of funds to improve
infrastructure.
 
The UN defines 'water scarcity' as fewer than 1,000m3 of renewable clean
water for each person every year to drink, clean, grow food and run industry.
By this measure half the world's population lives in countries suffering
water scarcity. Jordan is one of the most water-scarce countries on earth,
averaging just 160m3 of renewable water per person per year.
 
The result is that it is not just farmers who are rationed. The Al-Mherat
family, like the rest of greater Amman, only get water to their house one day
a week. A city of more than 2m people runs to the rhythm of 'water day', says
Dr Khadija Darmame, who is part of a £1.25m project organised by Mithen and
sponsored by Britain's Leverhulme Trust to study links between 'water, life
and civilisation' in Jordan, from the earliest settlements to modern day.
 
Poor supplies and stagnant tanks occasionally lead to infections. But for
most, the problem is drudgery. 'The first thing is to do the maximum laundry
and then clean the house,' says Darmame. Children and men take a shower, 'and
the last thing is for the women to take a shower, and then you need a few
hours to fill the tanks,' stacked on every roof.
 
For millions of others, bad supplies are a question of life and death. Lack
of clean drinking water and sanitation are largely blamed for the death of
11m children under five each year from disease and malnutrition; for nearly
1bn people who are chronically hungry; for 2bn who suffer what the UN's Food
and Agriculture Organization calls 'food insecurity', because they do not
have adequate food and nutrition for an 'active and healthy life'; and for
keeping more than 60m girls out of school. These people then get caught in a
water and poverty trap: two-thirds of the people who lack enough water for
even the most basic needs live on less than $2 a day. 'Variability of water
availability is strongly and negatively related to per capita income,' says
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, author of Common Wealth: Economics For a Crowded
Planet, and a special adviser to the UN Secretary General. Poor health, lack
of education and hunger make it hard to escape.
 
Ultimately, lack of water is seen as a threat to peace. From genocide in
Darfur to rows between states in India and the US, Ban Ki-Moon is one of
several global leaders who have warned of further legal and armed disputes
over water. Intuitively it is obvious people will fight over their most
precious resource, but so far few conflicts have broken out. The idea of
'water wars' seized the public imagination in 2001 when Marq de Villiers's
book of that name was published in the UK, but the author disagreed with the
publisher's choice of title. De Villiers agrees that water is often an
underlying cause of tension, but has only identified one water 'war', between
Egypt and Sudan. 'You cannot do without water, so when shortages pinch,
states do co-operate and compromise,' he says.
 
But if half the world's population lives in water-stressed countries, how do
so many, from the breadbaskets of Asia to the sprawling cities in the arid
American west, keep watering fields and running taps?
 
One reason is that water flows uphill to money, as the saying goes. Thus
people in oil-rich Kuwait enjoy expensive desalination, while Palestinians
suffer daily hardship; tourists in Amman can turn on the tap at any time,
while those in the poorest areas of the city have access to water for a few
hours each week. As Tony Allan says: 'Water shortages don't pose serious
problems to gardeners in Hampshire or California homeowners with pools to
fill.'
 
Another answer to the conundrum was identified by Allan, who in the Sixties
became curious about why Middle Eastern countries without abundant water
supplies were not suffering from a more obvious water crisis. The answer, he
realised, was trade: by buying food, water-poor societies were 'buying' what
he dubbed 'virtual water'. They were helped by farmers dumping grain into the
world market once subsidies created massive over-supply. 'This potential
tragedy was motoring on and hit the calm waters of the Americans and
Europeans providing food [for the world market] at half cost, and the water
contained in that food [was water] they didn't have to find.'
 
The other answer is that communities around the world have been forced to tap
rivers and lakes and aquifers, sometimes millions of years old, far beyond
the limit at which they can replenish themselves. Above ground, lakes are
shrinking and rivers are being reduced to pathetic flows, or drying up
altogether. Below ground, a largely invisible crisis is unfolding as millions
of wells have been sunk into aquifers - 4m in Bangladesh alone. Many aquifers
are replenishable, but not all, and many that can be recharged don't get
enough rain to match demand. Sometimes the empty cavities simply collapse,
putting them beyond use forever. In his recent book, Plan B 3.0, Lester Brown
catalogues the results. In the breadbaskets of China, India, the US,
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel and Mexico, water
tables are falling, sometimes by many metres a year. Pumps are being drilled
a kilometre or more to find water, thousands more wells have dried
up altogether and agricultural yields are shrinking. These countries contain
more than half the world's people and produce most of its grain, warns Brown.
Meanwhile, almost forgotten amid the human suffering are the terrible
consequences for the natural world: freshwater fish populations fell by half
between 1970 and 2000, says the UN.
 
All these dams and irrigation channels and pumps and pipes allow billions of
people to run up a gigantic global water overdraft. What worries experts is
that there is no sign of humans withdrawing less water.
 
Two years ago, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) published
a report by 700 experts warning that one in three people were 'enduring one
form or another of water scarcity'. 'Scarcity for me is when women work hard
to get water, [or] you want to allocate more but can't,' says David Molden,
deputy director of the Sri Lanka-based organisation.
Molden warns that the situation is becoming 'a little bit more critical',
because of continuing rising demand for food, the recent boom in biofuels and
climate change. To that can also be added another, poignant 'demand': the
long-overdue realisation that nature also needs water, which in Europe and
other countries has led to laws to ensure 'minimum environmental flows'
remain in place.
 
For food alone, the World Bank estimates that demand for water will rise 50
per cent by 2030, and the IWMI fears it could nearly double by 2050. Whether
these crops require rain or irrigation depends on where they are grown, and
how much rain there is.
Like a great river fed by many tributaries, water is a conduit for the
various effects of global warming: more variable rainfall, more floods, more
droughts, the melting of glaciers on which 1bn people depend for summer river
flows, and rising sea levels, threatening to inundate not just coastal
communities but also their freshwater aquifers, river deltas and wetlands.
 
>From the headline figures, climate change should be good news. Crudely,
>scientists estimate for every 1C rise in the average global temperature,
>precipitation will increase one per cent, as warmer air absorbs more
>moisture. The world's total volume would not change, but it would be
>recycled more quickly, affecting the majority of the world's agriculture
>which depends on the volume and timing of rainfall.
 
Balancing all these impacts, Nigel Arnell, director of Reading University's
Walker Institute for Climate Change, calculates that the number of people
living in water basins exposed to water stress will rise from 1.4bn to
2.9-3.3bn by 2025 and to 3.4-5.6bn by 2055. In fact, the greatest impact in
Arnell's modelling is from rising populations, particularly in China and
India, and, globally, climate change is actually reducing exposure to
shortages. This may be good news for some, but masks huge disruption, as some
regions fear too much water, while hundreds of millions of people start to
run out.
 
It is impossible to attribute one farm's difficulties or one year's rainfall
to climate change. But if climate is the statistics of weather, then the rain
gauge this year on the farm of Sameeh Al-Nuimat, northwest of Amman, is
typical of what the experts forecast. Al-Nuimat had noticed a gradual decline
in rainfall for years, but this year it dropped off steeply and there was no
rain at all in March, a critical time for summer crops. 'My father told me
he'd never seen such a year,' he says.
 
Such dramatic events have injected urgency into discussions about Jordan's
precarious water supplies, says Al-Nuimat, who is also an irrigation engineer
at the Ministry of Agriculture. 'Before, when water was available, no one
worried about it. But now there's interest - every night people speaking,
every night debating, at every level, from the farmer to the planner to the
politician. As a farmer I'd like to see drought-resistant crops; from a civil
engineering point of view we should look for mega projects; and, if you're
thinking about global planning, there should be acceptance of people moving
from water-scarce regions to where water is available.'
 
Around the world the same debates are under way. Rich countries can make
significant gains from domestic efficiency, but most of the world's
population does not have power showers and swimming pools, or waste great
quantities of food. Instead the main focus is on reducing water in
agriculture, through more efficient irrigation, by engineering seeds to grow
in more arid and salty conditions, and even shifting crops. 'If the world
were my farm, I'd grow things in different places,' says David Molden. But
even benign-sounding conservation is often unpopular. There is widespread
resistance to raising prices for water (or energy for pumping) to increase
efficiency, suspicion of genetic modification, and a reluctance among farmers
to abandon water-hungry but lucrative crops when they are struggling to feed
their family. 'It's a socioeconomic dilemma,' says Al-Nuimat. 'You can't stop
now: it's the source of their life.'
 
Faced with public apathy and even resistance, responses have tended to focus
on increasing supply. For decades the scale of ambition has been like a game
of global engineering one-upmanship: rivers have been diverted across
countries, pumps sunk kilometres into fossil aquifers, and bigger plants
commissioned to recycle or desalinate water. And there is no sign of a
let-up. As shortages become more desperate and costs and energy use fall,
Global Water Intelligence forecasts that desalination capacity will more than
double by 2015, and the potential to increase wastewater recycling is
enormous, being only 2 per cent of volume.
 
But huge costs, environmental concerns and public distaste for drinking their
'waste' has forced many communities to reconsider simpler, traditional
methods, too. Some of the ideas the earliest farmers would have recognised:
tree replanting, ripping out thirsty non-native plants, stone walls to hold
back erosion, and rain harvesting with simple ponds and tanks. Some have even
urged a return to more vegetarian diets, which at their extreme demand only
half the water of a typical American meat-eater's. This is, according to Lord
Haskins, the former chairman of Britain's Northern Foods group and a
government adviser, 'the most virtuous and responsible step of all'.
 
And when all options are exhausted at home, countries have another option: to
import water in food and even industrial goods. Political meddling with
subsidies makes trade a controversial 'solution', but by favouring regions
with a 'competitive advantage' in water it can work. Globally the IWMI
estimates irrigation demand would be 11 per cent higher without trade, and
quotes a projection that imports can cut future irrigation by another 19-38
per cent by 2025. Saudi Arabia has gone further than most, announcing in
February that it would stop all wheat production in a few years, though other
countries might now be deterred by higher food prices.
 
Ultimately governments are being forced down several paths at once: to raise
prices to reflect the true value of water to humans and the environment,
invest in technology to improve efficiency and supplies, engage in more
trade, and make peace with neighbours that can hold up incoming water or
food. These will only be possible, though, if people can be lifted out of
poverty, to afford higher prices, capital spending and imports. 'When you
diversify your economy you solve your problems,' says Allan.
 
Looking back at the history of mankind's struggle for enough water,
experience suggests the initiative which enabled humans to settle, farm and
dominate the planet will provide many solutions. But sometimes we might have
to accept defeat. 'On the one hand you can see this amazing technological
ingenuity of humans, which throughout prehistory and history continually
invented new ways to manage water supply,' says Mithen. 'On the other, the
story of the past tells us that sometimes, however brilliant your
technological inventions, they are just not good enough, and you get periods
of abandonment of landscapes. We have got to be prepared to invest in
technology, but also to recognise in some parts of the world there are going
to be areas where we're going to have to say "enough's enough".'
 
A person uses about 50 litres of water a day; industry accounts for double
that. But agriculture needs much more - in fact, 90 per cent of all water
used by humans.
Liquid assets
How much water does it take to make a can of coke? The answer is hard to
swallow
 
Your fridge contains more water than you'd think. The bottle of mineral
water, for instance, used five times its volume in the manufacture of the
bottle. That steak came from a cow that had to be fed and watered for three
years. This figure is known as a 'water footprint' and we measure how your
daily rations add up ...
 
1 can of coke water
Water footprint: 200 litres
Despite containing only 0.35 litres of water, your can of coke has a water
footprint of 200 litres due to its sugar content. Sugar cane, being a
tropical crop, requires plenty of irrigation
 
1KG of beef
Water footprint: 15,500 litres
Almost all of your steak's water footprint is created by the grain used as
cattle feed
 
300g of cheese
Water footprint: 1,500 litres
Food water footprints vary according to farming methods and climate. Cheese
produced in India has a water footprint 3.5 times that of cheese produced in
Ireland, due to the climatic differences
 
1 loaf of white bread
Water footprint: 800 litres
The worldwide production of wheat, used to make your loaf, consumes 790bn m3
every year – that's 12 per cent of the global water use for crop production
 
1KG of chicken
Water footprint: 3,900 litres
A chicken will consume over 3kg of grain and needs 30 litres of water in the
10 weeks before its slaughter
 
Box of six eggs
Water footprint: 1,200 litres
An egg's water footprint is created largely by the water required to grow the
grain which is used in rearing the chicken
 
1 litre of milk
Water footprint: 1,000 litres
Milk has the second largest agricultural water footprint, only beef is
higher. This is due to the water required to grow feed and for the animals to
drink
 
1 orange
Water footprint: 50 litres
Fruit has a high footprint due to the level of irrigation. Citrus fruit in
particular has a very high footprint, topped only by bananas and grapes
 
1 bottle of wine
Water footprint: 720 litres
Most of the water footprint for your bottle of wine created in the irrigation
of the vineyard
 
1KG of lamb
Water footprint: 6,100 litres
Lamb has one of the smallest livestock water footprints, despite the 18
months required to rear and feed the sheep. This is mostly because relatively
little grain is used as feed
 
1 Spanish tomato
Water footprint: 8.2 litres
Tomatoes are a water-intensive crop, often grown in water-scarce regions. The
Spanish tomato industry, the largest provider of tomatoes to the UK, is
responsible for polluting 29m m3 of fresh water resources each year
Drying out: how can I reduce my water footprint?
Can I see how much water I'm using?
The good folk at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have launched
waterfootprint.org, a website allowing you to measure the 'water footprint'
of the manufacture and transport of your groceries, clothes, stationery and
electrical goods. And, indeed, your own individual WF score.
 
Why aren't goods labelled?
Multinational food and drink companies have now
begun to take this seriously and WWF has set up a highlevel taskforce to
study water footprinting. But taking the idea a step further on to food
labels which would reach millions of consumers is proving harder, says Dave
Tickner, head of the WWF UK's freshwater programme.
 
Is all water the same?
Unlike carbon, water is a local issue. It is better to buy a kilo of wheat
from water-rich Canada than from arid Australia, even if they only use half
the amount of water Down Under. Similarly it matters little how much rain
watered your tea leaves, but shirt-cotton grown by draining lake water in
central Asia is worrying.
 
These sound like difficult choices
Campaigners fear quick judgements about 'good' and 'bad' water will destroy
jobs in poor areas, and possibly force farmers into more environmentally
damaging crops to survive. So, a 'traffic light' labelling scheme indicating
good, improving and bad water practices is more likely than one that simply
states the quantity of water used.
 
In the meantime, what can I do?
Eat local and avoid importing out-of-season foods from arid areas. Cut down
your consumption of cotton – the average UK resident has a cotton WF of 211
litres a day, equivalent to flushing your loo 20 times a day.





  • [Livingontheland] Is water the new oil?, Tradingpost, 11/27/2008

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