The world needs to work together and find a solution to the supply and demand of such a vital resource.
In April last year, conditions of extreme drought forced the US state of California to issue restrictions on water use for the first time.
The governor, Jerry Brown, announced the tough measures high in the Nevada Mountains, while standing symbolically on slopes bare of the deep snow in which they would usually be carpeted.
“This historic drought demands unprecedented action,” he said. “As Californians, we must pull together and save water in every way possible.”
It was similar story in other parts of the world, including Korea, southern Africa and Brazil, which began last year suffering the worst drought the country has known.
Elsewhere, flooding from rainfall caused misery for millions, from southern India, Malaysia and 13 US states to the UK, Argentina and parts of Africa.
This is Earth’s apparently intractable water enigma: how to access, manage and evenly distribute sufficient supplies of a vital resource that is abundantly available, though all too often found in the wrong place or at the wrong time.
“Climate change manifests largely through water and exacerbates existing challenges,” said Vincent Casey, technical support manager for water security for the charity WaterAid.
“Not just too much water but also too little, as in droughts; at the wrong time, as in delayed seasons or shock weather events like cyclones; and in poor quality, as in salty or polluted water.
“Water security should not be thought of only in terms of the presence or absence of water.”
No one is expecting a magic bullet solution to this issue to emerge from this month’s International Water Summit – hosted this week in Abu Dhabi by Masdar, the UAE’s pacesetting clean-energy company – but what is becoming apparent from the deliberations of experts at such gatherings is that, in the developed and developing world, the solution to water crises lies as much in the intelligent management of supplies as it does in the development of alternative sources and methods of production.
Nowhere is the issue of water supply of more pressing concern than in the Gulf region, where booming economies and rising populations are putting increasing strain on limited resources.
A report last year by Al Jazeera Centre for Studies found that in the past decade demand for water in the GCC had risen 140 per cent in a region where resources were “already diminishing due to droughts, low rainfall and the prevalent climate”.
Unlike some countries with inadequate natural water supplies, the UAE can – for now, at least – afford to make what it needs from seawater. But demand for water in the region is escalating, and over the next five years, GCC governments are expected to have to invest up to US$300 billion in technology and increased energy-efficient seawater desalination, simply to boost capacity by a required 40 per cent by 2020.
Desalination, which traditionally consumes large amounts of energy, is a prohibitively expensive process which, in the face of rising demand, is unsustainable in the long run – and beyond the reach of many poorer nations.
“Desalination offers politicians a way to avoid making difficult decisions about water allocation,” said WaterAid’s Vincent Casey. “The problem is that desalination is only cost-effective if you have very cheap energy, political consensus that it is a good idea, optimal arrangements with private operators of desalination plants and minimal environmental impacts.”
When it comes to research and investment in alternative and sustainable energy processes, the record of organisations such as Masdar is second to none.
The company is developing seawater desalination technologies powered by renewable energy, aiming to have a commercial facility up and running by 2020.
While groundbreaking developments in technologies such as wind and solar power generation might conceivably have a long-term effect on the fossil fuel cost of water desalination, many experts believe an equally important part of the solution to water stress in arid regions is to rein-in the runaway demand that is the downside of rapid economic expansion.
“I am interested in exploring the extent to which the goal of sustainability in water use is dependent upon the control of demand, rather than the development of cheaper production techniques,” said Claire Yeates, director of UK-based water-management specialist Waterscan, who will be talking at the summit about the increasingly vital need for “behavioural and cultural change”.
“The treatment and supply of water is hugely energy intensive and cheaper production solutions not only have a negative effect on the energy or carbon footprint but also do not deal with the crux of the problem.”
She fears that lower oil prices may stall efforts to reduce demand for water, having the same “negative effect of cheaper production techniques, which make it exceptionally difficult to achieve true sustainability. Demand management is by far the more sustainable solution”.
But controlling demand can be a thorny task politically.
“There have been numerous debates about physically limiting volumes of water rather than attempting to do so by, say, cost,” she said. “But this is a very emotive topic and one that will not only be hard to police but is a view with which few agree.”
The alternative to rationing water use – imposing higher costs so consumers in effect ration themselves – is being practised in the UAE and is showing encouraging results.
“As oil revenues decrease and the issue of water has risen up the political agenda, governments have acted to try to dampen demand and reduce capital and operational expenditure,” said Ed James, director of content and analysis at MEED Projects, the region’s leading projects tracking service.
Earlier this year, Abu Dhabi imposed water charges for Emiratis for the first time, while raising the prices for expatriates. The move followed Dubai’s decision in 2010 to raise water tariffs, which had the immediate effect of slowing annual demand growth in the emirate from 10 per cent to 4 per cent.
There are other weapons to wield besides price rises, said Ms Yeates, such as “proven technologies to control demand that can have a significant effect on the water volume requirement for everyday use, both domestic and commercial, which are low cost and can be retrofitted”.
One innovative example of demand management, installed by Waterscan, is up and running in Abu Dhabi.
All the mains water that is used for washing, showers or baths, instead of being flushed back into the wastewater system, passes through a filter system before being stored as clear water for reuse in flushing toilets, washing laundry and irrigating landscaping.
The new Premier Inn hotel at Abu Dhabi International Airport features the first greywater recycling system to be approved by the emirate’s Regulation and Supervision Bureau, and is serving as a working demonstration of the vast savings in money and water that the UAE’s hospitality sector, and wider industry, could be making.
Water is responsible for about 10 per cent of any hotel’s utility overheads and, said Waterscan, greywater recycling can reduce consumption by 40 per cent.
Put another way, each occupied hotel room accounts for the consumption of an average of 200 litres of water a day, 80 litres of which can be saved by the technology.
Part of the beauty of the system is that there is no effect on the end user – the customer – and the company can claim green credentials in an increasingly competitive hospitality market.
The system, which “is producing great results”, will now be rolled out in all new Premier Inns built in the region.
Technology and intelligent demand management can provide solutions to the UAE’s water woes, but these pale into insignificance compared with those confronting millions in less fortunate parts of the world.
According to the World Health Organisation, by 2025 half of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed areas, while “at least 1.8 billion people use a drinking-water source contaminated with faeces” and a further “663 million rely on unimproved sources, including 159 million dependent on surface water”.
In such contaminated water can be found the causes of diseases such diarrhoea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid and polio. Diarrhoea alone, caused by contaminated drinking water, is estimated to cause 502,000 deaths each year.
Water Aid offers a statistic to consider for perspective when confronted with your next bill for water usage: around the world 900 children under five die each day from diseases caused by dirty water and poor sanitation.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, such seemingly remote issues rarely figure in the thinking of individuals or companies in countries such as the UAE. But Ms Yeates believes that the vital importance of water can be brought home in other ways, especially to industry, which accounts for the biggest proportion of water use.
“Water is not given the required consideration because of its perceived low value,” she said. The way to change that perspective was “through education and risk analysis: how would these businesses operate without water and therefore what value does water really hold in their operational supply chain?”.
The bottom line, said Mr James, is that “with growing demand and the large investments being made towards desalination projects in the region, greater awareness and discussion is needed on sustainable practice”.
Yesterday, thousands of delegates and 180 companies from 70 countries began gathering in Abu Dhabi to have that very discussion – and not a moment too soon.
As the organisers of the International Water Summit point out, “Arabian Gulf countries already have the highest per capita consumption of domestic water in the world and demand is expected to double in the next two decades”.
