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WASTE NOT, WANT NOT Egypt's grandiose plans prove that some governments still think they can engineer away their water woes. But most experts are skeptical. "The era of big water schemes is ending," says Gordon Conway, vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex in England and a water consultant for the Ford Foundation and World Bank. "They don't work. Costs are increasing in real terms, the environmental and social consequences are considerable, and there are big questions about their efficiency." What does work, Conway and others say, is the kind of careful conservation practiced by an increasing number of water users. That's not widely encouraged, since water is free or heavily subsidized by government in most parts of the world. But as the village women of Somalia are showing, simply charging higher fees for water can be a first step toward conservation. Municipalities from Mexico City to New York City to Singapore are doing just that. In the Muslim world, though, water is considered a gift of God, and governments are reluctant to put a price on it. Fortunately, that's not the only way to achieve conservation. On the municipal level, cities have saved from 10% to 25% of their water through the repair of leaky pipes, recycling of wastewater for urban irrigation and fines for water waste. Mexico City replaced 650,000 of its toilets with smaller, 6-liter models and saved enough water each day to serve hundreds of thousands of households. When a drought hit Melbourne, Australia, in the early 1980s, the city cut its water use 30% by launching a television campaign and restricting residential consumption. Even after the end of the dry spell, Melbourne's water demand has grown modestly, thanks in part to a user-pays system. Industrial water recycling, begun on a large scale in the 1970s to help cope with antipollution regulations, has also proved to be an effective conservation measure. In Japan and western Germany, total industrial water use has not risen in more that two decades, despite a large increase in the number of factories. American steelmakers, which once consumed 280 tons of water for every ton of steel made, now use only 14 tons of new water. The rest is recycled. In agriculture the wonder machine of the age is not the giant hydroelectric dam but a simple length of perforated pipe hooked up to a pump. This is the basic tool of drip irrigation, also called micro-irrigation, the Israeli-devised technique in which small amounts of water are applied directly to plant roots through pipes buried along rows of crops. The method is 95% efficient--meaning that almost all the water is applied to nurturing the plant--compared with as little as 20% in traditional irrigation. Not much water is lost to evaporation or runoff. Today drip irrigation waters at least 16,000 sq km of crops in two dozen nations--still less than 1% of all irrigated land. The benefits of drip irrigation or 6-liter toilets or low-flow shower heads may seem small, but drop by drop they make a difference. Until every lake, river and stream is as prized as a desert oasis, the world can expect ever-widening conflicts over water. The time to start conserving and protecting the planet's most vital resource is long before the well of life runs dry. --Reported by Joanna Downer/Washington, Peter Graff/Nairobi, Angela Leuker/Vienna, Fred Pearce/London, Amany Radwan/Cairo, Jamil Hamad and Eric Silver/Jerusalem and Mia Turner/Beijing
THIRSTY WORLD
Source: World Resources Institute |
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