Water crisis and water wars: myths and realities

Abstract

In recent decades, ‘water crisis’ and ‘water wars’ have become increasing concerns of water professionals, political scientists and the media. Both start with the simplistic and erroneous assumption that the quantity of water available in the world for human use is limited. This, coupled with the fact that population, urbanization and industrial activities are all steadily increasing, is used to predict that the world is facing a water crisis of unprecedented proportion, which may even result in wars between countries over water. Projections in recent years by major international organizations have been consistently dire. For example, in 2009, the 2030 Water Resources Group projected that the world would face 40% water deficit under a business-as-usual climate scenario. In 2016, UNEP claimed that by 2030 almost ‘half of the world’s population will suffer from severe water stress’. In 2017, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon proclaimed that by 2030 the ‘world may face 40% shortfall in water’. The World Bank has claimed that by 2050, about 1.8 billion people will be living under acute water scarcity. In 2018, the World Bank and the UN claimed that 36% of the global population lives in water-scarce areas. The World Resources Institute (WRI) claimed that 33 countries will face ‘extremely high water stress’. According to the WRI analysis, seven countries will jointly rank as number one in terms of the most water-stressed countries of the world. All of them are in the Middle East, except for Singapore. These are frightening statistics that have been repeated ad nauseam by academics, water professionals, political figures and international organizations without any serious scrutiny of the validity of their underlying assumptions, the methodology of their estimates, or the national and international data-sets available and their quality. The fundamental question that arises is, are such frightening forecasts correct, or should they be taken with a very big pinch of salt? Probabilities are, it is likely to be the latter. First, as every school kid knows, water is a renewable resource. It is not like oil, natural gas or coal, which after being used break down into different components and cannot be used again. Water, by contrast, can be used, and the wastewater generated can be treated and reused. Properly managed, this process can continue indefinitely. Thus, how much renewable water a country has is not a meaningful metric. When the World Commission on Water started its work, one of the first decisions it made was that no attempt would be made to estimate how much water a country, or the world, had that could be used, because it is not a meaningful number. How much water is available for use will depend primarily on how well this resource is managed. Yet most international and national institutions have decided that if a country has less than 1700 m per person of renewable freshwater, it is suffering from water stress. If this figure falls below 1000 m per person, it is facing scarcity. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WATER RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT 2019, VOL. 35, NO. 5, 727–731 https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2019.1636502