Stephen
Leahy is a Co-Winner Of The United Nations Global Prize For
Climate Change And Environment Reporting. He work has been ublished
in National Geographic, The Guardian, Vice, Al Jazeera, New
Scientist, Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS).. His critically-acclaimed
book, Your Water Footprint: The Shocking Facts About How
Much Water We Use To Make Everyday Products, received a
national award as the Best General Audience Science Book in
2014. For more of Stephen, please visit his website.and
Your Water Footprint.
How
much water does it take to turn on a light? It took 10,000 litres
to make your jeans. Another three big bathtubs of water was
needed for your two-eggs-toast-coffee breakfast this morning.
We
are surrounded by an unseen world of water: furniture, houses,
cars, roads, buildings – practically everything we use
and make needs water.“There is no way to generate energy
without water,” said Zafar Adeel, co-chair of the UN-Water
Task Force on Water Security and director of the Institute for
Water, Environment and Health in Canada.
Even
solar panels need regular washing to perform well. Wind energy
might be an exception, Adeel told IPS from a water conference
in Beijing being held during World Water Week.
There
is growing recognition that peak oil is nowhere near as important
as peak water because there is no substitute for water. The
growing shortage of water — 1.2 to 1.7 billion people
face scarcity — has alarmed many. Water has been identified
as an “urgent security issue”, by a group that last
year included both former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
and the InterAction Council, an association of 37 former heads
of state and government.
It’s
important that “water security” be recognised by
the U.N. Security Council as either as a trigger, a potential
target, or a contributing factor to insecurity and potential
conflict in many parts of the world, said Adeel.
Defining
exactly what the term “water security” means has
been challenging, but UN-Water, the United Nations’ inter-agency
coordination mechanism for all water-related issues, now has
a working definition.
They
have defined water security as: “The capacity of a population
to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of and
acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being,
and socio-economic development, for ensuring protection against
water-borne pollution and water-related disasters, and for preserving
ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability.”
The
definition was released Friday on World Water Day along with
an analytical brief “Water Security and the Global Water
Agenda."
“Water
fits within this broader definition of security — embracing
political, health, economic, personal, food, energy, environmental
and other concerns — and acts as a central link between
them,” says Michel Jarraud, Chair of UN-Water and secretary-general
of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
It
is important to note that conflicts over water are rare. “Historically
there hasn’t been a war between nations over water,”
said Harriet Bigas, a co-author of the brief and colleague of
Adeel at the Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Water
issues do create friction between nations and have led to local
internal conflicts, she said in an interview.
Driven
largely by water and food shortages linked to drought in the
Horn of Africa, almost 185,000 Somalis fled to neighbouring
countries in 2011. In Sudan, violence broke out in March 2012
in the Jamam refugee camp where large numbers of people faced
serious water scarcity. And in South Sudan, entire communities
were forced to leave due to scarce water resources as a result
of conflict in 2012.
Water
insecurity can lead to cascading political, social, economic
and environmental consequences, she said.However, the norm is
for nations and regional partners to work out water-sharing
agreements, offering important opportunities for dialogue amongst
traditional enemies.
“Water
is a greater pathway to peace than conflict,” writes noted
international water expert Aaron Wolf of Oregon State University.Even
when nations are at war, they negotiate water-sharing agreements,
Wolf says. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos continued the successful
Mekong Committee to manage the Mekong River even during the
Vietnam war.
In
2010 Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina signed an agreement
to share the management of the Guaraní Aquifer, which
extends over more than one million sq km. A population of 15
million today relies on the aquifer because surface water, though
abundant, is often polluted, the UN-Water brief noted.
There’s
also rising international support for adopting “universal
water security” as one of the Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs) — a set of mid-term global objectives to
succeed the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, agreed
by world leaders in 2000 for achievement by 2015.
“Water
encompasses all aspects of development. We’re hopeful
water security will be one of the main SDGs,” said Adeel.Water,
food and energy are sides of the same triangle – shrink
one side and it affects the other two, he said.
An
SDG for water security should include targets and indicators
that reflect this. It needs to specific to various countries’
needs and indicate what resources will be needed to achieve
water security. “It’s important to explicit state
how each country can get there.”The draft SDGs will be
presented at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly this September.
The
biggest challenge in achieving universal water security is not
money or technology but human institutions, said Bigas. Simply
getting government departments in the same country to coordinate
on water issues is “an enormous challenge.”
This article reprinted
courtesy of the author and Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS)
http://www.ipsnews.net/
