By Jims Vincent T. Capuno
In one way or the other, every Filipino seems to experience it. When it becomes a hassle, everyone complains. But when it is gone, no one talks about it anymore.
So, how do you solve a problem like water crisis when the country is in fact surrounded by oceans of water? “The image of a water-rich Philippines is a mirage,” deplores Gregory C. Ira, former head of the WELLS (Water Equity in the Lifescape and Landscape Study) of the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction in Silang, Cavite .
Elisea Gozun, former secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), agrees. “On a macro-level, it appears there is plenty of water, but we are now experiencing problems and, in some instances, some areas (of the country) are suffering from lack of water,” she points out.
The Philippines is endowed with rich water resources. Rivers and lakes cover 1,830 square kilometers – that’s 0.61 percent of the country’s total land area of 30 million hectares. In addition, it has 421 river basins in 119 proclaimed watersheds.
Unfortunately, the country has only 1,907 cubic meters of fresh water available per Filipino annually. This ranks the Philippines as the second lowest among countries with fresh water availability in Southeast Asia; Thailand tops with only 1,854 cubic meters.
By 2025, the country water demand is expected to triple from the 1995 demand: from 1,303 cubic meters in 1995 to 3,955 cubic meters in 2005. “The country may be blessed with abundant water at this time, but we face an acute water crisis in the near future if we do not conserve this vital resource,” said Senator Loren Legarda.
Even today, there is already a water crisis. “Water resources are unevenly distributed throughout the country, often resulting in water shortages in highly populated areas, especially during the dry season,” a World Bank report notes.
In other parts of the world, the crisis is even worse. Scientists calculate that 7 percent of the human race today does not have enough water to survive. This figure show that this will rise to 70 percent by 2050. “Most of humanity faces a future without the most basic of resources,” they claim.
When that happens, a war is more likely to happen. “Whiskey’s for drinkin’,” Mark Twain once wrote. “But water is for fightin’ over.” Ismail Seageldin thinks so, too. “Many of the wars in the past were about oil, but the wars of the coming years will be about water,” he said those words when he was still the vice-president of the World Bank.
“Over the last three centuries, the growth in the volume of water withdrawn from freshwater sources for human use has been much more rapid than the growth in population,” reports the Geneva-based World Health Organization.
The volume of water withdrawal has reportedly increased more than 35 times, whereas human population has only increased by seven-fold, the United Nations health agency reports.
To think of, the world is awash with water. In total, there is about 1,400 million million million liters: about 100 billion liters per person. But the hitch is: 97 percent is sea water. The rest is fresh, but most of it is trapped underground or stored at the poles as snow and ice.
In fact, only 0.8 percent of Earth’s water is accessible and drinkable – about a billion billion liters. Given that a person’s minimum annual requirement is a million liters, there is still enough – on average. “Water, water everywhere,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The Time of the Ancient Mariner, “but not a drop to drink.”
By 2015, nearly three billion people – 40 percent of the project world population – are expected to live in countries that find it difficult or impossible to mobilize enough water to satisfy the food, industrial, and domestic needs of their citizens.
“We need water for drinking, keeping clean, and making things – but, most importantly, we need it for farming,” said Professor Jim Wallace of the Institute of Hydrology in Oxfordshire. “About three-quarters of the water we use goes on growing food.”
“The link between water and food is strong,” points out Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington DC . “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.”
Consider rice: some 5,000 liters of water are needed to produce one kilogram of rice. “Water has contributed most to the growth in rice production for the past 30 years,” said the Laguna-based International Rice Research Institute.
“Unlike the energy crisis, the water crisis is life threatening,” said Dr. Klaus Toepfer, during his term as executive director of the Nairobi-based United Nations Environment Program. “The level of suffering and misery represented by these statistics is almost beyond comprehension.”
By 2015, tens of millions of people will have died from water-borne diseases, including an average of 6,000 children every day. “It is a grave moral shortcoming that 1.2 billion people cannot drink water without courting disease or death,” asserted Sandra Postel, director of the Massachusetts-based Global Water Policy Project and author of The Last Oasis.
In the Philippines, about “31 percent of illnesses are water-related due to lack of clean drinking water supply and efficient sanitary facilities,” said Rep. Bernadette R. Herrera-Dy of Bagong Henerasyon Party List.
Water for Life, Water for People, a United Nations publication, considered water as “a priority field for action.” It emphasized the tragic impact the crisis has on “the everyday lives of poor people, who are blighted by the burden of water-related disease, living in degraded and often dangerous environments and to earn a living, and get enough to eat.”
It is also a question of equity. Poor households in the Philippines , for instance, spend a greater proportion of their income per month on water than do rich households. According to study done by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), an average Filipino poor household – reliant on vended water as the main water source – spends 80 percent more on vended water than an average rich household.
Whether rich or poor, averting water crisis should be everyone’s concern. As Senator Legarda said, “Water stress, amplified by climate change, will create a growing security challenge. We must avert any possible water crisis, which can lead to a food and health crisis if left unchecked.”
However, “we cannot talk of providing sustainable water to the people unless we protect the source of the commodity – the watersheds,” contends Gozun. Massive destruction of once-productive forested watersheds by loggers and uncontrolled land use from mining, overgrazing, agricultural expansion, and industrialization have contributed to water depletion.
Indeed, a healthy forest is one good indicator of a good watershed. “This is because forests can help to relegate the flow of water,” explains Patrick Durst, the regional forestry officer of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
“If the forest perishes, so will the life of people,” someone once said. “The trees are our source of life. Without trees, there will be no water. If there is no water, there will be no life.”
Over extraction of fresh water underground may result to saltwater intrusion. Such is the case of Cebu which “can always become the country’s salt capital,” to quote the words of veteran journalist Juan Mercado.
Cebu reportedly pumps 275,000 cubic meters daily. Its coastal aquifer can recharge less than half. Demand from population and industry will more than double by 2030. This “over-mining” permits salt water to seep in. The damage is irreversible. It takes 500 years or so to flush tainted underground reservoirs.
“Of all the social and natural crises we humans face,” commented Koichiro Matsuura, of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, “the water crisis is the one that lies at the heart of our survival and that of our planet earth.”
“When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water,” noted American statesman Benjamin Franklin in 1746. Today, in many parts of the world, the well is, indeed, drying up!
