Global Ecological Problems and Issues

Another problem is that the different industries and urban areas are rapidly increasing their water consumption. When people move from a rural area to a city they tend to forget where the water comes from and increase their consumption of it. Mark Rosengrant and Claudia Ringler of the International Food Research Institute have estimated, that the urban households' and industry's share of the world's water consumption might increase from 13 to 27 per cent by the year 2020. According to Rosengrant and Ringler the world's food production could be reduced by one sixth, if all this water is taken away from irrigation purposes.

According to the Population Action International 2800-3500 million people could suffer from acute lack of water in the year 2025. The GEO 2000 programme of the United Nations has presented even more pessimistic predictions. According to GEO 2000 it is possible, that two thirds of humanity will soon be faced with water shortages. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted, that five billion people will suffer from an acute scarcity of water after twenty years.

The expected warming of the Earth's climate due to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is likely to aggravate these problems. While the climate change may increase rainfall, it will probably increase the evaporation of water even more. According to one estimate a four-centigrade warming in the tropics might increase the rainfall by 12 per cent but the evaporation by 30 per cent, thus making the tropical and sub-tropical areas considerably drier.

It is clear that the present trends will pretty soon lead to an impossible situation: there won't simply be enough water for all these purposes. This could leave to serious conflicts over the use of water within each country, and between different countries. The danger is that it is the poor that will, once again, suffer the most. The rich farmer can make a deeper well when the wells of the poor remain dry. The people living in the cities and the industries are usually more influential than the rural people, and a ton of water used in an industry can produce seventy times more in terms of dollars than if the same amount of water is used to irrigate the fields. On the other hand, food is usually more important for the people than various industrial products.

Another closely related set of problems has to do with the pollution or poisoning of the groundwater resources. The most horrible case is the vast arsenic poisoning epidemic in Bangladesh, and in the Indian states of West Bengal, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh where almost one hundred fifty million people are slowly being poisoned by the water they are drinking. Epidemiologists have warned that unless rapid measures are taken one death in ten in the badly affected areas of Bangladesh will soon be caused by arsenic poisoning. The situation in Bangladesh and the mentioned Indian states, however, is not an isolated case but an extreme example of a much trend.

According to Payal Sampat from the Worldwatch Institute the groundwater resources are slowly being poisoned by pesticides, by the nitrates from chemical fertilizers and carelessly designed pit latrines, by garbage dumps, by oil leaks from cars and service stations and by industrial waste. The main problem is that it usually takes several decades or more before these poisons have seeped their way through the soil into the groundwater. The problems that are currently detected in the groundwater have leaked to the ground long ago. Since then the amount of different chemicals and toxic waste that has just been dumped on the ground has increased by dozens of times. A vast amount of pollutants is already on its way towards the groundwater, and the present problems are only an iceberg's tip of what we can expect in the future.

A recent study near 22 industrial centers of India discovered that the groundwater in the surrounding areas was no longer fit to be used as drinking or household water. According to the Worldwatch institute most of the approximately two billion people who are now drinking groundwater, could soon face serious problems related to the pollution of the groundwater.

The most important solution to these problems could be the revitalizing and further development of the various ancient rainwater harvesting and storing systems. Even in the world's driest areas proper water harvesting and storing methods can provide an adequate drinking, household and irrigation water supply for the people. Even as little as 100 millimeters of rain provides a thousand cubic metres or one million litres for each hectare of land. In India there are at least 500 000 large tanks that were built, long time ago, in order to store rainwater. The state of Tamil Nadu, for example, has 30 000 such water tanks called eris. They form, altogether, a huge water collecting structure consisting of hundreds of thousands of brick-made dams and of 50 000 kilometres of other structures.

In many parts of India, in Pakistan, China, Afghanistan and Iran, in the Middle East and in North Africa people used to construct horizontal wells that collected water from the deep soil layers and transported it to the nearby population centers. In Afghanistan, Pakistan and in the Xinkiang province of China these horizontal wells are known with the name karez. On India's western coast they are surangams, in Marocco they are called foggaras. In Iran they are qanats. Iran has, alltogether about 40 000 qanats, the combined length of which is about 270 000 kilometres. The longest qanats are 40 or 50 kilometres in length.

Such horizontal wells have their darker side. Their construction has originally required huge amounts of labour. It is very likely that many of them have been constructed by slave labour, and that many people have died in the process. However, in our own day we could build similar horizontal wells in ways that would not endanger the lives of our construction workers.

It would probably be a good idea to revitalize the technology, because it is still working astonishingly well. Many horizontal wells have kept on producing good-quality drinking water for thousands of years. Xinkiang's one thousand karez structures are still providing the province with one third of its water. In Iran three quarters of water supply was based on qanats until the 1950's, and the system started to deteriorate only after that due to the exaggerated westernization drive of the Shah Reza Pahlavi.

In many countries people have also constructed sub-surface dams, ditches filled with stones and various types of earthen walls that increase the formation of groundwater. Tarun Bharat Singh, an organization working in the drylands of Rajasthan, in India, has been able to bring whole rivers back to life with the help of such traditional technologies. The thousands of village parliaments organized by Tarun Bharat Singh have been an important model experimenting with ecological democracy at the local level.

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