Water: views on its management and related challenges

Class was given by Marco Keskinen.

Numbers are strong:

• ~1 billion lack access to water, ~2.5 billion to sanitation

• ~2.3 billion suffer from diseases linked to water

• 4/5 of all diseases, 1/3 of all deaths are due to low quality domestic water.

On the other hand, I find this very interesting: Most of the world’s water is used for agriculture: on average ~70%, many developing countries ~90%.

We were asked to determine which regions are critical in terms of water scarcity in 2020. Middle East and North Africa were the first regions that came to our minds. However, as we discussed we came to another conclusion: lack of water resources is not enough to explain water scarcity phenomena. The problem turns out to be the management of water instead of the resource itself. Simply put, as the money, resources and good governance decrease, water scarcity increases.

There are examples of cities that are built in areas where water is scarce, such as Las Vegas and Dubai. Hence they don’t lack access to water resources. It seems that a city can provide water needed for sanitation and drinking to its citizens no matter how harsh the geographical conditions are. As long as agriculture is not the main source of income, a city can survive in a desert.

The concept of virtual water is an important but not a widely discussed topic: you import oranges from Middle East and you are consuming their water, indirectly. The same applies when you shop from H&M, you basically contribute to shrunk of Aral sea. Even though in most developed cities people have water abundance, their daily choices affect people living in another part of the world. I believe this is not an easy concept to perceive, and many are unaware of this.

During the class we saw the water resources with respect to five changes:

• Population growth & urbanisation

• Development issues (informal sector, polarisation, health)

• Energy production

• Climate change

• Environmental degradation

When we were asked to rank these, population growth was the foremost factor that affect water resources. This is because the other changes are closely related to and can be explained by the population growth.