Consequences of Water Insecurity (Edexcel A Level Geography)

Global Pattern of Water Scarcity & Causes

• Accessible freshwater is a dwindling resource

• Population growth and economic development places an increasing pressure on freshwater resource

Categories of Water Scarcity 

• Causes of water scarcity:

  • Lack of annual or seasonal precipitation

  • Lack of investment and management of water infrastructure to meet demand

  • Scarcity may also be a social construct due to wealth, expectation and usual behaviour 

• Although access to safe, potable water is regarded as a human right, it is treated as a commodity to be paid for 

• The majority of water supplies are privately controlled and costs vary greatly not only between countries but between regions

• In HDEs, people expect to pay for their water supply, its removal, and subsequent treatment

• In some areas of LDEs however, water is free but not usually clean and people often have to spend many hours a day walking up to 10km to the supplies, carrying heavy containers

• This usually falls to women and girls to do on a daily basis

• If they do have access to safe water, then the cost can be beyond most people

  • In the UK the average cost of a litre of tap water is 0.01p or 5p for 50 litres and 99% of households have mains water piped directly to their homes (some people do not have mains water from choice)

  • In Ghana, only 41% have access to a safely managed water source, while only 18% have access to very basic sanitation

  • Within the capital of Accra, only 45% of households have a supply of water - for those that can afford it - and is an intermittent supply

  • The majority rely on water vendors for their water and come in 'packets' and depending on the vendor costs vary

Cost of Water for Ghana

Adapted from the Ghana Water Company Ltd April 2023

• Whilst the cost in UK£ may not appear much, for many Ghanaians, it represents 20-25% of their daily income and for the very poor, unaffordable

• Furthermore, if a resource is scarce, then it becomes more expensive

• Any rise in demand will also rise costs as water companies invest in production, treatment and infrastructure

• Many private companies have share holders to answer to, and profits are a requirement for future investments

• In some countries there is only one water company, which amounts to a monopoly on supplying water, and therefore, can charge what they want - a profit over people approach

• TNC French based Veolia is one of the largest water corporations globally and has been accused of environmental, labour and human rights abuses across the world

Importance of Water Supply

Agriculture

• Economic development is one of the drivers for the increased demand of safe water supplies

• Agriculture dominates water usage

• 20% of the Earth's land is fully irrigated, of which 30% comes from dams and their respective irrigation channels

• The majority though, is pumped from aquifers which is leading to irreversible groundwater depletion

• Areas of greatest groundwater depletion are in India, Pakistan, the United States and China

• These are areas where food production and water use are unsustainable

• Groundwater irrigation eventually discharges into the world's oceans, and contributes to sea level rise

• IPCC scientists estimate this to be 0.8 mm per year, which is just less than a quarter of the current sea level rise of 3.3 mm

Industry and energy

• 20% of global freshwater abstraction is for industrial and or energy production

• Of that, over 50% is used for generating energy either as hydroelectric power (HEP) or for cooling for thermal and nuclear power stations

• The majority of this water is returned to source virtually unchanged

• Chemical, clothing, paper, electronic, steel, and petroleum industries are also major consumers of water

• Furthermore, water pollution is a significant consequence of these industries particularly in LDEs and EMEs, where water governance and protection policies are limited, ignored or non existent 

• Growing crops for the production of biodiesel and bioethanol requires a lot of water and there is growing concern over their use

Domestic use

• Rising standards of living, due to economic development, increases per capita use of water

• Access to safe, potable water is fundamental to human health

• Water that is polluted through lack of sanitation, is a breeding ground for mosquitoes, snails and parasitic worms and their vector disease of malaria, dengue fever and bilharzia

• Other diseases such as typhoid, cholera and dysentery, are transmitted through polluted water

• Water that is safe for washing and food preparation is particularly necessary 

• Inadequate supplies will disrupt water-dependent aspects of further economic development, raising costs both economically and socially

• Environmentally, there is a risk of over-exploitation of what little supplies there are, prolonging periods of drought and possibly initiating the steps towards desertification

Potential for Conflicts

• As the demand for water overtakes supplies there is potential for conflict or 'water wars'

• Conflict for water arises between competing demands of irrigation, energy, industrial, domestic and recreation uses

• The bulk of internal conflicts are usually agriculture-related

  • The semi-arid region of Sahel, Africa, sees regular clashes of herdsmen and crop farmers over scarce supplies of water needed for both animals and crops

• In many parts of the world, ownership is done through owning the river banks in what is called 'riparian rights'

• Yet water is a moving object, and it crosses borders easily

• It is this 'shared' river, aquifer or drainage basin that raises transboundary tensions to a level of international and even open conflict

Waters of the Nile

• The Nile River is the longest river in the world stretching 4,132 miles (6,650 km) while crossing 11 countries in northern Africa

• The sources of the Nile are high in the mountains of Burundi, Rwanda and Kenya, where the rivers feed into Lake Victoria, which was considered the source of the White Nile by John Speke in 1862

• Called the White Nile because the water is coloured by whitish clay particles suspended in it

• The other main tributary, the Blue Nile, has its origins high in the highlands of Ethiopia which flow into Lake Tana

• These two great rivers meet at Khartoum in Sudan and flow northwards through Egypt to the Mediterranean

• The river has huge seasonal variation due to the rain in Ethiopia

• These feed the Blue Nile in the summer but in winter there is almost nothing, and the river can become a trickle

• The lower Nile is fed by the more constant flow of the White Nile

• This seasonal flooding on top of steady flow is what made settlement and agriculture in the lower Nile Valley of Egypt possible

• The waters of the Nile have provided the essential life-support system for human development and civilisation in the region for 1000’s of years

Water rights

• In 1929, the Nile Water Agreement was made which granted Egypt the rights to most of the river water apart from a tiny bit in the Sudan

• The people of the upper courses, were effectively forbidden to use the water

• In 1959 Egypt and Sudan signed an agreement increasing the allocations of water in both Egypt and Sudan

• The problem is that Egypt is 90% dependent on the waters of the Nile for its survival

• Egypt's military power and political instability in other countries has been its ally

• This has essentially stopped the other countries from interfering with the water, as they were rather busy elsewhere

• But, in the 1990’s things began to change. The need for cooperation was becoming obvious and by 2006 a Nile River Basin Commission was established to ensure equal and fair usage of the River Nile

Dams on the Nile

• Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia all depend on inflow from the Blue Nile and have long exchanged political blows over the upstream Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project – a dam built at $5bn (£3.6bn), and three times the size of the country's Lake Tana

• The dam is the largest hydropower project in Africa and will create a reservoir containing 74 billion cubic meters of water

• When the Ethiopian government announced plans to press ahead filling the dam, Egypt and Sudan held a joint war exercise in May 2021, called "Guardians of the Nile"

• The filling of the giant dam at the headwaters of the Nile River, will reduce water supplies to downstream Egypt by more than one-third and reduce arable land in Egypt by up to 72% and take years to fully fill

• The economic losses to Egyptian agriculture could be up to US$51 billion

• GDP loss would push unemployment to 24% and potentially displace people and disrupt other economies

• Water rights along the Nile have been in dispute since 1959; however, the conflict now threatens to escalate into a war