Shattered myth

There is no substitute for water. “We drink it. We generate electricity with it. We soak our crops with it.” Every man, woman and child needs almost four liters of water daily. Rice and staples siphon 500 times as much water.

You can’t drink oil. Saudi Arabia today swaps oil for water. Some 30 million Saudis—the equivalent of a Canada—now totally depend on imported grain. When wells dry up, communities die. Your footsteps echo eerily in the ghost city of Fatiphurshakri, near India’s Taj Mahal. Its aquifers dried up.

These underscores significance of the 24^th annual World Water Week which starts Monday in Stockholm, Sweden.

From August 31 to September 5, some 2,500 scientists and policy leaders will probe the link between energy and water. “These two resources are inseparable in policy crafting for sustainable development for a world with still increasing populations.                        

The conference will be venue for over a hundred seminars to exhibits. Energy is needed for pumping, storing, transporting and treating water, we need water for producing almost all sorts of energy. An increase or decrease in one immediately affects the other.

Filipinos are fixated on Vice President Jejomar Binay twisting in the wind over Makati scams. But where do we stand in the water equation? 

Our “water abundance” is a shattered myth. Each Filipino has 4,476 liters of “internal renewable resources.” Malaysians have almost triple that at 21,259 liters. Only one third of Philippine river systems are considered suitable for public water supply.

Come 2025, water availability will be marginal in most major cities and in eight of the 19 major river basins, estimates forecast. Cebu City, siphons twice what its aquifers can recharge. Then Cebu Mayor Tomas Osmeña hired an 80-year old “water diviner” Soledad Legaspi to locate new sources.

“In China, India, and Philippines, total availability of water, per person per year, slumped below 1,700 cubic meters, Asian Development Bank notes. That’s the global threshold for water stress.

“Capitol and Ayala did not wait for Lolo Choleng.  A joint venture between Cebu provincial government and the Ayala-led Cebu Manila Water Development Inc. (CMWDI) consortium will supply 35 million liters from surface water. It eases pressure on collapsing aquifers but will still fall short of 18 percent of demand.

Who used rain catchments to prepare for summer’s drought, asked Magsaysay Awardee Antonio Oposa. Summers are now longer and cloudbursts more frequent. The equatorial band of rains shift, University of Washington scientists caution.

Worldwide, spreading water shortages can trigger more upheavals, says Earth Policy Institute’s Lester Brown. Yemen is now a “hydrological basket case”. Like Cebu, it pumps aquifers beyond rate of recharge. In the capital Sana’a, tap water trickles once every four days. Conflict racks Syria and Iraq, already parched by thin flows from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. Now these flows are drastically reduced.

Daily, there are 10,000 more mouths to feed and less water with which to raise food. “The world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level,” Brown writes. “For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region. (There is) nothing in sight to arrest the decline.”

In Asia, births and migrants swell city populations by the size of a Seattle every three days. Will residents be split between water-haves and have-nots? And what can be done?

Deepening scarcities are here to stay. “Policies must address underlying causes, not symptoms. “Singapore and Israel do a great job of conserving water,” ADB’s Arjun Thapan says. They set realistic tariffs and ensure waste water is treated and reused.

Reforms postponed cost more over the long haul.  Attention is shifting away from physical limits to growth,” World Bank notes. It focuses on “incentives for human behavior. “The divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ can be bridged.”

Leaders must face the fact that the era of abundant resources is over. Deepening scarcities are here to stay. “The time when you torched a hectare of trees to harvest 600 kilos of palay is gone,” the towering and late forester Sudhakhar Rao wrote.