Save a little water for Tomorrow by Kevin Watkins, United Nations Development Program International Herald Tribune 11:43am 18th Mar, 2006   March 17, 2006    One hundred years ago, William Mulholland introduced the citizens of California to a new concept in state politics: the water grab.    Charged with securing water supplies for a small, thirsty town in a desert, the baron of the Los Angeles Department of Water hit on an imaginative response. He quietly bought up water rights in the Owens Valley, 230 miles to the north, built an aquifer across the blistering Mojave Desert, and took the water to downtown Los Angeles. When local ranchers protested by dynamiting his aquifer, Mulholland declared war, responding with a massive show of armed force.    Nowadays southern Californians fight over water in courts of law. Angelenos have some of America"s greenest lawns and biggest swimming pools, not to mention a desert that blooms with cotton and fruit. Keeping it that way means piping in water from hundreds of miles away and draining a Colorado River so depleted that it barely reaches the sea. And it means disputing every drop of the Colorado with Arizona.    The Mulholland model represents a brutish form of what has been a global approach to water management. Want to urbanize and industrialize at breakneck speed? Then dam and divert your rivers to meet the demand. Want to expand the agricultural frontier? Then mine your aquifers and groundwaters.    This week and next, governments, international agencies and nongovernmental organizations are gathering in Mexico City at the World Water Forum to discuss the legacy of global Mulhollandism in water - and to chart a new course.    They could hardly have chosen a better location. Water is being pumped out of the aquifer on which Mexico City stands at twice the rate of replenishment. The result: the city is subsiding at the rate of about half a meter every decade. You can see the consequences in the cracked cathedrals, the tilting Palace of Arts and the broken water and sewerage pipes.    Every region of the world has its own variant of the water crisis story. The mining of groundwaters for irrigation has lowered the water table in parts of India and Pakistan by 30 meters in the past three decades. As water goes down, the cost of pumping goes up, undermining the livelihoods of poor farmers. Meanwhile, a lethal combination of water shortages, soil salination, and waterlogging threatens the breadbaskets of both countries. In India, about one quarter of grain production is based on unsustainable groundwater use.    In China, urbanization and rapid growth has lifted millions of people out of poverty. It has also left a water crisis of epic proportions. The Hai-Huai-Yellow river basin tells its own story. More than 80 percent of river lengths are chronically polluted. The basin is home to more than 400 million people and about one half of the rural poor. It produces more than half of China"s wheat and corn. And it is running out of water. Current use exceeds river flow by a third, leading to another case of groundwater overexploitation.    What is driving the global water crisis? Physical availability is part of the problem. Unlike oil or coal, water is an infinitely renewable resource, but it is available in a finite quantity. With water use increasing at twice the rate of population growth, the amount available per person is shrinking - especially in some of the poorest countries.    Over the next 25 years, the number of people living in countries with water crises will increase from 700 million to 2.2 billion, with more than half of the populations of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa affected. Factor in global warming, which could reduce rainfall in parts of sub-Saharan Africa by up to a quarter over the next century, and this is starting to look like a crisis in the making for human development.    Growing scarcity means more competition. And as William Mulholland taught us all those years ago, competition without good governance can turn ugly - especially for those without power. Conflicts between agricultural users on the one side and urban and industrial users on the other are intensifying. The danger is that the poorest farmers with the weakest voice in water management will lose out, with devastating consequences for global poverty reduction efforts.    Challenging as physical scarcity may be in some countries, the real problems in water go deeper. The 20th-century model for water management was based on a simple idea: that water is an infinitely available free resource to be exploited, dammed or diverted without reference to scarcity or sustainability.    Forty years ago, the Aral Sea covered an area the size of Belgium. Thanks to Soviet-era planners who diverted the Amu Dary and the Syr Darya rivers into cotton irrigation, it has been reduced to a couple of small, lifeless hypersaline lakes. In the United States, farmers on the High Plains are pumping water from the Ogallala aquifer - one of the world"s oldest fossil aquifers - at eight times the recharge rate. From Texas to the Punjab, groundwater mining is not only tolerated but supported by hefty subsidies directed to large farmers.    Across the world, water-based ecological systems - rivers, lakes and watersheds - have been taken beyond the frontiers of ecological sustainability by policy makers who have turned a blind eye to the consequences of over- exploitation.    We need a new model of water management for the 21st century. What does that mean? For starters, we have to stop using water like there"s no tomorrow - and that means using it more efficiently at levels that do not destroy our environment. The buzz- phrase at the Mexico Water forum is "integrated water resource management." What it means is that governments need to manage the private demand of different users and manage this precious resource in the public interest.    There is another, equally profound challenge. In an era of intensifying competition, we have to ensure that the world"s poor do not suffer an early 21st century variant of the fate of the residents of Owens Valley. That means strengthening the rights and the voice of the poor - and it means putting social justice at the center of water management.    (Kevin Watkins is the director of the United Nations Development Program"s Human Development Report Office)    WaterAid exposes international donors for ignoring world''s poorest    On UN World Water Day 2006, WaterAid has released a report exposing the international donor community for consistently failing to serve the needs of the world''s poorest people.    Who is doing their bit? reveals that in the years since world governments signed the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without access to basic water and sanitation, the proportion of total international aid to these vital services has actually decreased.    More than a billion people still get their drinking water from rivers, streams, swamps and contaminated wells. In order to meet the MDG on water, nearly 300,000 people (the population of Newcastle) would have gain access every single day for the next nine years.    Despite the urgency of the situation, analysis of data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development''s Development Assistance Committee (OECD DAC) reveals that between 2000 and 2004 the percentage of total international aid devoted to water and sanitation has dropped from 6% to 5%. Amongst the G7 countries the drop was from 7% to less than 4%. The UK''s share of direct country-to-country bilateral aid for water and sanitation fell from 3.8% to 0.86%.    Even more alarming than the failure to prioritise aid to water and sanitation is the question of where what little aid there is actually goes. Most people expect aid to go to the world''s neediest, yet 65% of water and sanitation aid between 2000 and 2004 went to middle income countries, with the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) receiving a mere 17%. Nowhere is this disparity more acute than in European Commission (EC) aid to water and sanitation, 86% of which goes to upper and middle income countries. In per capita terms, the 1% of Hungarians needing improved water received an average of £373.37 each, while in Ethiopia, the African country with the least access to clean water, the average was less than 2p.    WaterAid chief executive Barbara Frost said: "If the situation wasn''t so tragic it would be farcical. Clean water doesn''t just safely quench thirst, it is an internationally recognised crucial first step on the road out of poverty. When girls are freed from spending hours every day fetching water, they go to school. When children are not suffering from diarrhoea, they go to school. When parents are not in constant debt treating their children''s illnesses, economic opportunities open up for them. Everyone involved in development issues knows this. Water is a fundamental human need."    WaterAid, which has been delivering water and sanitation to impoverished communities in Africa and Asia since 1981, also criticised the governments of some recipient countries. The report details a two-year investigation by WaterAid country programmes in Africa and Asia, revealing the failures of national governments to fully utilise their existing water budgets, a lack of transparency or accountability and an almost complete failure to set aside funds specifically for sanitation needs.    Barbara Frost continued: "Citizens in developing countries can make the link between access to water and poverty reduction. When they are actually asked what they need water almost always comes at the top of their list. Unfortunately, all too often their leaders - who all have showers and toilets - fail to make water and sanitation a priority in their poverty reduction strategies."    The failure of donor and recipient governments to listen to the poor or to look at the overwhelming evidence supporting the prioritisation of water and sanitation, has led WaterAid to the conclusion that a bottom up approach is also needed if the MDGs on water and sanitation are not to remain well off target. The organisation''s country programmes in Africa and Asia are increasingly focussing their work with partners on Citizens'' Action - empowering local communities to establish and demand their rights to water and sanitation. Outstanding results have been achieved in the past year in Nepal, Uganda, India, Ghana and Ethiopia.    During the World Water Forum which began in Mexico City last week and finishes tomorrow, WaterAid has encouraged other groups and individuals to help turn Citizens'' Action into a movement.    Barbara Frost concluded: "Until national governments - and the donor community setting the aid agenda - are held to account by the poor to deliver what the poor really need, water for all will remain an agonising mirage. It''s time for everyone to do their bit."
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