Water scarcity has reached such a vulnerable level that googling it will take you to the official website of the UN, where it is mentioned in number 6 of 17 sustainable development goals that 2.6 billion people have gained access to improved drinking water sources since 1990, however, 663 million are still without access. Also, at least 1.8 billion people all over the globe use a drinking water source that is faecally contaminated.
Water Leader is the official publication of the Global Water Leaders Group, and it is the foremost publication for water sector performance worldwide. The group aims to initiate this process through its common solution program. The magazine shares the stories of the sector’s thought-leading and top-achieving CEOs and ministers, while it also reports the output of the group’s CEO-level workshops, including the latest and most innovative leadership, management, and operational performance models. And I am glad to write that, according to the Global Water Leaders Innovation Survey 2016, I have been selected as one of the featured CEOs. Thanks very much for appreciating my efforts!
The magazine features my perspective of the matter under the heading “Prophesising the Future of Water.” The authors mentioned that the main forces that will shape the water industry by 2050 are threefold—demography, economics, and technology—and I feel the urgency of managing these forces and their associated challenges and opportunities. The following quote of mine sums up my views during my keynote speech in Abu Dhabi in April 2016, where more than 1,000 water leaders were present: “We are at a crossroads now. To have a water leader, you need sustainable leaders. We are trying to fight greenhouse gas emissions. In looking for innovative ideas and solutions, the world needs to come together. We need history-makers, not just game changers.”
At this point, I am recalling that moment in 2007 when I was honored and recognized with a Gold Medal by the mayor of Cannes, France, in appreciation of my water management and sanitation programs. I am very thankful that my efforts towards water sustainability were recognized.
It is worth mentioning here how critical water could be, and it could be a real challenge. The examples I would like to highlight here are the water scarcities in Maharashtra, Malaysia, and California.
A lot of regions around the world are facing water shortages, and California is one of them. The Colorado River basin, which provides critical water supplies to seven states, including California, has been affected by a slow-burning catastrophe for the last 16 years. The seven states are Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada,
Arizona, and California. In those states, the Colorado River basin is an important water resource that sustains 40 million people in those states, supports 15 percent of the nation’s food supply, and fills two of the largest water reserves in the country.
Because of the severe shortage of rainfall, the $46 billion agricultural industry in California has been affected. Most parts of California are experiencing “extreme to exceptional drought”, and the crisis has now entered its fourth year. Considering this serious situation, in June 2015, state officials announced the first cutback on farmers’ water rights since 1977 and ordered cities and towns to cut down on their water use by as much as 36 percent. The condition is so serious that NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) scientists said it will take several years of average or above-average rainfall before California’s water supply can return to anything close to normal.
Drought has also affected sports in India. Owing to the severe drought in Maharashtra, India, all 2016 Indian Premiere League (IPL) matches scheduled there after April 30, 2016, were moved, in accordance with a ruling by the Bombay High Court. The ruling was passed after a public interest litigation, which questioned the hosting of matches in Mumbai, Pune, and Nagpur owing to the severe drought in Maharashtra. Moving the matches caused problems for both franchises and players, but it was necessary. The Mumbai Indians and the Rising Pune Supergiants, which are franchises based in Mumbai and Pune, respectively, had proposed to contribute 0.75 million to the Maharashtrian chief minister’s drought relief fund and supply 4 million liters of water to drought-hit areas at their own cost.
Malaysia is known as a country with an abundance of water resources. The country’s population has access to clean water almost every day, but the problem is that, nowadays, it is no longer enough. The requirement is more than the resources could provide. Malaysia uses 232 l/c/d (liters per capita per day). For reference purposes, the World Health Organization recommends 150 l/c/d under normal conditions, and 100 l/c/d is set as the minimum for drinking and hygiene purposes. Do you see the difference?
AGREEMENT FOR THIRST
Under the 1962 Water Agreement with Malaysia, which will end in 2061, the Public Utilities Board (PUB), which is a statutory board under the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources, and is the national water agency that manages Singapore’s water supply, water catchment, and used water in an integrated way, is entitled to draw 250 million gallons of raw water per day from the Johor River. In turn, PUB is obliged to sell 5 million gallons of treated water per day to Johor. What I want to highlight here is that the condition there is so vulnerable that they have no other option than to depend on another country for clean water to fulfil their daily needs.
On July 17, 2016, Singapore started an additional supply of 6 million gallons of treated water per day for three days after Johor’s water regulatory body made an urgent request to stabilize its supply system in Johor Baru, which has been affected by pollution in the Johor River, Singapore’s PUB said in a statement. Currently, the republic already regularly provides 15 to 16 million gallons of treated water per day to Johor. As Benjamin Franklin said, “When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.” We should always be conscious of how important water is and how we should use it so that we never have to face the crisis that a lot of countries are facing today.
VITO is a leading independent European research and technology organization in the areas of clean tech and sustainable development, finding innovative and high-quality solutions for the large societal challenges of today. VITO’s research agenda tackles the major societal challenges we are facing today. In so doing, it focuses on five different research programs: sustainable chemistry, energy, health, materials management, and land use. I congratulate them for their tremendous work in their programs.
On January 17, 2017, I had the chance to meet Mr. Dirk Fransaer, managing director, and Dr. Walter J. R. Buydens, CEO of Vito, at my SEWA office. We discussed the issues, challenges, and opportunities in water management and sanitation programs in Sharjah and worldwide. The purpose of their visit was to invite me to the Vito R&D Center headquarters in Belgium and to ask me to be a speaker at the Global Science, Technology and Innovation Conference on October 23–25, 2017, in Brussels, the capital of Belgium. It was really a great honor and privilege for me to work with such an organization for such a good cause.
During our discussion at SEWA, they highlighted the very critical challenge that the region and the Arabian Sea may go through because of the action taken by Iraq and Turkey in building dams and stopping the water flowing to the sea.
Dr. Walter was kind enough to share his white paper and his opinion regarding the Arabian Gulf waters, which he also shared at the UNESCO-IHE at Delft as a guest lecturer. The report is titled “Can Man’s Interference with the Hydrological Cycle Be Blamed for the Increasing High Salinity Content in the Arabian Gulf Waters?”
The Arabian Gulf can be best viewed as a shallow semi-enclosed basin that is 900 kilometers long and has a width ranging from 50 kilometers at the Strait of Hormuz to 340 kilometers at its widest stretch and an average depth of 30 meters. It has a surface area of about 240,000 square kilometers. The Indian Ocean waters get pulled in through the Strait of Hormuz and flow counterclockwise and on top of the heavier (owing to its higher salinity content) Gulf water.
The average seawater salinity is 35 grams of salt per one litre of water, whereas the salinity in the Arabian Gulf is a whopping 45 ppt. Scientifically, this phenomenon is called hypersalinity. The reason behind it can be explained by the disparity between the evaporation flux, which is up to 200 centimeters per year on the one hand, and sparse rainfall at a maximum of 10 centimeters per year, combined with incoming “freshwater” flux from the Shatt al-Arab River. The Shatt al-Arab River is formed by the confluence of the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karun Rivers. It used to be the main source of freshwater in the Gulf, though it no longer “freshens” the waters in the Gulf.
The term freshwater must, unfortunately, be taken with more than a pinch of salt since large-scale upstream dams and irrigation projects in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq have triggered both low water flows and severe salinization in the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates. As a matter of fact, owing to continually declining water flows, we now observe the reverse infiltration of saltwater from the Arabian Gulf into the Shatt al-Arab River in Iraq for nearly 150 kilometers inland, a phenomenon that has forced many local farmers to migrate.
To make matters worse, the wetlands of the Mesopotamian marshes have virtually lost their ecological function as “kidneys” cleaning the delta waters. First came the drainage of parts of the marshes in the 1950s to drill for oil and expand agriculture. This had a severe environmental impact, but it was nothing compared with the deliberate deathblow in the 1990s, when the then Iraqi leadership retaliated for local uprisings by hydraulically destroying the marshes and reducing them to 1/10 of their size. This culminated in one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters, as described by the UN. Since 2003, there have been efforts to restore these age-old ecosystems, which, although successful in the first years, it ultimately ended in mixed results as recent warfare levies its environmental toll up to this day. The Mesopotamian marshes, once epitomized as the Garden of Eden, are still in an apocalyptical state.
What about the other man-made water inflows, rejects, and withdrawals in the Arabian Gulf? The desalination of seawater is of paramount importance in meeting the needs of the growing human population in the Arabian Gulf countries, which is also compounded by the increase in human consumption. At the time of writing, approximately 70 percent of desalination plants are located in the northern, western, and southern part of the Arabian Gulf. The Gulf States plan to double the capacity of desalination systems by 2030.
What are the impacts? The salinity of reject streams in desalination plants is up to 2.5 times as high as the intake water. Brine increases the salinity by up to 55 ppt in the vicinity of the desalination plants—up to almost 60 percent higher than that of average seawater. Besides the concentration of salt, chemical discharges, air pollution, and GHG, emissions are a concern in the operation of desalination plants.
One can only sympathize with the fate of hawksbill sea turtles, dugongs, dolphins, a myriad of bird species, coral reefs, and mangrove coastal area species. Even seagrass habitats, which are indispensable in the marine food chain, have been depleted by more than 35 percent by the combined effect of salinity, oil spills, and heavy metal pollution from industrial effluents. However, economically speaking, a challenge is rising as higher salt content means ever more expensive desalination.
All stakeholders indiscriminately seek gains from using the waterthe quintessential “free or common good.” The flip side of a free or common good is that by seeking their self-interest in this open-access resource, stakeholders are dispersing the cost and environmental burden of the increasing salinity to the community at large.
Those dwelling at the bottom of the dam cascades suffer the highest impact amounting to unsustainable living conditions. Countries on the southern coast of the Arabian Gulf are the most at risk of being affected by the salinity and oil spills as the main sea current is flowing counterclockwise, starting at the Strait of Hormuz, and then along the coast of Iran to the north and going back south along the UAE to the Strait of Hormuz. Along the path of the sea streams, increasing salt content and pollution is picked up, part of which is released into the Oman Sea.
But who will foot the bill for this large-scale environmental degradation? Will it be the farmer or the household in Turkey who benefits from the hydropower and extra irrigation possibilities resulting from the ongoing large-scale dam construction? Will it be the desperate refugee or warrior in Syria, or rather the Marsh Arab downstream in Iraq? Will it be the fisherman from Bahrain, the Saudi oil companies, or the nature conservationists in Ras al-Khaimah? These unanswered questions painfully illustrate the well-known economic externality phenomena of the tragedy of the use of a common good the likes of free water. Also, it may well become a serious problem, or rather a tragedy that could spill far beyond the hydrographic basins of Tigris-Euphrates and the Arabian Gulf waters.
It is not enough to enumerate the root causes of the problems. It is high time we started to look for enduring solutions as the Arabian Gulf is heading gradually toward becoming a saltwater lake instead of a normal sea. At this moment, only the broad brush approaches can be suggested.
At the political level, for the Tigris-Euphrates basin, the discussion of fair water distribution should involve more countries than just Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. Indeed, all countries bordering the Arabian Gulf, as well as Oman, are affected stakeholders and should be consulted in an intergovernmental water management body. Extra dams may be constructed only after careful negotiations and the modeling of the environmental impacts downstream is completed, including the waters of the Arabian Gulf. At the technical level, regarding desalination: caution needs to be exerted as to the location of new desalination plants, the treatment of the reject brine, the use of chemicals and heavy metals in the processes, and the study of the location and flux of reject brine streams. On top of this, the observation of oil spills and red algae bloom is critical in preserving the marine environment of the Gulf.
At the scientific level, the situation needs to be monitored closely both by water measurements and by drone and satellite imagery. The effects of climate change need to be addressed and predicted. At the same time, more fundamental hydrodynamic research is needed on the inflow-outflow characteristics at the Strait of Hormuz and the dynamics of the water currents in the Gulf.
As we cannot foretell the future, I finally suggest that an expert panel take into account all of the above and consider a wide range of future scenarios, answer the many “what-if questions” to be timely prepared, and come up with sustainable strategies to save the Arabian Gulf waters.
Alpha Utilities (AU) was established in February 2005, by the C&C Alpha Group Limited in the UK in response to the growing demand for power and water from both the domestic and industrial sectors in the UAE. At that time, I was the director general of the Hamriyah Free Zone (HFZ) and was fortunately able to support them to become an institute inside the Hamriyah Free Zone. C&C Alpha has a comprehensive background as an independent power producer (IPP) in the state of Haryana, India.
At that time, the unit price of water