The acute droughts in Kenya, Argentina and the U.S. state of California are among the latest phenomena to illustrate that the global environment has been dangerously degraded. And participants in the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, heard that the planet could be destined towards "water bankruptcy".
It might surprise many to learn, then, that water issues are not directly included in the Kyoto protocol, the main international agreement on tackling climate change. Ensuring that this omission is not replicated in a follow-up accord scheduled to be finalised at talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, near the end of 2009, was one of the main topics addressed at a conference in Brussels Feb. 12 and 13. According to Maude Barlow, an adviser on water to the United Nations general assembly, the underlying assumptions made by many decision-makers have been misguided. Whereas they have tended to view water shortage as a consequence of climate change, the unsustainable exploitation of water is in fact "one of the major causes of climate change."
Pollution, the overstretching of rivers, and the mining of groundwater supplies are all contributing to this ecological and social calamity. So, too, is the way of life to which people in the wealthier parts of the world have become accustomed. Millions of roses sold in Europe to celebrate Valentine's Day this year have originated in Africa's Rift Valley. The habitat of the hippopotamus, an endangered species, its water supplies have been heavily drained by agri- business companies involved in the flower trade. While private entrepreneurs have profited handsomely from this situation, Africa contains some of the worst incidences of water-related diseases on earth. More children die from such diseases than the next three causes of death combined.
Data by the World Health Organisation suggests that 80 percent of infectious diseases in the world could be caused by dirty water. Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet president, said that the conventional model of economic development being followed in much of the world is in crisis. "The unsustainability of this model is reflected by the water problem," he added. "A recent report by the UN Development Programme said that at least 700 million people - until recently it was 1 billion - face a shortage of water. At the same time, demand for water is growing all the time."
During 2008 the UN's Human Rights Council decided to carry out a three- year investigation into how access to water relates to basic rights. About 1 billion people worldwide do not have access to an adequate supply of drinking water, and 2.5 billion are not guaranteed the amount of water they need for sanitation. Despite the underlying issues of justice, water has been increasingly viewed by policymakers as an economic good, rather than as a universal right over the past few decades. The bottled water industry, for example, registered global sales of 200 billion litres in plastic containers last year. Almost 90 percent of these bottles were dumped, rather than recycled.
"We need to re-commit to public water," said Barlow. "We must make it uncool to go around with a bottle of commercial water on our hips."
Next month, the key players in the private water industry will gather in Istanbul. Danielle Mitterrand, widow of the late French president François Mitterrand and a human rights campaigner in her own right, said that the 100 euro (129 dollars) per day admission fee for the event illustrated its elitist nature. "Managing water is not an industrial challenge," she said. "It is a democratic challenge." Luigi Infanti, a Catholic bishop in Chile, noted that a constitution introduced in his country in 1980 by the military dictator Augusto Pinochet promoted the privatisation of water. "Eighty percent of water was handed over to private hands," he said. "It was handed over for free and forever. In Chile, we have been fighting for years for human rights. We should fight with the same intensity for human rights relating to the environment." The European Union has been eager to promote privatisation in poor countries by negotiating free trade agreements with them. One such accord signed between the EU and the Caribbean region earlier this year, for example, is designed to give western firms the possibility of having a greater role in the provision of basic services. Oxfam is among the anti-poverty organisations to have expressed concern about how water could fall into private hands as a result. But Karl Falkenberg, director-general for environment in the European Commission and a former top-level EU trade negotiator, said: "We all agree that access to high quality water at a price affordable to all is important." A policy paper that his institution hopes to publish in late March will "begin to focus on the concrete actions necessary" to address global water issues, he added. Tony Allan, a scientist working in King's College in London, said that the world has enough water to meet the needs of its current population of 6 billion and the 9 billion to which it has been projected to rise by the middle of this century.
The problem, however, is that access to safe water is frequently tied to income. "Only poor people are short of water," he said. "Rich people can always access water for domestic uses, for their jobs and for their food.
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