The Disappearing Water of Life


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Wetlands Conservation

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(WWF/Mauri Rautkari)
Women carrying water in Gujarat, India.



(WWF/Mauri Rautkari)
People gathering at the well in Maharashtra, India



 
By Claude Martin*
In spite of a 27-year-old international convention to preserve and manage wetlands, the world is still facing a severe water crisis in the next century. How serious will water shortages have to become before concerted action is taken to protect our most precious natural resource?

Gland, Switzerland: The environmental crises that have arisen throughout the world in the last few decades have been many and varied. Most of them, however, have had one thing in common - the fact that the warnings of their arrival and the actions needed to deal with them have been separated by gaps of many years.

That unfortunate truth has been visible in the wholesale degradation of forests, in the devastation of marine fisheries, in the disastrous effects of pollution-related climate change. Sadly, the gulf between warning and reaction is now only too obvious as well in the looming crisis over fresh water.

For years, we at WWF-World Wide Fund For Nature, along with many others, have been saying that early in the coming new century humanity will face serious problems with fresh water. Few people doubt that a severe shortage of the world's most basic need could lead to dramatic health problems among poorer people, perhaps even to social conflict. At another level, of course, conservationists are concerned, too, about the effects of widespread water shortages on the world's already profoundly degraded wetland habitats.

But this gathering crisis is somewhat different from other environmental threats, because it does not present an obvious cause and effect. On the contrary, it is a complex phenomenon arising from a variety of sources, and that makes it difficult to address by means of any one, central policy - a problem that merely serves to add to the time elapsing between warning and the implementation of appropriate measures.

Some of the reasons for depletion of water resources are simple enough to understand. The growth of the world's population and the spread of economic activity on an industrial scale clearly lead to increased demand for fresh water. In addition, the rapid spread of urbanisation changes patterns of consumption, while the need to increase the area of productive land provokes greater pressure for irrigation.

Other factors contributing to water shortages are perhaps less obvious, with deforestation as a prime example. Forests act like vast sponges, retaining water and gradually releasing it into freshwater ecosystems. Take the forest away, and where is that water going to be stored? Then there are the effects of climate change. Weather patterns are becoming more erratic, with drought in some places matched by severe flooding in others: no water where it is needed, too much where it is not. The multiplicity of causes, of needs and of effects means that the water problem is not global, at least not in the sense that it can be solved through a single international treaty. Rather the crisis is ubiquitous, which is a far more difficult pattern both to identify and to redress. I found the problem thrown into sharp focus at a recent conference in New Delhi, where WWF and UNICEF were collaborating on responses to the freshwater problem in India. There, water tables have been dropping by many metres over the last few years, right across the Union. Thousands of hand pumps - many supplied by UNICEF - have been rendered useless and conflicts have arisen over water for both irrigation and drinking. One response has been to employ powerful motor pumps to tap shrinking resources, but that has merely exacerbated the problem by spreading it across wider areas. Given the population increase in India, which will soon reach a billion inhabitants, there is no immediate prospect of relief.

The complexities of the water crisis make it painfully clear that organisations such as WWF and UNICEF will never be able to solve it alone. But we do have contributions to make, not least in making sure that the many and various factors involved become widely known. We have our part to play not only in alerting the world to what might face it, but also in promoting better management of water resources and working to ensure that what international agreement there is can be most usefully applied.

An international wetlands treaty does exist and can be used to avert a potentially disastrous crisis. The Convention on Wetlands was signed as long ago as 2 February 1971 at Ramsar in Iran. In the Ramsar Convention, 106 countries committed themselves to identifying "wetlands of international importance" within their territories and to conserving those sites and using them wisely. So far, some 900 such sites have been placed on the Ramsar list - a total of 67,500,000 hectares, or an area larger than France.

Yet none of the Ramsar signatories has applied the Convention to its full extent. Only 13 have drawn up national wetlands policies and the same number is in the process of developing such policies. Indeed, just 30 countries have even set up national Ramsar committees, despite the fact that the Convention commits them to the sound management of all wetlands within their borders.

If the promises of Ramsar are not honoured, the consequences will be dire. Already more than 50 per cent of wetlands have been lost across the world in countries ranging from the USA, Australia and New Zealand to Thailand, Tanzania, Niger and Chad. Over the next 30 years demand for fresh water is expected to grow by a staggering 650 per cent. The warnings have been in place for many years, as has a means of beginning to tackle the problem in the Ramsar Convention. The gap between identification and eradication must not be allowed to widen further.

*Dr Claude Martin is Director General of WWF-International