This
Parched Earth: Act or We Perish
By Juliette Jowit
The
Observer
15 February, 2004
Water
is life. Nothing can exist without it - not humans, not animals, not
plants, not food, not even dreams. As Marq de Villiers, author of Water
Wars, put it: 'Millions have lived without love. No one has lived without
water.'
For most of us, this does not matter. We turn on our taps, flush our
lavatories and water our plants with barely a thought. Yet our seas,
rivers and even rainfall are under siege from pollution, waste and man-made
destruction.
Forget the bold
talk of attempts to colonise space before the Earth expires. The great
race of our time is already under way all round the world. Unseen and
unreported, teams of specialists are working on controversial projects
to replumb the planet and avert the deepening of a catastrophe that
is already claiming the life of one child every 15 seconds.
Water makes up 70
per cent of the surface of the globe (and the same proportion of the
human body). That sounds like a lot of water. Unfortunately, however,
only 3 per cent is fresh. The vast majority of that is locked in the
polar icecaps or too deep underground to reach. Less than 1 per cent
of all water is fresh and 'accessible'.
Human use of fresh
water has quadrupled since the 1940s and is still growing fast, driven
by population growth and more affluent 'water-hungry' lifestyles with
household appliances, golf courses to tender and a taste for year-round
fresh food.
According to the
United Nations, the total amount of fresh water available for humans
and eco-systems is 200,000 kilometres cubed, or 200,000,000 billion
litres. Others say the amount of accessible, renewable water for mankind
is just 15,000,000bn litres. The strain on many ground water reserves
and rivers has caused pollution to what little is left. Experts believe
the world is already using 30 to 40 per cent of this 'blue gold'.
This presents policy-makers
with two of their biggest global problems. One-fifth of humanity - 1.1
billion people - has no access to safe drinking water. This, together
with lack of sanitation for 2.4 billion people, causes a child to die
every 15 seconds and five million deaths a year.
But the environmental
cost of providing more water has been devastating. Six out of 10 of
the world's biggest rivers have been seriously or moderately fragmented
by dams, diversions and canals.
Half of the planet's
wetlands were lost during the twentieth century, in part due to these
pressures, while ground water supplies are becoming polluted and running
out.
Look anywhere in
the world and the crisis is laid bare. Britain is the most 'water-stressed'
country in Europe and an official drought was declared this winter.
In other countries, the situation is more drastic.
Five times in the
last decade the Yellow River in northern China has failed to reach the
sea and some underground stores in rocks have lost 90 per cent of their
reserves.
Widespread drought
in southern India two years ago caused huge political pressure for national
action, the Aral Sea in the former Soviet Union has dried up and Lake
Chad has dropped 90 per cent since the mid-1960s.
In America, the
Government wants to buy the contents of Canada's Arctic rivers for Los
Angeles and other desperate cities.
The human impact
is shocking: billions of people - normally women and children - are
walking an average of six miles a day to fetch water. The water they
collect is often carrying disease.
'It doesn't have
the impact of starvation - which is visible and terminal - but this
is one of the silent emergencies at the roots of everything,' says Ravi
Narayanan, WaterAid's director.
And still it is
getting worse: in fewer than 25 years, says the UN Environment Programme,
two-thirds of the world's population will live in 'water-stressed' countries
where there is not enough water per person to be sure in future of secure
supplies and healthy rivers and lakes.
The estuary of the
River Ebro juts out from the south of Spain into the Mediterranean like
a huge roughly hewn arrowhead. This is a landscape from another time:
home to more than 350 bird species, supposedly protected by a fistful
of international treaties, and described by the Royal Society for the
Protection of Birds as 'one of the important places for bio-diversity
in Europe'. The delta is also a living museum of traditions: people
live in thatched homes, tourists stop to photograph old women on bikes,
workers go home for lunch, and families tend rice paddies at the weekend
or fish for sardines, anchovies and shellfish.
Rice is not natural
to the Ebro delta, but it was first planted by monks in the seventeenth
century and is very much the way of life, says farmer Jordi Prats. Rice
has even shaped the language. 'Even the younger generation who have
started to work in other places, the colloquial expressions they use
are still related to the land,' says Prats. 'If it's a bad day, they
say "it's a bad day for the rice" or "the storms are
going to play havoc with the rice".'
This, though, is
a way of life under threat from a plan by the Spanish government to
build enormous pipelines to take water from the Ebro north to Barcelona
and south to the semi-arid regions of Valencia, Murcia and Almería,
up to 500 miles away. It is a mind-boggling scheme, but only one of
a great many ever more ambitious projects by politicians and engineers.
For generations, they believed they could, with ingenuity and money,
re-engineer the hydrological cycle to their needs.
For most of the
twentieth century this was the prevailing view, and dams and diversions
were built all over the developed world, like a sprawling international
plumbing system. From the 1970s the scale of the environmental damage
and human displacement in flooded valleys forced decision-makers to
question whether there were more 'sustainable' ways of tackling the
problem.
But still another
generation of schemes is now under construction - and they are bigger
than ever before.
The Three Gorges
Dam in China is perhaps the most famous mega-dam in the world at the
moment, but it is not the biggest. The Chinese government has started
to build a 750-mile channel to take water from the Yangtze river in
the south to fill up the Yellow river - which, when complete, will transfer
50 cubic kilometres a year, or three times the total water used by England
and Wales.
In India a plan
to bring water from the rivers of the Himalayas to the arid south will
move a similar volume of water but cost several times as much. In Australia
there have been calls to divert the northern rivers across the outback
to the drier south. In Africa, the Congo, the world's second largest
river, is threatened by two diversion projects: five countries in Central
Africa have agreed to dam a main tributary and feed it north to the
drying Lake Chad; in Namibia politicians want to divert the great river
south to their land. And Libya is building a multi-billion-dollar pump
to mine water stored under the Sahara for up to 70,000 years.
Next to these the
River Ebro diversion looks rather modest, but to move a river up to
500 miles is ambitious by any measure. The Ebro project is also a microcosm
of the dilemmas, promises and threats which have made such big engineering
projects so controversial.
The plan to divert
the Ebro is just one of the most controversial proposals in the National
Hydrological Plan by the Spanish government. In total, it is due to
cost £16bn and covers 836 separate projects, including more than
100 dams, several water transfers, channelling, reforestation and improvements
to water supply and waste treat ment. The European Commission has been
asked to contribute 30 per cent of the cost. The impacts of the plan
will be felt across Spain. Many communities will benefit, but there
will be many losers too, including people in the Pyrenees threatened
with eviction by new dams and a stretch of the St James's Way pilgrimage
route, which is supposed to be protected by Unesco as a world heritage
site.
The Ebro, though,
has a special place in the hearts of many Spanish: the name - Ebre in
Spanish - gave its name to the whole Iberian peninsula, and it is one
of Europe's greatest rivers. It has become, therefore, a rallying point
for opposition to the plan from all over Spain, and indeed Europe.
There is another
side to this story: the plan was conceived to help areas such as Almería,
in Andalusia, which with its 200mm of rain a year has 'a little more
than the Sahara, but not much', says Antonio Pulido Bosch at Almería
University.
Twenty-five years
ago Almería was one of the poorest regions of Spain and generations
of children were forced to leave the region, often the country, to seek
work. Today Almería has a booming tourist industry and acres
of plastic greenhouses growing fruit and vegetables the year round.
But the summer glut
of tourists and the huge irrigation of the 'growing' industry have caused
underground aquifers to drop and salt water to leach in. A water recycling
plant opened five years ago, but there simply isn't enough 'dirty' water
going into the system to supply their needs. A desalination plant has
been built but to supply the whole region with desalinated water would
need more electricity than the entire national grid, says the Environment
Ministry in Madrid. So, say community leaders, the water from the Ebro
is essential to their future.
It is easy to argue
that such industries seem unsustainable in the closest thing Europe
has to a desert. It is much harder to tell a community scarred by the
memory of hardship that it should give up its new-found success.
'Water is to survive,
to carry on,' says Andrés Soler Márquez, who is marketing
director of vegetable growers Vega Cañada in Almería.
'What we're asking for is not to get richer and richer, but to maintain
what's been achieved. If we don't have water we can't produce, and if
we can't produce we can't get any money and we have to emigrate again.'
But sending water
south to feed golf courses and intensive agriculture is only encouraging
unsustainable development, claim the objectors, who want more done to
cut down demand by limiting future development and cracking down on
illegal greenhouses. The Almeríans say they treat water like
'gold', but Pulido Bosch estimates that even here 20 per cent is 'wasted'.
Around the world, the UN estimates up to two-thirds of all water used
for irrigation and up to 40 per cent of urban supply is lost through
evaporation or leakage.
In Spain, however,
the government says the diversion of the Ebro is a logical move to share
water from the 'wet' north to the 'dry' south. This is how the growers
in Almería understand the problem: 'They [the rivers] throw millions
and millions of litres of water into the Mediterranean each year,' says
Emilio Martínez Parra, another director at Vega Cañada.
Rivers are constantly
evolving, but campaigners are worried about the scale and speed of change
if so much water and - just as crucially - sediments stop flowing down
the lower reaches of the river. As evidence, they cite a 'mini-transfer'
from the Ebro to the regional centre of Tarragona in the 1980s.
Since then, the
drop in fresh water floods has caused salts to build up in the land,
which is getting harder to cultivate and allowed algal blooms to flourish,
killing off fish and shellfish. Meanwhile, scientists supporting the
objectors calculate that sediments - crucial to replace erosion of the
delta by the sea - have dropped 99 per cent. As a result, the delta
is receding by up to 100m a year and subsiding by 3mm a year, says Susanna
Abella, a protester who also works for a local water treatment company.
'There was a huge
amount of algae all along the river, a plague of zebra mussels played
havoc with the water pumps and pipes, fish catches dropped dramatically,
[and] shellfish farms lost millions. If that was to happen every year
it would be the end of a way of life.'
Faced with a growing
and increasingly noisy backlash against engineering projects on the
one hand, and continuing water shortages on the other, international
agencies, such as the World Council on Dams, are counselling against
many big engineering projects, forcing governments and local communities
increasingly to turn to other solutions.
These fall into
two categories: 'making' water and saving water. The first set are,
basically, the cousins of the great dams and diversions: mostly big
capital investments in water desalination plants, water recycling works,
mining water from deep underground reservoirs, and even - somewhat comically
- the idea of towing icebergs from the polar regions to desperate places
like Australia and California.
Some have big environmental
problems of their own to worry about. Desalination and mining need masses
of energy, which would mostly come from carbon-emitting sources. Desalination
also produces a briney discharge that is harmful to sealife. And mining
more water than can be recharged only exacerbates pollution.
Experts also believe
big engineering projects have encouraged people to assume water will
always be provided and caused many communities to forget traditional
ways of farming and conserving a scarce resource.
Governments are
being encouraged to invest in more efficient irrigation and mend or
replace creaky distribution systems. They are also being pressed to
reform agricultural subsidies, which encourage farmers in Spain to increase
yields by watering olive trees which have spent millennia adapting to
thrive in dry climates.
Increasingly, the
policy-makers are studying what they can learn from ancient civilisations
and lost traditions. In Australia the desperate government has called
in Aboriginal elders to explain how they coped for centuries with a
water supply which the 'settlers' have all but used up in 200 years,
In India and other
countries villages have started to harvest their own water using the
roofs of their houses, yards and giant nets to 'catch' the vapour available
in the air.
'It's only in the
last 50 years we have abused our water resources in this way,' says
Professor Mike Edmunds at Oxford University's Centre for Water Research.
'Now people are coming to realise the folly of their ways and are saying,
let's turn back and begin harvesting schemes and conservation schemes.'
For all these good
intentions, though, the scale of the global problem (and perhaps the
politics of persuading people to use less water) means more big projects
will have to be built in future. They crucial thing is to make them
more responsible, says David Smith of the UN Environment Programme.
'Civil engineering
projects to transfer water to users are absolutely vital,' he says.
'That is not the issue; the issue is how to ensure the most appropriate
civil engineering projects in economic, environmental and social terms
are chosen. For example, if it is cheaper to fix leaks in pipes or promote
rain water harvesting, why isn't that happening?'
Adrian McDonald,
of Leeds University, an adviser to the World Water Forum in 2000, said:
'When it gets down to it, people need water first, then they need food;
and people want a glass of water before they want a more diverse habitat.'