The Matter of Water
Often ignored, one of life’s basic elements is making its importance felt by way of its scarcity. Now, experts are getting alarmed.
Environmentalists, government officials, policymakers, and even ordinary people are talking about global warming, which refers to an increase in average global temperatures causing climate change. Although advocates believe that the phenomenon is now happening and it’s just a matter of time that worst case scenario will happen, cynics contradict that it won’t happen.
After all, what most experts are presenting are mostly models, although there are some calamities in recent years that have been traced as “most likely” caused by global warming. “Climate change is the biggest environmental issue because it threatens to be disastrous. It will not only directly affect our climate. It will severely affect human beings and the ecosystem. We will have millions of people suffering from it,” said Geird Leipold, international executive director of Greenpeace.
However, there is one predicament that has not been given much attention, although it is very much transparent: water crisis. Dr Sandra Postel, director of the Massachusetts-based Global Water Policy Project, believes water problems will be alongside with climate change as a threat to the human future, and global warming will worsen water problems. “Although the two are related, water has no substitutes,” she explains. “We can transition away from coal and oil to solar, wind and other renewable energy sources. But there is no transitioning away from water to something else.”
Water, according to Leonardo da Vinci, is the driver of nature. This could be an overstatement in the 16th century, but nearly half a millennium later, da Vinci’s view on water can be considered prophetic. “Water is increasingly being realized to be the lifeblood of the planet,” said Professor Asit Biswas, the 2006 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate.
“Water, water everywhere,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in `The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ “but not a drop to drink.”
Only 2.5% of the water that covers over 70% of the earth’s surface is considered fresh water. And only 1.3% is available for human use since most of the freshwater are trapped in glaciers, ice sheets, and mountainous areas. Fresh water is drawn either from wells (tapping underground sources called aquifers) or from surface flows (like lakes, rivers and man-made reservoirs).
“Water is the most precious asset on Earth,” says Dr. Postel. “It is the basis of life.” Ideally, each person needs 50 liters of water every day to meet basic needs - for drinking, food preparation, cooking and cleaning up, washing and personal hygiene, laundry, house cleaning.
Water is also needed to produce the food human beings eat. “Water for agriculture is critical for food security,” points out Dr. Mark W. Rosegrant, a senior research fellow at the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). “The link between water and food is strong,” says Lester R. Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, also based in Washington, D.C. “We drink, in one form or another, nearly 4 liters of water per day. But the food we consume each day requires at least 2,000 liters to produce, 5oo times as much.”
In the Philippines, agriculture has the highest demand of all water use with 85% while the other sectors - industry and domestic - have a combined demand of only 15%. “With the demand for water growing in all three categories, competition among sectors is intensifying, with agriculture almost always losing,” deplores Brown.
In most of Asia, including the Philippines, water is the single most important component for sustainable rice production, especially in the traditional rice growing areas, according to Thierry Facon, senior water management officer of the regional office of Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Bangkok, Thailand.
Current rice production systems consume a high amount of water. It takes about 3,000 liters of water to produce one kilogram of rice, reports the Laguna-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).
The most important use of water in agriculture is for irrigation. FAO defines irrigation as “water artificially applied to soil and confined in time and space.” It enables to meet the water requirements of a crop at a given time of its vegetative cycle or to bring the soil to the desired moisture level outside the vegetative cycle. The irrigation of a field includes one or more watering per season.
Within the agricultural sector, crop production receives the greatest attention, but fish and livestock also require water. “Animals (including fish) consume a relatively small volume of water in comparison to crop consumption and can produce a very high value of output,” says Dr. Ruth Meinzen-Dick, a development sociologist who has done extensive research on water management. “As worldwide demand for animal products increases, the importance of supplying water for aquaculture and livestock is also likely to increase.”
Several factors contribute to water shortage, including variability in climate, demographic patterns, and unsustainable water-use patterns. In some urban centers of the Philippines where water is available, 50% never reaches the designated consumers due to leakage, theft and poor management. These identified problems are compounded by the degradation of water resource base.
For instance, many of the country’s largest cities are located in watersheds (also called “catchment” areas or drainage basin) where all available water is being used. “Land use and vegetative cover in the watershed are very important because they affect water flow and water quality,” explains Patrick Durst, senior forestry officer of FAO’s regional office in Bangkok, Thailand.
Example of a good watershed is a healthy forest. “This is because forests can help to relegate the flow of water,” says Durst. A recent report released by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) said that 90% of the 99 watershed areas in the country are “hydrologically critical” due to their degraded physical condition as a result of loss of forest cover.
“One of the most formidable environmental challenges the Philippines faces today is its diminishing forest cover,” the World Bank report claims. “Of the country’s total forestland area of 15.88 million hectares, only 5.4 million hectares are covered with forests and fewer than a million hectares of these are left with old growth forests.”
River pollution also contributes to the country’s current water woes. The Asian Water Development Outlook 2007,’ published by the Asian Development Bank, said that 16 rivers are now considered “biologically dead” during dry months. Some 48% of water pollution come from domestic waste, 37% from agricultural waste, and 15% from industrial waste.
In the rural areas, the major source of water pollution is agricultural farms. These are in the forms of organic wastes (such as decayed plants, livestock manure, and dead animals), soil loss (suspended soils and erosion), and pesticides and fertilizer residues.
“When water is polluted, fish and other aquatic resources can perish, which leads to a decline in fisheries production,” a World Bank report states. The Philippine economy loses an average of P17 billion annually due to the degradation of fisheries environment.
“Whiskey’s for drinkin’,” Mark Twain once wrote. “But water is for fightin’ over.” Sir Crispin Tickell, one of the organizers of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, agreed: “The world has got a very big water problem. It will be the progenitor of more wars than oil.”
