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| Sunday, 26 June 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Water:
An urgent global issue
YUTAKA TAKAHASI, Japan's leading expert on river engineering and representative on the International Hydrological Program (IHP) of UNESCO from 1988 to 1996, and member of the Board of Directors of the World Water Council from 1996 to 2003 states: by Hisashi Kondo It has been said that no one has died directly from global warming, but a great many lives have been lost because of water. Water has become an urgent global issue. Water shortages and water pollution cause four million deaths per year around the world - this means one person dies every eight seconds. The majority of these victims are infants under five years old from Africa and the developing countries of Asia. Of the world's population of six billion, about 1.2 billion do not have access to safe, clean water, and are forced to rely on unsanitary water for their daily needs. Meanwhile, half of the world's population do not have indoor toilets, and have to make use of rivers, lakes or bushes. In developing countries sharply, there is a cycle of high birth and death rates. This is because people are unable to secure safe water supplies, and human waste is not properly disposed of. Water polluted with human waste can contain harmful micro-organisms; other sources of pollution include chemical fertilizers, pesticides, heavy metals, oil, and high salt content caused by excessive water use for irrigation. The situation is compounded by mechanised agriculture, which aims at mass production through reliance on chemical fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals. This raises grain production, but it pollutes the soil and underground water resources, thus reducing the availability of underground water which can be safely drunk. As a further problem, mechanized agriculture creates a pattern whereby farmers who cannot compete move from agricultural villages to towns and cities, where they often live in slums - the unsanitary environment thus continues to grow. The global water crisis is not a chance occurrence - it is happening because we have not treated the issue of water seriously enough, and there are structural causes behind this. What are the structural causes such as destruction to natural environment in the name of development. Take China as an example. It is seeing remarkable economic growth at the moment, but if we look closely we can see the effect this has had on the water cycle. The flow of the huge Yellow River has been interrupted, so that at times it dries up and water does not reach the river mouth. This phenomenon occurred for the first time along the downstream section of the river in 1972, and since 1991 it has occurred increasingly often. The flow of the river is broken by the amount of water taken for agriculture, industry and everyday use as the river valley is developed. The problem has been compounded by deforestation and destruction of the grasslands on the Loess Plateau, which increased soil erosion, and climate change, which brought about a decrease in rainfall. While the Yellow River has dried up frequently, the valley of the Yangtze River has experienced regular flooding. From 1950 to the 1970s, the valley was flooded on average, once every five years; since the 1990s it has flooded twice every three years, and the extent of the flooding has increased. The reason is believed to be increased soil erosion following the destruction of forests in the valleys, and a reduction in the natural control of the river's flow stemming from the reclamation of lakes and marshes. Another major reason has been a localised increase in rainfall, a result of climate change. Looking at lake and marshland environments, the most tragic example of destruction is the Aral Sea, which straddles the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The Soviet Union proudly began the Aral Sea project, an agricultural development on a huge scale, in 1960. It was a grand concept to change the semi-desert region into agricultural land by digging irrigation canals that would divert water from both of the rivers flowing into the Aral Sea. The irrigated area reached 200,000 square kilometres, and by the 1980s it had become Russia's biggest producer of raw cotton, rice and vegetables. However, taking large amounts of water from both rivers drastically reduced the flow into the Aral Sea; originally 6,600 square kilometers in size, it shrank to a mere 35 percent of this in just 40 years. Its ecosystem was completely destroyed. Rapid urbanisation is also cited as a major cause of disruption to the water cycle. This can be seen in the frequent occurrence of urban flood disasters around the world. Floods are thought to cause more damage and loss of life than any other natural disaster. Of the world's 6 billion people, 3.4 billion are living in monsoon Asia - the majority of these are concentrated on alluvial floodplains in mid and downstream regions of large rivers, or their deltas. These areas are seeing rapid urbanisation, and the possible damage from widespread flooding is a matter of great concern. So what is the most effective way of preventing floods? We need to adopt various different measures, but I think the most important thing is to rethink our relationship with water. We really need to be looking for a radical cure rather than a piecemeal approach. It is well worth looking back over the history of Japan, a country on the very edge of monsoon Asia which has long fought floods. Japan's measures to combat flooding cannot be said to have been completely successful as there was widespread flood damage soon after World War II, but if we look over the longer-term history of 100 years of flood prevention we can describe Japan as a qualified success in this field. Japan started works projects aimed at modernizing rivers in 1896, when the original River Act was passed. Under this law, large flood prevention projects were started to reduce flood damage from the main rivers across the country. To control flooding, the governments of the time began large flood prevention projects, which consisted of large embankments along both sides of rivers to prevent them from overflowing. What were the usual methods of flood control at that time? Monsoon Asia has a heavy annual rainfall, and it was thought that it would be technically impossible to channel all the water from an advancing flood completely into the river courses. Thus, rather than preventing floods people learned to live with them and adopted measures to minimise the damage caused by them. In Japan too, similar measures were taken, but the problem remained that the frequency of floods prevented full-scale development on the alluvial plains. In monsoon Asia, mid and downstream areas of rivers suffer far greater rainfall and flooding than anything usually experienced in the West, and the Japanese government took the drastic course of trying to control rivers in the Western way with big engineering projects. This was largely successful. Learning the flood prevention techniques of the West in a short period of time and adapting them to Japanese conditions was seen as a miracle of engineering, and it largely came from the passion of the elite to use the technology of the time to develop Japan. When did the river administration in Japan really start to take the environment into consideration? This change of direction took on real momentum in the 1990s, and the 1997 amendment to the Rivers Act was particularly important. Article 1 of the act stated clearly that the purpose of river projects was the maintenance and preservation of the river environment. Up until then, the purpose of river projects had been flood prevention and the development of water resources, but under the amended River Act all work now has to be planned in relation to the natural environment. The amendment also included the addition that experts and local people have to be included in the planning process. The amended River Act stated that all river projects must give due consideration to river improvement, water utilization and the river environment, and that full importance be given to allowing access to the natural environment of the river and to dialogue with local residents. Japan's river administration took a long, meandering course before arriving at this destination. How do you see our relationship with water in the future? Recently, there has been a large circulation around the world of what is known as "virtual water." This is the huge amount of water used in the production of imported food items - for example, the water used to grow crops or raise animals. The advance of globalisation means that there has been a rapid increase in the movement of this virtual water. This is a subject that needs to be seriously tackled if we are to protect global water circulation. We need to seriously look at what we can do to restore the water cycle, and the global water crisis demands that we reform our awareness of the place of water in our lives. Courtesy: Asia Pacific Perspectives |
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