Global Ecological Problems and Issues

The scarcity of water is rapidly becoming one of the world's most serious problems. Water problems also have numerous dimensions which are basically issues of democracy.

Freshwater resources are often limited, especially during dry seasons. This thumb rule applies both to groundwater resources and to surface water, freshwater in the lakes, ponds and rivers. If the water resources are limited, who will decide how they will be shared? What kind of participatory and democratic decision-making structures for sharing the water resources should there be on the local and on the national level?

At present water resources are usually divided in a most unequal and undemocratic way. Different industries and power plants easily get more than their fair share of the national water resources. There is no eagerness to emphasize those forms of energy production that do not require large amounts of freshwater, like wind, solar and wave energy. The main emphasis is still in coal and nuclear power plants, both of which require large amounts of fresh cooling water.

People living in cities consume, on average, several times more water than people living in the countryside. Moreover, urban people often waste a major part of the water they use by not bothering to mend leaks in water taps or pipes or to fix leaking water closets. A badly leaking water toilet in a city can use, in one day, more water than a poor rural household in dry areas is using during the whole year.

Agriculture is, in most countries, the largest consumer of freshwater. More emphasis should be paid in cultivating crops and breeding cultivars that do not require large amounts of water. Even water-hungry crops can be cultivated with methods that require less water. Various traditional and modern drip-irrigation methods and sub-surface irrigation methods delivering the irrigation water straight under the ground to the roots of the plants are especially recommendable. Such techniques can greatly reduce the need for irrigation water.

Besides this it would be important to divide the existing freshwater resources in a more equal way, and to develop local democratic institutions for this purpose.

The larger landowners that can afford to build deep tubewells and install strong water pumps typically appropriate a lion's share of the water resources for themselves. The poorer families can only afford to dig ordinary, much shallower wells, and extract lesser amounts of water from them. The big landowners with more efficient pumps often use so much water that the water-table on the whole area declines and the shallower wells of the poor families become totally dry. Larger landowners often appropriate also a disproportionate share of the river water for themselves through large-scale irrigation projects.

Various communal or cooperative rainwater harvesting and storing schemes based on different traditional technologies could be an important way to ensure a more democratic appropriation of local water resources.

Another issue is how to divide, in the international level, the water in rivers that are shared between more than one country. For example the sharing of the freshwater resources of the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Jordan and Indus rivers is causing growing tensions between the nations competing of the water of these rivers.

The main reason for the world's present water crises has been the overuse of groundwater. The humanity started to dig wells at least 5 000 year ago, when the oldest known wells were constructed by the Indus Valley civilization, in areas that now lie within the borders of Pakistan and India. However, most of the dugwells were relatively shallow. They often dried during the dry season, which forced the ancient cultures to depend on rainwater harvesting and storing in their water supply systems. Numerous such systems are known from Asia, North Africa and Latin America, and they provided an important part of the basis of many civilizations for thousands of years.

It was only after the Second World War that the large-scale construction of tube-wells was introduced to the South. Before the Second World War there were only a few thousand tube-wells in India, now there are tens of millions of them. Tube-wells provide safe and clean water for hundreds of millions of people.

However, in many areas too many tube-wells were soon made, and too much water was taken from them. The wells were not used to provide safe drinking water and household water, only, but huge amounts of water were pumped to the ground for irrigation purposes. The utilization of groundwater resources was no longer on a sustainable basis. People started to mine groundwater resources and use them with a much quicker pace than the reserves were able to replenish themselves.

The UN organizations have estimated, that Africa has already lost two thirds and Asia and Latin America about one half of their easily accessible groundwater resources during the last fifty years.

In large parts of the Middle East, South Asia, China, the United States of America and Africa the water tables are now receding by 1-4 metres per year. The situation may have serious implications for the world's food production. For example in China, Egypt, India, Indonesia and Pakistan more than one half of the food production is based on irrigation, by which two or even three crops can annually be produced on the same patch of land.

In India it has been estimated that the annual use of groundwater resources already exceeds the replenishment by about one hundred billion cubic metres. International Water Management Institute says, that the depletion of the groundwater resources is a threat for one quarter of India's grain yields. In China the situation is almost as serious.

The pressures on groundwater reserves are likely to increase because of the population growth and a number of other factors. Because of the economic globalization a growing percentage of the people in the South is abandoning ancient vegetarian traditions and increasing their consumption of meat. To provide an American diet (containing a lot of meat) for one people typically consumes two times more water than the provision of an average Asian diet (containing very little meat), in spite of the fact that the most important staple food of Asia is rice, which is a water-thirsty plant.

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