“Although climate change and water are related, water has no substitutes. We can transition away from coal and oil to solar, wind and other renewable energy sources. But there is no transitioning away from water to something else.” – Sandra Postel in an e-mail interview with the author
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Two years ago, a diarrhea outbreak happened in the outskirt communities of barangay Upper Labay in General Santos City. Although no one died, at least 34 people were hospitalized for several days.
The outbreak was due to a contaminated drinking water. According to a MindaNews report, the residents “draw their drinking water from rubber pipes attached to a spring water resource at an upland portion of the barangay.”
Apparently, the area’s drinking water was contaminated due to some openings in portions of the rubber pipes. After drinking the “foul-tasting” water, according to some victims, they felt diarrhea-like symptoms.
The diarrhea outbreak in Upper Labay is not unique; it is happening in other parts of the country – particularly in far-flung areas where potable water systems are not existing. Generally, these people – who are mostly poor – rely on deep wells which can be contaminated anytime.
So much so that a study done by the United Nations Development Program, Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Water Crisis, concluded: the “crisis in water and sanitation is – above all – a crisis of the poor.”
“People living in the slums… face shortages of clean water,” the UNDP study claimed. “(But) their neighbors in high income suburbs… keep their lawns green and swimming pools topped up. (The poor) pay five to ten times more for water per unit than those in high-income areas of their own cities.”
Nobel Peace laureate Kofi Annan, when he was still the secretary-general of the United Nations, commented: “The lack of access of water – for drinking, hygiene and food security – inflicts enormous hardships…”
In the Philippines, a World Bank study found 58% of the sampled groundwater tested positive for coliform bacteria. Surveys done by some local government units have indicated that one half or more of their public water systems do not meet drinking water quality standards.
Water shortage
If those are not enough, the Philippines is facing a water shortage in the coming years. In 2007, the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB) sounded the alarm in its annual report. The causes: rapid urbanization, only 33% of river systems still suitable as a supply source and up to 58% of groundwater already contaminated.
“Water quality is poorest in urban areas,” the ADB pointed out in its report. It added: “The rapid urbanization of the Philippines, with more than 2 million persons being added to the urban population annually, is having a major impact on water resources.”
The Washington, D.C.-based World Resources Institute (WRI), in its report a few years back, has identified the Philippines as among the countries which will experience water stress. It is defined as “the ratio between total water withdrawals and available renewable surface water at a sub-catchment level.”
The right to water is a basic human right. “A person can survive only three to five days without water, in some cases people have survived for an average of one week,” says thewaterpage.com. “Once the body is deprived of fluids the cells and organs in the body begin to deteriorate. The presence of water in the body could mean the difference between life and death.”
Among Filipinos, about 310 to 507 million cubic meters of water are being consumed each day. “A household of five needs at least 120 liters per days to meet basic needs – for drinking, food preparation, cooking and cleaning up, washing and personal hygiene, laundry, house cleaning,” noted David Satterthwaite and Gordon McGranahan in their collaborative report published in the State of the World.
Science has shown that life, as we know it, cannot exist without water. As Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize winner for medicine, said: “Water is life’s mater and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.”
Water covers 75% of the earth’s surface and the amount that exists is already fixed: some 1,400 million cubic kilometers. Most of this, that is, 97.4%, is salt water; another 2% is locked away in ice caps and glaciers. This leaves only 0.6%, or 8.4 million cubic kilometers, of which some 8 million cubic kilometers are stored underground.
Put it another way, if all the earth’s water were to fit in a gallon jug (4 liters), the available fresh water would be just over one tablespoon.
“Although water is a renewable resource, it is also a finite one,” writes Sandra Postel, author of Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity. “Nature makes only so much available in a given region each year — and supplies can drop considerably below average in times of drought.”
Food production
As stated earlier, water is needed not only for health reasons and survival but also for food production. In fact, most of the available freshwater is used to grow food. “The link between water and food is strong,” admits Lester Brown, president of Washington, D.C.-based Earth Policy Institute. “We drink, in one form or another, nearly 4 liters of water per day. But the food we consume each day requires at least 2,000 liters to produce, 500 times as much.”
Take the case of rice, the staple food of Filipinos. It takes about 3,000 liters of water to produce one kilogram of rice, reports the Laguna-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).
In his book, Food Revolution, author John Robbins said that 23 gallons of water is needed to produce one pound of lettuce, 23 gallons for one pound of tomatoes, 24 gallons for one pound of potatoes, 25 gallons for one pound of wheat, 33 gallons for one pound of carrots, and 49 gallons for one pound of apples.
Meat production also consumes a lot of water. “Agriculture uses about 70% of the world’s available freshwater, and one third of that is used to grow the grain fed to livestock,” reports the Worldwatch Institute.
Time’s Michael S. Serrill is damned right when he wrote: “Agriculture is where future water shortages will be most acute.”
Pollution and trees
In 2004, then Environment Secretary Elisea Gozum told The Sunday Times Magazine that the country’s freshwater is being threatened by pollution and deforestation. The 2007 ADB study said the main sources of pollution, particularly in urban areas, are “untreated discharges of industrial and municipal wastes.”
The study added: “The majority of solid waste disposal and landfill sites are poorly operated and maintained, permitting leachate to pollute some water resources.”
According to Gozum, the lack of watersheds due to deforestation has also affected the water retention capacity of our ecosystem. This is the reason why forests, for one, are very important.
“The importance of water is inseparable to the Lumad and ancestral domain discussions,” said Dante Sinhayan, a tribal leader in the uplands of Bukidnon. “Every day, every minute, we use water and with it, we discuss forest, although not often. By discussing how water emerges, then the forest gets discussed.”
The question is: Do trees really produce water?
“You ask an interesting question,” Dr. Patrick B. Durst, regional forestry officer of the UN Food and Agriculture (FAO), replied in an exclusive interview. “As with so many things related to forests and trees, the answer is not simple – certainly not as simple as many people would like to present it.
“In the narrow sense, trees are not a source of water,” he emphasized. “In fact, as living organisms, trees are substantial consumers of water, particularly when healthy. This is why, for example, people sometimes plant fast-growing trees to help drain swamps; the trees consume water and draw down the water level.”
Here’s an interesting information: “Water table sometimes rise when trees are cleared from an area. Famous watershed studies at the Coweeta Hydrological Laboratory in North Carolina since 1934, show very clearly that there was scope for increased yield by reducing forest vegetation.”
So, what role do trees play in “producing” water? Clearly, trees must be good for something when it comes to watershed management, or else foresters and water management specialists wouldn’t make so much fuss about trees. Here’s an explanation from Dr. Durst: “The answer is that trees (and more importantly healthy forests) are very important. The main benefit they provide is helping to intercept precipitation and facilitate its infiltration into the soil and ground water storage areas.”
Conclusion
During her inaugural speech, then president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo pledged that she would “supply water to all barangay” before her term ends in 2010.
“It’s good a President seeks water,” wrote veteran journalist Juan Mercado. “But citizens must respond by lifestyles that reduces demands on a scarce common resource.”
“World demand for water doubles every 21 years, but the volume available is the same as it was in the Roman times,” observes Sir Crispin Tickell, former British ambassador to the United Nations and one of the organizers of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. “Something has got to give.”
Since 1950, global water use has more than tripled. “When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water,” reminded American statesman Benjamin Franklin. – ###
