the United States, Australia, Israel, and
The UN Millennium Goals
Council that began in Marrakesh in 1997. A
Spain are among an ever widening group
include the aim of halving
further stimulus was provided by the World
of countries forging ahead with large the number of people without Summit on Sustainable Development in
desalination plants fuelled by a range of
access to safe water by 2015.
Johannesburg, 2002, which highlighted the
sources from oil and nuclear power to more need to improve sanitation and personal
environmentally-friendly solar power. From hygiene, as well as improving water
being the saviour of the drylands, it is now governance. Even so, progress is painfully
a ubiquitous solution for islands. It is even slow – in many cases too slow to keep
a strong option in the UK, including London. pace with changing social, physical and
Technologies are improving and costs have economic environments. We look forward
been falling, though it is still not necessarily to the deliberations of the 6th World Water
the cheapest option, and hardly an option at Forum in Istanbul in 2009, but with limited
all for landlocked states. expectations.
One problem is topographic. Whereas What is now very apparent is that it is
traditional engineering can use gravity to misleading to talk of a single global water
transport water supplies from the hills, most as a net exporter of food began to falter as crisis. There are multitudes of crises facing
desalinated water has to be pumped uphill food production struggled to keep pace with individual regions and countries, each with
from the sea incurring more energy costs. population growth. Undeterred by history their own sets of causes and their own best
The main environmental problem is ensuring and spurred on by the apparent success of solutions. Conservation, reduced waste and
safe return and dispersal of the salty waste Libya’s prestige project, Algeria now plans more effi cient energy use are indeed fairly
concentrate into the ecosystem. to emulate it. universal needs, but the water issue is not
By far the grandest solution of all is the same as global warming. It cannot be
Libya’s Great Man-made River, which is not International progress solved by a Kyoto-style agreement. Saving
a river at all but a 3,850km long system It is only in the last 10 years that serious water in water-rich countries will not help
of pipelines. By completion in 2010, it is international progress has been made, the water-poor developing countries in the
projected to deliver 6.5 million cubic metres much of it as a result of the series of World way that reducing carbon emissions may
a day to the Mediterranean coastal cities Water Forums run by the World Water – at least, not in any direct way. But we
»
live in a globalised world, and trade is its
The grandest solution is Libya’s Great Man- lifeblood.
made River, which is not a river at all, but a
Trade in fresh water has multiplied four-
fold in the last 20 years, ranging from bulk
3,850km long system of pipelines.
water transfers in supertankers to crates of
and farmland from aquifers deep beneath
The Middle East is one
the Sahara desert. It will increase Libya’s of the worst-affected
cultivated area by 50%, its main goal being
areas in the world.
food security. However, it is ultimately
unsustainable, since the resource has not
been topped up for around 10,000 years;
it is the drinkable equivalent of oil. It does
appear to be a vast resource, but estimates
range wildly between 20,000 and 120,000
billion cubic metres of water and nobody
knows just how long it may last. Worse,
it is likely to result in salinisation and the
eventual demise of the newly irrigated soils.
Yet, Egypt has a tale to tell. The Aswan
High Dam was built in the 1960s to provide
water to irrigate 405,000 hectares of new
agricultural land reclaimed from the desert.
Over the last 40 years, two-thirds of the
reclaimed land has fallen out of production
or become marginal. Three-quarters of the
gain in food production from the new irrigated
land has been lost through salinisation. By
the mid-1970s, Egypt’s historical position
106 PLANET EARTH www.yearofplanetearth.org
PE24.water resources.rkymw.indd 106 16/2/09 11:49:38 am
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