Starting Points: water management

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Jan 8, 2010

Mideast Water Crisis Brings Misery, Uncertainty

Hadi Mizban/AP

January 7, 2010

The Middle East is facing its worst water crisis in decades. For three summers, the annual rains have failed to come. Farmland has dried up across the region in Iraq, Syria, southeast Turkey and Lebanon.

While oil was the resource that defined the last century, water and its scarcity may define this one.

Experts say the climate is warming in the Fertile Crescent, the area of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, contributing to the water shortage and helping to create a new phenomenon — water refugees.

Middle East Water Woes

Droughts for several consecutive years and the damming of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have the Middle East facing its worst water crisis in decades.

This winter, rain has barely settled into the hard, cracked farmland in northern Syria. There was a time when the fields were green most of the year, but the summer droughts have taken a toll. Farther east is the Badia, a vast rangeland, where thousands of people tend herds of sheep.

Addami is a traditional village where the houses are white domes of baked clay. This summer, Addami was completely abandoned during the driest months.

"There was no water and too much sand," says villager Nofa Hamid, 51, who has been tending sheep since she was a child. "It got into everything, even the kitchen."

"It was crazy; the sand was everywhere this summer," she says.

Life has never been easy in Addami. But Ismar Mohammed, a 43-year-old shepherd wrapped in a black wool robe against the cold, says he was wealthy by local standards as the owner of the area's largest herd.

He had to drive his flock more than 150 miles for water. With no luck and no grass, he had to buy feed for his 275 sheep, and that meant he had to sell some of them to feed the rest.

"No question, I had to do this otherwise they would die, and I had to feed my kids. Before the drought, I used to have 400 head," he says.

"No question, we were doing fine, just except for this drought, which is affecting us very badly," he says."

'Perfect Storm' Creates Water Refugees

More than 160 villages are abandoned now in Syria alone. According to a United Nations report on the drought, 800,000 people have lost their livelihood. Hundreds of thousands left once-fertile land that turned to dust and pitched tents near the big cities, looking for any kind of work.

Enlarge Deborah Amos/NPR

Nofa Hamid, 51, has been tending sheep since she was a child. Her Syrian village, Addami, was completely abandoned during the driest months of the drought. "It was crazy; the sand was everywhere this summer," she says.

"It's an emergency," says Syrian economist Nabil Sukkar. "If we have two more years of drought, then we do ... have a crisis."

Formerly with the World Bank, Sukkar now heads a private consulting firm for development and investment. He has been researching the emergency, including its economic and social costs.

"I've gone out and I saw some people in the tents. I told them, 'From where you are coming? How do you manage?' They said, 'We find short-term work,' but this is not sustainable," he says.

The mass migration to the cities has created a new community of displaced people across Syria and Iraq.

"Water scarcity is forcing people off the land," says Hussein Amery, an expert on Middle East water management and a professor at the Colorado School of Mines.

He says the policy failures that have made the emergency worse. "Therefore, these refugees are very much water refugees, they are a product of water scarcity in the region," Amery says.

He says the water crisis has been building for years.

"The water refugees are a product of climate change, mismanaged water resources. It's a product of population explosion; it's a lot of things. It's a perfect storm that is wreaking havoc in the rural farming sector of Syria and Iraq," he says.

Changing History Of Outdated Techniques, Waste

Due east of the Syrian capital, Damascus, is the city of Palmyra, a popular tourist destination. The city's ancient Roman ruins are a draw for Japanese tourists — and a livelihood for the locals.

Palmyra, hit hard by the drought, is also the headquarters for the Syrian government response. Emergency measures include food aid for families and low-cost loans for farmers.

At the government office for development, Mohsan Nahas says Palmyra is experimenting with new water-saving techniques.

"I have talked about the oasis we've been setting up. That's being done with drip irrigation," he says.

Nahas offers visitors a slideshow to illustrate what he is up against — a dust storm so large it could be seen from space on Google Earth. Conditions on the ground were intolerable: Sand blew into houses, mixing with food and affecting people's eyesight.

With the widespread drought, a food crisis is looming. For the first time, Syria now has to import wheat.

Sukkar, the economist, says things won't get better unless the country changes a history of wasteful water management and outdated farming techniques.

"Unfortunately, we haven't introduced modern technology, and so we are dependent on rainfall, period," he says.

Politics, Not Climate, At Root Of Problem

But rainfall, or lack of it, is not the only culprit, he says. Syria and Iraq blame Turkey's huge network of dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for reducing water supplies by 50 percent.

Turkey is the site of the headwaters of a river system that Syria and Iraq depend on. An informal agreement determines the flow downstream.

"When we had bad relations with Turkey, they reduced the flow of water despite the agreement, and now, thank God, we have excellent relations with Turkey, and hopefully, we will not see any cutoff of water," Sukkar says.

Turkey says there is enough water for everyone, but Syria and Iraq waste their share. Amery, the water expert, says the Turks are partly right.

"The issue is water but it goes far beyond water," he says.

Amery says the key to head off a water crisis is more efficient management of a scarce resource. But he adds politics, not climate, is the problem.

"A lot of Arabs believe that Turkey is trying to assert itself as a regional superpower," he says, "and water is being used as a tool to advance that interest."

Related NPR Stories
Obscured By War, Water Crisis Looms In Yemen Nov. 20, 2009
Drought Withers Iraqi Farms, Food Supplies Sep. 3, 2009
Iraq's Marshlands Face A Second Death By Drought March 9, 2009
Farming Is Latest Casualty In Drought-Stricken Iraq Aug. 6, 2008
Water, Food Shortages Squeeze Yemen June 3, 2008
Jordan Faces Major Water Shortage Aug. 14, 2007

Dec 17, 2009

Dams and Development Threaten the Mekong

Image via Wikipedia

By THOMAS FULLER

SOP RUAK, Thailand — Basket loads of fish, villagers bathing along the banks of the river, a farmer’s market selling jungle delicacies — these are Pornlert Prompanya’s boyhood memories of a wild and pristine Mekong River.

Mr. Pornlert — now 32 and the owner of a company that organizes speedboat outings for tourists in this village in northern Thailand, where Myanmar and Laos converge — peers across the Mekong today at a more modern picture: a newly constructed, gold-domed casino where high-rollers are chauffeured along the riverbanks in a Bentley and a stretch Cadillac limousine.

The Mekong has long held a mystique for outsiders, whether American G.I.’s in the Delta during the Vietnam War or ill-starred 19th-century French explorers who searched for the river’s source in Tibet. The earliest visitors realized the hard way that the river was untamed and treacherous, its waterfalls and rapids ensuring it would never become Southeast Asia’s Mississippi or Rhine.

Image via Wikipedia

But today the river, which courses 3,032 miles through portions of China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam before emptying into the South China Sea, is rapidly being transformed by a rising tide of economic development, the region’s thirst for electricity and the desire to use the river as a cargo thoroughfare. The Mekong has been spared the pollution that blackens many of Asia’s great rivers, but it is no longer the backwater of centuries past.

China has built three hydroelectric dams on the Mekong (known as the Lancang in Chinese) and is halfway through a fourth at Xiaowan, which when completed will be the world’s tallest dam, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

Image via Wikipedia

Laos is planning so many dams on the Mekong and its tributaries — 7 of about 70 have been completed — that government officials have said that their ambition is to turn the country into “the battery of Asia.” Cambodia is planning two dams.

At the same time, the dashed dreams of French colonizers to use the river as a southern gateway to China are being partly realized: After Chinese engineers dynamited a series of rapids and rocks in the early part of this decade, trade by riverboat between China and Thailand increased by close to 50 percent.

The cargo passes through increasingly populated areas, erstwhile sleepy cities in Laos that are now teeming with tourists and defying the economic downturn with swinging construction cranes. Many parts of the Mekong were once a star-gazer’s dream; now nights on the river are increasingly aglare with electric lights.

Environmentalists worry that the rush to develop the Mekong, particularly the dams, is not only changing the panorama of the river but could also destroy the livelihoods of people who have depended on it for centuries. One of the world’s most bountiful rivers is under threat, warns a series of reports by the United Nations, environmental groups and academics.

The most controversial aspects of the dams are their effects on migrating fish and on the rice-growing Mekong Delta in Vietnam, where half of that country’s food is grown. The delta depends on mineral-rich silt, which the Chinese dams are partially blocking.

Experts say the new crop of dams will block even more sediment and the many types of fish that travel great distances to spawn, damaging the $2 billion Mekong fishing industry, according to the Mekong River Commission, an advisory body set up in 1995 by the governments of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Of the hundreds of fish species in the river, 87 percent are migratory, according to a 2006 study.

“The fish will have nowhere to go,” said Kaew Suanpad, a 78-year-old farmer and fisherman in the village of Nagrasang, Laos, which sits above the river’s great Khone Falls.

“The dams are a very big issue for the 60 million people in the Mekong basin,” said Milton Osborne, visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney and the author of several books on the Mekong. “People depend in very substantial ways on the bounty of the Mekong.”

Some analysts see the seeds of international conflict in the rush to dam the river. Civic groups in Thailand say they are frustrated that China does not seem to care how its dams affect the lives of people downstream.

In August, the Vietnamese province of An Giang began a “Save the Mekong” campaign that opposes the construction of the dams in the lower part of the river, according to Carl Middleton, the head of the Mekong program at International Rivers, an organization campaigning against the Mekong dams.

Neither China nor military-ruled Myanmar, the two northernmost countries through which the river passes, are members of the Mekong River Commission, freeing them from the obligation to consult other countries on issues such as building dams and sharing water.

And yet, for now, the dams are not national preoccupations in any of the countries along the river.

“Most of the voices that are shouting in the wilderness about these dams are still very little heard outside of academic circles,” Mr. Osbourne said.

There have been no major protests and for many people in the region the dams are the symbol of progress and avenues to greater prosperity. The development of the Mekong is also an affirmation of a new Asia that is no longer hidebound by ideological conflict.

Jeremy Bird, the chief executive officer of the Mekong River Commission, says the dams are likely to even out the flow of the river, mitigating flooding and making the river even more navigable.

“You could have launches like you have on the Rhine,” Mr. Bird said. He added: “With dams there are always negatives and positives.”

For Mr. Pornlert, whose boyhood village of Sop Ruak has now grown into a town with five-star resorts and restaurants catering to tourists, the negatives seem to outweigh the good.

He says the river behaves unpredictably, it is more difficult to catch fish, and he is uneasy about swimming in the river because there is “too much trash and pollution.”

“The water level used to depend on the seasons,” Mr. Pornlert said. “Now it depends on how much water China wants and needs.”

Nov 15, 2009

Washington Times - Yemen's capital running out of water

Image by Ahron de Leeuw via Flickr

Heather Murdock THE WASHINGTON TIMES

SAN'A, Yemen | Five years ago, Hussein Saleh al-Ayni's well was full.

He grew onions, garlic and other vegetables in his garden and sold them for $30 a day.

Now, a slight breeze blows beige dust where crops once grew. An old tire and a yellow bottle of cooking oil poke out of the mud at the bottom of the well. Mr. al-Ayni drives a motorcycle taxi and supports his wife and two children on about $5 a day.

"I just make enough for daily food," he said.

Water shortages can be felt in every corner of Yemen's capital. Gardens are dry, and water trucks crisscross the city to deliver to households that can afford it. Those who cannot send women and children to line up at mosque spigots.

With well levels dropping as much as 65 feet a year, many Yemenis and outside specialists predict that San'a will become the first capital city to run out of groundwater. The shortages pose a special challenge in an impoverished nation that is already fighting two insurgencies and al Qaeda.

"The problem is not in the future," said Saleh Aziz, a Yemeni farmer who heads the Hamdan Water Association. "We are suffering now."

Ten years ago, there was 20 percent more rainfall in San'a — 9.84 inches per year compared to 7.87 inches now, according to a water resource specialist at San'a University, Abdullah Al-Numan.

Other parts of Yemen receive less than a third of the water they received a decade ago, dropping from 11.81 inches a year on average to 3.93 inches, he said.

When rain does come, the timing is unpredictable and the concentration so heavy that the water's value is lost, he said. In some areas, the entire yearly rainfall can now happen in a matter of days. Last year 58 people were killed and 20,000 people fled their homes in October floods.

The drought extends into East Africa and is the worst in the region since 2000, according to the Economist magazine. Yemen is among about 50 countries, mostly in the Middle East and Africa, that are facing water shortages owing largely to population increase and climate change. One in six people on the planet do not have enough clean water to drink. By 2025, the United Nations predicts, about two-thirds of the world's population will live in areas where water is scarce.

In Yemen, most homes do not have running water and about a third of the population of 22 million has no access to safe, clean water, according to the U.N.

International efforts to slow the crisis in Yemen have failed, according to Ramon Scoble, a water-resource specialist for the German development agency GTZ.

The United States, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and the World Bank pump tens of millions of dollars into Yemeni water projects each year. But a lack of government will and capability, coupled with a population that is largely uneducated about water issues and resistant to change, have crippled efforts to build a sustainable water system, he said.

In the capital, Mr. Scoble estimates that the population consumes 10 to 20 times the water replenished by rainfall.

"There are families out there that are literally drinking sewage here in San'a," he said.

The future looks even bleaker. Yemen's population is expected to double in the next 20 years. Climate change could mean even less rainfall for a country afflicted with drought for years.

Three current armed conflicts in Yemen, while not directly caused by water shortages, are a sign of the times, Mr. Scoble said. Government forces are battling a Shi'ite Muslim insurgency in the north, secessionists in the south and al Qaeda adherents in the ungoverned countryside.

Water protests are also turning violent. In late August, one person was killed and three were injured in a riot after water access was cut in several districts in the southern port city of Aden.

Besides the growing population and diminished rainfall, rapid urbanization, traditional farming practices and plain old waste are to blame for the crisis, according to Saleh al-Dubby, director of the San'a Basin Water Management Project, which is funded by the World Bank.

As villages dry out, people flock to the cities, further taxing already strained resources. And because city planners cannot keep up with the influx, families dig their own toilets, polluting the groundwater.

Those who remain in arid rural areas buy water from trucks. Farmers say the price of water has tripled in the past four years, and the quality of life in Yemen, already one of the world's poorest countries, is dropping as fast as the water table.

But it is difficult to convince farmers to adopt modern irrigation systems, Mr. al-Dubby said. Farmers, accustomed to flooding their fields many times a year, have a hard time believing that drip-irrigation systems will grow their crops.

"If I am a farmer, I can't imagine that will be enough for my plants," he said.

The most profitable crop in Yemen - khat, a mildly narcotic leaf that is wildly popular here — consumes about a third of the country's water supply, maybe more.

Most Yemeni men spend hours a day chewing the leaves, which saps productivity in every sector, including the government, Mr. Scoble said. The national addiction also makes farmers and government officials reluctant to change.

"We're in Yemen, and almost everything is 'insh'allah, bukra' ["God willing, tomorrow"], except [khat] o'clock," he wrote in an e-mail.

Yahiya al-Hubaishi, a khat farmer, picked leaves off his trees and added them to the tennis-ball sized wad in his cheek. Mr. al-Hubaishi, who also grows grapes and tomatoes in a rocky valley on the outskirts of the capital, said he floods his fields about 13 times a year and that no one has suggested he abandon this traditional method of irrigation.

"The water will not finish," he said. "There is still rain."

But experts say the groundwater will disappear if these practices continue. Even if Yemen could afford to build desalination plants, that would not provide enough water to support agriculture, the mainstay of an overwhelming majority of Yemenis.

Increasing unemployment could boost al Qaeda recruitment in the country of Osama bin Laden's father's birth and produce a host of other ills, from mass migration to food shortages to crippling women's rights.

Johan Kuylenstierna, a specialist on water issues for the U.N., notes that millions of women and girls in water-scarce countries walk for hours a day to fetch water. They carry it home balanced on their heads in 45-pound jerry cans, sometimes climbing mountains late at night.

Girls miss school to collect water and often drop out when they reach puberty because there are no gender-specific toilets, or no toilets at all, he said. Women with no bathrooms go to the outskirts of villages for privacy and are often victims of rape or other attacks.

"You're outside alone, unprotected," Mr. Kuylenstierna said. "You are a very easy target."

Malik al-Amari, who drives a water truck in San'a, moved to the city from a distant village that is now close to uninhabitable. Five years ago, a pump drew water from a local well 24 hours a day. Now, the pump runs dry after two hours, he said.

But villagers are still not conserving water, Mr. al-Amari said, as he leaned against his pink-and-blue-painted metal water truck. He glanced at a crowd of noisy children climbing on his truck, and crossed his arms.

"I'm scared for the whole country," he said.

Nov 1, 2009

Thirsty Plant Dries Out Yemen - NYTimes.com

Image by Ferdinand Reus via Flickr

By ROBERT F. WORTH

JAHILIYA, Yemen — More than half of this country’s scarce water is used to feed an addiction.

Even as drought kills off Yemen’s crops, farmers in villages like this one are turning increasingly to a thirsty plant called qat, the leaves of which are chewed every day by most Yemeni men (and some women) for their mild narcotic effect. The farmers have little choice: qat is the only way to make a profit.

Meanwhile, the water wells are running dry, and deep, ominous cracks have begun opening in the parched earth, some of them hundreds of yards long.

“They tell us it’s because the water table is sinking so fast,” said Muhammad Hamoud Amer, a worn-looking farmer who has lost two-thirds of his peach trees to drought in the past two years. “Every year we have to drill deeper and deeper to get water.”

Across Yemen, the underground water sources that sustain 24 million people are running out, and some areas could be depleted in just a few years. It is a crisis that threatens the very survival of this arid, overpopulated country, and one that could prove deadlier than the better known resurgence of Al Qaeda here.

Water scarcity afflicts much of the Middle East, but Yemen’s poverty and lawlessness make the problem more serious and harder to address, experts say. The government now supplies water once every 45 days in some urban areas, and in much of the country there is no public water supply at all. Meanwhile, the market price of water has quadrupled in the past four years, pushing more and more people to drill illegally into rapidly receding aquifers.

“It is a collapse with social, economic and environmental aspects,” said Abdul Rahman al-Eryani, Yemen’s minister of water and environment. “We are reaching a point where we don’t even know if the interventions we are proposing will save the situation.”

Making matters far worse is the proliferation of qat trees, which have replaced other crops across much of the country, taking up a vast and growing share of water, according to studies by the World Bank. The government has struggled to limit drilling by qat farmers, but to no effect. The state has little authority outside the capital, Sana.

Already, the lack of water is fueling tribal conflicts and insurgencies, Mr. Eryani said. Those conflicts, including a widening armed rebellion in the north and a violent separatist movement in the south, in turn make it more difficult to address the water crisis in an organized way. Many parts of the country are too dangerous for government engineers or hydrologists to venture into.

Climate change is deepening the problem, making seasonal rains less reliable and driving up average temperatures in some areas, said Jochen Renger, a water resources specialist with the German government’s technical assistance arm, who has been advising the water ministry for five years.

Unlike some other arid countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Yemen lacks the money to invest heavily in desalination plants. Even wastewater treatment has proved difficult in Yemen. The plants have been managed poorly, and some clerics have declared the reuse of wastewater to be a violation of Islamic principles.

At the root of the water crisis — as with so many of the ills affecting the Middle East — is rapid population growth, experts say. The number of Yemenis has quadrupled in the last half century, and is expected to triple again in the next 40 years, to about 60 million.

In rural areas, people can often be seen gathering drinking water from cloudy, stagnant cisterns where animals drink. Even in parts of Sana, the poor cluster to gather runoff from privately owned local wells as their wealthier neighbors pay the equivalent of $10 for a 3,000 liter-truckload of water.

“At least 1,000 people depend on this well,” said Hassan Yahya al-Khayari, 38, as he stood watching water pour from a black rubber tube into a tanker truck near his home in Sana. “But the number of people is rising, and the water is growing less and less.”

For millenniums, Yemen preserved traditions of careful water use. Farmers depended mostly on rainwater collection and shallow wells. In some areas they built dams, including the great Marib dam in northern Yemen, which lasted for more than 1,000 years until it collapsed in the sixth century A.D.

But traditional agriculture began to fall apart in the 1960s after Yemen was flooded with cheap foreign grain, which put many farmers out of business. Qat began replacing food crops, and in the late 1960s, motorized drills began to proliferate, allowing farmers and villagers to pump water from underground aquifers much faster than it could be replaced through natural processes. The number of drills has only grown since they were outlawed in 2002.

Despite the destructive effects of qat, the Yemeni government supports it, through diesel subsidies, loans and customs exemptions, Mr. Eryani said. It is illegal to import qat, and powerful growers known here as the “qat mafia” have threatened to shoot down any planes bringing in cheaper qat from abroad.

Still, the water crisis could be eased substantially through a return to rainwater collection and better management, Mr. Renger said. Between 20 and 30 percent of Yemen’s water is lost through waste, he said, compared with 7 to 9 percent in Europe.

In Jahiliya and other areas around the capital, the World Bank is leading a project to change wasteful irrigation patterns.

Mr. Amer, the farmer based here, proudly showed visitors his efforts to irrigate fruit and tomato fields using rubber tubes, instead of just funneling it through earthen ditches that allow most of the water to evaporate unused. Little hoses spray the crops with water instead of wastefully soaking them.

But he also pointed out two local wells where the water is dropping at the astonishing rate of almost 60 feet a year, causing the land to subside. Nearby, sinkholes in the arid soil of his property are growing longer and deeper every year.

“We have been suffering for years from this,” he said, gesturing at a cast-off drill rig that broke after going down too deep into the earth.

The Yemeni engineers working on the World Bank project concede they have had tremendous difficulty convincing other farmers — and even government agencies — to take their efforts seriously.

“There is no coordination with other parts of the government, even after we explain the dangers,” said Ali Hassan Awad. “Prosecutors don’t understand that drilling is a serious problem.”

Mr. Eryani, the water minister, takes the long view. Yemen has suffered ecological crises before and survived. The collapse of the Marib dam, for instance, led to a famine that pushed vast numbers of people to migrate abroad, and their descendants are now scattered across the Middle East.

“But that was before national borders were established,” Mr. Eryani added. “If we face a similar catastrophe now, who will allow us to move?”

Sep 13, 2009

Singapore's All Wet - Time

Image via Wikipedia

By Neel Chowdhury

In Singapore, there is water everywhere and, belying the old adage, almost every drop can be drunk. Much of Singapore's water falls from the sky. Stand outside in the afternoon, when dark thunderclouds usually roll by, and you will probably get drenched. An average of 7.9 ft. of rain falls on Singapore annually, nearly 2½ times the global average. Moreover, this small, chestnut-shaped, 268-sq.-mi. island is surrounded by water, albeit the salty kind.

Hot, equatorial, but with limited groundwater, Singapore has made itself a global paragon of water conservation by harvesting--and reusing--the aqueous bounty of its skies and, to a lesser extent, its surrounding seas. "It is an exemplary model of integrated water management," said Lars Gunnarsson of the Stockholm International Water Institute in the citation given to Singapore's national water agency when it won the 2007 Stockholm Water Industry Award. "The story would fit well as a study example in the education of water managers."

Water is chronically in short supply in the world's megacities. In the arid Western U.S., cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix are in constant legal scrapes over access to the stuff, and there are strict rules for homeowners about usage. By 2025, 1 in 2 Africans could face water scarcity, leading to potential water wars between countries. Chronic shortages are also expected in Asia. And groundwater supplies in three of India's most productive agrarian states are rapidly shrinking.

Singapore's success story, like many happy ones, began in struggle. "When you have your back against the wall, you come out fighting," says Sam Ong, deputy CEO of Hyflux, a Singapore-based water-treatment company. "That's how Singapore is with water." The fight dates back to several old water agreements with Malaysia, the country Singapore acrimoniously broke away from in 1965--which ensured that as of Singapore's independence, 80% of its freshwater supply came from Malaysia through fat steel pipes across a causeway. Yet soon after Singapore signed the agreements over the course of 1961 and 1962, it began formulating Plan B. Fearing that its erstwhile master would use water as a "lever of pressure," as Singapore's first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, put it in his memoirs, the country has searched for more than 40 years for ways to wean itself off foreign water.

It has succeeded. Even though roughly 40% of the country's freshwater still comes from Malaysia, by building a sophisticated network of rivulets, storm drains and canals, Singapore has made itself into a vast catchment area for the thundershowers that regularly soak it. "We are a large-scale urban storm harvester" is how Khoo Teng Chye, chief executive of Singapore's PUB (formerly known as Public Utilities Board), puts it. "We do not have any groundwater, but we do get a lot of rain," Khoo says. "That was the starting point of our efforts."

And Singapore purifies and recycles what it captures, including sewage. Here's how it works: More than half the island is crisscrossed by a grid of drains that not only prevent flooding, to which low-lying Singapore is prone, but more important, capture rainwater. That rainwater eventually flows into canals. From the canals, the water runs to one of several reservoirs and then to a treatment plant, where it is purified for home use. The wastewater, meanwhile, runs into a gigantic underground pipe, nearly as wide as a subway tunnel, that traverses the length of Singapore. To speed the water flow, this giant pipe tilts progressively downward, reaching a depth of 230 ft. By that point, hundreds of millions of gallons of water have arrived below a lip of reclaimed land on the easternmost edge of Singapore. There, a newly opened $2.5 billion water plant pumps the water back to the surface and treats it, discharging some of it out to sea and treating some of it further for use in factories. Not only are rainwater and wastewater efficiently "harvested" in this way, officials point out, but the system also makes every Singaporean water-conscious. "We want to promote the idea that the water that falls on your roof, patio or car park is eventually used," says the PUB's Khoo. "This ensures the environment is kept clean."

The government's enlightened policies have developed an expertise in water management that has spawned a host of profitable companies. Chief among them is Hyflux, a water-treatment company that purifies waste-, salt- and rainwater. Hyflux was started in 1989 by a chemistry graduate named Olivia Lum, who grew up so poor in a Malaysian village that rains regularly flooded her grandmother's small wooden house.

The company struggled for nearly half a decade. Then came the penguins. "To convince Singapore [that it could treat water], we tried our first project in a bird park with the penguin tank," explains Hyflux's Ong. Because penguins are used to pristine arctic water, the water in their tank needed to be continuously cleaned. The penguins were pleased enough by Hyflux that the company was allowed to recycle part of Singapore's wastewater into drinking water, which has in turn propelled Hyflux from a start-up into a global player in water treatment. Its systems are now used in cities such as Tianjin, China, and Magtaa, Algeria.

Hyflux's membrane technology shows that even the dirtiest water can be cleaned. Seawater in Singapore, for instance, is first dosed with acids to adjust alkaline levels and then cleaned of contaminants like oil and grease. The water passes through a sieve of sand that removes silt. Then it is shot through a stringy honeycomb of plastic membranes at high pressure, which "polishes" the water, Ong says. In the case of desalination in Singapore, Ong adds, the water becomes so clean that minerals have to be restored for it to be consumed. In 2008, Hyflux reported net profits of $40 million, a 79% increase over the previous year, on revenues of roughly $382 million. Hyflux's stock has jumped almost twentyfold since its public listing in 2001.

Not all of Singapore's water babies harbor such commercial promise. To highlight its prowess at converting wastewater into drinking water, the government created a drink called NEWater and packaged it in colorful plastic bottles. Although it's copiously drunk by Singaporean government ministers, often at media-saturated events like the country's National Day celebrations, brands like Evian and Perrier have little to fear. Singapore's officials are more interested in making a point than a dollar, the point being that water is a valuable, renewable resource.

The country's painstaking efforts to become self-sufficient in water have worked. The first of the water agreements with Malaysia, which expires in 2011, is not likely to be renewed, according to a book sponsored by the Singapore government. Equally important, by using so much of its land to capture rainwater, Singapore has made its citizens environmental stewards who take responsibility for conserving resources. "It's a passion," says Albert Phee, a 49-year-old IT expert who has persuaded his family to turn off the shower while shampooing and reuse the water he washes his car with for flushing the toilet. "Once I've started, I can't stop."

Aug 18, 2009

Water crisis to hit Asian food

Scientists have warned Asian countries that they face chronic food shortages and likely social unrest if they do not improve water management.

The water experts are meeting at a UN-sponsored conference in Sweden.

They say countries in south and east Asia must spend billions of dollars to improve antiquated crop irrigation to cope with rapid population increases.

That estimate does not yet take into account the possible impact of global warming on water supplies, they said.

Asia's population is forecast to increase by 1.5bn people over the next 40 years.

Going hungry

The findings are published in a new joint report by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).

They suggest that Asian countries will need to import more than a quarter of their rice and other staples to feed their populations.

"Asia's food and feed demand is expected to double by 2050," said IWMI director general Colin Chartres.

"Relying on trade to meet a large part of this demand will impose a huge and politically untenable burden on the economies of many developing countries.

"The best bet for Asia lies in revitalising its vast irrigation systems, which account for 70% of the world's total irrigated land," he said.

“ Without water productivity gains, South Asia would need 57% more water for irrigated agriculture and East Asia 70% more. ”
Report by UN Food and Agricultural Organisation and the International Water Management Institute

With new agricultural land in short supply, the solution, he said, is to intensify irrigation methods, modernising old systems built in the 1970s and 1980s.

But that, he says will require billions of dollars of investment.

'Scary scenarios'

At the same time as needing to import more food, the prices of those cereals are likely to continue to rise due to increasingly volatile international markets.

The report says millions of farmers have taken the responsibility for irrigation into their own hands, mainly using out-of-date and inefficient pump technology.

This means they can extract as much water as they like from their land, draining a precious natural resource.

"Governments' inability to regulate this practice is giving rise to scary scenarios of groundwater over-exploitation, which could lead to regional food crises and widespread social unrest," said the IWMI's Tushaar Shah, a co-author of the report.

Asian governments must join with the private sector to invest in modern, and more efficient methods of using water, the study concluded.

"Without water productivity gains, south Asia would need 57% more water for irrigated agriculture and east Asia 70% more," the study found.

"Given the scarcity of land and water, and growing water needs for cities, such a scenario is untenable," it said.

The scenarios forecast do not factor in the impact of global warming, which will likely make rainfall more erratic and less plentiful in some agricultural regions over the coming decades.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/8206466.stm

Published: 2009/08/18