Images courtesy of NASA
Water is plentiful, but not ubiquitous, and if we are not careful, we threaten our existence although we are almost drowning in water.
As discussed in the previous post on water, we have on this planet enough water to support the health and development of our projected peak population. The issue with water does not come from amount, but rather from availability. The images show the Aral Sea, previously one of Asia's largest freshwater bodies, in 2000 and 2011 with the outline delineating the shoreline in 1960. Over the span of fifty (50) years, government intervention in natural systems has nearly depleted the resource, and forever changed the quality of life in this region. Where once was plentiful access to sustain human life, now sits a lost resource and an instrument of suffering.
Access to water breaks down into three main issues: recharge/climate, water quality/sanitation, and social equity. Each of these pose specific challenges for societies trying to maintain or improve the quality of life for its citizens. The United Nations High Counselor for Human rights has declared that:
"The human right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses. An adequate amount of safe water is necessary to prevent death from dehydration, to reduce the risk of water-related disease and to provide for consumption, cooking, personal and domestic hygienic requirements."
We have fought wars over water, manipulated natural flows of water, and poisoned water. If we wish to develop a truly just and livable world, we must develop our societies such that we consider equal access for all as a primary goal.
Issues of local recharge, availability, and diversion
The recharge rate for any freshwater source denotes how quickly new freshwater supply enters the source. The withdrawal rate denotes how quickly we take water from the source for human health, irrigation, or industrial purposes. A well-cared for water source has a withdrawal rate that, at its maximum, equals the recharge rate. Throughout the world, millions of people live in river basins where the withdrawal rate significantly outpaces the recharge rate. Closer to home, one need only look at the portion of the Ogallala Aquifer in Texas, where the 2012 State Water Plan notes that the state does not have the water resources to handle times of drought, and that within the next 50 years, demand will well outstrip supply. Additionally, in Chicago, next to one of the largest freshwater sources in the world, engineering of the region's rivers has changed the recharge of Lake Michigan. Where about half of the region's rainwater used to recharge the lake, the Army Corps of Engineers (to solve a sanitation issue) reversed the flow of the Chicago River to keep storm water and sewage from entering the drinking supply. This greatly improved the quality of life (see the later discussion on sanitation), but has changed the way that the lake recharges, and the way that communities downstream of Chicago receive wastewater.
In cities as we know them, with drinking fountains and public restrooms abounding, we cannot imagine a scenario whereby thirty (30) to fifty (50) percent of any area could not have a direct hookup to a water source. Water conservation in a large portion of our country, and the developed world, gets little traction because the cost of water rarely enters into a realm where we notice. Although parts of the US experience water shortages, and have organized political discussions on the approaches to sound management (namely the southwest of the country which has discussed water rights for well over a century, and the upper Great Plains and Texas which have survived through significant drought over the past couple of years), most of us do not even notice how much we use. So when we hear that countries in Sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia may have cities where that level of water inaccessibility exists, we have a hard time believing it.
The image of the Aral Sea highlights only one example of the decisions that affect water availability. In the US, the Ogallala Aquifer stands as one of the largest freshwater sources in the country. The aquifer sits beneath some of the prime farming areas of the country, and as such has been tapped for irrigation water at rates that now exceed the recharge rate. This has stopped flows that used to emanate from the southeastern portion of the aquifer. Since the aquifer sits beneath several states in the middle of the US, competing interests make it difficult to place either responsibility or blame to any one user for the situation. This leads to a political stalemate by which, at best, the status quo remains, or at worst, the issue accelerates causing water shortages in some of the most critical areas of our nations agriculture.
Issues of sanitation and pollution
Every year, approximately 1.8 million children die from waterborne illness. In the developed world, we experienced this type of population destruction in the latter part of the 19th century when we experienced significant population migration from rural to urban living. Cities such as London and Chicago experienced significant losses in population due to cholera, typhoid, and diarrhea, especially among infants and children. This came about because the public water source also served as the public and industrial sewage collection facility, and private entities managed access to the sources of clean water. This dual-edged sword placed clean drinking water out of the reach of most citizens of the city, and forced them to use water of less quality to sustain their lives.
In Chicago, long-time residents are familiar with "Bubbly Creek" - the south fork of the south branch of the Chicago River that flowed near the Union Stockyards that bubbled from the tons of animal carcass waste and human waste that lay at the bottom rotting and releasing methane. This waste eventually found its way into Lake Michigan through the river, polluting the source of drinking water.
Chicago, London, and most major cities in the developed world had the resources through various forms of public financing to tap the wealth that had been created in those cities to make significant improvements in the necessary separation of sanitation and water source (Chicago going to the point of actually reversing the flow of the Chicago River so that it no longer flows into the lake). With China, India, southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa all experiencing rapid urbanization and industrialization, we as a worldwide civilization can hopefully learn from these lessons of our past development, and work to secure clean water and effective sanitation to reduce the number of deaths from waterborne illness and increase access to safe drinking water. Currently, over fifteen percent of the world has no access to clean water, and almost forty percent have no access to sanitation. If we are to realize a world in which all are created equal and have equal opportunity to grow and add value to society, we need to address this shortcoming.
Issues of gender and social equity
For those communities striving to succeed and develop, when no public access to clean water exists, members of the community must either relocate to a source or delegate responsibility for fetching the water. This task of fetching water falls largely on the women in a community, forcing young girls to give up education and betterment in order to sustain their communities. In a fully developing world, without the resources to prevent this situation, a discussion of gender equity falls secondary to that of survival. However, our world does not want for the knowledge or resources to provide fresh water to communities, we only lack the will.
In addition, although the big picture of a developing nation's wealth has little correlation with the overall access to clean water and sanitation, within a nation the poorest have the least access. We accept the proposition that anyone who works hard can bring themselves out of poverty, increase their station in life, and establish a footing for their family to lead a better quality of life in the future. When individuals in the poorest station in society have to live with the worst of conditions, and must constantly battle water-bourne illness, it places a weight around the neck of their personal and familial development. If we desire a world with equality of opportunity, then we must find a way to remedy this situation and provide that opportunity.
Conclusion
An economy distributes limited resources in the most efficient manner possible. If we truly had a limited resource in water, we could understand (although hopefully we would not accept) a situation where a significant portion of the world's population had no access to clean water or to sanitation. Water is not a limited resource, and in our developed world, we recognized over a century ago that the public must have control over access to affordable water and sanitation in order for civilization to develop. In order to maintain water's status as an abundant resource, we must respect the natural flows of water and its boundary-less nature, while extending the access to clean water throughout the world. If we support extended access to clean water, give communities control over that water, and respect open dialogue to manage disagreements, we can support the projected world population with the current resources available to us.
(Thanks to the "Human Development Report 2006 Beyond Scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis" for information contained within this post.)
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