Urban Oasis
Water is the driving force of all nature.
–Leonardo da Vinci
Mulling over the Canadian media's extensive coverage of last week’s Cancun summit I wondered if there wasn’t a more pressing issue south of the Rio Grande, something besides international murder investigations, softwood lumber disputes or Mexicans illegally burrowing their way into California and Texas. As it turned out, there was: but you’d never have guessed it given the paucity of coverage. On March 22, World Water Day, the fourth World Water Forum concluded in Mexico City. It had attracted nearly 20,000 participants, plenty of activists, 120 nations and addressed both the quality and quantity of our most vital resource. The paucity of coverage inversely reflected the gravity of our situation. Consider some of what came out of Mexico City:
Radical youths were blamed for outbreaks of violence.
• More than one billion people currently have no access to safe drinking water, and an estimated 2.7 billion, or one third of the world’s population, will face major water shortages by 2025.
• Sanitation services vary [across the region] and treating wastewater remains a major challenge for some Latin American countries.
• 41 million Europeans do not have access to safe water.
• 300 million Africans currently lack access to basic water and sanitation.
• The Middle East has the world’s lowest per capita share of water, which is further declining, with absolute scarcity expected by 2025.
Yet the forum’s participants failed to declare “the right to safe, clean drinking water as a human right.” Moreover, given the increased problems associated with urbanization, industrialization and population growth, we can only expect things to get worse. Since a PetroChina chemical factory leaked 100 tonnes of benzene and nitrobenzene into the Songhua River four months ago, depriving 3.8 million citizens of their only source of fresh water for five days, there have been another 73 major spills and the Ministry of Water Resources “estimates that 40 per cent of water in China’s 1,300 major waterways is fit only for industrial or agricultural use.” And it gets worse.
Of China’s 600 cities, 110 are facing serious shortages; the available fresh water per capita is 2,300 cubic metres, a quarter of the global average (Environment Canada says: “Water stress begins when there is less than 1,700 cubic metres per person per year”); and people in at least four provinces along the Huaihe River, China’s third longest, must add sugar or salt before drinking their water or else buy the bottled variety, “despite the arduous efforts made in the past ten years” to reduce pollution levels.
Then there’s India, where in provinces like Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, “an average of 70 per cent of available groundwater has been used... while the districts of Jalandhar and Kapurthala have mined a shocking 254 and 204 per cent [of their groundwater reserves last year] respectively.” In other words, every year India sucks more water out of the ground than Mother Nature can replenish. Even non-math types like me will draw ominous conclusions from this dilemma born of sheer volume. And India’s Central Groundwater Board “assesses only water quantity, not its quality,” which is a whole other ballgame.
Canadians of course remain oblivious to the impending crisis but our comfort level may soon prove illusory. Bottled water consumption has jumped 57 per cent in the last five years, reaching 154 billion litres in 2004 according to Earth-Policy.org. And our very own Great Lakes are the best watering hole around. Jim Olson, an environmental attorney in Michigan, criticized the Great Lakes states for allowing the sale of their water. “We’re banning diversions, but on the other hand we’re loosening up the law in a way that will allow exports,” he said in December. But let no law prohibit profits.
Earth-policy.org calls “the potential for further growth in the market staggering.” Each Chinese citizen need only consume 100 eight-once glasses of bottled water per year to become the world’s leading consumer (31 billion litres). And their demand has doubled in the last five years, reaching almost 12 billion litres; it’s tripled in India over the same period, and neither country makes the top 15 in per capita consumption. In Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico (all of whom are in the top 15) the consumption per person has increased “by 44-50 per cent between 1999 and 2004.”
With urban populations more than tripling from 1950 to 2000, to 2.86 billion, it can safely be assumed that the pollution concomitant with this trend will only get worse: most of the growth will be in developing nations where environmental protection is often sacrificed on the altar of profitable industrialization. “By 2020,” says a 2001 UN report, “77 per cent of the global urban population (3.26 billion) is expected to be in developing countries.” All you visionary investors might want to consider rainwater-catchers.
–Leonardo da Vinci
Mulling over the Canadian media's extensive coverage of last week’s Cancun summit I wondered if there wasn’t a more pressing issue south of the Rio Grande, something besides international murder investigations, softwood lumber disputes or Mexicans illegally burrowing their way into California and Texas. As it turned out, there was: but you’d never have guessed it given the paucity of coverage. On March 22, World Water Day, the fourth World Water Forum concluded in Mexico City. It had attracted nearly 20,000 participants, plenty of activists, 120 nations and addressed both the quality and quantity of our most vital resource. The paucity of coverage inversely reflected the gravity of our situation. Consider some of what came out of Mexico City:
Radical youths were blamed for outbreaks of violence.
• More than one billion people currently have no access to safe drinking water, and an estimated 2.7 billion, or one third of the world’s population, will face major water shortages by 2025.
• Sanitation services vary [across the region] and treating wastewater remains a major challenge for some Latin American countries.
• 41 million Europeans do not have access to safe water.
• 300 million Africans currently lack access to basic water and sanitation.
• The Middle East has the world’s lowest per capita share of water, which is further declining, with absolute scarcity expected by 2025.
Yet the forum’s participants failed to declare “the right to safe, clean drinking water as a human right.” Moreover, given the increased problems associated with urbanization, industrialization and population growth, we can only expect things to get worse. Since a PetroChina chemical factory leaked 100 tonnes of benzene and nitrobenzene into the Songhua River four months ago, depriving 3.8 million citizens of their only source of fresh water for five days, there have been another 73 major spills and the Ministry of Water Resources “estimates that 40 per cent of water in China’s 1,300 major waterways is fit only for industrial or agricultural use.” And it gets worse.
Of China’s 600 cities, 110 are facing serious shortages; the available fresh water per capita is 2,300 cubic metres, a quarter of the global average (Environment Canada says: “Water stress begins when there is less than 1,700 cubic metres per person per year”); and people in at least four provinces along the Huaihe River, China’s third longest, must add sugar or salt before drinking their water or else buy the bottled variety, “despite the arduous efforts made in the past ten years” to reduce pollution levels.
Then there’s India, where in provinces like Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, “an average of 70 per cent of available groundwater has been used... while the districts of Jalandhar and Kapurthala have mined a shocking 254 and 204 per cent [of their groundwater reserves last year] respectively.” In other words, every year India sucks more water out of the ground than Mother Nature can replenish. Even non-math types like me will draw ominous conclusions from this dilemma born of sheer volume. And India’s Central Groundwater Board “assesses only water quantity, not its quality,” which is a whole other ballgame.
Canadians of course remain oblivious to the impending crisis but our comfort level may soon prove illusory. Bottled water consumption has jumped 57 per cent in the last five years, reaching 154 billion litres in 2004 according to Earth-Policy.org. And our very own Great Lakes are the best watering hole around. Jim Olson, an environmental attorney in Michigan, criticized the Great Lakes states for allowing the sale of their water. “We’re banning diversions, but on the other hand we’re loosening up the law in a way that will allow exports,” he said in December. But let no law prohibit profits.
Earth-policy.org calls “the potential for further growth in the market staggering.” Each Chinese citizen need only consume 100 eight-once glasses of bottled water per year to become the world’s leading consumer (31 billion litres). And their demand has doubled in the last five years, reaching almost 12 billion litres; it’s tripled in India over the same period, and neither country makes the top 15 in per capita consumption. In Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico (all of whom are in the top 15) the consumption per person has increased “by 44-50 per cent between 1999 and 2004.”
With urban populations more than tripling from 1950 to 2000, to 2.86 billion, it can safely be assumed that the pollution concomitant with this trend will only get worse: most of the growth will be in developing nations where environmental protection is often sacrificed on the altar of profitable industrialization. “By 2020,” says a 2001 UN report, “77 per cent of the global urban population (3.26 billion) is expected to be in developing countries.” All you visionary investors might want to consider rainwater-catchers.
posted by jp at 11:00
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