Water Crisis: A Global Concern

“There is a water crisis today. But the crisis is not about having too little water to satisfy our needs. It is a crisis of managing water so badly that billions of people – and the environment – suffer badly.”    World Water Vision Report”

With the current state of affairs, correcting measures still can be taken to avoid the crisis to be worsening. There is a increasing awareness that our freshwater resources are limited and need to be protected both in terms of quantity and quality. This water challenge affects not only the water community, but also decision-makers and every human being. “Water is everybody’s business” was one the key messages of the 2nd World Water Forum.

What is water scarcity?

Water scarcity is the lack of sufficient available water resources to meet the demands of water usage within a region.

It already affects every continent and around 2.8 billion people around the world at least one month out of every year.

More than 1.2 billion people lack access to clean drinking water.

Water scarcity involves water stress, water shortage or deficits, and water crisis.

While the concept of water stress is relatively new, it is the difficulty of obtaining sources of fresh water for use during a period of time and may result in further depletion and deterioration of available water resources. Water shortages may be caused by climate change, such as altered weather patterns including droughts or floods, increased pollution, and increased human demand and overuse of water.

A water crisis is a situation where the available potable, unpolluted water within a region is less than that region’s demand.

What are the causes of Water crisis?

• Water scarcity is being driven by two converging phenomena: growing freshwater use and depletion of usable freshwater resources.
• Water scarcity can be a result of two mechanisms: physical (absolute) water scarcity and economic water scarcity, where physical water scarcity is a result of inadequate natural water resources to supply a region’s demand, and economic water scarcity is a result of poor management of the sufficient available water resources.
• According to the United Nations Development Programme, the latter is found more often to be the cause of countries or regions experiencing water scarcity, as most countries or regions have enough water to meet household, industrial, agricultural, and environmental needs, but lack the means to provide it in an accessible manner.

Saving water resources

• Whatever the use of freshwater (agriculture, industry, domestic use), huge saving of water and improving of water management is possible.
• Almost everywhere, water is wasted, and as long as people are not facing water scarcity, they believe access to water is an obvious and natural thing.
• With urbanization and changes in lifestyle, water consumption is bound to increase. However, changes in food habits, for example, may reduce the problem, knowing that growing 1kg of potatoes requires only 100 litres of water, whereas 1 kg of beef requires 13 000 litres.

Improving drinking water supply

Water should be recognized as a great priority. One of the main objectives of the World Water Council is to increase awareness of the water issue. Decision-makers at all levels must be implicated. One of the Millenium Development Goals is to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation. To that aim, several measures should be taken:

• guarantee the right to water;
• decentralise the responsibility for water;
• develop know-how at the local level;
• increase and improve financing;
• evaluate and monitor water resources.

 

Improving transboundary cooperation

As far as transboundary conflicts are concerned, regional economic development and cultural preservation can all be strengthened by states cooperating of water. Instead of a trend towards war, water management can be viewed as a trend towards cooperation and peace. Many initiatives are launched to avoid crises. Institutional commitments like in the Senegal River are created. In 2001, UNESCO and GRENN Cross International have joined forces in response to the growing threat of conflicts linked to water. They launched the joint From Potential Conflicts to Co-Operation Potential programme to promote peace in the use of transboundary watercourses by addressing conflicts and fostering co-operation among states and stakeholders.

Water resources are becoming scarce

Agricultural crisis

• Although food security has been significantly increased in the past thirty years, water withdrawals for irrigation represent 66 % of the total withdrawals and up to 90 % in arid regions, the other 34 % being used by domestic households (10 %), industry (20 %), or evaporated from reservoirs (4 %).
• As the per capita use increases due to changes in lifestyle and as population increases as well, the proportion of water for human use is increasing. This, coupled with spatial and temporal variations in water availability, means that the water to produce food for human consumption, industrial processes and all the other uses is becoming scarce.

Environmental crisis

It is all the more critical that increased water use by humans does not only reduce the amount of water available for industrial and agricultural development but has a profound effect on aquatic ecosystems and their dependent species. Environmental balances are disturbed and cannot play their regulating role anymore.

An increase in tensions

As the resource is becoming scarce, tensions among different users may intensify, both at the national and international level. Over 260 river basins are shared by two or more countries. In the absence of strong institutions and agreements, changes within a basin can lead to transboundary tensions. When major projects proceed without regional collaboration, they can become a point of conflicts, heightening regional instability. The Parana La Plata, the Aral Sea, the Jordan and the Danube may serve as examples. Due to the pressure on the Aral Sea, half of its superficy has disappeared, representing 2/3 of its volume. 36 000 km2 of marin grounds are now recovered by salt.

Water stress:

Water stress results from an imbalance between water use and water resources. The water stress indicator in this map measures the proportion of water withdrawal with respect to total renewable resources. It is a criticality ratio, which implies that water stress depends on the variability of resources. Water stress causes deterioration of fresh water resources in terms of quantity (aquifer over-exploitation, dry rivers, etc.) and quality (eutrophication, organic matter pollution, saline intrusion, etc.) The value of this criticality ratio that indicates high water stress is based on expert judgment and experience. It ranges between 20 % for basins with highly variable runoff and 60 % for temperate zone basins. In this map it can be seen that the situation is heterogeneous over the world.

 

The concept of Water Stress

 

Already there is more waste water generated and dispersed today than at any other time in the history of our planet: more than one out of six people lack access to safe drinking water, namely 1.1 billion people, and more than two out of six lack adequate sanitation, namely 2.6 billion people, 3900 children die every day from water borne diseases (WHO 2004). One must know that these figures represent only people with very poor conditions. In reality, these figures should be much higher.

 

 

 

Water Crisis

 

While the world’s population tripled in the 20th century, the use of renewable water resources has grown six-fold. Within the next fifty years, the world population will increase by another 40 to 50 %. This population growth – coupled with industrialization and urbanization – will result in an increasing demand for water and will have serious consequences on the environment.

Water crisis in India:

India is facing one of its major and most serious water crisis.

After two consecutive years of weak monsoons, 330 million people — a quarter of the country’s population — are affected by a severe drought. With nearly 50 per cent of India grappling with drought-like conditions, the situation has been particularly grim this year in western and southern states that received below average rainfall.

According to the Composite Water Management Index (CWMI) report released by the Niti Aayog in 2018, 21 major cities (Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and others) are racing to reach zero groundwater levels by 2020, affecting access for 100 million people.

Areas of concern:

• With a diverse population that is three times the size of the United States but one-third the physical size, India has the second largest population in the world.
• According to the World Bank, India has taken significant steps to reduce poverty, but the number of people who live in poverty is still highly disproportionate to the number of people who are middle-income, with a combined rate of over 52% of both rural and urban poor.
• Although India has made improvements over the past decades to both the availability and quality of municipal drinking water systems, its large population has stressed planned water resources and rural areas are left out.
• In addition, rapid growth in India’s urban areas has stretched government solutions, which have been compromised by over-privatization.
• Regardless of improvements to drinking water, many other water sources are contaminated with both bio and chemical pollutants, and over 21 % of the country’s diseases are water related. Furthermore, only 33% of the country has access to traditional sanitation.
• One concern is that India may lack overall long term availability of replenishable water resources. While India’s aquifers are currently associated with replenishing sources, the country is also a major grain producer with a great need for water to support the commodity. As with all countries with large agricultural output, excess water consumption for food production depletes the overall water table.
• Many rural communities in India who are situated on the outskirts of urban sprawl also have little choice but to drill wells to access groundwater sources. However, any water system adds to the overall depletion of water. There is no easy answer for India which must tap into water sources for food and human sustenance, but India’s overall water availability is running dry.
• India’s water crisis is often attributed to lack of government planning, increased corporate privatization, industrial and human waste and government corruption. In addition, water scarcity in India is expected to worsen as the overall population is expected to increase to 1.6 billion by year 2050.

 

Measures taken by the Indian Government:

• The Union government recently formed a new Jal Shakti(water) ministry, which aims at tackling water issues with a holistic and integrated perspective on the subject.
• The ministry has announced an ambitious plan to provide piped water connections to every household in India by 2024.
• The ministry has set a tough target at a time when hundreds of millions don’t have access to clean water. Aiming at laying huge pipeline networks for water supply means that yet again, we are giving more preference to infrastructure.

Also, the moot questions are: what will happen if there is no water to supply?

What will happen to all the wastewater that gets generated?

This indicates that there is a clear disconnect between water, society and economy. Currently, the interest is seen in laying large networks, constructing huge storage dams, fetching water from 150 kilometres and above, which involves a huge carbon footprint.

The road ahead

Looking at the current situation, there is a need for a paradigm shift.

A transition from this ‘supply-and-supply-more water’ provision to measures which lead towards improving water use efficiency, reducing leakages, recharging/restoring local water bodies as well as applying for higher tariffs and ownership by various stakeholders is urgently required.

A recovery-based closed loop system is the need of the hour.

It is time to go back and start using our traditional practice of rainwater harvesting — catching water where it falls. Presently, India captures only eight per cent of its annual rainfall, among the lowest in the world.

Another aspect is the treatment and reuse of waste water. About 80 per cent of the water that reaches households, leaves as waste and pollutes our waterbodies and environment. There is a huge potential in reusing and recycling this treated wastewater at least for non-potable purposes, which is cost effective.

All this leads to the fact that we need to promote a decentralised approach, with a key focus on water conservation, source sustainability, storage and reuse wherever possible.

It is important to understand that managing the water situation is not the job of only engineers but all stakeholders including hydrogeologists, economists, planners and most importantly, communities themselves.

Emphasis on behavioural change is not getting enough attention because it is nuanced and complex. But locals/citizens/ communities have a huge part to play. By keeping in check our own usage and actions, we can contribute.

On a positive note, some areas of India are fortunate to have relatively wet climate, even in the most arid regions. However, with no rain catchment programs in place, most of the water is displaced or dried up instead of used. In these areas, rain harvesting could be one solution for water collection. Collected water can be immediately used for agriculture, and with improved filtration practices to reduce water-borne pathogens, also quickly available for human consumption.

Whatever the means, India needs solutions now. Children in 100 million homes in the country lack water and one out of every two children are malnourished. environmental justice needs to be restored to India, so that families can raise their children with dignity, and providing water to communities is one such way to best ensure that chance.