Water: The final resource: How the politics of water will affect the world

Water politics, sometimes called hydropolitics, is politics affected by the availability of water and water resources, a necessity The United Nations Development Programme sums up world water distribution in the In places, surface water can be stored in a reservoir behind a dam, and then used for municipal and.
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Global Challenges for Gender Equality. D7 K33 Volume Information: It was in when the first machinery was used to mine the gold from the region. The average amount of contamination in the water system of Obuasi was over 10—38 times the maximum amount that is allowable by law.

During precipitation or rainfall, the dust "may be oxidized to the trioxide by the air and be converted to the sulphate in dew and rainwater". Residents have seen the environmental changes especially in the water. Sludge floats down on streams that were once main sources of drinking water according to local residents. Many local farmers suffered the hardest with the contamination of the water. Due to the irrigation systems using the contaminated water to irrigate all of the soil were then contaminated as well.

According to Action Aid, many schools have been flooded with the over flow of the local streams, causing the children to leave school, sometimes permanently. AngloGold Ashanti AGA has put up standpipes to compensate for the contaminated water supplies, but these have also been useless to the locals.

No compensation has been giving to the local residents for the damage they have done to their water and environment. Globalization has benefitted the economy greatly through increased trade and production of food, energy, and goods. Water is a finite resource that is shared between nations, within nations, multiple interest groups and private organizations. Poor water politics and practices can result in water conflict , which is more common surrounding freshwater due to its necessity for survival.

Countries that have a greater supply of water have greater economic success due to an increase in agricultural business and the production of goods, whereas countries, which have limited access to water, have less economic success. The World Trade Organization has emerged as a key figure in the allocation of water in order to protect the agricultural trade.

This water conflict begun in as a result of poor water politics and management between nation states and negotiations are ongoing. Currently, negotiations have attempted to establish a fair divide and share of the Jordan River, but have had little success. The water conflict in the Aral Sea is an ongoing transboundary conflict starting from between Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , Turkmenistan , Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Water politics is present within nations, otherwise known as subnational.

The shared jurisdiction of access to water between intergovernmental actors is crucial to efficient water politics. Inefficient water politics at the subnational level has a greater impact on the local economy through increased costs for businesses, increased costs for the agricultural sector, decreased local competitiveness, decrease in local jobs and infrastructure costs. The Colorado River Basin demonstrates intergovernmental conflict over the autonomy of water politics.

Cooperation in subnational water politics can result in economic benefits through shared costs and risk for infrastructure. In addition, efficient water politic management results in profitable allocations of water that can sustain irrigation and the agricultural sector. Water is an absolute necessity in human sustainability and human survival.

There is no human activity that can be sustained without the use of water whether it be at a direct or indirect level. In addition, the Millennium Development Goals of includes the sharing and fair allocation of water as a major goal.


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Equal access to water entails that no individual should be given privilege over the other at the absolute basic level. The sale of water cannot be permitted or justified under the United Nations at the basic level because water is seen as a universal human right. The right to water was created specifically to assist poor individuals in developing countries through attaining equitable access to water to prevent illness and death. There have been many agreements set in place to try and avoid inequality and conflict with the use of water.

Still, international leaders are struggling with incorporating bilateral and multilateral agreements to ensure efficient and fair water allocation. For instance, there are approximately river basins and ground water aquifers with policies that manage the sharing of the resource by two or more nations. The United Nations has not presented an initiative to create a strategic framework to penalize nations, which have water conflicts.

Inside Story - What can be done to stop global water scarcity?

There has been a demand from countries and interest groups for the United Nations to set out a policy with rules and boundaries on water sharing and allocation. This policy must include clear-cut penalties for countries that go against the policies. As the availability of water decreases daily, the demand for policies and agreements to address water allocation and sharing increases. Bilateral and multilateral agreements are most important for third world countries since water is a scarce resource, and they will be the first to face water shortages.

Developed countries can offer resources to trade for water but third world countries are not as well off as developed countries and will lag behind. If agreements are not set in place many third world countries will have no choice but to turn to warfare in order to secure water. The United Nations emphasizes and prioritizes water as a human right.

However, the United Nations fails to create a policy that appropriately creates balance in terms of water-sharing and allocation. The creation of policies and agreements becomes even more difficult when the matter of hydropsychology is factored in. Hydropsychology is known as the use of water at the micro-level or at the individual level. Hydropsychology is advantageous because it studies the use of water at the smaller scale. Hydropsychology is noted as the bottom-up approach whereas hydropolitics water politics is the top-down approach. Whereas, many third world countries do not have access to clean water and their situation will only worsen as the water supply lessens.

Furthermore, the usage of water for recreational activity instead of sustainability creates a significant increase in the attention that hydropsychology is now receiving as there are drastic gaps between the availability of water in countries. Some countries use water freely for recreation, whereas other countries had limited supplies for survival, efficient water politics addresses this issue through good water allocation and management.

There has been a proposition in a more balanced approach for water-sharing and allocation through a combination of large scale politics on the international level and smaller scale politics hydropsychology rather than focusing strictly one a singular approach. This balanced approach would include policies created at community levels and national levels in order to address the issue of water-sharing and allocation.

The failure of hydropolitics on its own is demonstrated through the conflicts that have occurred in the past and present between nations that share and manage water together. Thus the combination of hydropolitics and hydropsychology would assist international leaders with addressing water-sharing.

Both hydropolitics and hydropsychology have different approaches on dealing with the matter and the different ideas can merge to create a more complete solution. Subsequently, the local level pays minimal attention to international affairs but has major knowledge on local water use.

Water politics

Thus, the combination of the two make up for the lack of attention each level gives to the other. It is also important to note that the individual level has an impact on the governmental level, which affects the abundance of water, and international agreements that will be created. By , as much as two-thirds of the world population would be under stress conditions" UN, It is recognized that areas that are short on water may in effect import it from other areas when they import food or energy or manufactured products that require water inputs.

The peoples of the study area will almost assuredly live under conditions of significant water stress during the immediate future. Barring completely unforeseen events, the population of the region is likely to grow, possibly very rapidly. Moreover, the region will likely continue to. The twin phenomena of population and economic growth will place increasing pressure on the already limited water supplies of the region. The region's success in managing this intensifying water problem will largely be a matter of how it identifies and accounts for all of the many factors that determine and influence water use.

This chapter reviews the factors that are likely to influence future water use, giving special consideration to practices that may be amenable to some degree of change. The chapter's discussion begins with the difficulties of projections and the problems associated with identifying specific disparities between water supply and demand. Water resource planners frequently focus on identifying potential gaps between water demand and water supply at some future date. Detailed plans are then developed to ensure that supplies are brought into balance with anticipated demands, thereby eliminating the gap.

Such plans typically include projections of anticipated levels of water use based on population growth, per capita and per hectare water use, and other variables that affect demand. These estimates of future use are then compared with existing levels of available water supplies, and the time when a ''gap" or disparity between anticipated levels of use and existing levels of supply is identified.

Based on the size and timing of this gap, measures and actions are then identified to close the gap and bring supplies into balance with the expected demands. There are many examples of this planning methodology California Department of Water Resources, , including many of the water planning analyses for the study area see, for example, CES Consulting Engineers and GTZ, The committee believes that water planning approaches that initially focus on emerging gaps between supply and demand are flawed.

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They are based on projections that, however well informed, often ignore the considerable uncertainty surrounding future levels of water use; and more generally, such plans are always based on a significant number of assumptions, many of them untested and unstated. To the extent that water availability determines population and economic growth, projections can become self-fulfilling prophesies.

By contrast, where economic and population growth are only weakly determined by the availability of water, overly optimistic growth projections may lead to investment in excess water supply capacity, the costs of which must be borne, regardless of whether the water is used. In circumstances characterized by significant. The uncertain prospect of global environmental change, for example, would appear to call for flexible responses, permitting regions to adapt reasonably quickly to changes in climatic patterns as they emerge Vaux, Many assumptions in the traditional analyses are unstated or have not been subject to careful examination.

Frequently, plans are based on the assumption that current levels and patterns of water use are optimal, irrespective of the costs of maintaining them in the face of population and economic growth. The role of prices in rationing the quantities of water used is rarely considered, since most such studies are premised on the unstated notion that real or nominal prices for water should remain constant. Additionally, planning based on the analysis of gaps frequently fails to identify the full range of adaptive mechanisms through which growth in water demands can be accommodated. Thus, such studies have often been done for the sole purpose of justifying the "need" for public financing of additional facilities, even though other less expensive means for balancing water supply and demand may have been available.

It is only recently that such plans have included significant consideration of various options for managing water demand see, for example, Berkoff, The ultimate issue for planning, of course, is not closing any gap in the most literal sense: It is not physically possible for an individual or population to use more water than is actually available. The issue is rather that the amount of water desired or needed for many purposes may exceed available supplies.

In many Middle East households, water supply is severely restricted for some or all of the time, and such restrictions may grow as economies and populations grow unless water delivery capacities can be increased. Where existing levels of water use are extremely low compared with the levels needed to avoid high economic and social costs, attention understandably focuses on closing the water supply "gap" between current and minimally acceptable levels of use.

In addition, where current levels of supply include sources that cannot be sustained over the long-run—"mined" ground water, for example—it will not be possible to maintain a balance between supply and existing patterns of use indefinitely. Bringing demand and supply into balance in such cases requires reallocation among uses or the development of new supplies. Either action may entail substantial economic, social, or environmental costs. The planning issue, then, is the identification of alternative options through which supply and demand can feasibly be balanced, the costs of achieving these various alternatives, and the amounts of water use and.

Any plan for managing water scarcity in the Middle East should identify the full range of alternatives for augmenting water supply and managing demand, provide estimates of the costs of each alternative, and identify and characterize alternative levels of water use where supplies and demands are in equilibrium. In developing and assessing strategies to manage scarce water supplies, it will be important to identify the variables that have a large influence on the level of water use.

It will be equally important to understand the extent to which these variables can be managed and controlled, or be changed by further research and development. The quantities of water used in any activity are jointly determined by the supply of water available to support that activity and the demand for water in that activity.

Both the supply and the demand for water are further determined by variables that tend to be location specific.

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Nevertheless, a number of overarching factors influence levels of water use independent of location. These factors will undoubtedly be critical in determining future levels of water use in the study area. At the most fundamental level, water is needed to supply people's basic domestic needs, in quantities directly proportional to the number of people. Other uses of water include the various municipal, industrial, agricultural, environmental, and other uses described elsewhere in this report. The quantities of water used for these purposes are also related to some degree to the number and spatial distribution of people in the region, but these quantities are also affected by many other factors, discussed below.

Finally, people residing in urban areas tend to have different patterns of water use, and they tend to use different quantities of water than people in rural or agricultural areas. Trends in population growth and distribution are extremely difficult to predict. Currently, annual population growth rates in the study area are 3. However, the growth and distribution of population has been strongly sensitive to events both within and outside the study area. For example, armed conflicts in the Middle East resulted in three waves of immigration to Jordan and changes in policies. Although it appears quite likely that population in the study area will continue to grow over the next few decades, the rates and distribution of this growth are extremely difficult to predict accurately.

Technology and changes in technology may affect the availability or supply of water, demand for water and levels of water use. Industrialization, for example, typically increases the demand for water, at least initially. However, technological developments that permit users to economize on water—such developments as water-efficient indoor plumbing fixtures, closed-conduit irrigation systems like drip and microsprinkler systems, and computerized irrigation management techniques—frequently result in reductions in water use.

Technical improvements that improve timing and lower costs of supply can also affect water use. For example, the construction of impoundment facilities permits control and regulation of runoff and allows more constant levels of supply. Over the last century, pumping technology improvements have made new sources of ground water available that previously could not be exploited because of their depth.

On the other hand, failure to employ modern technology may mean lower quantities and higher costs of available supply. While improvements in technology have sometimes dramatically increased the availability of water supplies, technology can also produce unwanted and unforeseen side effects. Some technology-induced or technology-influenced changes in water supply may be reversible only over time scales of thousands of years.

For example, the construction of large dams NRC, , , exploitation of ground water and irrigation practices NRC, may alter water quality, regional hydrology, and water-dependent ecosystems in ways that are either impossible or prohibitively expensive to reverse on any reasonable time scale. Consequently, a complete assessment, including considerations of sustainability and intergenerational equity , of the impacts of new and existing water supply technology should identify specifically the time domains over which the benefits and costs of the technology are likely to be borne.

Economic conditions, both within and outside the study area may affect water supply and demand.


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  • Recent declines in the world price for cotton have caused sharp declines in the potential profits from cultivation of irrigated cotton. In turn, this development has provided both the political. World energy prices also affect the quantities of water used by boosting the price of water that must be pumped or treated before it can be used. Changes in economic conditions also affect foreign trade in many ways whose implications for water use are not always easy to foresee.

    Finally, economic conditions within the region will affect water supply and demand by affecting the ability of water users to pay for water, as well as the ability of producers to purchase capital and labor for activities in many industries that may directly or indirectly affect water use, including agriculture. Changes in environmental conditions can also significantly influence water supply and demand. Increased precipitation or decreased evapotranspiration are likely to augment water supplies and reduce the water demanded by irrigated agriculture.

    Increases in temperature or decreases in vegetated area or biological diversity are likely to diminish available supplies and increase the water demanded in many water using sectors. Water quality deterioration due to increased contamination levels reduces the available supply of water as surely as drought. Changes in the environment can be directly or indirectly caused by human activities, or they can be apparently unrelated to human activity.