Water, so goes the cliché, is life. But water—dirty, untreated, tainted with chemicals—can also be death, a reality that confronts billions of people around the world. It’s an ironic testament to the planet’s interconnectedness that today, as people and scientists confront the impact of climate change, especially global warming that melts glaciers faster than ever and swells sea levels, threatening thousands of coastal communities with deadly floods, so many others are also dying from the lack of water for so many vital uses: for irrigation, for running factories, for cleansing, and for drinking.
Improper waste-management practices are not being given so much attention by those who should know better, when in fact these pose among the biggest threats to clean water supply. Hospital or medical waste and chemicals, for instance, pollute waterways, thus impacting food security; not to mention tainting the human water supply.
The lack of water is so real, and the rate at which water supplies are being depleted is so rapid, that not a few experts say the next war will be over water.
Yesterday (March 22), the UN observed World Water Day around the planet, but beyond the eloquent rhetoric of those who know the real score and have been warning about the crisis for a long time, little much in terms of comprehensive, sustainable solutions may be hoped for—whether at the local, national or global level.
It’s not as if the statistics aren’t compelling enough. For starters, waterborne diseases cause the death of more than 1.5 million children every year, according to Rodrigo Fuentes, executive director of the Asean Centre for Biodiversity. He goes on to cite UN stats: 2 million tons of sewage and other effluents drain into the world’s waters every day. In developing countries, 70 percent of industrial waste is dumped untreated into waters where they pollute the usable water supply. More than 894 million people do not have access to safe freshwater.
Other statistics show 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, an estimated 2.5 billion people have no access to proper sanitation, and more than 5 million people, mostly children below 5, die each year from water-related diseases—the equivalent of one child dying every 15 seconds.
While the demand for water continues to grow, the supply is getting smaller, no thanks to both benign neglect and the rapacious exploitation of the environment by corporate buccaneers and other profiteers who think nothing of destroying vital watershed, among other human activities. Mr. Fuentes wrote in greater detail about these unsustainable actions in an op-ed piece here on March 22.
Meanwhile, a 2009 research by the ADB or Asian Development Bank concluded that clean water supply in the Philippines is fast deteriorating with rapid urbanization, and that only about 33 percent of river systems are still suitable as clean and safe supply source of water, and up to 58 percent of the country’s groundwater are now contaminated.
According to the ADB study cited by Cristina Parungao of the Health Care Without Harm-Southeast Asia coalition, the annual freshwater availability per capita in the Philippines is only 1,907 m3 compared to Asian and world averages of 3,669 m3/person and 7,045 m3/person.
And yet, warns Parungao’s group, improper waste-management practices are not being given so much attention by those who should know better, when in fact these pose among the biggest threats to clean water supply. Hospital or medical waste and chemicals, for instance, pollute waterways, thus impacting food security; not to mention tainting the human water supply.
Given all these, it’s clear that reckoning with the rapidly worsening crisis of water will require comprehensive approaches that put water at the center of a fragile, interconnected ecosystem. It will require multi-sectoral approaches; political will and policies that seamlessly reinforce, not cancel out, each other; and very crucial, unstinting public education at all levels.
Recently, the warning that the next world war will be about water was raised again. In fact, the first serious warnings were raised a quarter of a century ago, by a small experts’ panel in the South-South Commission. We are long past the time for making dire predictions.
Action should have started way before yesterday. One hopes those men and women aspiring to lead the country after June 30 have the right stuff for reckoning with this very real threat to life. In a manner of speaking, we will be forced to sink or swim with them and their misgovernance—assuming there’s enough water to thrash around in.