Access to water supply will be a defining issue of 21st century

Ireland’s recent experience of the politics of water introduces us to a worldwide trend which is set to become one of the defining issues of the 21st century.

Water is an essential element of life but it is a scarce resource, under pressure from transboundary conflicts, climate change and capitalist growth policies.

In her book Blue Future: Protecting Water for People and the Planet Forever, Canadian author Maude Barlow, identifies three major issues in the politics of water: diminishing freshwater supplies; inequitable access between richer and poorer states and peoples; and water justice especially for women and indigenous communities.

Several compendiums of contemporary risks put water conflicts at the top of the international agenda. Some 50 per cent of the world’s usable water supply is transnational, running through two or more states. Last year a UN watercourse convention was activated, but it is non-binding and has not been signed by China or other nations in south and southeast Asia most prone to such conflicts.

A vivid account of China's water policies in Tibet by another Canadian writer, Michael Buckley in his book Meltdown in Tibet, illustrates what is at stake. China has the world's largest population and greatest number of dams in the world – more than 26,000, or half the world's total. In 2011 it was decided to double this so as to reduce the reliance on coal-burning power plants.

Survival

Tibet, the world’s third largest reservoir of freshwater, is the source of some of Asia’s most important rivers – the Yangtze, Mekong, Yarlung Tsangpo, Salween and Brahmaputra – and most of the new dams will be built there. Buckley says the survival of more than 750 million people in countries downstream – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Laos, Cambodia – depends on waters originating in this Chinese-controlled territory.

By damming transboundary rivers and curtailing their flow, China gains political leverage over the downstream nations. By diverting water from Tibet to other parts of China to fuel agriculture, manufacturing and mining an unprecedented hydro-engineering project is under way.

China faces some of the world’s most severe environmental problems, much of it created by American and other multinational capitalist companies outsourcing their manufacturing – and pollution – there. The country is one of the most committed to tackling these problems through tighter regulation and technical innovation, and there is a vigorous and powerful environmental movement in its civil society.

Buckley proposes much greater use of wind and solar energy in Tibet rather than concentrating on these vast hydro-projects. But China’s rulers face choices between short-term measures to ensure growth and profitability and longer-term ecological sustainability of its economy and good relations with other Asian states.

Most of them also face problems of diminishing groundwater aquifers over-used for agriculture, which consumes an average 70 per cent of the available water. India-Pakistan-Bangladesh, Israel-Palestine, Egypt-Ethiopia and China-Indochina are but some of the regions most prone to such water-based transboundary conflict. Severe water shortages are also a factor in Yemen’s rapidly escalating civil war.

Similar political choices about priorities in water policy face California’s rulers. The state of 65 million people is into its fourth year of drought driven, scientists say, by climate change. Mandatory restrictions on personal and domestic water use have been introduced by its governor Jerry Brown. But their impact is inherently limited since the state’s huge agriculture industry uses 80 per cent of its water to produce half of the US’s vegetables and fruit. Fracking is also using up an increasing proportion in California and elsewhere.

Water issues are regularly monitored in Unesco’s annual world water development report and in the annual Stockholm Water Week seminars. Both were inspired by Irish hydrologist Jim Dooge’s pioneering work linking water to climate change.

Global demand

Unesco’s latest report says the planet could face a 40 per cent water shortfall by 2030 if its use is not changed. Mass migration and wars would result. Analysis by the US’s defence department predicts global water demand will rise by 55 per cent in 35 years’ time, while the world’s population will grow by a third from the present 6.5 billion people.

Bear in mind that 97 per cent of the Earth’s supply is saltwater and of the remaining 3 per cent some 70 per cent is (still) frozen in the polar icecaps. The other 30 per cent is mostly present as soil moisture or stored in underground aquifers; less than 1 per cent of the world’s fresh water is readily accessible for direct human use. pegillespie@gmail.com