In a region dependent on fossil fuel-driven desalination plants, Saudi Arabia hopes to significantly reduce the cost of producing potable water from the salty waters of the Gulf with the Gulf’s first solar-powered desalination plant. If successful, the Saudi example could encourage other oil and sun-rich Gulf states, who rank among the world’s biggest carbon emitters, to reduce their emissions by building similar plants..
The solar-powered plant is being built by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), the epicenter of the kingdom’s efforts to break its puritan Islamic mould in a bid to ensure technological and economic development, and IBM, which has made water one of its key areas of focus.
“The culmination of our joint research initiatives has enabled us to radically reduce the cost of water through the development of nanotechnologies that revolutionize traditional desalination methods and renewable energy sources,” Takreem el Tohamy, IBM general manager for the Middle East and North Africa, told The National.
Traditional desalination plants in Saudi Arabia produce a cubic meter of water at a relatively high cost of $.067 to $1.47 compared to Singapore cubic meter and the United States, whose cost can be as little as $0.46 per cubic meter.
Located in Al Khafji, the solar-powered will also reduce cost by employing membranes instead of boiling processes to remove the salt from seawater, IBM and KACST said in a statement.IBM announced last year it had developed a new energy-eficient membrane that has a longer lifespan than previous materials. The Al Khafji plant will generate fresh water by pushing seawater through membranes to remove the salt. The solar component of the plant will produce the electricity needed to drive the machinery.
The project’s scale will overshadow pilot solar desalination plants that have been built in a number of Gulf countries, including a plant that opened in Abu Dhabi’s Al Gharbia region last year with a daily capacity of 68.2 cubic meters. Gulf countries have been trying to build cost-effective solar desalination plants for decades. Abu Dhabi built a plant at Umm al Nar in the 1980s, but it proved to be economically infeasible.
IBM and KACST predict the cost reduction despite the fact that the new plant will use electricity from concentrated solar technology that produces power at a cost many times higher than power stations fired by natural gas or oil. Electricity will come from concentrated photovoltaics, a technology that blends traditional photovoltaic cells with mirrors, lenses and motors to concentrate the rays of sun, thereby more than doubling the efficiency of the panels.
The technology is significantly more expensive than traditional photovoltaic cells alone but takes up less space and operates better in hot climates. The increased cost of using electricity from solar panels at Al Khafji will be offset by the vast efficiency gains of using the new membranes rather than heat to take the salt out of seawater.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
Groping For Water in Saudi Arabia
Saudia Arabia has launched a major effort to search for water, according to Der Spiegel.
To do so, it has hired a German geologist German development agency GTZ, which is drilling holes up to 2,000 meters deep to conduct pumping tests and apply complex measuring techniques and computer models. The tests are designed determine how much fossil groundwater remains stored between layers of rock beneath the Arabian Peninsula. GTZ is assisted by the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig, which uses supercomputers to simulate groundwater currents from the last ice age until today.
The Saudi effort is prompted by the realization that its current pattern of water consumption is unsustainable and that water supply would run out in 3o years at current consumption rates. With its research, GTZ expects Saudi Arabia to become a test case for arid regions, which make up about 40 percent of the world's land area.
Fossil groundwater is the only natural water source in a region without rivers and lakes, where every raindrop is an event. After the last ice age, when the climate on the Arabian Peninsula was similar, in terms of temperature and precipitation, to that of savanna regions today, the water seeped away into the ground, eventually accumulating in hollow spaces between layers of sedimentary rock.
Most of this water is in eastern Saudi Arabia, home to most of the country's oil and natural gas reserves. As a result, geologists searching for oil sometimes find water and vice-versa. And like oil, the precious drops of water from the last ice age are finite. Too much of that water is now being pumped out of ever-deeper wells, causing the water table to drop. This in turn allows salt water to seep into the groundwater along the coasts.
To tackle its water scarcity problem, Saudi Arabia has already halted its attempts to turn its deserts into green pastures and achieve food security by promoting domestic agriculture. To do so, the agriculture ministry was stripped of its discretionary authority in all things water. In 2007, the government canceled all subsidies for wheat farming and said the country's wheat production would be wound down by 2016. Instead Saudi Arabia is moving to buy agricultrual land in Africa and Asia and to import wheat and other agricultural products. It also is encouraging small farmers in Saudi Arabia return to traditional agriculture and plant drought-resistant date palms, or grow profitable vegetable crops in greenhouses.
"Our biggest challenge is the conflict between agriculture and other water users," Deputy Water Minister Mohammed Al-Saud told Der Spiegel. "Anyone who wants to develop agriculture does so at the expense of water. And you can't conserve water without having a negative impact on agriculture."
Eventually, the minister hopes to make Saudi Arabia a model for other countries by monitoring water consumption on farms in real time, which would allow the government to develop a comprehensive water strategy. GTZ is preparing the first step in that direction by developing a computer model that would determine for any location in the country the nearest aquifer and calculate its size where it would make most sense to drill a well.
To do so, it has hired a German geologist German development agency GTZ, which is drilling holes up to 2,000 meters deep to conduct pumping tests and apply complex measuring techniques and computer models. The tests are designed determine how much fossil groundwater remains stored between layers of rock beneath the Arabian Peninsula. GTZ is assisted by the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig, which uses supercomputers to simulate groundwater currents from the last ice age until today.
The Saudi effort is prompted by the realization that its current pattern of water consumption is unsustainable and that water supply would run out in 3o years at current consumption rates. With its research, GTZ expects Saudi Arabia to become a test case for arid regions, which make up about 40 percent of the world's land area.
Fossil groundwater is the only natural water source in a region without rivers and lakes, where every raindrop is an event. After the last ice age, when the climate on the Arabian Peninsula was similar, in terms of temperature and precipitation, to that of savanna regions today, the water seeped away into the ground, eventually accumulating in hollow spaces between layers of sedimentary rock.
Most of this water is in eastern Saudi Arabia, home to most of the country's oil and natural gas reserves. As a result, geologists searching for oil sometimes find water and vice-versa. And like oil, the precious drops of water from the last ice age are finite. Too much of that water is now being pumped out of ever-deeper wells, causing the water table to drop. This in turn allows salt water to seep into the groundwater along the coasts.
To tackle its water scarcity problem, Saudi Arabia has already halted its attempts to turn its deserts into green pastures and achieve food security by promoting domestic agriculture. To do so, the agriculture ministry was stripped of its discretionary authority in all things water. In 2007, the government canceled all subsidies for wheat farming and said the country's wheat production would be wound down by 2016. Instead Saudi Arabia is moving to buy agricultrual land in Africa and Asia and to import wheat and other agricultural products. It also is encouraging small farmers in Saudi Arabia return to traditional agriculture and plant drought-resistant date palms, or grow profitable vegetable crops in greenhouses.
"Our biggest challenge is the conflict between agriculture and other water users," Deputy Water Minister Mohammed Al-Saud told Der Spiegel. "Anyone who wants to develop agriculture does so at the expense of water. And you can't conserve water without having a negative impact on agriculture."
Eventually, the minister hopes to make Saudi Arabia a model for other countries by monitoring water consumption on farms in real time, which would allow the government to develop a comprehensive water strategy. GTZ is preparing the first step in that direction by developing a computer model that would determine for any location in the country the nearest aquifer and calculate its size where it would make most sense to drill a well.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Jordan Identifies Water as a Policy Priority
One of the world’s water-poorest countries, Jordan celebrated World Water Day by identifying its water shortage as the greatest challenge to its development. Per capita water consumption in Jordan, according to the Jordanian water and irrigation ministry is far below the international water poverty line of 1,000 cubic meters per person per year. The United Nations ranks Jordan alongside Kuwait, the UAE and Bahrain as one of the world’s ten most thirsty countries with a per capita water consumption of 145 cubic meters a year. The country’s water shortage is heightened by the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Iraq and an annual 2.3 percent population growth.
The situation is made worse by constantly increasing demand. The country’s population of six million is growing at a rate of 2.3 per cent annually. Jordan’s water resources have also come under increased strain with the influx of 500,000 to 700,000 Iraqi refugees since the US-led war in Iraq began in 2003.
“One of the key challenges the water sector faces is that the supply-and-demand equation is not balanced,” The National quotes Water and Irrigation Minister Mohammad Najar as saying. “Also water resources are limited, and the (process) of depleting underground water … are major challenges the ministry is facing.” Najar said the ministry was having difficulty stopping illegal pumping of underground and surface water and enforcing laws and regulations. Officials say mismanagement and lack of maintenance further contribute to the shortage. An estimated 40 percent of the kingdom’s water is lost annually to worn-out pipes, leakage and water theft.
The National quotes water expert Dureid Mahasneh as also blaming ill-advised agricultural policies. “We wrongly export our water in the forms of tomatoes to Europe,” Mahasneh says. “There is no need to grow apricots and peaches in winter as they consume so much water. The priority should be for drinking water.”
The government hopes that two major projects will help alleviate the shortage. The Dissi project, which is expected to provide Amman by 2013 with 100 cubic meters of water per year from an ancient desert aquifer 325km south of the capital near the border with Saudi Arabia. The project, which kicked off this month, is expected to be complete in 2013 at a cost of US$990m (Dh3.6 billion). The other is a controversial plan to build a canal linking the Red Sea and the Dead Sea Canal at an estimated $2bn. The project has long been a target for environmentalists and been mired in the intricacies of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The situation is made worse by constantly increasing demand. The country’s population of six million is growing at a rate of 2.3 per cent annually. Jordan’s water resources have also come under increased strain with the influx of 500,000 to 700,000 Iraqi refugees since the US-led war in Iraq began in 2003.
“One of the key challenges the water sector faces is that the supply-and-demand equation is not balanced,” The National quotes Water and Irrigation Minister Mohammad Najar as saying. “Also water resources are limited, and the (process) of depleting underground water … are major challenges the ministry is facing.” Najar said the ministry was having difficulty stopping illegal pumping of underground and surface water and enforcing laws and regulations. Officials say mismanagement and lack of maintenance further contribute to the shortage. An estimated 40 percent of the kingdom’s water is lost annually to worn-out pipes, leakage and water theft.
The National quotes water expert Dureid Mahasneh as also blaming ill-advised agricultural policies. “We wrongly export our water in the forms of tomatoes to Europe,” Mahasneh says. “There is no need to grow apricots and peaches in winter as they consume so much water. The priority should be for drinking water.”
The government hopes that two major projects will help alleviate the shortage. The Dissi project, which is expected to provide Amman by 2013 with 100 cubic meters of water per year from an ancient desert aquifer 325km south of the capital near the border with Saudi Arabia. The project, which kicked off this month, is expected to be complete in 2013 at a cost of US$990m (Dh3.6 billion). The other is a controversial plan to build a canal linking the Red Sea and the Dead Sea Canal at an estimated $2bn. The project has long been a target for environmentalists and been mired in the intricacies of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
The Story of Bottled Water
The Story of Bottled Water, being releasing on March 22, 2010, employs the Story of Stuff style to tell the fast-paced, fact-filled story of manufactured demand—how you get Americans to buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when it already flows from the tap. Over five minutes, the film explores the bottled water industry’s attacks on tap water and its use of seductive, environmental-themed advertising to cover up the mountains of plastic waste it produces. The film concludes with a call to take back the tap, not only by making a personal commitment to avoid bottled water, but by supporting investments in clean, available tap water for all.
The Story of Bottled Water
The Story of Bottled Water
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Oman sees farm crisis as ancient canals run dry
Oman’s ancient aflaj system, once used in warfare by attackers to cut off precious water supply to communities under siege, is now facing dry spells that threaten farmers with lower crop production. The falaj -- widely viewed as an ancient remarkable feat of engineering although little is known about its origins -- collects groundwater through a natural infiltration process that then flows to the surface by gravity.
Oman has some 11,000 aflaj canals that are key to rural farming communities, in fact increasingly so. Oman’s agriculture ministry says aflaj water production has risen from 500 million cubic meters of irrigation water in 1985 to 1.6 billion in 2008. The ministry attributes the rise to the emergence of new farms. For many of the farmers dependent on aflaj, the system is their only water source because hooking up to the government’s water supply is too expensive.
Like much of the rest of the Middle East, Oman is struggling with a gap between water supply and demand. By 2025, water demand is expected to increase to 7.5 billion cubic meters. The gap is already effecting agricultural production. Khalfan Hamood al Toby, who owns a 90-hectare farm in Sawadi in Oman’s Batnah region, told
Oman has some 11,000 aflaj canals that are key to rural farming communities, in fact increasingly so. Oman’s agriculture ministry says aflaj water production has risen from 500 million cubic meters of irrigation water in 1985 to 1.6 billion in 2008. The ministry attributes the rise to the emergence of new farms. For many of the farmers dependent on aflaj, the system is their only water source because hooking up to the government’s water supply is too expensive.
Like much of the rest of the Middle East, Oman is struggling with a gap between water supply and demand. By 2025, water demand is expected to increase to 7.5 billion cubic meters. The gap is already effecting agricultural production. Khalfan Hamood al Toby, who owns a 90-hectare farm in Sawadi in Oman’s Batnah region, told
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Water and the War on Terror
by Steven Solomon
Grist.org
While leaders in Washington have been war-gaming the national security risks of climate change, they’ve only started to connect the dots to the closely related threats emanating from the growing crisis of global freshwater scarcity. At first blush, water and national security may not seem to be interlinked. But the reality, as narrated in my new book WATER: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization", is that the unfolding global water crisis increasingly influences the outcome of America’s two wars, homeland defense against international terrorism, and other key U.S. national-security interests, including the transforming planetary environment and world geopolitical order.
Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali famously predicted 25 years ago that the “next war in the Middle East will be fought over water.” While that has yet to come to pass, the greatest present danger stems from failing nation-states—and not just in the bone-dry Middle East. With world water use growing at twice the rate of human population over the last century, many of the Earth’s vital freshwater ecosystems are already critically depleted and being used unsustainably to support our global population of 6.5 billion, according the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the situation can only be expected to get worse as the population pushes toward 9 billion by 2050. As great rivers run dry before reaching the sea, groundwater is mined deeper and deeper beyond replenishment levels, and water quality erodes with growing pollution, an explosive fault line is cleaving between freshwater Haves and Have-Nots across the political, economic, and social landscapes of the 21st century.
Among the water Have-Nots are the 3.6 billion who will live in countries that won’t be able to feed themselves within 15 years due largely to scarcity of water—likely to include giant India. Throughout history, states that have been unable to feed themselves with homegrown or reliably imported cheap food have stagnated, declined, and often collapsed, with grievous adjustments in living standards, population levels, and regional turmoil.
Health and humanitarian crises are likely to emanate from the dark side of the Have-Not divide where 1 billion abject poor lack regular access to clean, fresh water for minimal needs and 2.6 billion don’t have basic sanitation. Upriver water Have states increasingly exert control over the precious water flows to their dependent neighbors downstream, while within nations the wealthy and those with greatest political clout commonly enjoy the formidable competitive advantage of better, and often subsidized, access to the best water resources. Global warming exacerbates the water crisis with extreme, unpredictable floods, droughts, glacier melts, storm swells, and other water cycle–related depredations that fall disproportionately on already water-insecure, Have-Not regions and overwhelm existing, fragile water infrastructures. Such dislocating events are expected to create 150 million environmental refugees within a decade.
A tumultuous adjustment to the freshwater scarcity crisis lies ahead, and in our global society the feedback effects will buffet even the security of distant nations. Two cases from the headlines—Yemen and Pakistan—illustrate some of the problems and challenges.
Yemen
Globe. Arid Yemen is an impoverished, failing state, home to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which helped to train and arm the would-be Detroit-bound, Christmas suicide bomber from Nigeria. The Yemeni government is not much better than a large, corrupt tribe competing for control of the nation’s diminishing resources through patronage payoffs and proxy alliances with other strong tribes. There is warfare in the north between Houthi tribesmen and Saudi-backed government forces, while politically and economically disaffected southerners are trying to secede. The government is also battling al-Qaida, which flourishes in ungoverned no-man’s-lands.
Terrorism—which claimed 17 U.S. sailor lives in the attack in Aden Harbor on the USS Cole in 2000, and was beaten back for a few years with the help of U.S. drones—is resurgent. The Yemeni government’s policy of routinely releasing captured or repatriated terrorists after little more than a promise not to do it again frustrates the Obama administration’s efforts to shut the Guantanamo Bay prison, where about half of the remaining 200 prisoners are Yemeni.
One of the world’s most dire freshwater scarcity crises underlies Yemen’s extreme poverty and faltering state. The average Yemeni lives at eight times below the world freshwater availability poverty line, and has 1/20th the world average. Less than half have access to enough clean, fresh water for basic needs, while five-sixths lack adequate sanitation. Illegal well drilling is ubiquitous. Yet when the government tried to remove state subsidies for the diesel fuel powering the illegal pumps, riots forced it to desist. The lion’s share of the groundwater is commandeered (and used wastefully in flood irrigation) to grow the cash crop qat, a narcotic stimulant chewed by Yemeni men and an integral part of Yemeni culture.
The net result is an ecological and human catastrophe unfolding in slow motion: Water tables around the country are plunging—in many places two to four times faster than the natural replenishment rate. Soaring 7 percent annual population growth, adding to the current 23 million Yemenis, compounds the water scarcity crisis. As much as two-thirds of rural violence, including some deaths, is related to water. As life in rural areas grows untenable, Yemenis are crowding into already swollen cities, where water riots are not uncommon and mosques dispense minimum free water as charity to the poorest. In the capital, San’a, 100 of the 180 wells in use a decade ago have run dry. Within just five to 10 years, it is widely predicted to become the world’s first capital city to literally run out of water.
To try to retain some control, the government delegated power over water to local authorities and urban water companies. Al-Qaida is strongest in places like ancient Marib and Shabwa where no water companies operate, and it gains the support of the populace by providing health care and helping to dig wells. What viable diplomatic policy America and its allies can pursue in such a situation is unclear, as international financial aid simply disappears down the government’s sieve of corruption.
Pakistan
Earth. As dangerous as Yemen is as a failed state, it pales in comparison to Pakistan, which is nuclear-armed, Taliban-besieged, regionally fractious, and severely water fragile. Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida’s core leadership are believed to be hiding out in its rugged northwest regions.
American leaders had a big fright in April 2009 when Muslim fundamentalist Taliban fighters broke out of the northwestern provinces and struck within 25 miles of the Indus River’s giant Tarbela Dam, a critical site they’d attacked through terrorism before, and only 30 miles from the capital, Islamabad. The Tarbela Dam is the strategic heart of Pakistan’s irrigation, hydropower, and flood-control network. If the Taliban damaged or took control of the giant dam, and gained critical leverage over Pakistan’s food and energy security, the government’s viability would be imperiled.
While Pakistan’s American-trained elite counterterrorism forces and air power quickly rallied to beat back the Taliban, the U.S. responded to the Taliban’s show of strength in the spring of 2009 by accelerating its $7.5 billion five-year aid package to Pakistan—the lion’s share of which is focused on rehabilitating the nation’s perilously deteriorating and inadequate agricultural and hydropower waterworks. During her tumultuous October 2009 visit to Pakistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was repeatedly warned about the nation’s impending freshwater crisis.
At the heart of Pakistan’s crisis is the Indus River, its water lifeline and foundation of its farm economy, which provides the livelihood for 60 percent of Pakistanis. It’s already so badly overused that its water rarely reaches its now dried-up delta, and its huge fertile irrigated basin cropland is heavily reliant on overpumped groundwater and in dire need of a refurbished drainage system to remove poisoning salts. The Indus River also faces an alarming loss of up to a third of its flow by 2025 from the global warming–induced melting of its source Himalayan glaciers. In the same period, moreover, the nation’s population will grow 30 percent more to 225 million. Global climate change is further menacing monsoonal Pakistan with more unpredictable and intense seasonal floods and droughts. In a country where the water-storage capacity to buffer prolonged drought and loss of hydropower is only 30 days—1/30th as much as in the U.S. and 1/15th as much as in China—the effects of climate change can quickly become catastrophic and destabilizing.
Complicating Pakistan’s water crisis is that most of its water originates outside its borders, in archenemy, nuclear-armed India—with whom it has fought several wars and still heatedly disputes the Kashmir border region—as well as in Afghanistan and China. The Indus water dispute with India, which helped trigger the first war between the countries, was resolved with a 1960 treaty. But under the strain of population growth and climate change, the treaty is in dire need of renegotiation. One source of tension is that both countries are building new hydropower dams on Indus tributaries in the Kashmir. Pakistan is also highly suspicious of India’s increased aid to Afghanistan for dams on rivers that flow into Pakistan; it fears it is an Indian subterfuge to put Pakistan in an east-west hydrological vise once America leaves Afghanistan. For their part, the Pakistanis have awarded their dam contract to China, India’s adversary with whom it has its own water disputes and testy political relations.
The chessboard of Pakistan’s destiny is immensely complex, of course. But how it manages its critical water challenges—both from internal and external pressures—is one of the paramount variables in whether it will hold together as a coherent nation-state. Given its nukes, radical Muslim fundamentalists, and regional stature, what happens to it is of grave significance to American national security and Asian regional security.
The global water crisis is unfolding in many other places around the world, and in many different ways, posing vital national security challenges to the U.S. Israel’s conflicts with Palestinians and Syria include contentious disputes over the vital water supplies of the West Bank and Golan Heights, which Israel won in the 1967 war and which today account for two-thirds of Israel’s total freshwater. Iraq’s national viability and prosperity depend significantly on how much water its upstream neighbors Syria and Turkey (the Middle East’s rising water superpower) permit to flow downstream. How tightly China, in its dam-building frenzy for economic growth, squeezes the waters from the 10 major Asian rivers originating in its Tibetan plateau will affect the prosperity and political robustness of downstream nations across Asia, China’s geopolitical status, and with it, U.S. national security interests. Whether and how big a food importer India becomes as its own water management runs short will affect global food prices, and conditions of famine and health, in food import–dependent countries worldwide.
Water and national security may not seem at first to be interconnected. But they are-increasingly so as the global freshwater scarcity crisis deepens.
Grist.org
While leaders in Washington have been war-gaming the national security risks of climate change, they’ve only started to connect the dots to the closely related threats emanating from the growing crisis of global freshwater scarcity. At first blush, water and national security may not seem to be interlinked. But the reality, as narrated in my new book WATER: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization", is that the unfolding global water crisis increasingly influences the outcome of America’s two wars, homeland defense against international terrorism, and other key U.S. national-security interests, including the transforming planetary environment and world geopolitical order.
Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali famously predicted 25 years ago that the “next war in the Middle East will be fought over water.” While that has yet to come to pass, the greatest present danger stems from failing nation-states—and not just in the bone-dry Middle East. With world water use growing at twice the rate of human population over the last century, many of the Earth’s vital freshwater ecosystems are already critically depleted and being used unsustainably to support our global population of 6.5 billion, according the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the situation can only be expected to get worse as the population pushes toward 9 billion by 2050. As great rivers run dry before reaching the sea, groundwater is mined deeper and deeper beyond replenishment levels, and water quality erodes with growing pollution, an explosive fault line is cleaving between freshwater Haves and Have-Nots across the political, economic, and social landscapes of the 21st century.
Among the water Have-Nots are the 3.6 billion who will live in countries that won’t be able to feed themselves within 15 years due largely to scarcity of water—likely to include giant India. Throughout history, states that have been unable to feed themselves with homegrown or reliably imported cheap food have stagnated, declined, and often collapsed, with grievous adjustments in living standards, population levels, and regional turmoil.
Health and humanitarian crises are likely to emanate from the dark side of the Have-Not divide where 1 billion abject poor lack regular access to clean, fresh water for minimal needs and 2.6 billion don’t have basic sanitation. Upriver water Have states increasingly exert control over the precious water flows to their dependent neighbors downstream, while within nations the wealthy and those with greatest political clout commonly enjoy the formidable competitive advantage of better, and often subsidized, access to the best water resources. Global warming exacerbates the water crisis with extreme, unpredictable floods, droughts, glacier melts, storm swells, and other water cycle–related depredations that fall disproportionately on already water-insecure, Have-Not regions and overwhelm existing, fragile water infrastructures. Such dislocating events are expected to create 150 million environmental refugees within a decade.
A tumultuous adjustment to the freshwater scarcity crisis lies ahead, and in our global society the feedback effects will buffet even the security of distant nations. Two cases from the headlines—Yemen and Pakistan—illustrate some of the problems and challenges.
Yemen
Globe. Arid Yemen is an impoverished, failing state, home to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which helped to train and arm the would-be Detroit-bound, Christmas suicide bomber from Nigeria. The Yemeni government is not much better than a large, corrupt tribe competing for control of the nation’s diminishing resources through patronage payoffs and proxy alliances with other strong tribes. There is warfare in the north between Houthi tribesmen and Saudi-backed government forces, while politically and economically disaffected southerners are trying to secede. The government is also battling al-Qaida, which flourishes in ungoverned no-man’s-lands.
Terrorism—which claimed 17 U.S. sailor lives in the attack in Aden Harbor on the USS Cole in 2000, and was beaten back for a few years with the help of U.S. drones—is resurgent. The Yemeni government’s policy of routinely releasing captured or repatriated terrorists after little more than a promise not to do it again frustrates the Obama administration’s efforts to shut the Guantanamo Bay prison, where about half of the remaining 200 prisoners are Yemeni.
One of the world’s most dire freshwater scarcity crises underlies Yemen’s extreme poverty and faltering state. The average Yemeni lives at eight times below the world freshwater availability poverty line, and has 1/20th the world average. Less than half have access to enough clean, fresh water for basic needs, while five-sixths lack adequate sanitation. Illegal well drilling is ubiquitous. Yet when the government tried to remove state subsidies for the diesel fuel powering the illegal pumps, riots forced it to desist. The lion’s share of the groundwater is commandeered (and used wastefully in flood irrigation) to grow the cash crop qat, a narcotic stimulant chewed by Yemeni men and an integral part of Yemeni culture.
The net result is an ecological and human catastrophe unfolding in slow motion: Water tables around the country are plunging—in many places two to four times faster than the natural replenishment rate. Soaring 7 percent annual population growth, adding to the current 23 million Yemenis, compounds the water scarcity crisis. As much as two-thirds of rural violence, including some deaths, is related to water. As life in rural areas grows untenable, Yemenis are crowding into already swollen cities, where water riots are not uncommon and mosques dispense minimum free water as charity to the poorest. In the capital, San’a, 100 of the 180 wells in use a decade ago have run dry. Within just five to 10 years, it is widely predicted to become the world’s first capital city to literally run out of water.
To try to retain some control, the government delegated power over water to local authorities and urban water companies. Al-Qaida is strongest in places like ancient Marib and Shabwa where no water companies operate, and it gains the support of the populace by providing health care and helping to dig wells. What viable diplomatic policy America and its allies can pursue in such a situation is unclear, as international financial aid simply disappears down the government’s sieve of corruption.
Pakistan
Earth. As dangerous as Yemen is as a failed state, it pales in comparison to Pakistan, which is nuclear-armed, Taliban-besieged, regionally fractious, and severely water fragile. Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida’s core leadership are believed to be hiding out in its rugged northwest regions.
American leaders had a big fright in April 2009 when Muslim fundamentalist Taliban fighters broke out of the northwestern provinces and struck within 25 miles of the Indus River’s giant Tarbela Dam, a critical site they’d attacked through terrorism before, and only 30 miles from the capital, Islamabad. The Tarbela Dam is the strategic heart of Pakistan’s irrigation, hydropower, and flood-control network. If the Taliban damaged or took control of the giant dam, and gained critical leverage over Pakistan’s food and energy security, the government’s viability would be imperiled.
While Pakistan’s American-trained elite counterterrorism forces and air power quickly rallied to beat back the Taliban, the U.S. responded to the Taliban’s show of strength in the spring of 2009 by accelerating its $7.5 billion five-year aid package to Pakistan—the lion’s share of which is focused on rehabilitating the nation’s perilously deteriorating and inadequate agricultural and hydropower waterworks. During her tumultuous October 2009 visit to Pakistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was repeatedly warned about the nation’s impending freshwater crisis.
At the heart of Pakistan’s crisis is the Indus River, its water lifeline and foundation of its farm economy, which provides the livelihood for 60 percent of Pakistanis. It’s already so badly overused that its water rarely reaches its now dried-up delta, and its huge fertile irrigated basin cropland is heavily reliant on overpumped groundwater and in dire need of a refurbished drainage system to remove poisoning salts. The Indus River also faces an alarming loss of up to a third of its flow by 2025 from the global warming–induced melting of its source Himalayan glaciers. In the same period, moreover, the nation’s population will grow 30 percent more to 225 million. Global climate change is further menacing monsoonal Pakistan with more unpredictable and intense seasonal floods and droughts. In a country where the water-storage capacity to buffer prolonged drought and loss of hydropower is only 30 days—1/30th as much as in the U.S. and 1/15th as much as in China—the effects of climate change can quickly become catastrophic and destabilizing.
Complicating Pakistan’s water crisis is that most of its water originates outside its borders, in archenemy, nuclear-armed India—with whom it has fought several wars and still heatedly disputes the Kashmir border region—as well as in Afghanistan and China. The Indus water dispute with India, which helped trigger the first war between the countries, was resolved with a 1960 treaty. But under the strain of population growth and climate change, the treaty is in dire need of renegotiation. One source of tension is that both countries are building new hydropower dams on Indus tributaries in the Kashmir. Pakistan is also highly suspicious of India’s increased aid to Afghanistan for dams on rivers that flow into Pakistan; it fears it is an Indian subterfuge to put Pakistan in an east-west hydrological vise once America leaves Afghanistan. For their part, the Pakistanis have awarded their dam contract to China, India’s adversary with whom it has its own water disputes and testy political relations.
The chessboard of Pakistan’s destiny is immensely complex, of course. But how it manages its critical water challenges—both from internal and external pressures—is one of the paramount variables in whether it will hold together as a coherent nation-state. Given its nukes, radical Muslim fundamentalists, and regional stature, what happens to it is of grave significance to American national security and Asian regional security.
The global water crisis is unfolding in many other places around the world, and in many different ways, posing vital national security challenges to the U.S. Israel’s conflicts with Palestinians and Syria include contentious disputes over the vital water supplies of the West Bank and Golan Heights, which Israel won in the 1967 war and which today account for two-thirds of Israel’s total freshwater. Iraq’s national viability and prosperity depend significantly on how much water its upstream neighbors Syria and Turkey (the Middle East’s rising water superpower) permit to flow downstream. How tightly China, in its dam-building frenzy for economic growth, squeezes the waters from the 10 major Asian rivers originating in its Tibetan plateau will affect the prosperity and political robustness of downstream nations across Asia, China’s geopolitical status, and with it, U.S. national security interests. Whether and how big a food importer India becomes as its own water management runs short will affect global food prices, and conditions of famine and health, in food import–dependent countries worldwide.
Water and national security may not seem at first to be interconnected. But they are-increasingly so as the global freshwater scarcity crisis deepens.
UAE Puts Water Under Federal Control
In a move that will strengthen oil-rich Abu Dhabi as the most powerful emirate in the UAE, a loose federation of largely autonomous sheikdoms. In a statement , the UAE Ministry of Environment and Water said it was reviewing a draft law that would transfer water management from the sheikdoms to the central government to improve planning and efficiency.
With average consumption of 550 liters per person per day, water-poor UAE has one of the world’s highest domestic water consumption rates in the world, most of which is produced by desalination. After Saudi Arabia, the UAE with 30 desalination plants is the world’s largest desalinator. Abu Dhabi alone produces up to nine million tons of greenhouse gasses a year as a result of desalination.
UAE Environment and Water Minister Rashid bin Fahad said the new law was necessary because even within the various sheikdoms responsibility for water is shared by various authorities. Abu Dhabi is the emirate that has an independent authority to regulate desalination, water and electricity authorities.
Analysts says the law is likely to be resisted by some sheikdoms. “The question becomes how to get all emirates to subscribe to it,” says Shawki Barghouti, the director general of the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture in Dubai.
With average consumption of 550 liters per person per day, water-poor UAE has one of the world’s highest domestic water consumption rates in the world, most of which is produced by desalination. After Saudi Arabia, the UAE with 30 desalination plants is the world’s largest desalinator. Abu Dhabi alone produces up to nine million tons of greenhouse gasses a year as a result of desalination.
UAE Environment and Water Minister Rashid bin Fahad said the new law was necessary because even within the various sheikdoms responsibility for water is shared by various authorities. Abu Dhabi is the emirate that has an independent authority to regulate desalination, water and electricity authorities.
Analysts says the law is likely to be resisted by some sheikdoms. “The question becomes how to get all emirates to subscribe to it,” says Shawki Barghouti, the director general of the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture in Dubai.
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