Excerpts from speech by Maude Barlow – Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the United Nations General Assembly and author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.
THE GLOBAL WATER CRISIS
Here are just a few headlines from the last month alone that give a flavour of what we are dealing with:
- Argentina is experiencing the worst drought in half a century, pushing the country to a state of emergency
- California facing worst drought in modern history.
- Nevada has been declared a natural disaster area because of severe drought
- Jordan facing historic drought
- Kenya has declared a national drought emergency
- In Spain, water is the new battleground as swaths of Southwest Spain are steadily turning into desert
- Pakistan is on the brink of “water disaster” due to accelerated melting of the glaciers and massive depletion in the Indus Basin Rivers
- South Asia’s growing water stress threatens river basins that sustain half the region’s 1.5 billion people
- China is facing the worst drought in 50 years, leaving 4 and a half million Chinese without drinking water and destroying half this year’s wheat crop.
- Israel faces worst water crisis in 80 years
- Water crisis hits Iraq
- The world is on the edge of “water bankruptcy” recently conceded the
World Economic Forum.
Suddenly it is so clear: the world is running out of clean water. This information contradicts what we all learned in school, which was that there is an infinite hydrologic cycle and we cannot run out of water, no matter how much we use or waste. But what our teachers did not know and could not teach us was that in a few short decades, humans would create a freshwater demand that far outstrips the earth’s supply.
How is this possible?
- We are polluting massive amounts of surface and even ground water, rendering it inaccessible to us.
- As a result we are over extracting our rivers to death, mostly for flood irrigation and to grow crops in deserts, creating more desert.
- We move water from where it supports a healthy hydrologic cycle and ship it away from watersheds embedded in commodity exports.
- We mine groundwater far faster than nature can replace it and ship it to mega-cities, which dump it into the ocean instead of returning it to the watershed.
- We pave over water-retentive landscape, negatively affecting the hydrologic cycle and reducing rainfall on land.
By these actions, humans are emptying aquifers and watersheds, perhaps permanently. This means that whole areas of the world may be drying out, not experiencing what many incorrectly describe as “cyclical drought.”
There has been great destruction of existing water systems, Rivers are being drained at an unsustainable rate; aquifers are way over-pumped – groundwater extraction skyrocketed a whopping 90 per cent in the 1990s – as well as being contaminated from the 80,000 dumpsites under the major cities; and many surface management areas now exceed sustainable limits. Less than 8 per cent of Australia’s old growth forests remain and 90 per cent of the Murray-Darling wetlands have been lost.
The Murray Darling is vastly over-extracted, much of it for corporate-based agribusiness that plunders the rivers to send huge volumes of water around the world in the form of “virtual water exports.” I note however that UNESCO’s
Hydrology Institute recently reported that the amount of water shipped out of the country in commodities was cut in half in the last two years – most likely due to the devastating collapse of the rice industry here. This is a perfect example of default thinking – waiting until the crisis hits instead of heeding the warnings from scientists and acting to avert it.
Further, Australia has partially weathered the global economic downturn by dependence on resource exploitation, all of which places huge burdens on already stressed water supplies. In New South Wales alone, at least sixteen river systems have been permanently damaged from careless mining practices.
Rivers SOS says: “The devastation caused by long-wall and open cut mining operations is as horrifying as it is widespread. The destruction of aquifers and heavy metal pollution of ground and surface water is nationwide and a disgrace.”
But governments continue to allow this exploitation of resources; over $64 billion of new mining operations in Australia have recently been announced. Similarly, unregulated, rampant, excessive urban development is not only allowed but also encouraged by many governments.
Secondly, governments at all levels have bought into the notion that water is a commodity, best allocated by the market, and now increasingly in the hands of largely unregulated private water brokers. This development dates back to the 1994 decision to establish an open water market in Australia, basically gifting massive amounts of water to irrigators who did not pay for this public investment in the first place, and giving them pre-emptive rights to this once public water.
Let’s not mince words: this is the privatization of the Murray Darling River where private owners and brokers, who oversee annual transactions of $1.68 billion, have more say over these depleted water supplies than governments.
The whole plan lacks focus toward an end goal with no distinction between water sold to supply overseas markets and water sold for domestic purposes and holds no guarantee of water for where it is most needed – in the lakes, rivers and aquifers desperate for survival. In fact the first national report on water markets (2007-2008) clearly states that water purchased for the environment made up only 8 per cent of the total water traded last year. While trading is still supposed to be limited to rural communities, it is only a matter of time before it is going to be opened up both to cities and to private foreign investors anxious to find new sources of water in countries that still permit the foreign sale of this precious commodity.
Water trading is not the only form of water privatization in Australia. A thriving
bottled water industry is extracting pristine water – about 600 million litres a year – from water stressed aquifers and paying pittance for the water. Big foreign private water utilities fund staff and research at the so-called “Centres of Excellence in Water Management” at Australian universities. Foreign-based water interests now supply water services to one capital city and in several county centres. As well, many state government-owned water utilities have now been corporatized and are seen as cash cows, sources of funding rather than a vehicle for public service.
If Australians want to see where this trend will lead you, look no further than
Chile, where all water is a private commodity and local farmers have been put off the land by big agribusiness and mining interests and where, in one huge region in the South, a single electricity company from Spain has bought up 80 percent of the water rights. Towns caught in the struggle have been left bone dry.
Dams, desalination and diversion
Like many countries, Australia has built too many large dams creating high evaporation losses and high levels of mercury and blue-green algae contamination in the water captured behind the dams. The advantage of storing water in aquifers is that both these problems are offset. Big dams are being de-commissioned for environmental reasons all over the world and Australians must demand an end to blind faith in them here.
Desalination plants generate a poisonous by-product, a lethal combination of concentrated salt brine, the chemicals needed for the reverse osmosis process, and the aquatic life sucked into the process. Dr. Ian Dyson, a marine sedimentologist, says that the discharge from Adelaide’s plant will create huge hyper saline sea lakes, aquatic dead zones that will have catastrophic impacts on the fisheries. Building big desalination plants, weirs and pipelines such as the Victoria government’s North-South pipeline, (being done without an environmental assessment) also gives control over Australia’s water to foreign water corporations. It is ironic that the two big French companies bidding on the Wonthaggi plant – Suez and Veolia – are about to lose their Paris water licenses when they come up for renewal in a few months.
First, Australia must declare its water to be a public trust. It is time for the national government to re-instate the public ownership of water.
As well, privately owned municipal water service providers should be replaced by not-for-profit public systems delivering clean safe water as a public service.
This is not to say that there is no role for the private sector in helping to create a water secure future. There is a very important role for the private sector in finding ways to reduce its own water footprint and for helping to create appropriate technology for restoring sick bodies of water. But corporations should not determine the allocation of water; that is the role of government.
Second is the crucial need to revitalize wounded water systems and return and protect enough water in rivers, aquifers and watersheds for their survival and the survival of other life in this country.
The need to establish comprehensive, systemic freshwater protected areas is
urgent and must be accompanied by effective land and water management that places first priority on the environmental health of these systems. Rivers have rights and needs to natural flows. All water catchments must be enlarged and the destruction of high-conservation value forests and the logging of native forests to make way for plantations must stop. Soil, vegetation, riparian zones, wetlands and estuaries must be restored and protected. The mining industry must be forced to comply with strict environmental standards and a one-kilometre safety zone must be established around all rivers and lakes where mining activity is taking place. The precautionary principle of ecosystem protection must take precedence over commercial demands on these waters. Only by restoring the integrity of watersheds and rivers will the drying of Australia be reversed.
Third, it is crucial to abandon the “hard path” of large-scale technology such as the pipelines, big dams and big desalination plants, for the ‘soft path” of conservation. The hard path is centralized and capital and energy intensive, and very expensive because of the involvement of large corporate players. The conservation alternative favours rainwater harvesting; recycling; strict codes for new buildings and funding for retrofitting old ones; energy reduction and the development of alternative energy sources; investment in municipal infrastructure to cut down on loss of water through leaks; and the collection of grey water and storm water which is captured and re-used, not dumped into the ocean.
The Salisbury storm water harvesting project uses wetlands to clean the water, which is then injected into the aquifer for storage. The water is then pumped for use by industry, gardens, parks and some household uses such as flushing toilets. Colin Pitman, director of city projects for Salisbury, reports that if Adelaide recycled 60 per cent of its storm water, more than 100 gigalitres of water could be produced for $300 million, compared to the desalination plant, which will produce 50 gigalitres a year at the cost of $1.2 billion!
Similarly a recently leaked document that was commissioned by the state government but ignored reports that both the controversial $750 million North South pipeline and the desalination plant are unnecessary and their water sources much more cheaply realized through conservation methods.
Finally, it must be commonly understood that water is not first and foremost a commercial good, although of course it has an economic dimension, but rather, a human right. What is needed now is binding law, in every country and at the United Nations, to codify that states have the obligation to deliver sufficient, safe, accessible and affordable water to their citizens as a public service. Behind the call for a binding right to water covenant are questions of principle that must be decided soon as the world’s water sources become more depleted and fought over.
Thomas Friedman, in a recent New York Times column: “Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2009 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it is telling us that the whole growth model we created over the past 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that this is the year when we hit the wall – when Mother Nature and the market both said ‘No more.’
We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in
China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change… We can’t do this anymore. Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we are living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets.”
