Too much and too little of a good thing: water, the environment and society
A few things before we continue with our water and sanitation theme- Oxfam has launched a report today on neglected aspects of research and development that affect the poorest in society. It is particularly noteworthy as it includes realistic recommendations for incentivising research in areas of low profit but high health importance. Have a look at our news item on the report for more. We’ve created an “in the news” section where we can post summaries of recent news stories, so keep your eye on that. Secondly, as you will no doubt have seen in the media, the situation is still dire in the DR Congo but as yet little decisive action has been taken. We’d like to draw your attention to a letter urging the EU to send a neutral peacekeeping force to protect civilians that you might want to sign. Our blog today focuses on the links between the environment, water and public health and we’d again encourage you to sign the letter on promoting water and sanitation as a health issue.
Photo courtesy of Oxfam
Water is a prerequisite for life on earth. There is such a good case for it being essential for any form of life in general that nearly all considerations of the possibility of extraterrestrial life revolve around whether the planet (Mars being a classic example) can currently or could in the past support liquid water. There is certainly a lot of it around on our “blue planet”, but for human purposes, such as drinking, agriculture and hygiene, 97% of it is too salty to be usable. If all the water in the world could be compared to a bucket of water, the world’s freshwater would fit in a teaspoon. Despite the presence of (and increasing interest in) desalination technology, all societies, developed and developing, rely nearly completely on this one precious teaspoon. That the fates of many ancient civilisations have been made or broken by water is an important reminder of this.
One of the targets of Millennium Development Goal 7, to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water, therefore needs to be framed in the considerable logistical challenges that this entails. It is not simply an issue of building an infrastructure of pipes and sewers (often complicated in their own right) but of where this water is going to come from. Forces in the world today, notably climate change and the rising global population (including changes in consumption habits), have already begun to threaten water security. Coupled with this are the disastrous effects of too much water-floods and rising sea levels-definitely or likely due to climate change. The rest of this blog will touch on a few of these points. Water pollution also has a significant impact on health but is beyond the scope of this blog.
It is estimated that every person needs a minimum of 1000 cubic metres of water per year, for drinking, washing and growing food. Not everyone receives this minimum due to local scarcity or lack of access and others in rich countries use far in excess of this. Interestingly though, each person only needs about 1 cubic metre per year for drinking, though the quality of this water is essential for ensuring good health, as we have mentioned before. The lion’s share of water consumption is given over to agriculture and this has been a neglected aspect of the recent food crisis, as outlined in a press release from the International Water Management Institute. Physical scarcity, lack of adequate investment in water sources or a combination of both can have terrible consequences, as the recurrent famines in Ethiopia have shown. As well as malnutrition and displacement, there are other knock-on consequences, for instance the spread of cholera in Mozambique at the moment has been exacerbated by drought and in Kenya, lack of water is forcing children out of school. Producing energy is also heavily reliant on water, not just in hydroelectric power but for many functions, including cooling. Additionally, sourcing, processing and distributing water is a very energy-intensive process. A commentary in Nature nicely describes the cyclicality of these issues and how the situation will develop as both water and fossil fuels become increasingly scarce. The race to biofuels has been widely blamed as a major contributor to the food crisis by diverting land from crop plants. The issue runs deeper, however, as producing ethanol requires huge amounts of water; a typical factory making 50 million gallons of biofuel per year needs roughly 500 gallons of water per minute. Some but not all water is lost through evaporation and as waste.
It has become clear through modelling, research and recent events that many of the early and major effects of climate change will impact on water. Flooding has always been a significant problem for many communities and there is evidence (though it is extremely difficult to conclusively prove) that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent in certain areas, be they sudden and catastrophic or more long-term. Honduras is experiencing extensive flooding due to a prolonged tropical climatic depression and Bangladesh, a region which has suffered from increasingly bad flooding over the years, still has yet to recover from cyclone Sidr last November. The rise in sea levels is another obvious effect of a warming planet and though only 2% of land is less than 10m above sea level, 10% of the global population live in these threatened regions. In terms of more subtle effects, the changes in rainfall patterns and climatic conditions in general will have a huge effect on people everywhere, but particularly on the poorest. An article in Scientific American on climate change refugees provides a very good review on how environmental changes will lead to displacement for multiple reasons (the author, Jeffrey Sachs, is a prominent figure in global economic and environmental debates but not without his detractors - see this scathing review of his latest book). More than one sixth of the global population rely on glaciers and seasonal snowpacks for their sources of freshwater, which are threatened by rising temperatures. This is already a severe problem for countries such as Kyrgyzstan.
This all may seem rather far from the initial point of this blog, which is to talk about health, but it is clear that all these issues, from agriculture to sea encroachment, will impact on health. Thus, while our main focus might be the difference clean water and sanitation can make to the health of an individual or a community, we must also be aware of the wider context and the challenges that universal and equitable access to water pose. Speaking about MDG7 at a conference last week, Professor Allan said that one of the major problems is that responsibility for providing water and water resources is divided between multiple institutions and companies; agricultural bodies, governments, water companies etc., leading to a lack of coordination. Many people, including academics, have talked about the need to bring the wider environment back into health policy. This is something that we should heed, and soon.