WASHINGTON: River water is currently the cause of much quibbling and heartburn between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and will replace oil as the resource over which wars of the next century will be fought, according to an American Congressional journal.
In a paper entitled “Global Water Shortage,’ the Congressional Quarterly Researcher says as in 1910, 20 countries in the world faced chronic water shortages, That number, according to a World Banks study, is expected to grow to 34 by 2025, Most of these countries are and will be in West Asia and Saharan Africa.
By 2050, when the world’s population will be 10 billion, nearly 4.4 billion will live in 58 countries suffering water scarcity. The study does not list India among the countries that suffers or may suffer water shortage.
Policymakers have yet to find a way to forestall the growing depletion of fresh water supplies in part because of the strictly local nature of water shortages. While West Asia faces potentially devastating shortages countries such as Iceland and Canada have more water than they can use, the study says.
The next war in the west Asia will be over water, not politics,” the paper quotes Mr. Boutros Boutros Ghali as saying when he was Egypt’s Deputy Prime Minister. The view is seconded by World Bank Vice-president Ismail Sergageldin, a Turk; “Many of the wars of this century were about oil, but wary of the next century will be over water.” Egypt, incidentally, lies at the tail and of the upper riparian countries that control the flow of the great Nib as it empties out in the north.
The paper concentrates largely on West Asia where Israel, Syria and the new Palestinian entity are at loggerheads over the scarce waters of the river Jordan, Turkey, Syria and lraq are also involved in a dispute over water resources in the Tigris and Europeanish river basin.
Outside West Asia, water rights are contentious issue in the Ganges river basin shared by India and Bangladesh, the Danube river, where Slovakia and Hungary are arguing over a planned hydroelectric dam, and even the Colorado river, whose waters, arc so depleted by diversions in the American southwest that barely a trickle of polluted saline water reaches Mexico, the report says.
According to the report, although there are 304 million cubic miles of water on the Earth, 98% of it is salt water unfit for human consumption, agriculture and industry, only about 2.5% of the Earth’s water is fresh, and almost 99% of that small amount is locked up in glaciers and permanent Show cover in the planet regions. In the final analysis, less than one per cent of Barth’s fresh water is removable, this is the water found in fresh water lakes and rivers, whose losses Lo evaporation and consumption are replenished by rainfall, river flow and Springs.
The paper says dam construction is slowing down in most developed countries because suitable dam sites have already been used. In less developed nations, dams continue to offer Solutions to Security problems, but construction is often hampered by concerns about environmental depredation and the need to resettle vast numbers of the affected.
Article extracted from this publication >> January 24, 1996
