“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
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Primitive man roamed from place to place, but it was the need for water which always decided his movements. As man progressed, and developed permanent settlements, he needed waternot only for himself but also for the crops he grew and the animals he raised.
Water is a limited non-renewable resource: of which a fixed amount exists on the planet: some 1,400 million cubic kilometers, which can be neither increased nor decreased. Most of this, that is, 97.4 percent, is salt water; another 2 percent is locked away in ice caps and glaciers. This leaves only 0.6 percent, or 8.4 cubic kilometers, of which some 8 million cubic kilometers are stored underground.
Put in 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.
Water is life, so goes a saying. In recent years, there has been much speculation about the potential for future international conflicts to arise over competition for water resources. “Battles have been fought over water allocation in many countries,” Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev once asserted.
These days, water is increasingly becoming the central political issue – and a matter of survival for literally billions of people.
For a country surrounded by bodies of water, the Philippines may not run out of water. But Filipinos may soon echo the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.”
In the 1950s, the Philippines had as much as 9,600 cubic meters of clean water per person, according to Dr. Rafael D. Guerrero, former head of the Philippine Council for Aquatic and Marine Research and Development. Four decades later, Filipinos must make do with little more than a third for that volume – 3,300 cubic meters per capita.
Today, the Philippines ranks second from the lowest among Southeast Asian countries in terms of per capita water availability per year with only 1,907 cubic meters, according to a World Bank report. Thailand is at the bottom, with 1,854 cubic meters. Vietnamese have more than twice what Filipinos get: 4,591 cubic meters.
“Everyone agrees water is basic for life,” notes veteran journalist Juan L. Mercado. “When cisterns go dry, disease and death rates surge. That ushers in economic decay – and political instability. Water riots can be ugly. And no one has yet invented a substitute for water.”
The Philippines is not yet what hydrologists call a “water stressed nation.” That label applies when annual water supplies, drops below 2,740 liters, per citizen. Among the countries which are listed as such are sub-Saharan nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
While the country is still not “water stressed,” it has already areas suffering from “water scarcity.” Four river basins – Pampanga, Agno, Pasig-Laguna, and the island of Cebu – are experiencing water scarcity.
During summer months, many residents of Metro Manila – home to more than 10 million people – are coping with a “water supply crisis.” Metro Cebu in the Visayas and Davao City in Mindanao are already experiencing the same “status.”
The three major cities — along with six others (Baguio, Angeles, Bacolod, Iloilo, Cagayan de Oro and Zamboanga) — were identified by a study done by Japan International Cooperation Agency in 1991 to be “water-critical areas.”
At least 17 million Filipinos today have no access to adequate and safe drinking water. “(About) 31% of illnesses in the country are water-related due to lack of clean drinking watersupply and efficient sanitary facilities,” a lady congressman once pointed out.
“We cannot talk of providing sustainable water to the people unless we protect the sources of the commodity — the watersheds,” said Elisea Gozun, former head of the Department ofEnvironment and Natural Resources (DENR).
In a report a couple of years ago, the environment department said that 90% of the 99 watershed areas in the country were “hydrologically critical” due to their degraded physical condition.
Massive destruction of the once-productive forested watersheds by loggers – both legal and illegal – and uncontrolled land use from mining, overgrazing, agricultural expansion, and industrialization have contributed to water depletion.
“Land use and vegetative cover in the watershed are very important because they affect water flow and water quality,” explains Patrick Durst, senior forestry officer of the regional office of the Food and Agriculture Organization in Bangkok, Thailand.
River pollution also contributes to the country’s current water woes. A report released by the Asian Development Bank said that 16 rivers are now considered “biologically dead” during dry months. Some 48 per cent of water pollution come from domestic waste, 37 per cent from agricultural waste, and 15 per cent from industrial waste.
Changing weather patterns worldwide also contribute to the crisis. One such thing is the El Niño phenomenon, which is associated with unusually warm water that occasionally forms across much of the tropical eastern and central Pacific. In weak to moderate El Niño events, rainfall tends to be somewhat less than normal.
“Water isn’t just a commodity. It is a source of life,” says Sandra Postel, director of the Massachusetts-based Global Water Policy Project. Ideally, a person should have at least 50 liters ofwater each day to meet basic needs – for drinking, food preparation, cooking and cleaning up, washing and personal hygiene, laundry, house cleaning.
Water is drawn in two fundamental ways: from wells, tapping underground sources of water called aquifers; or from surface flows – that is, from lakes, rivers, and man-made reservoirs. Water is drawn in two fundamental ways: from wells, tapping underground sources of water called aquifers; or from surface flows – that is, from lakes, rivers, and man-made reservoirs.
“Every year, the rain falling on Earth’s surface amounts to about 110,000 cubic kilometers,” wrote David Molden, Charlotte de Fraiture, and Frank Rijsberman, in their paper, “WaterScarcity: The Food Factor.” “About 40,000 cubic kilometers contributes to rivers and groundwater. The remainder evaporates directly from soil.”
Rainfall supplies plenty of water for food production. But often it fails to rain in the right place or at the right time. Agriculture represents the largest use of water around the world, nearly 70%, according to the United Nation’s 2018 Water Development Report.
“Most of the food we grow or raise on a farm or ranch is full of water, which represents one of the many ways we satisfy our thirst, our need for water,” notes the website,farmprogress.com. “Even though, as each year sees less water than the year before, we’re beginning to realize that the resource is limited. It’s no secret that water is becoming more scarce, and for a lot of reasons.”
Each day, a person needs just 2-5 liters of drinking water and 20-400 liters of water for household use. But in reality, each individual use more – between 2,000 and 5,000 liters of waterper person, “depending largely on how productive their agriculture is and what kind of food they eat.”
“On average, each of us require about 1,000 cubic meters (3 tons or 3,000 cubic liters!) of water per day,” Molden and his two co-authors wrote. “For country-level food security, about 2,800 to 3,000 calories must reach the market in order for each of us to consume about 2,000 calories. Thus, about one liter of water is required per calorie of food supply.” – ###
