Gulf states try to tackle water woes

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates - Plans are afoot to build what could become one of the world's longest pipelines, costing $10.5bn and stretching about 2,000 kilometres from Oman to Kuwait.

But instead of transporting the fossil fuels produced in this oil-rich corner of the Middle East, the pipes would be pumping something even more precious: water. With little groundwater - and, in some cases, just a few days' worth of fresh water in reserve - countries in the Gulf region fear they could face dire consequences if their water supply were to be disrupted.

This is an important project to secure water sustainability, because we are in a [water] scarce region.

- Rashid Bin Fahad, UAE's environment and water minister

Last week, the undersecretaries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries' water authorities met in Kuwait to discuss the proposed "water grid", which would shuttle the liquid from states with excess supply to those in need of a drink. Meetings on the mega-project are expected to resume in March at the ministerial level.

The GCC is a bloc of six oil-exporting monarchies including Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman.

"Water has always been the biggest challenge - not just for the UAE, but for the world," Rashid Bin Fahad, the UAE's environment and water minister, told Al Jazeera. "This is an important project to secure water sustainability, because we are in a [water] scarce region."

Water worries

Threats to the GCC countries' water supply, say some analysts, are magnified by the fact that they rely heavily on desalinating water from a single source: the Gulf.

Walid Khalil Zubari, a water scientist from Bahrain who participated in last week's meeting, said he sees five types of threats to the region's water supply: pollution caused by oil spills, red tides, or other factors; nuclear contamination; power outages or hackers disabling desalination plants; natural disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes; and acts of war.

"Most of the Gulf countries have relatively little water storage," said Tom Pankratz, the editor of Water Desalination Report. "If there are operational problems with multiple plants in one area, you could jeopardise the water production for a fairly large number of people and industries."

The transnational grid would be the first of its kind, according to Zubari. The plan calls for building two giant desalination plants on Oman's Indian Sea coast that would together be able to produce 500 million cubic metres of water per year.

Desalination plants extract the salt found in seawater - either by heating the water and condensing the steam, or pushing the water through a membrane that filters out the salt. The process is energy-intensive, but the Gulf countries have no shortage of fuel - and plants are becoming more efficient.

The biggest beneficiaries of the grid, Zubari said, would likely be Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, because their limited amounts of groundwater give them few options in case of emergency. More

 

Water security in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia … a far-fetched dream?

DAMMAM – Environmental and water experts have warned that water security might be a far-reaching dream for the Kingdom.
Limited water resources such as groundwater are being depleted by greedy farmers who care about nothing but profits, they said. The claimed nuclear energy can help desalinate seawater and save the country from a looming disaster that future generations will experience. Al-Riyadh daily asked the experts about the challenges the state faces in ensuring water security.

Precious resource

Dr. Asad Abu Ruzaizah, president of the Saudi Society for Environment Sciences, said the country is running out of groundwater at an alarming rate. He stressed the important role citizens can play to mitigate the enormity of the problem and conserve this valuable resource. “Some people are not really aware that we have a water security problem,” Ruzaizah said. “The government spends a huge amount of money on the desalination process but this causes a tremendous negative effect on the environment.
“Moreover, strategic water reserves are poor in the Kingdom and other GCC countries and this fact makes the water problem a huge challenge for these countries.
“We have a poor water authority and low awareness levels regarding the importance of saving water. “More funding should go into developing and managing water resources and searching constantly for new sources.
“The water authority and other water agencies should be developed to deal better with this issue and achieve sustainable development for the next generation.”

New regulations to manage current reserve

Dr. Muhammad Al-Ghamdi, professor of King Faisal University’s School of Agricultural Sciences, disagrees with Ruzaizah. “Everyone is saying let’s find new water resources instead of searching for regulations that can lead to the wise management of current resources,” Al-Ghamdi said. “Unfortunately, there are no clear plans, programs, or strategies to help us achieve water security.” He said he wondered how this problem would be solved while farmers, led by greed, continue to waste groundwater and mismanage limited water resources. “The sad thing is facts and statistics indicate that our groundwater problem is getting worse every year. “I’m worried the next generations will encounter insurmountable problems solving this issue.”
Dr. Ali Ishqi, ecology professor at King Abdulaziz University, said the Arabian Peninsula has a severe water shortage. Ninety percent of its area is barren desert land while green areas account for 2 percent of the total area. Ishqi believed that mismanagement of water resources has largely exacerbated groundwater shortages.
He said the only strategy that can end this looming crisis is to make use of nuclear energy.
“The use of nuclear reactors is the best choice for seawater desalination.
“Solar energy is not. “To meet the water needs of a small city population, you will need to have so many solar cells on a very large area.”

Rainwater harvesting is the solution

Abdullah Al-Rasheed, economist, said the only option available to solve this crisis is to set up a national authority for rainwater harvesting, where rainwater is collected and used for irrigation, drinking, and other purposes. The next upcoming war will be for water, Al-Rasheed claimed.
He quoted a feature that National Geographic carried a while ago on the water issue.
The Kingdom’s groundwater resources used to stand at 500 cubic kilometers 40 years ago, according to the feature. So far the country has used 400 cubic kilometers, which means that one generation has consumed 80 percent of the country’s resources. The feature said the Kingdom now has no choice but to use seawater because the remaining groundwater will probably be consumed in a few years. Al-Rasheed said he hoped that the statistics mentioned in the feature were not true. “One thing remains true: we have squandered our groundwater and used it for farming purposes. “There is no point now of crying over spilled milk. “It’s high time we utilized rainwater.”
Al-Rasheed said every year there is 150 billion to 250 billion cubic meters of rainfall in the Kingdom, while the amount of desalinated water the public consumes annually is 3 billion. “This is a small amount compared to the huge quantity of rainwater available for us.” More

 

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity - Lester Brown

Peak Water and Food Scarcity

Although many analysts are concerned about the depletion of oil resources, the depletion of underground water resources poses a far greater threat to our future. While there are substitutes for oil, there are none for water. Indeed, modern humans lived a long time without oil, but we would live for only a matter of days without water.

Not only are there no substitutes for water, but the world needs vast amounts of it to produce food. As adults, each of us drinks nearly 4 liters of water a day in one form or another. But it takes 2,000 liters of water—500 times as much—to produce the food we consume each day. 1

Since food is such an extraordinarily water-intensive product, it comes as no surprise that 70 percent of world water use is for irrigation. Although it is now widely accepted that the world is facing severe water shortages, not everyone realizes that a future of water shortages will also be a future of food shortages. 2

The use of irrigation to expand food production goes back some 6,000 years. Indeed, the development of irrigation using water from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers set the stage for the emergence of the Sumerian civilization, and it was the Nile that gave birth to ancient Egypt. 3

Throughout most of history, irrigation spread rather slowly. But in the latter half of the twentieth century it underwent a rapid expansion. In 1950, there were some 250 million acres of irrigated land in the world. By 2000, the figure had nearly tripled to roughly 700 million acres. After these several decades of rapid increase, however, the growth in irrigated area has slowed dramatically since the turn of the century, expanding only 9 percent from 2000 to 2009. Given that governments are much more likely to report increases than decreases, the recent net growth in irrigated area may be even smaller. This dramatic loss of momentum in irrigation expansion, coupled with the aquifer depletion that is already reducing irrigated area in some countries, suggests that peak water may now be on our doorstep. 4

The trend in irrigated land area per person is even less promising. For the last half-century, the irrigated area has been expanding—but not as fast as population. As a result, the irrigated area per person today is 10 percent less than it was in 1960. With so many aquifers being depleted and more and more irrigation wells going dry, this shrinkage in irrigated area per person is likely not only to continue but to accelerate in the years ahead. 5

Roughly 40 percent of the world grain harvest is grown on irrigated land. The rest is rainfed. Among the big three grain producers—China, India, and the United States—the role of irrigation varies widely. In China, four fifths of the grain harvest comes from irrigated land. For India it is three fifths, and for the United States, only one fifth. Asia, where rice is the staple food, totally dominates the world irrigated area. 6

Farmers use both surface and underground water for irrigation. Surface water is typically stored behind dams on rivers and then channeled onto the land through a network of irrigation canals. Historically, and notably from 1950 until 1975, when most of the world’s large dams were built, this was the main source of growth in world irrigated area. During the 1970s, however, as the sites for new dams diminished, attention shifted from building dams to drilling wells for access to underground water. 7

Most underground water comes from aquifers that are regularly replenished with rainfall; these can be pumped indefinitely as long as water extraction does not exceed recharge. A small minority of aquifers are fossil aquifers, however, containing water put there eons ago. Since these do not recharge, irrigation ends once they are pumped dry. Among the more prominent fossil aquifers are the Ogallala underlying the U.S. Great Plains, the deep aquifer under the North China Plain, and the Saudi aquifers. 8

Given a choice, farmers generally prefer having their own wells because it enables them to control the timing and amount of water delivered with a precision that is not possible with large, centrally managed canal irrigation systems. Pumps let them apply water precisely when the crop needs it, thus achieving higher yields than with large-scale, river-based irrigation systems. Forty percent of world irrigated area is now dependent on underground water. As world demand for grain has climbed, farmers have drilled more and more irrigation wells with little concern for how many the local aquifers could support. As a result, water tables are falling and millions of irrigation wells are either going dry or are on the verge of doing so. 9

As groundwater use for irrigation expands, so does the grain harvest. But if the pumping surpasses the sustainable yield of the aquifer, aquifers are depleted. When this happens, the rate of irrigation pumping is necessarily reduced to the aquifer’s natural rate of recharge. At this point, grain production declines too.

The resulting water-based “food bubbles,” which create a short-term false sense of security, can now be found in some 18 countries that contain more than half the world’s people. In these countries, food is being produced by drawing down water reserves. This group includes China, India, and the United States. 10 (See Table 6–1.) More

 

Global threat to food supply as water wells dry up, warns top environment expert

Lester Brown says grain harvests are already shrinking as US, India and China come close to 'peak water'

Iraq facing water shortages

Wells are drying up and underwater tables falling so fast in the Middle East and parts of India, China and the US that food supplies are seriously threatened, one of the world's leading resource analysts has warned.

In a major new essay Lester Brown, head of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, claims that 18 countries, together containing half the world's people, are now overpumping their underground watertables to the point – known as "peak water" – where they are not replenishing and where harvests are getting smaller each year.

The situation is most serious in the Middle East. According to Brown: "Among the countries whose water supply has peaked and begun to decline are Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. By 2016 Saudi Arabia projects it will be importing some 15m tonnes of wheat, rice, corn and barley to feed its population of 30 million people. It is the first country to publicly project how aquifer depletion will shrink its grain harvest.

"The world is seeing the collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline. Because of the failure of governments in the region to mesh population and water policies, each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed and less irrigation water with which to feed them."

Brown warns that Syria's grain production peaked in 2002 and since then has dropped 30%; Iraq has dropped its grain production 33% since 2004; and production in Iran dropped 10% between 2007 and 2012 as its irrigation wells started to go dry.

"Iran is already in deep trouble. It is feeling the effects of shrinking water supplies from overpumping. Yemen is fast becoming a hydrological basket case. Grain production has fallen there by half over the last 35 years. By 2015 irrigated fields will be a rarity and the country will be importing virtually all of its grain."

There is also concern about falling water tables in China, India and the US, the world's three largest food-producing countries. "In India, 175 million people are being fed with grain produced by overpumping, in China 130 million. In the United States the irrigated area is shrinking in leading farm states with rapid population growth, such as California and Texas, as aquifers are depleted and irrigation water is diverted to cities."

Falling water tables are already adversely affecting harvest prospects in China, which rivals the US as the world's largest grain producer, says Brown. "The water table under the North China Plain, an area that produces more than half of the country's wheat and a third of its maize is falling fast. Overpumping has largely depleted the shallow aquifer, forcing well drillers to turn to the region's deep aquifer, which is not replenishable."

The situation in India may be even worse, given that well drillers are now using modified oil-drilling technology to reach water half a mile or more deep. "The harvest has been expanding rapidly in recent years, but only because of massive overpumping from the water table. The margin between food consumption and survival is precarious in India, whose population is growing by 18 million per year and where irrigation depends almost entirely on underground water. Farmers have drilled some 21m irrigation wells and are pumping vast amounts of underground water, and water tables are declining at an accelerating rate in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu."

In the US, farmers are overpumping in the Western Great Plains, including in several leading grain-producing states such as Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. Irrigated agriculture has thrived in these states, but the water is drawn from the Ogallala aquifer, a huge underground water body that stretches from Nebraska southwards to the Texas Panhandle. "It is, unfortunately, a fossil aquifer, one that does not recharge. Once it is depleted, the wells go dry and farmers either go back to dryland farming or abandon farming altogether, depending on local conditions," says Brown.

"In Texas, located on the shallow end of the aquifer, the irrigated area peaked in 1975 and has dropped 37% since then. In Oklahoma irrigation peaked in 1982 and has dropped by 25%. In Kansas the peak did not come until 2009, but during the three years since then it has dropped precipitously, falling nearly 30%. Nebraska saw its irrigated area peak in 2007. Since then its grain harvest has shrunk by 15%."

Brown warned that many other countries may be on the verge of declining harvests. "With less water for irrigation, Mexico may be on the verge of a downturn in its grain harvest. Pakistan may also have reached peak water. If so, peak grain may not be far behind."

 

Saudi Arabia & Iran Are Overexploiting Their Groundwater Supplies

In the Middle East, water shortages are a widely accepted reality which many countries are trying to fight head on. Worldwide, however, the issue is not so pressing with environmental issues such as energy and emissions taking centre stage. Despite this, new research from McGill University in Montreal and Utrecht University in the Netherlands indicates that the world is increasingly dependent on an unsustainable supply of groundwater. They estimate that the world’s ‘water footprint’, which is defined as the area above ground required to sustain groundwater use, is about 3.5 times the actual area of the available aquifers. And this has huge implications not only on water supplies but for food and political security too.

Combining data from around the world, the research team has been able to measure the amount of water available and the water usage. The result which Tom Gleeson from McGill called ‘sobering’ indicate global overexploitation of groundwater in a number of regions across Asia and North America. The study suggests that around 1.7 billion people – mostly in Asia – are living in areas where underground water reserves are under threat. That means that we humans as well as the vast ecosystems that water supports, are blindly walking into crisis.

The areas that the research showed were under most stress include Saudi Arabia, Iran, northern India and parts of northern China. In the US, the areas included western Mexico, the High Plains and California’s Central Valley. The overexploitation of groundwater supplies in countries such as China, the US and India is linked to their global scale production of food.

“The relatively few aquifers that are being heavily exploited are unfortunately critical to agriculture in a number of different countries,” Tom Gleeson told Reuters. “So even though the number is relatively small, these are critical resources that need better management.”

The study found that Saudi Arabia had substantially depleted its own aquifers (as has Iran), which is why the country is buying up land in Africa to help ensure food security. However, it is not all bad news. According to the data gathered, groundwater depletion isn’t a worldwide problem and 80 percent of aquifers around the world aren’t being depleted. For example, some of the largest reserves of groundwater are under North African countries like Libya, Algeria, Egypt and Sudan and these haven’t been over-exploited yet.

The biggest scheme to get to this water was Libya’s $25 billion Great Manmade River project, built by the dictator Muammar Gaddafi to supply cities including Tripoli, Benghazi and Sirte with an estimated 6.5 million cubic meters of water a day. The problem is that once this water is taken out of these aquifers, it is not replenished and so the need to control our consumption of water is still a pressing issue.

Authors of the study suggest that limits on water extraction, more efficient irrigation and the promotion of diets with less meat (or no meat at all) could make water resources more sustainable. More

 

Water Shortages Threaten Food Future in the Arab Middle East

May 3 2011 - Long after the political uprisings in the Middle East have subsided, many underlying challenges that are not now in the news will remain. Prominent among these are rapid  population growth, spreading water shortages, and ever growing food insecurity.

In some countries, grain production is now falling as aquifers are depleted. After the Arab oil-export embargo of the 1970s, the Saudis realized that since they were heavily dependent on imported grain, they were vulnerable to a grain counter-embargo. Using oil-drilling technology, they tapped into an aquifer far below the desert to produce irrigated wheat. In a matter of years, Saudi Arabia was self-sufficient in wheat, its principal food staple.

But after more than 20 years of wheat self-sufficiency, the Saudis announced in January 2008 that this aquifer was largely depleted and they would be phasing out wheat production. Between 2007 and 2010, the wheat harvest of nearly 3 million tons dropped by more than two thirds. At this rate the Saudis likely will harvest their last wheat crop in 2012 and then be totally dependent on imported grain to feed their Canada-sized population of nearly 30 million people. More >>>