Water in the 21st century: defining the elements of global crises and potential solutions.

• Author: Lall, Upmanu
• Position: CAPSTONE ESSAY - Essay

Will we run out of fresh water in the 21st century? The media highlights the parched lands, dry riverbeds and springs and falling groundwater tables across the world daily. Over a billion people living in developing countries without access to safe drinking water are facing economic and water poverty. (1) Another real and troubling indicator is the rapid rate of aquatic habitat degradation and biodiversity loss in the last century. (2) Projected changes in climate due to greenhouse gases invariably portray a future world that is much drier in the tropics--where over half the world's population lives--and suggest a global increase in floods and droughts.

Is a global water crisis already upon us? The answer to this question seems to depend on who you ask. On the one hand, active voices such as Sandra Postel, Peter Gleick, Vandana Shiva, Lester Brown and Paul Elrich, as well as leaders of major global organizations with an interest in water, have been warning of an impending global water catastrophe. On the other hand, the mainstream academic community involved in hydrology and water has largely ignored the topic. For example, a Google search for "water crisis" leads to almost 1 million hits, but the same search on Google Scholar yields approximately 4,000 hits as compared to over 1 million Google Scholar hits for "climate change." Malay of these articles focus on policy solutions, but do not necessarily explore the nature of the problem in-depth. Furthermore, the literature is largely non-American and contains references to much of the same work. Introducing "global water crisis" into a Google search reduces the number of hits by a factor of ten. In fact, the handful of scientists who do study this problem have divergent opinions as to whether and when the world will run out of water. (3) A handful of scholars--particularly economists--go so far as to claim that a global water crisis does not exist or is, at best, overstated. (4) These scholars generally find that, on the whole, water access is improving worldwide and that with continued efficiency enhancements, the amount of water will continue to meet existing demands.

Perhaps the way the global water crisis has been defined--whether the world will run out of freshwater--is the wrong way to look at the problem. While there are many scholars looking at the range of localized and specific water challenges that are occurring around the globe, it seems that the academic community has yet to find success in accurately characterizing the sum of their parts. In this article, we argue that there are three distinct water crises--or challenges, depending on who you ask-that have yet to be systematically connected by scholars. It is by looking at how these three challenges are interrelated that we can better articulate the global characteristics of water resource dilemmas and, ultimately, identify the global factors that can help solve these dilemmas.

REORIENTING THE DEBATE: THREE CRISES ROLLED INTO ONE

Three types of water crises appear prominently in academic and professional discourse. First, there is the crisis of access to safe drinking water. This includes the inability to provide basic infrastructure to store, treat and deliver water supplies to a large part of the world's population. Second, there is the crisis of pollution that is analogous to climate change in that it relates to the impact of by-products of resource use. Third, there is the crisis of scarcity, or resource depletion, which is analogous to the fear of running out of oil. Now that we have defined three types of water crises, we can examine what we know about them, how they are linked, to what extent they are global problems and, finally, what are some possible solutions.

The Access Crisis

Many people equate the global component of a water crisis with the vast number of people worldwide whose economic productivity and social development is limited by access to safe drinking water. For instance, the World Health Organization, the World Bank Group Development Education Program, Global Water and the Global Water Challenge draw attention to the fact that over 1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water. As a result, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, the World Water Forum and other groups have rallied around a common metric for this issue by measuring the number of people with access to safe drinking water. For example, one of the key targets under the Millennium Development Goals is to "reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water." (5) Although these goals have been lauded as important policy directives, the international community has not yet made much progress in meeting them. (6)

Why is it so difficult to meet these goals? A vast body of literature points to the technical, institutional and financial challenges involved in developing the infrastructure and systems needed for water storage, supply and treatment. (7) As this body of literature has discussed, poor countries may not have access to sufficient capital to build large-scale infrastructure like reservoirs, water treatment plants or delivery systems. If they have donors to supply the initial capital, they often do not have the means to repay these loans. Some developing regions that acquire the resources to build new infrastructure later discover that they cannot afford to maintain it. Other times, donors build water supply projects that are grossly mismatched with the needs of local communities. (8)

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Despite these challenges, research and practical experience have shown that the water access problem can be addressed--at least superficially--with existing knowledge and resources. For example, numerous low-cost technologies are now available to treat water quickly without large-scale infrastructure. Simple and cost-effective infrastructure, like rainwater harvesting systems, is readily available to many water-scarce communities. (9) Additionally, creative financing mechanisms--like public-private partnerships--have been adopted by many local communities to pay for new water supply systems. (10) These types of interventions--as well as successfully developed large-scale water supply infrastructure--have helped increase the number of people with nominal access to safe drinking water from 77 percent in 1990 to 83 percent in 2002. (11) It is because of these improvements in recent decades that some scholars have argued that a global water crisis does not exist.

The Pollution Crisis

Intertwined with the access crisis is the water pollution crisis. For those 1.1 billion individuals who lack access to safe drinking water, "safe" is often the key word. While the infrastructure for water storage and access is often available, sometimes the water is contaminated by chemicals, microbes or other pollutants that render it non-potable. Yet, just as we have the know-how to develop water supply technologies, we also have the know-how to treat contaminated water. In the last century, tremendous research efforts have translated into an ability to treat wastewater and remove many of the most well-known chemicals of concern, including the ability to reuse or release this treated water into the environment. Technological advancements and tighter environmental regulations have created major progress in controlling the pollution of water from point sources, such as industries and municipalities. Although exotic or emerging chemicals continue to be a concern, their control is an active area of research. Therefore, where there is political will and available funds, pollution emitted from point sources is now under control. However, the political will and funds available to control point sources are still limited in many regions of the world. Many poor countries face similar challenges in developing the infrastructure to treat water as well as in supplying water.

An even more difficult pollution problem to solve is that of non-point source pollution, which results from diffuse sources, such as farms, or is caused by atmospheric deposition from industrial polluters. This form of pollution can have wide-ranging impacts, both on human use and on ecology, particularly through the accumulation of contaminants in water bodies and through the biological food chain. Examples of large-scale and cumulative ecological effects include hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico, pfiesteria in the Chesapeake Bay and the decimation of the Ganges River dolphins. (12) Historically, the effects of non-point source pollution have been easier to ignore than point sources because they affect humans less directly and visibly than sludge coming out of a pipe and directly polluting a drinking water source. Often, the cumulative impacts of non-point source pollution do not show up until they harm habitat and species living in downstream estuaries, bays and wetlands. These impacts cannot be ignored forever. As China has recently discovered, the extensive pollutants entering its waterways from factory waste, agricultural runoff and municipal sewage have had a tremendous impact on the quality of their aquaculture, causing decreased international confidence in their seafood markets. (13)

Although it is possible to reduce pollution from diffuse sources, it is typically challenging and costly First, limiting non-point pollution requires substantial time and effort to figure out from whom and where the pollution is coming from, especially when the total amount of contaminants is high and when large volumes of water are moved during rainfall. In any given watershed, we may generally know that nitrogen and phosphorous entering a river is coming from upstream farms or mercury is coming from deposition produced by regional power plants. However, it is often quite difficult--without direct and costly monitoring--to know how much each polluter contributes in a given location. Thus, this type of pollution is more...