- Worldwide ‘stress’ and ‘scarcity’ of water
Itself enduring water rationing nowadays, Brazil is hosting the World Water Forum attended by 15 heads of state and government along with 300 mayors and experts. Chilling statistics being conveyed ought to make water sector the number one agenda of governments around the globe. Yes, even above feverish arming and building nest eggs of ill-gotten unwieldy wealth. The UN’s 2018 World Water Development Report earlier revealed that 3.6 billion people inhabit regions with an annual water scarcity of at least one month, with the number reaching 5.7 billion by 2050. From California to Cape Town the dreaded ‘Day Zero’, when tap water has perforce to be turned off and people restricted to a few litres from collection centres, is fast becoming reality. Man-made and natural disasters (often the two are one, mankind’s profligate environmental ways a major cause) disrupt the delicately poised ecological system, and one life-threatening corollary of this interlinked tangle is catastrophic impact on global water resources.
Emphasis must increasingly be shifted to ‘green’ or natural systems of water preservation, such as wetlands, proper utilisation of groundwater aquifers, reduced wastage of rain, river and canal waters, improved irrigation, and forestation projects, apart from the ‘grey’ solutions of dams, recycling, de-silting, and desalination of sea water.
For Pakistan, water resources hold urgent, special significance: water, food and energy security are closely interlinked, amid a population increasing by leaps and bounds. It is already a ‘water stressed’ country, slipping towards ‘water scarcity’(less than 1,000 cubic metres per capita per year) by 2025. A frightening trend, which the Draft of National Water Policy, due for discussion in Committee of Common Interests, seeks to reverse. Its recommendations include development of water resources, reduction in water loss, increased funding of water sector (federal and provincial), additional storage capacity, measured use of groundwater, enhancing sprinkler, drip irrigation (‘more crop per drop’), expensive pricing policy to prevent wastage ( as in energy sector), accurate statistical data of overall water availability, and transparent monitoring and accounting of river flows, among others. Hopefully these will be implemented on a war footing. Man may be the greatest hazard to the planet, but he is also its only hope.
