Water — A Necessity of Life

Water is the integral fabric in the quilt of life. The Earth’s ecosystems, societies and individuals need it. Without it, food security and human health, energy supplies and industrial production would be unobtainable. Plants and wildlife and their ecosystems need water. Shortages and poor management can lead to loss of biodiversity and agricultural production, increase in malnutrition and disease, reduced economic growth, social instability and conflict. Water helps regulate the global climate – and as we are continuing to see, water resources themselves are affected by global climate change.

Earth is the only planet known where water exists in its three forms: as water vapour, as flowing water and as ice. It is therefore also the only planet where life exists as we know it. The global water cycle between the sea, the atmosphere and the continents is a vital circulatory system for nature and man.

This system brings some 110,000 cubic kilometres of water to the continents every year by
precipitation. Most of it evaporates back into the atmosphere from the ground and vegetation. The remaining water refills groundwater aquifers, lakes and rivers.

There are several challenges facing us with regard to managing our limited resource. The human population is growing and thus there will be more mouths to feed and more people needing safe drinking water and adequate sanitation in the near future. Currently, 1.1 billion people lack safe drinking water and 2.6 are without basic sanitation.

The UN Millennium Development Goals and their associated Targets now form the centrepiece of the global development agenda. To combat hunger, disease, environmental degradation, illiteracy, gender inequality and poverty, water is a key. Governments have committed to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.

What would this mean in practise? For a rural woman in a developing country, better access to safe drinking water would lead to less time spent on walking to and from the well, carrying heavy buckets of water. In many areas collecting water takes several hours and the walks cover distances of many kilometres. Often the job of providing the family with water falls on the younger girls and with more time spent on carrying water, less time, if any, is spent in school. If the water supply is closer to the home it will become possible to grow more vegetables that need watering in the gardens around the home, providing more food and nutrition to the family.

In general, access to water and sanitation can be an engine for accelerated economic growth, sustainable development, improved health and reduced poverty, particularly for the world’s poorer people.

That 2.6 billion people around the world are forced to defecate in plastic bags, buckets, open pits, agricultural fields, and public areas in their communities should generate a collective outcry for immediate, concerted efforts to expand access to improved sanitation facilities.

Sanitation, in particular, and the means to practice hygienic behaviours yield direct benefits in terms of health, education and economic productivity. Investing in sanitation would seem to make sense: 1.47 billion people (20 percent of the world’s population) stand to benefit if the MDG target is met and economic benefits could be as high as USD 65 billion annually. The greatest proportion of these benefits accrue in the poorest regions of the world, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.

What, then, are some of the challenges? Globally, agricultural irrigation is the biggest consumer of water, accounting for 70 per cent of total use. The mounting pressure to feed the world’s growing population will not reduce that figure. Per person, the amount of water to be available will continue to diminish while the food needs will continue to increase – and food consumption is moving towards more water-intensive items. Daily human needs for water are around 50 to 100 litres. Unless you count food. Then it is 3,500 litres. A Big Mac itself is, essentially, 1,000 litres of water.

Conventionally, the amount of water available for societal use is seen as the water that passes through rivers and groundwater formations.That view neglects the water literally consumed in plant production on rain fed crop fields, in forests and grasslands, used for food production and by ecosystems. The ultimate freshwater resource should therefore be seen as the precipitation over the river catchment.

Groundwater overuse is another threat. In dry countries, rapid expansion of irrigation in growing agricultural sectors has already led to a depletion of groundwater supplies. The low water table leads to salt water intrusion into aquifers, rendering potential drinking water unfit for that use. The same threat faces the world’s mega cities and other highly urbanised regions, which try solving the water scarcity problem by pumping up groundwater.

In rural areas of developing countries, waterholes are often contaminated by livestock, speeding the spread of illnesses such as diarrhoea. Poor-quality water is the most common cause of disease, being blamed for four out of five cases of ill health in the world. Bacteria and disease-spreading insects and parasites thrive in dirty water. Seven hundred million people contract diarrhoeal diseases every year, and more than 5 million of these people die, most of them children.

Another challenge is reducing the degradation of water quality by pollution. Apart from contamination by livestock a common cause of poor water quality is the discharge of untreated wastewater into rivers and lakes. Industrial growth has been a major factor in this respect, and also created new types of pollution. Toxic chemicals dumped on land eventually escape into surface and ground waters and spread.

The challenges mentioned here are only a few facing us in the future with regard to water, but even if these problems may seem overwhelming, there are some good stories to be told. With the UN Millennium Development Goals the global community has committed to reduce the amount of people lacking safe drinking water, sanitation and food. Water is on the agenda and the political will is increasing. By 2025, it can be hoped that the daughters of the girls who now walk long distances to collect water, will be attending school studying the hydrological cycle.