Blue Gold, European Water Partnership Blog

With the launch of Blue Gold, the European Water Partnership (EWP) is creating a communication platform for the EWP, its members, the European water community, stakeholders and those interested in water at large.

Blue Gold is in important tool in achieving EWP's mission to be an action-oriented forum for all stakeholders including local, national and European governmental agencies, knowledge institutes, business, non-governmental organizations, public and private financial institutions, end-users and civil society groups. It constitutes a platform for exchanging views, finding solutions for water challenges in wider Europe and stimulating cooperation and partnerships.

Read more...

Water, precious but cheap

By Rupert Wright

All commodities, with one major exception, are priced according to market demand. If there is a glut, the price falls. If something is scarce, it becomes desirable, whether it is a handbag or a new four-wheel drive.

Diamonds would not be fought over if they appeared like mushrooms every September. When there is a bumper wheat harvest, the price falls; when the crop fails, prices rise.

As many people in the UAE know from bitter experience, the housing market follows a similar model. Rents have doubled in Abu Dhabi in the last year and show few signs of abating as increasing numbers arrive looking for somewhere to live.
However, there is one commodity, the most precious of all, which does not follow this model of supply and demand at all: water.

Water has been classified as a human right by the UN. It is hard to think of anything that could have been more unhelpful. This is a good example of the dictum that no good deed goes unpunished.

According to the UN’s own figures, more than one billion people do not have access to clean water. Meanwhile, the price of a litre of water in a Third World slum is often more than it is in Mayfair or Chelsea – and you don’t have to buy it from a water seller but can draw it from a tap.
Most people in countries with a lot of water do not like to pay too much for it – and think that neither should people in other countries, partly because it is a human right.

But talk to the mother of an Indian girl who cannot go to school because she has to wait by the roadside every morning for a tanker of water – this is in the heart of Delhi, India’s capital – and you get a different story.

She would pay for water if it were available, but neither the local government nor private companies will risk installing the necessary infrastructure. Instead she has to pay a higher price than most westerners could bear.
Her child is substituting her education for a few gallons of water a day, and the result of this will be that her children will wait for a water tanker in 20 years’ time.

No city in India has 24-hour running water. If you are middle class this is fine, because your elaborate system of water storage tanks comes into play for the two hours a day that the pipes run.

But should a country with First World aspirations not be able to supply its citizens with water, particularly at a time when it is talking about manned flights to the moon?
The perception persists that nobody wants to pay for this precious commodity. Countries around the world take varied approaches to pricing and supplying their water and almost without exception, they are wrong.

In the UK, for example, water supply was privatised in the 1980s. Some 15 different companies were created, but the customer had no choice in where to buy his water.

This produced a privatised monopoly at a stroke. Private companies are generally more efficient than public companies. Give a private company a monopoly and it will make more money from its customers than its state counterpart.
Lack of water is not normally a problem that Britain has to cope with – although a few years ago there was a hosepipe ban in the south of England. In Australia, there has been a drought lasting almost eight years. The authorities have tried introducing various strategies to alleviate the drought, such as allowing interested parties to trade water rights, but none of this gets to the root of the problem, which is that demand outstrips supply. This is often the case in dry areas, such as parts of California, Las Vegas, and most of North Africa.
How to put a brake on demand? An American economist, David Zetland, caused a ripple in water circles recently by suggesting that water should be more expensive. This is heresy in the development world. What about the poor? bleats the World Bank among others.

But the poor suffer most under the status quo in most countries – much of the water subsidy goes to the middle classes.

South Africa is one of the few countries to address this issue. Its policy of Free Basic Water – 6,000 litres per month for every household – ensures that most people get enough to survive, as long as they are lucky enough to be connected to the mains, that is.
In the Middle East water has always been a big issue.

The origins of Shariah law come from the concept of shared water. One meaning of the Arabic word Shariah is the clear, well-trodden path to water. The Quran is quite clear on the importance of water. Nobody was allowed to have a monopoly on water, while the Arabic spirit of hospitality extended to sharing the little water that was available.

In a place where water is scarce, it is not surprising that there was a tradition of using it sparingly. Except that nowadays, with the introduction of desalination plants, countries in the Gulf are using more and more of it.
The great thing about water is that you cannot waste it: it is endlessly recycled via the hydrological cycle – some 37 times a year, according to Dr Felix Franks, a water industry expert. However, it does not always return where you want it.

The UAE has an innovative and elaborate system of meteorological monitoring – and when clouds are spotted, planes are scrambled to shower the clouds with seeds, in the hope of producing rain.
This probably produces the most expensive water in the world, with a giant carbon footprint. It might be cheaper to import bottles of Evian water.

Desalination plants are more efficient – but perhaps they are storing up environmental problems for the future.

It is no surprise that it is so easy to float in the waters around Abu Dhabi; it is among the saltiest I have encountered outside the Dead Sea. Part of this may be caused by the reintroduction of the salt from the desalination plants – much of which is unable to escape through the Straits of Hormuz and mix with the waters of the Arabian Sea.
It is thus rather shocking to learn that the UAE is the world’s largest consumer of water per capita. Plants grow where once there was desert. Cars are washed and swimming pools are built. But history suggests that the more water that is made available – the more a population consumes.

Roman aqueducts were not essential for city life – Rome prospered for hundreds of years without any – but once the first aqueduct was built, demand grew, and continued to grow. The taps were never turned off and the fountains played all day and night.
Likewise Manhattan. The city is in the middle of its most ambitious infrastructure project in its history: the construction of a third water tunnel, known as the Manhattan Spur, at a cost of US$670 million (Dh2.4 billion).

So why not increase the price of water, rather than always trying to find more? This has the very desirable effect of limiting use. Nobody in America stopped driving their Hummer until the price of oil went past $60 a barrel.
Once it got to nearly $147 a barrel, driving a four-wheel drive was considered positively anti-social. American cyclist Lance Armstrong has just been fingered as Austin, Texas’s number one water consumer.

His Spanish-style villa, with its lawns and swimming pool, used 330,000 gallons of water in July – at a cost of just $2,460. That is a lot of water bottles. How to stop Lance using so much?

My guess is that if you added a zero to his water bill, even the thirsty cyclist might cut back on consumption.

Rupert Wright is author of Take Me to the Source: In Search of Water, published by Harvill Secker

Bahrain opts for low-risk wastewater privatisation

Manama opts for low-risk wastewater privatisation

Bahrain is taking no chances with its wastewater privatisation. With water-loss levels unacceptably high and the quality of treated water so poor that the agricultural sector refuses to use it for irrigation, it is clear the state-run utilities should be replaced.

The entry of the private sector will bring much-needed investment, technology and experience to improve standards.

There will be no shortage of interest from international developers. Because the Muharraq sewage treatment plant is the first part of the privatisation plan, the government has opted for a low-risk approach by guaranteeing the supply of effluent and the offtake of treated water.

This relieves the developer of much of the risk and ensures a steady stream of income, but it is not necessarily the most efficient system for the state in the long run.

In time, Manama will hope to invite companies to take control of the wastewater collection and distribution networks, thereby passing on market risk to the private sector.

The hope will also be that as efficiencies and services improve, domestic and industrial users will be more willing to pay more for their wastewater treatment.

Water privatisation in the region is gaining traction, with Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi already bringing in the private sector. If they can make the schemes work, more of the region will surely follow and perhaps take more risks earlier on.

Water demand in Abu Dhabi to rise 43% in five years

Demand for water in Abu Dhabi will grow by 43 per cent in the next five years, while demand for electricity will almost double during this period, according to projections made by the Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority (ADWEA).
In the absence of adequate ground water or rivers, the emirate depends largely on desalination of sea water.
Desalinated water is used for drinking and for agricultural and industrial needs.
ADWEA has evolved a five-year strategy to produce 969 million gallons of water per day, virtually doubling the present capacity of a number of desalination plants scattered across the emirate.
Currently, the Umm Al Nar plant produces, per day, 165 million gallons, the Taweelah plant 231 million gallons, Al Marfa plant 39 million gallons, Al Shuweihat plant 101 million gallons and Al Fujairah plant 90 million gallons.
The Abu Dhabi Distribution Company (ADDC) is responsible for water and power supply in the emirate.
ADWEA and ADDC have forged a strong partnership to cope up with the growing demand in the light of the economic boom in the emirate.
ADDC is constantly upgrading its networks to keep pace with the expansion of townships in the emirate. During the past few years, the company has completed distribution networks in forty projects, which included new townships, development of islands, workers’ residential complexes and industrial sites.
ADWEA abide by the principles of sustainability in its strategy and expansion projects. Recently ADWEA participated in the celebrations of World Water Day
ADWEA has evolved a five-year strategy to produce 969 million gallons of water per day, virtually doubling the present capacity of a number of desalination plants scattered across the emirate.

Running dry

From The Economist

Everyone knows industry needs oil. Now people are worrying about water, too

“WATER is the oil of the 21st century,” declares Andrew Liveris, the chief executive of Dow, a chemical company. Like oil, water is a critical lubricant of the global economy. And as with oil, supplies of water—at least, the clean, easily accessible sort—are coming under enormous strain because of the growing global population and an emerging middle-class in Asia that hankers for the water-intensive life enjoyed by people in the West.

Oil prices have fallen from their recent peaks, but concerns about the availability of freshwater show no sign of abating. Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, estimates that global water consumption is doubling every 20 years, which it calls an “unsustainable” rate of growth. Water, unlike oil, has no substitute. Climate change is altering the patterns of freshwater availability in complex ways that can lead to more frequent and severe droughts.

Untrammelled industrialisation, particularly in poor countries, is contaminating rivers and aquifers. America’s generous subsidies for biofuel have increased the harvest of water-intensive crops that are now used for energy as well as food. And heavy subsidies for water in most parts of the world mean it is often grossly underpriced—and hence squandered.

All of this poses a problem, first and foremost, for human welfare. At the annual World Water Week conference in Stockholm this week, delegates focused on measures to extend access to clean water and sanitation to the world’s poor. But it also poses a problem for industry. “For businesses, water is not discretionary,” says Dominic Waughray of the World Economic Forum, a think-tank. “Without it, industry and the global economy falter.”

Water is an essential ingredient in many of the products that line supermarket shelves. JPMorgan, a bank, reckons that five big food and beverage giants—Nestlé, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch and Danone—consume almost 575 billion litres of water a year, enough to satisfy the daily water needs of every person on the planet.

Although agriculture uses most water (see chart), many other products and services also depend on it. It takes around 13 cubic metres of freshwater to produce a single 200mm semiconductor wafer, for example. Chipmaking is thought to account for 25% of water consumption in Silicon Valley. Energy production is also water-intensive: each year around 40% of the freshwater withdrawn from lakes and aquifers in America is used to cool power plants. And separating just one litre of oil from tar sands—a costly alternative fuel made viable by high oil prices—requires up to five litres of water.

Quality matters as much as quantity. According to the World Bank, around 90% of the rivers in China near urban areas are seriously polluted. The overall cost of water scarcity—from pollution and the depletion of groundwater—is estimated to be 147 billion yuan ($21.4 billion) a year, or almost 1% of China’s annual output. In 2007 poor water-quality cost China some $12 billion in lost industrial output alone.

Elsewhere, Taipei City in Taiwan no longer allows companies to tap its groundwater, because of shortages. Firms in drought-ridden Australia have lived under stringent water restrictions for years. Southern Company, an electricity utility based in Atlanta, temporarily shut down some of its power plants last summer because of a drought. Indeed, according to a survey by the Marsh Centre for Risk Insights, 40% of Fortune 1000 companies said the impact of a water shortage on their business would be “severe” or “catastrophic”—but only 17% said they were prepared for such a crisis.

Not all companies are sitting still. Since 1995 Dow has reduced the amount of water it uses per tonne of output by over a third. Nestlé cut its water consumption by 29% between 1997 and 2006, even as it almost doubled the volume of food it produced. And at Coca-Cola bottling plants from Bogotá to Beijing, schools of fish swim in water tanks filled with treated wastewater, testament to the firm’s commitment to clean all its wastewater by 2010 (it is 84% of the way there).

Cynics say such programmes are mere public relations. There is some truth to this. Companies that use freshwater in areas where it is scarce are understandably unpopular. Activists have attacked both Coca-Cola and Pepsi, for instance, for allegedly depleting groundwater in India to make bottled drinks. Coca-Cola took the matter to court and was exonerated by an independent commission, which blamed a regional drought for water shortages, but activists were not mollified. Coca-Cola has responded by redoubling its attention to water—for instance, by backing a scheme in Kaladera to teach villagers how to harvest rainwater and irrigate crops more efficiently. “Regulatory licences to water are not enough,” says Jeff Seabright of Coca-Cola. “We need a social licence—the OK from the community—to operate.”

Cutting water consumption can also make business sense. Using less water reduces spending on water acquisition and treatment, and on the clean-up of wastewater. Some firms have no choice. Elion Chemical in China is working with General Electric to recycle 90% of its wastewater to comply with Beijing’s strict new “zero-liquid discharge” rules, which bar companies from dumping wastewater into the environment. Of Nestlé’s 481 factories worldwide, 49 are in extremely water-stressed regions where water conservation and re-use is the only option.

Such farsightedness is, alas, only a drop in the bucket. In a drought, even water-efficient factories can run into trouble. Moreover, the water used within a factory’s walls is often only a tiny fraction of a firm’s true dependence on water. José Lopez, the chief operating officer of Nestlé, notes that it takes four litres of water to make one litre of product in Nestle’s factories, but 3,000 litres of water to grow the agricultural produce that goes into it. These 3,000 litres may be outside his control, but they are very much a part of his business. 

Dubai tests ‘breakthrough’desalination technology

By Matt Kwong, The National

Dubai has tested a “breakthrough” water-purification system that suggests it is possible to extract drinkable water from the Gulf without hazardous waste.

The advance could solve a seawater desalination dilemma shared worldwide: what to do with the harmful brine by-product that is ordinarily dumped back into the sea?

“This is the key to the entire desalination pollution problem everywhere,” said Martin Padisak, who brought the technology to the UAE. “The UAE is one of the most promising countries to use it.”

Mr Padisak, the chairman of the German-based environmental research firm IES Technology, has been negotiating with local private companies over the past year. He said he was within weeks of developing the waste-brine recycling systems in the capital as well as in Dubai.

“It’s ready to go,” he said. “We are finalising some deals in the private sector and hope we will be launching the project very soon in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The UAE will be the first to use this process.”

The Government-owned MED desalination plant in Ajman tested whether the “zero-discharge” design could recycle the hyper-concentrated brine left over after the desalination process.

“The brine samples came to us and we analysed them,” said Buthaina Ahmed, the head of the environment lab at Dubai Central Laboratory.

The Food and Environment section’s chemical analysis report, obtained by The National, certified the samples from Ajman were processed in late April.

In an email, the Middle East Desalination Research Centre also confirmed it was aware of IES Technology’s claims, calling the advancement “technically feasible”. However, K Venkat Reddy, the senior researcher, said in the email the “economic viability depends on the requirements of the client. If environmental regulations are very stringent, it is feasible.”

The Dubai company Alta Alouf Investment Development, which conducted the commercial and technical feasibility studies, found the technology “very reasonable”.

“It could be workable around the world,” said Ismael Bitar, the firm’s general manager. “There is a big American energy company that is very interested in making a chain of these units for its desalination plant.”

GCC nations and other arid regions facing scarce water supplies have increasingly turned to desalination, which turns seawater into drinkable water.

However, the energy and ecological costs have been criticised by environmental groups. The US Environmental Protection Agency considers the saline, which is flushed back into the sea, as “industrial waste” that is harmful to sensitive marine ecosystems.

However, Mr Padisak said IES had succeeded in recycling even the waste brine. By boosting the salt concentration further to the point of crystallisation, raw dry minerals such as gypsum, potassium, magnesium and table salt would materialise, he said.

“The benefit is nothing would go to waste. We took that waste brine and produced more drinking water from it as well as the valuable minerals,” he said. “Until now, there was no technology to stop this brine from polluting the seawater.”

Scientists were previously unable to raise the concentration of the brine during desalination due to the high calcium content in seawater. However, Mr Padisak said through an ion exchange process developed by IES, “we broke the calcium barrier, which makes the rest of the process a piece of cake”.

Abdelhedi Taofik, an engineer who conducted the feasibility study for Alta Alouf Investment Development, said scientists had long discussed the concept of 100 per cent waste-free desalination systems. “This is the first time to use a zero-discharge system in the industrial field,” he said.

A paper published in April from the University of Karlsruhe, a leading research university in Germany, cites the IES design as one potential example of a commercially viable zero-discharge system. “Because of the immense ecological advantages of such systems, the developments should be carefully watched and research efforts for an effective and cost-efficient design should be intensified,” it said.

Mr Padisak would not name any of the private investors in negotiations with IES, but the company’s Dubai partner, Smart Creative, said contractors for the Masdar company were interested.

The Middle East is the world’s largest desalination market, accounting for more than half of the total volume of desalinated water. Consumption of water in the UAE is 907 cubic metres a year per capita, making the Emirates one of the largest consumers of water in the world.

Dubai employs water saving devices to conserve

By Vesela Todorova, The National

DUBAI—Devices that could reduce domestic water use by up to 50 per cent are being installed in 58 buildings along Sheikh Zayed Road.

The project covers buildings on the stretch of motorway from the Dubai Trade Centre roundabout to the Defence Interchange.

Ahmed al Rafi, chief executive of the Dubai-based City Services, a private company that is installing the devices, said about Dh445,500 (US$121,288) worth of water could be saved a month, or 45,000 cubic metres – the equivalent of 18 Olympic-size swimming pools.

The project is scheduled for completion in October.

This is the first stage of a multimillion-dirham programme, which is sponsored by the real estate developer Emaar. Buildings along the length of Sheikh Zayed Road to Dubai Marina eventually will be included.

The devices, which include filters, reduce the pressure when people are showering, running taps or flushing toilets, cutting water consumption between 20 and 50 per cent.

Offices and apartments in another 58 to 60 buildings will have the new devices installed in phase two of the project, expected to start later this year.

Emaar would not reveal the cost of the project, but industry sources said the deal was worth several million dirhams and could reach tens of millions as the scheme progressed.

Water consumption in the UAE is among the highest in the world. Karim Idriss, 34, one the Sheikh Zayed Road residents affected by the change, said: “The pressure is a bit less now. There was quite a lot of pressure before.”

Mr Idriss, a Lebanese sales and marketing professional, lives in Sky Tower. “One thing that is nice is that the cold water lasts longer so I get to wash my face with cold water in the morning,” he said.

The type of devices fitted is determined only after a private consultant audits water use in a building.

In Mr Idriss’s apartment, the devices were put on taps and not showers.

The devices can be adjusted depending on the target that is set. The biggest savings, reaching up to 50 per cent, could be achieved in commercial buildings such as shopping malls, where people were more willing to compromise on convenience, Mr Rafi said.

In five-star luxury hotels, for instance, where the scope for compromise is less, the savings would be only 15 to 20 per cent, he said.

Besides sponsoring the project along Sheikh Zayed Road, Emaar is also investing in similar devices in its own projects and existing developments such as the Greens, Lake, Meadown, Emirates Hills and the Arabian Ranches.

City Services has already installed water-saving devices in 90 per cent of the completed area of the Burj Dubai development. It is expected the initiative will continue as more buildings in the development are completed.

If the project succeeds, there are benefits for individuals and the emirate as a whole. Residents will pay less for water consumption without having to invest in the water-saving equipment. The project is also expected to reduce the amount of sewage reaching Dubai’s treatment plant in Al Aweer. The facility, run by Dubai Municipality, is now operating at twice its design capacity.

Revealed: the massive scale of UK’s water consumption

By Felicity Lawrence, The Guardian

Each Briton uses 4,645 litres a day when hidden factors are included

The UK has become the sixth largest net importer of water in the world, the environment group WWF will tell a meeting of international experts in Stockholm, with every consumer indirectly responsible for the use of thousands of litres a day. Only 38% of the UK’s total water use comes from its own resources; the rest depends on the water systems of other countries, some of which are already facing serious shortages.

The study makes the first attempt to measure the UK’s total “water footprint” and highlights the extent to which our imports come from countries which are running out of fresh water. It calculates that:

· Average household water use for washing and drinking in the UK is about 150 litres a person daily, but we consume about 30 times as much in “virtual water”, used in the production of imported food and textiles;

· Taking virtual water into account, each of us soaks up 4,645 litres a day;

· Only Brazil, Mexico, Japan, China and Italy come higher in the league of net importers of virtual agricultural water. People in poorer countries typically subsist on 1,000 litres of virtual water a day;

· Different diets have different water footprints. A meat and dairy-based diet consumes about 5,000 litres of virtual water a day while a vegetarian diet uses about 2,000 litres.

“What’s particularly worrying is that huge amounts of the food and cotton we consume are grown in drier areas of the world where water resources are either already stressed or very likely to become so in the near future,” said Stuart Orr, WWF’s water footprint expert.
Link to this audio
Listen to Stuart Orr of WWF explain the report

With modern patterns of consumption, businesses and consumers are inadvertently contributing to the slow death of some of the world’s most important rivers, the charity warns, and we may not be able to depend on the same supplies in the near future.

Experts at this week’s World Water Week forum in the Swedish capital are increasingly talking of fresh water as “the new oil”, a finite resource that is running out in some areas and will become more and more expensive with a knock-on impact on consumer prices.

British retailers are already examining how much of their food comes from areas where water reserves are depleted and whether they will need to relocate some of their production as water runs out.

Marks & Spencer is working with WWF to calculate the water footprint of its entire food and clothing ranges. M&S’s technical director, David Gregory, said the availability of water over the next decade was already a key part of the company’s strategic decisions about where to source food for its stores.

“We are already in discussion with WWF about our decisions about where to grow crops in the future,” he said.

The retailer is auditing the water footprint of five key crops - strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes and roses - to establish where and how they should be grown in the next few years to make best use of water resources. The WWF report identifies Spain, northern African countries including Egypt and Morocco, South Africa, Israel, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as countries which face acute water stress and yet supply the UK with substantial exports of their water.

Sainsbury’s agronomist, Debbie Winstanley, confirmed that water would be “on every agenda in sourcing food”.

“From our point of view we’ve got to look at where our growers are going to get their water from,” she said. Most British supermarkets currently depend on southern Spain for salad crops, such as lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers, as well as broccoli out of season through the winter months.

But over-extraction of water for horticulture and the tourist industry have led to a crisis there. Aquifers have become severely depleted and the water table has been infiltrated by the sea. “There are massive challenges with water in places like Murcia [southern Spain]. We have to look at least 10 years ahead in terms of security of supply. Murcia will have to look very different in five years’ time.

“We’ll have to look at new desalination technologies, and we may have to look at crops that can cope with more saline conditions, such as broccoli. We take tomatoes out of Morocco in winter, and we’ve looked very hard at Moroccan water, but it’s complex; if you use more greenhouse production here it uses more energy. Peas and beans are a steady all-year market. We’ve got to think about how we get them here in a responsible manner,” she said.

This article appeared in the Guardian on Wednesday August 20 2008 on p1 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 14:00 on August 20 2008.

* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

T. Boone Pickens thinks water is the new oil—and he’s betting $100 million that he’s right

There Will Be Water

by Susan Berfield, BusinessWeek
Roberts County is a neat square in a remote corner of the Texas Panhandle, a land of rolling hills, tall grass, oak trees, mesquite, and cattle. It has a desolate beauty, a striking sparseness. The county encompasses 924 square miles and is home to fewer than 900 people. One of them is T. Boone Pickens, the oilman and corporate raider, who first bought some property here in 1971 to hunt quail. He’s now the largest landowner in the county: His Mesa Vista ranch sprawls across some 68,000 acres. Pickens has also bought up the rights to a considerable amount of water that lies below this part of the High Plains in a vast aquifer that came into existence millions of years ago.

If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property. The electricity generated by an enormous wind farm he is setting up in the Panhandle would also flow along that corridor. As far as Pickens is concerned, he could be selling wind, water, natural gas, or uranium; it’s all a matter of supply and demand. “There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it. That’s the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing,” he says.

In the coming decades, as growing numbers of people live in urban areas and climate change makes some regions much more prone to drought, water—or what many are calling “blue gold"—will become an increasingly scarce resource. By 2030 nearly half of the world’s population will inhabit areas with severe water stress, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. Pickens understands that. And while Texas is unusually lax in its laws about pumping groundwater, the rush to control water resources is gathering speed around the planet. In Australia, now in the sixth year of a drought, brokers in urban areas are buying up water rights from farmers. Rural residents around the U.S. are trying to sell their land (and water) to multi- national water bottlers like Nestlé (BW—Apr. 14). Companies that use large quantities of the precious resource to run their businesses are seeking to lock up water supplies. One is Royal Dutch Shell, which is buying groundwater rights in Colorado as it prepares to drill for oil in the shale deposits there.

Into this environment comes Pickens, who made a good living for a long time extracting oil and gas and now, at 80, believes the era of fossil fuel is over. So far he has spent $100 million and eight years on his project and still has not found any city in Texas willing to buy his water. But like many others, Pickens believes there’s a fortune to be made in slaking the thirst of a rapidly growing population. If he pumps as much as he can, he could sell about $165 million worth of water to Dallas each year. “The idea that water can be sold for private gain is still considered unconscionable by many,” says James M. Olson, one of America’s preeminent attorneys specializing in water- and land-use law. “But the scarcity of water and the extraordinary profits that can be made may overwhelm ordinary public sensibilities.”

THE BIGGEST PUMP WINS
Pickens, an Oklahoma native, geologist, and someone who calls himself the luckiest guy in the world, is the quintessential entrepreneur. He started as a wildcatter in 1956; three decades later his Mesa Petroleum was the largest independent exploration company in the U.S. But that’s not how Pickens made a name for himself—it was his hostile bids, one after the other through the 1980s, for oil companies far more powerful, far wealthier than his own. Pickens thought they could do more for their shareholders. He never took over any of them. He did, however, push them into deals they might not have considered otherwise, which helped reshape the oil industry. He did, sometimes, make hundreds of millions when he sold his stakes. And shareholders did, often, benefit. He was briefly the most famous businessman in America, a corporate raider who always wished people would call him a shareholder activist.

By the mid-1990s, though, Pickens had fallen. After a brutal and expensive fight with Unocal, he gave up his raiding. He lost control of Mesa Petroleum after a series of financial and managerial miscalculations. He went through an expensive divorce from his second wife and retreated to his ranch. It was in the midst of this that he acquired a newfound regard for water as a commodity that should be bought, sold, and traded for the benefit of those who own it and those who can afford it.

In 1996 a local water utility made its first big purchase of groundwater rights in the Panhandle. The utility, known as the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority (CRMWA), bought nearly 43,000 acres of water, some of it just south of Pickens’ ranch, for $14.5 million. (Property owners in Texas, and elsewhere, can sell their water separately from the land above it.) That Roberts County would become the stomping ground for the Panhandle water wars was perhaps inevitable. Underneath it lies one of the world’s largest repositories of water, moving slowly among layers of gravel, sand, and silt. The Ogallala Aquifer stretches from Texas to South Dakota and contains a quadrillion gallons of water—enough to cover the U.S. mainland to a depth of almost two feet. Yet the extensive irrigation necessary to grow corn, cotton, and wheat in west Texas has left the Ogallala nearly depleted in some places. It is not an aquifer that is easily or quickly replenished. But the land in Roberts County is unsuited for agriculture, and so the Ogallala there is largely untapped.

Since the early 1900s, groundwater use in Texas has been governed by what’s quaintly called the rule of capture, otherwise described as the biggest pump wins. It lets landowners pump as much water as they can, even if doing so drains neighboring properties. This put Pickens in an uncomfortable position: If he didn’t sell his water to CRMWA, the utility could potentially suck some of it right out from under his ranch. So he tried. But “they told me to kiss off,” he says. Kent Satterwhite, who was then assistant general manager, says: “Boone was fairly insistent that we buy his water. It made him mad that we didn’t have the money to buy it.” That was the first of several contretemps between Pickens and various local water authorities. Pickens next approached the city of Amarillo, which also had begun to acquire water rights in Roberts County. It wasn’t interested, either, though it did purchase water from several other nearby landowners. “Amarillo was pissed off at me,” says Pickens, who has a long and fraught history with the city. When Amarillo turned him down, Pickens felt surrounded. “I had to find a buyer for my water,” he says, “or I was going to be drained.”

LANDOWNERS DIVIDED
There’s a saying in Texas: “Whiskey’s for drinking. Water’s for fighting.” Pickens decided to fight. In 1999 he created a company called Mesa Water and began to accumulate water rights so he could strike a deal with another city altogether. The hell with Amarillo. Pickens was confident he could sell his water: The population of Texas was expected to jump 40% by 2020, mostly in urban areas one dry season away from drought.

Pickens’ decision to get into the water business was regarded by some in the Panhandle as nothing more, or less, than a shrewd move by a man who knows the value of commodities. The economy of the High Plains region is based on people taking out the natural resources and selling them. If water that can’t be used for farming ends up in the taps of city residents hundreds of miles away, that’s fine. Pickens says he’s buying stranded, surplus water that needs to be rescued. Kim Flowers, who runs an 8,300-acre ranch in Roberts County, speaks for many landowners when she says: “People can do with their water as they wish as long as they’re not wasting it.”

In all, Pickens, CRMWA, and Amarillo have spent about $150 million to buy up nearly 80% of the water rights in Roberts County, undermining and outbidding one another along the way. One unsurprising effect of their competition is that the price of an acre of water has in some places doubled, to $600. That’s something in which Pickens takes pride. Much as he did in the 1980s, when he went after big oil companies he believed weren’t doing right by their shareholders, Pickens now talks about creating value for Roberts County landowners. They make money from selling their water while continuing to live, run cattle, and hunt on their property. “I told them I was going to raise the value of the land, and I accomplished that. The landowners are all tickled to death. I made our water worth something. And anybody with any sense would sell it.”

Not all Roberts County landowners wanted to do business with him, though. Pickens intended to pull water from an aquifer that is pretty much the sole source for the Panhandle, and that isn’t refilled quickly, and sell it to a place like Dallas, whose water use is the highest of any city in Texas. This seemed ludicrous, even reckless, to some. C.E. Williams runs the Panhandle Groundwater Conservation District, which is responsible for managing the competing demands on the region’s share of the Ogallala. He puts it this way: “As a district, we cannot pick and choose where the water goes. But personally I am concerned. I have a son who is an irrigated farmer, and I have grandkids, and I want to make sure that they can conduct commerce when they want to.”

Pickens has a way of dismissing the complexity of a situation, sometimes even the possibility of an opinion contrary to his own. In this case, any opposition to his plan from anyone who is not a Roberts County landowner, who is not essentially a shareholder in this venture, he deems irrelevant. Williams, he points out, doesn’t himself have any property. “Water is a commodity,” he says. “Heck, isn’t it like oil? You have to come back to who owns the water. The groundwater is owned by the landowner. That’s it.” When it comes to potential buyers, Pickens cares about only one thing: how much they’re willing to pay. “Do I care what Dallas does with the water? Hell no.”

Republican State Representative Warren Chisum is a Roberts County rancher who owns 12,000 acres next to Pickens and sold his water to Amarillo in 2001. He would seem to be a natural ally. He’s not. “My water will remain local,” he says. “It’s controversial to ship it out of the Panhandle. When we run out, we’re done. The long-term value is to keep it here. That’s contrary to what Pickens wants to do. It’s his water. But he won’t be here in 50 years.”

In 2002, Pickens began approaching several of Texas’ sprawling cities, all of which share one defining feature: Their populations are growing so quickly that they are constantly in need of new supplies of water. But with water, as with so much else, location is critical. And Pickens’ water is far, far away from anyplace that might buy it. Pickens knew he’d have to build a pipeline, and to do so at anything resembling a reasonable cost, he’d need the power of eminent domain—the right of a government entity to force the sale of private property for the public good. Water utilities have that right. If Dallas agreed to buy Pickens’ water, it could extend such authority to him. But Dallas deemed Pickens’ price too high and declined to do a deal. So Pickens and his executives tried to create a Fresh Water Supply District—a government entity that would have that power. But they couldn’t get it through.

Over the next several years, Pickens continued accumulating water rights and began to lease other land, this time with the idea of creating the world’s biggest wind farm. “One of the great wind areas is right up where we are,” says Robert L. Stillwell, Pickens’ general counsel. “You can set it right on top of where the water is.” And since, one day anyway, Dallas may well buy both, Mesa could use a single right-of-way for the water pipeline and the electric lines. In Roberts County there would be real economic benefits from the wind farm. “The wind is meant to sweeten the deal,” says Representative Chisum. “The big money for Pickens is in the water.”

It had been a decade since Pickens first realized the potential value of the water deposited eons ago in the sand below the High Plains. Now it was time to employ the one resource he hadn’t yet used: his lobbying clout.

POWERFUL LOBBYING
In January, 2007, the Texas Legislature convened in the grand statehouse in Austin. The 80th session turned out to be very productive, and one person who kept busy during that time was J.E. Buster Brown, a former state senator and one of the most powerful lobbyists in town. Among Brown’s clients is Mesa Water. “My job is primarily defensive,” Brown says of his work for Pickens. “I’m watching to make sure there is no legislation passed that creates obstacles to Pickens doing what he wants to do. I’m supposed to make sure nothing bad happens.”

Brown did more than that: He helped win Pickens a key new legal right. It was contained in an amendment to a major piece of water legislation. The amendment, one of more than 100 added after the bill had been reviewed in the House, allowed a water-supply district to transmit alternative energy and transport water in a single corridor, or right-of-way. “We helped move that along,” says Stillwell. “We thought it would be handy and helpful to everyone.”

After the bill passed, Tom “Smitty” Smith, Texas director of Public Citizens, an advocacy group, says several legislators were drinking coffee and reading through it. “Uh-oh,” one said. They’d just realized the amendment would help Pickens build his pipeline. “Many legislators were watching for this play,” Smith says, “and it still snuck by.” State Senator Robert Duncan, a Republican who represents Lubbock, says: “It probably should have raised our suspicions, but we were moving a lot of bills. And it would have been hard to hold up this one even if we’d discovered the amendment.”

Pickens still needed the power of eminent domain if he was going to build his pipeline and wind-power lines across private land. And by happy coincidence, the legislators passed a smaller bill that made that all the easier. The new legislation loosened the requirements for creating a water district. Previously, a district’s five elected supervisors needed to be registered voters living within the boundaries of the district. Now, they only had to own land in the district; they could live and vote wherever. The bill, as it happens, was put forth by two legislators from Houston; Brown says he and Mesa had nothing to do with it. “That wasn’t our bill,” says Brown. “I wish I could take credit for it.”

Pickens moved quickly to take advantage of the new rules. Over the summer of 2007, he sold eight acres on the back side of his ranch to five people in his employ: Stillwell, who resides in Houston, two of his executives in Dallas, and the couple who manage his ranch, Alton and Lu Boone. A few days later, Mesa Water filed a petition to create an eight-acre water-supply district with those five as the directors and sole members. On Nov. 6, Roberts County held an election to decide whether to form the new district. Only two people were qualified to take part: Alton and Lu Boone. The vote was unanimous. With that, Pickens won the right to issue tax-free bonds for his pipeline and electrical lines as well as the extraordinary power to claim land across swaths of the state.

No one at Mesa regards Roberts County Fresh Water Supply District No. 1 as an unusual arrangement. “We’re no different from any other water or electricity supplier,” says Stillwell, meaning they, too, would use the power of eminent domain only as a last resort and for the public good. As for the suggestion that he wouldn’t have qualified to be a board member under the old rules, Stillwell says: “It doesn’t matter that I’m on the board. It would have been another me, just a local me.”

“WE’RE NOT HAPPY”
Pickens was ready to reach out to landowners along the route. In April, 2008, Mesa sent out some 1,100 letters to people along the 250-mile proposed right-of-way, from Miami, Tex., to a town called Jacksboro, just short of Dallas. The letters included a Texas landowners’ bill of rights, information on the condemnation procedure, a map of the route, and a list of open houses they could attend for more information.

One stifling evening in May, about 50 people showed up at the Twin Lakes Community Activity Center just outside Jacksboro. When the ranchers arrived, more than a dozen of Mesa’s public-relations consultants, hydrologists, and land men were waiting for them. Standing behind tables laid out with pens, cups, hats, and bags with the District No. 1 logo, the officials were available to answer questions about the 250-foot-wide corridor Mesa would use to construct, maintain, and possibly expand the pipeline and electric lines. While this arrangement allowed everyone to get information specific to their property, it also precluded any public questioning of the Mesa standard-bearers. This did not go unnoticed by the ranchers. “We’re not happy,” said one. “Pickens is pushing his power trip on us. I can’t fight his money. But if he asked first, I might have thought better of it.” Another said: “Land goes way back for a lot of people here. If you tell people you want their land, Texans raise their guns.” At the end of the evening, most of the pens and hats and cups still lay on the tables.

Pickens isn’t bothered that by his invoking the right of eminent domain, Mesa has inflamed landowners up and down the route. “It always does,” he says. Mesa expects to acquire the land it needs in the next 18 months and pay about $30 million for it; Pickens wants to begin construction on the $1.2 billion pipeline right afterward. It should take about three years to complete. If all goes according to plan, Mesa will be able to pump enough water to satisfy the needs of some 1.5 million Texans every day.

Pickens hopes to strike a deal with Dallas or the urban areas around it before Mesa starts building the pipeline. “Eventually they will need it,” he says. So far, though, the talks might best be characterized as preliminary. “We continue to meet with Pickens’ staff and engineers to get a better understanding of the proposal and so they can understand what our needs are,” says Mike Rickman, assistant general manager of the North Texas Municipal Water District, which supplies water to 13 cities north and east of Dallas. “Mesa has a lot of water. But how much will it cost to buy it and deliver it?” Rickman says that at some point he would have to consider the consequences for the Ogallala: “Does it make sense to take water from an arid portion of the state? We don’t want to harm our neighbors out there.”

In Roberts County, people hold on to the hope that pumping from the Ogallala can be controlled. In 1998, as Pickens and local water utilities began buying up water rights, the groundwater conservation district placed some restrictions on the rule of capture that it calls the 50-50 rule: Anyone who receives a new permit to pump can draw down the aquifer by only 50% over the next 50 years. Later, an additional limit of 1.2% per year was set. These essentially manage the depletion of the Ogallala under Roberts County; there, it is replenished at a rate of only 0.1% a year. Williams, who put the rules into place, says: “It’s like taking dollar bills out of your bank account and putting nickels back in. Even with a big bank account, there’s an end. That’s pretty much what’s happening in the Ogallala.”

Pickens has promised to abide by the 50-50 rule. “I don’t have any concerns about depleting the aquifer. All I’m doing is selling surplus water,” he says. “I’m not about to drain all the water out of Roberts County. I have my ranch there. But I could sure take it down 50% and not hurt anybody. And it could make a lot of people a lot of money.”

Fluoridated water now reaches nearly 70% of U.S. population

Nearly 70 percent of U.S. residents who get water from community water systems now receive fluoridated water, according to a report published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The proportion of the U.S. population receiving fluoridated water, about 184 million people, increased from 65.8 percent in 1992 to 69.2 percent in 2006, said the report.

The percentage of people served by community water systems with optimal levels (which are defined by the state and vary based on such things as the climate) of fluoridated water ranged from 8.4 percent in Hawaii to 100 percent in the District of Columbia, according to the report.

“Community water fluoridation is an equitable, cost-effective, and cost-saving method of delivering fluoride to most people,” said William Maas, director of CDC’s Division of Oral Health. “We’ve seen some marked improvements; however, there are still too many states that have not met the national goal. The national goal is that 75 percent of U.S. residents who are on community water systems be receiving fluoridated water by 2010.”

Fluoride, a naturally occurring compound in the environment, can reduce or prevent tooth decay. Adding or maintaining tiny levels of fluoride in drinking water is a safe and effective public health measure to prevent and control tooth decay (dental caries). The second half of the 20th century saw a major decline in the prevalence and severity of dental caries, attributed in part to the increasing use of fluoride.

Based upon studies and a systematic review, the new report suggests that fluoridation resulted in a median 29.1 percent relative decrease in tooth decay in the United States.

WaterAid rsanitation eport released at the G8 Hokkaido summit in Japan

Tackling the Silent Killer – The Case for Sanitation

This report sets out a framing case for the importance of sanitation in securing progress across the health, education and economic MDGs. The paper highlights the profound impact of poor sanitation on child mortality and points to compelling evidence that poor sanitation may be the biggest contributing factor to child deaths in the developing world. The paper points to the failure of the international aid system to respond to evidence (or historical experience) for strategic or ‘smart’ interventions that can drive the necessary rapid developmental gains if the MDGs are to be realized.

link to report http://www.wateraid.org/documents/tacking_the_silent_killer_the_case_for_sanitation.pdf

Making the Negev Desert bloom once seemed like a good idea, but it’s killing the Dead Sea.

The Myth Of Water

By Kevin Peraino and Kevin Peraino and Joanna Chen, NEWSWEEK

Israel ranks 49th on the green index but first among desert nations.

Few notions are more deeply rooted in Zionism’s founding mythology than the exhortation to “make the desert bloom.” The earliest Zionist pioneers arrived in Palestine with a strong faith in science and technology, shaped by the Jewish enlightenment that began in the late 18th century. They also brought an earthy sense of self-reliance that made growing their own food—even in the bleak Negev Desert—a high priority. Amid the ashes of the Holocaust, that determination only deepened. “For those who make the desert bloom there is room for hundreds, thousands, and even millions,” Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1954, when he moved to the Negev himself. As Israeli society grew increasingly devout in the 1970s, the prophet Isaiah provided further inspiration: “The wilderness and the parched land shall be glad; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.”

At first glance, today the parched land indeed looks glad. The arid coastal plain sprouts with fields of watermelons, tomatoes and sunflowers, and Israel has earned a reputation for creative use of sparse water supplies. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Israelis pioneered the use of “drip irrigation"—which delivers water directly to a plant’s roots. More recently, Israeli experiments with desalination and water recycling have drawn attention around the world. The Yale/ Columbia Environmental Performance Index ranks Israel 49th overall and best among desert nations, in part for managing the stress irrigation puts on water supplies. Still, some scientists worry about the environmental cost of building an economy in the desert. Israel consumes 1.8 billion cubic meters of water each year; 15 years from now, it will need an additional 1.5 billion cubic meters to meet demand rising due to population and economic growth, according to Israeli water experts. About half of Israel’s clean water is used for agriculture, yet farming accounts for only 2 percent of Israel’s GNP. Considering those numbers, some environmentalists are beginning to question whether agricultural growth in a desert climate like Israel’s is really sustainable. The question, says David Brooks, a Canadian water expert and environmentalist, “is not whether water is used efficiently in Israeli agriculture, but whether agriculture is an efficient way to use water in Israel.”

Water has long been a deeply political issue in the Levant; wars are waged over it. Aquifers and other sources of water tend to straddle political boundaries. Levi Eshkol, Israel’s prime minister during the Six Day War, was a water-company executive who spent long hours poring over maps of potential sources. According to “The Iron Wall,” a history by Avi Shlaim, Eshkol believed that “without control over the sources of water the Zionist dream could not be realized.” In 1964 Israel completed the National Water Carrier, designed to pipe drinking water from the Sea of Galilee, in Israel’s north, to the Negev in the south. Syria and other Arab states then moved to divert the headwaters of the Jordan, igniting fierce clashes that included Syrian-sponsored Palestinian guerrilla attacks. The water wars were one of the key factors in the establishment of the PLO in 1964.

Diverting water from the Galilee has contributed to another devastating environmental consequence: the drying of the Dead Sea. Much of the water that once made its way down the Jordan River is no longer available to replenish the body of water downstream. Before 1964, the Dead Sea used to receive 1.3 billion cubic meters of water each year, according to Eilon Adar, who heads the Water Research Institute at Ben-Gurion University. Now “at most it gets 200 million cubic meters a year.” Since the inauguration of the National Water Carrier, the sea level has fallen by 21 meters, and continues to drop at a rate of roughly one meter each year. “The Dead Sea is dying,” says Adar. “There’s an environmental toll here, and we’re really worried.” There’s also an economic toll: the dangerous sinkholes developing under the Dead Sea have badly hurt the region’s tourism industry, according to Adar.

Israel’s romantic notions of making the desert bloom have encouraged heavy government subsidies for farming. Israeli farmers pay roughly 40 percent as much for their water as those who use it for nonagricultural purposes, says Hillel Shuval, a water expert at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Academic College. The subsidies help Israeli farmers export much of their produce, which makes little environmental sense in an arid country. Exporting one kilogram of wheat is equivalent to exporting 1,000 liters of water, which means Israel in effect exports 100 million cubic meters of water each year, about as much as its desalination plants produce. Two years ago Israel inaugurated a massive desalination plant in the coastal city of Ashkelon, but desalination is costly and energy intensive; each cubic meter of clean water costs roughly 60 cents to produce, according to Adar. “Subsidizing water for agriculture results in irrational use, in growing crops which otherwise wouldn’t be economically feasible,” says Hillel.

The Negev is the laboratory for new technologies Israelis hope may solve their water troubles. Some of the most ambitious recycling experiments are found there, just minutes from the cabin where Ben-Gurion retired to the desert. In a sun-bleached sandlot surrounded by date palms and desert scrub, 41-year-old Amit Ziv explains how his kibbutz pumps 500,000 cubic meters of warm, brackish water each year from an aquifer 800 meters below ground. The water is first cycled several times through man-made ponds for growing fish including sea bass, tilapia and barramundi, then funneled to fields of wheat, olive and jojoba. “We wrote the book on this stuff,” says Ziv.

Experts, though, wonder how far technology can boost supply. Drip irrigation and desalination can only do so much. Making the desert bloom was a good idea “in its time,” says Brooks, but now “the very idea of developing the Negev is wrong.” The day to rethink Israel’s romance with desert farming may be here.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/143688

As drylands get drier and violence grows, new crises resembling Darfur will arise.

Land, Water And Conflict

By Jeffrey Sachs, Newsweek

The world will experience a growing risk of conflicts over food, energy and water in coming years. The population rises each year by about 80 million people, with most of the increase in impoverished regions already facing environmental stress. Climate change, water scarcity and tighter oil supplies will add to the stresses. As violence increases, in new crises resembling those now underway in Darfur, Somalia and Afghanistan, the tendency might be to look to the military for solutions. We’ll need to keep in mind that engineers and doctors will be the only ones who can truly keep us safe.

Hundreds of millions of people live on the margin of survival, and their numbers will increase if we continue on our current trajectory. The poorest of the poor tend to be found in remote, environmentally stressed regions, such as the drylands of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, which is evident in Yale and Columbia’s Environmental Performance Index. In these places, droughts are becoming more frequent and land more scarce. Rural populations head for the slums in cities unequipped to provide jobs, safe water, sewerage and other basic services.

With a business-as-usual approach, more regions are likely to experience intensifying stresses. Human-induced climate change is predicted to make drylands drier and increase the risk of floods and powerful cyclones in more-humid regions. Increasingly crowded coastal areas will face greater risks of devastating storms. In places that currently rely on groundwater, such as in India, China and the American Southwest, wells will run dry, or become too expensive to drill. And in places in the Andes and in South Asia that depend on the seasonal melting of glaciers for irrigation, these water flows may stop as the glaciers disappear.

The results are unlikely to be pretty. Poor and hungry people are vastly more likely to fall into violent conflict than rich and well-fed populations. And when the climate gets tough, people migrate. Nomads from the drylands of northern Darfur went into the more-humid farm regions of southern Darfur in the 1980s in search of water for their livestock. Similarly, migrants from other parts of the African Sahel, such as Burkina Faso, moved south toward the coastal regions, into the Ivory Coast and other coastal countries. In both cases, the migrations triggered conflicts. Such conflicts are not inevitable. Violence is often stoked by ruthless and demagogic politicians. Still, the environmental crises and ensuing desperation provide the fodder.

Outsiders tend to attribute violence to religion, culture and politics and overlook the underlying causes of water, food and jobs. What some regard as the arc of Islamic instability, across the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, is more accurately an arc of hunger, population pressures, water stress, growing food insecurity and a pervasive lack of jobs.

Real solutions will require bold investments in sustainable development. The United States, Europe, China, India and wealthy oil states will have to join forces to help conflict-prone parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia to raise food output, increase access to education and family planning, and improve productivity through investments in roads, power, irrigation and telecommunications. To head off even more devastating climate shocks in coming decades, we must also end the deadlock over climate-change policy. In water-stressed and conflict-prone regions, technology such as drought-resistant crops, solar-thermal power and drip irrigation can underscore our common fate and interests on an increasingly crowded and crisis-prone planet.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/143700

Beijing Water Crisis Exacerbated

By SHAI OSTER, The Wall Street Journal

BEIJING—The Olympics is contributing to Beijing’s worsening water crisis by increasing use of it for sports venues and prestige projects like giant musical fountains, according to a report by Chinese researchers.

The report, issued this month, says preparations for the August Games are adding about 5%, or around 200 million cubic meters, to normal water use in Beijing this year. The report says that officials are diverting water from farming in provinces around the capital, and tapping rapidly diminishing reserves of groundwater, instead of promoting conservation that could better address the issue. It says that the situation is a continuation of a long-standing, mistaken approach by the government in its water policy.

“Beijing’s water crisis stems more from decades of short-sighted policies that have degraded its watershed, and a political fixation on large-scale and environmentally damaging engineering projects to keep the taps flowing at little or no charge to consumers,” the report says.

The report was published by Probe International, a Canada-based environmental group, and edited by Dai Qing, a prominent Chinese journalist who was once jailed for her criticism of the Three Gorges Dam. Other Chinese experts who contributed to the report requested anonymity, in part for fear of government reprisals, according to Probe International.

Chinese officials have acknowledged that more work is needed to promote water conservation, but say that rising living standards and a growing population mean that supplies must be increased to meet new demands. Officials say raising tariffs too high would hurt the majority of urban residents, whose incomes are still much lower than in the West.

In one Olympics-related case described in the new report, the government is spending 430 million yuan, or about $62.6 million at current exchange rates, to build a 13-kilometer underground pipe to divert water to a river that has been dry for about a decade, to be used for Olympic rowing. The extra demands posed by the Olympics have forced Beijing to divert water from surrounding provinces, which have been required to guarantee steady supplies to the capital, the report said.

Beijing’s supply of water relative to its population is among the smallest of any of the world’s biggest cities, and is one-thirtieth the world average. Water consumption is between 4 billion and 4.5 billion cubic meters a year, slightly more than the natural supply. Nationwide, China’s available water supply per capita is one-fourth the world average. The biggest segment of demand comes from residential use, which has grown 10 times between 1995 and 2005, and now represents 39% of water use. That’s more than agriculture or industry.

Northern China is a naturally arid region, but it has been especially dry in recent years. Rainfall in the past decade has been 28% below the historical average.

Water is being pumped out of underground supplies much faster than it can be replenished, the report said.

Beijing already has the highest water tariffs in the country, but they need to go even higher to encourage conservation, the new report says.

New report shows how corruption undermines the global response to climate change and food shortages

Corruption in the water sector is a root cause and catalyst for the global water crisis that threatens billions of lives and exacerbates environmental degradation, according to the Global Corruption Report 2008: Corruption in the Water Sector, released today by Transparency International (TI).

“Water is a resource without substitute. It is paramount to our health, our food security, our energy future and our ecosystem. But corruption plagues water management and use in all these areas,” said Huguette Labelle, Chair of Transparency International.

The report, the first of its kind to explore the impact and scope of corruption in different segments of the water sector, identifies a range of problems, from petty bribery in water delivery to procurement-related looting of irrigation and hydropower funds; from covering up industrial pollution to manipulation of water management and allocation policies.

“Corruption’s impact on water is a fundamental governance problem, yet it is not sufficiently addressed in the many global policy initiatives for environmental sustainability, development, and food and energy security. This must change,” added Labelle.

The water crisis is undeniable and the corruption challenge it faces is urgent. More than 1 billion people worldwide have no guaranteed access to water and more than 2 billion are without adequate sanitation, which has devastating consequences for development and poverty reduction.

Corruption thwarts global response to climate change and global food shortage

“Climate change requires the world to come up with what is likely to be the most far-reaching and complex global governance framework ever devised. Without addressing the corruption risks, especially as they relate to water, such plans stand on shaky ground”, said Labelle. The report demonstrates corruption’s potential to obstruct effective enforcement of water-sharing pacts and resettlement arrangements, both key to confronting the fallout from climate change.

Irrigated land helps produce 40 per cent of the world’s food, but corruption in irrigation is rampant. Addressing this risk is fundamental to increasing food production and tackling the global food crisis. “Massive new investments in irrigation have been announced worldwide to help counter the food crisis, yet water shortage means food shortage and if corruption in irrigation is not also addressed, these efforts will fall short,” stated Labelle.

For the Philippines, which has allocated close to US$1 billion for irrigation and related agricultural improvements, the report presents case evidence of how corruption has hindered the building and performance of irrigation dams. In India, a country at the centre of the crisis, corruption is estimated to add at least 25 per cent to irrigation contracts and the proceeds help maintain a corrupt system of political handouts and compromised oversight. In the end, investment costs rise, systems are rendered inefficient and small farmers are left especially vulnerable to water shortage.

Drinking water and sanitation: the poor carry the greatest burden

When corruption occurs, the cost of connecting a household to a water network increases by up to 30 per cent, raising the price tag for achieving the Millennium Development Goals for water and sanitation by a staggering US$48 billion, according to expert estimates in the report.

Corruption in drinking water and sanitation emerges at every point along the water delivery chain; from policy design and budgeting to building, maintaining and operating water networks. It drains investment from the sector, increases prices and decreases water supplies. One result is that poor households in Jakarta, Lima, Nairobi or Manila spend more on water than residents of New York City, London or Rome.

Industrialised countries are not immune. Corruption has plagued the tendering of water contracts in cities like Grenoble, Milan, New Orleans and Atlanta. Likewise, cases of bid-rigging and price-fixing in water infrastructure provision have surfaced in Sweden, while in Chicago water budgets fell victim to misuse for political campaigning.

Risks for the environment and energy security

Corruption in water resources management undermines the sustainability of water supplies, fuels highly unequal water sharing which can incite political conflict and fosters the degradation of vital ecosystems. In China, for example, corruption has weakened the enforcement of environmental regulations, abetting the pollution of aquifers in 90 percent of cities and making over 75 per cent of urban rivers unsuitable for drinking or fishing.

Corruption in hydropower inflates the cost of dams and related projects. It also makes re-settlement more challenging by preying on compensation funds and initiatives meant to aid displaced people. The stakes are high: hydropower accounts for one-sixth of the world’s electricity production and investment volumes are projected to reach US$60 billion annually over the next 20 years.

A time for action: solutions to clean up the water sector

Corrupt conditions in water persist because their greatest impact is exacted on those with the least chance of redress, disproportionately affecting women, the poor and those with no voice at all: future generations and the environment.

Nonetheless, as the Global Corruption Report shows, taking action against corruption in the water sector is both timely and feasible.  Key recommendations of the report include:

Establish transparency and participation as guiding principles for all aspects of water governance: From transparent budgeting and participatory policy-making to public mapping of water pollution, public audits of projects and access to contract terms and performance reports, transparency and participation strengthen integrity in water governance, but need to be adopted globally.

Strengthen regulatory oversight: Government and the public sector continue to play the most prominent role in water governance and should establish effective regulatory oversight, whether for the environment, water and sanitation, agriculture or energy. Institutional reform and capacity-building are essential to bring oversight in water up to the standards already achieved in other sectors

Ensure fair competition and accountable implementation of water projects: All stakeholders have a role to play. Contracts should incorporate anti-corruption measures. Governments and contractors can enter into agreements for fair public procurement. Lenders and donors must strengthen anti-bribery provisions in their due diligence requirements.

Transparency International, along with the International Water and Sanitation Centre, the Stockholm International Water Institute, the Swedish Water House and the Water and Sanitation Program-Africa founded the Water Integrity Network (WIN) in 2006. Today WIN is a growing network of organisations and individuals that fights corruption in all parts of the water sector. The Global Corruption Report 2008 benefited from expert and financial support from WIN.