Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has launched an international “Global Water Organisation” based in Riyadh to enhance global efforts in addressing water challenges. One of the most important goals is to establish quality projects and “facilitate their financing, in an effort to ensure the sustainability of water resources and to enhance access to them for all”, the Saudi Press Agency reported on Monday. (The National News)
16 of the 25 highly water stressed countries are in MENA. WRI says that in MENA ‘100% of the population will live with extremely high water stress by 2050. That’s a problem not just for consumers and water-reliant industries, but for political stability’. I find this to be off the mark.
Is MENA really going to be water stressed ?
Setting aside war-torn Yemen/Syria … drinking water supply in MENA is overall excellent. In the GCC, this is in large part due to desalination technology which supplies much of the potable water. Reverse Osmosis costs have fallen by 70%+ in the last 10 years. Water infrastructure planners are still catching on to this development. In the Middle East, desal tariffs are now less than $0.5/m3 … compare that to the typical UK water tariff of more than $2/m3. Desalination needs electricity … but even moving completely to desal supply would typically add less than 10% to total electricity demand.
Things are different when it comes to agriculture … desalinating water for agriculture does not sound like a great idea. However, the UAE (and I think wider region) has acknowledged that much of its food will be imported. 25% of food is internationally traded … and moving food from rain-fed agriculture to places with limited rainfall makes sense.
I did my own list – the 25 countries with lowest access to ‘basic drinking water services’ based on World Bank data. All of the countries are in Sub-Saharan Africa even though almost all have excellent fresh water resources. The lowest on the list is DR Congo where only 25% of the rural population access basic drinking water services even though it has >1300mm of rainfall per year … twice that of rainy NW Europe.
This tells me that water stress is for the most part not an issue of resource. It is a lack of 3 things – money, infrastructure planning and good governance.
I think we need to think more carefully about what we mean by water scarcity and how to solve it !
( Brendan Cronin | Director at AFRY Management Consulting )
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