Egypt to Cooperate With Nile Basin Countries for Water Security

Egypt is keen on cooperating with all Nile Basin countries in a manner that benefits all parties, Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy said on Tuesday.

Nabil Fahmy

"Egypt's water security is an indispensible part of the country's national security and it cannot be ignored," Fahmy said, adding that "there are historic and legal rights that cannot be overlooked by any country."

Ethiopia started diverting the course of the Blue Nile, the main tributary of the Nile River, in May as part of its plan to build a hydroelectric dam that generates electricity.

The "Renaissance Dam" is built along the river that provides Egypt with about 60 percent of its annual 55 million cubic metres of Nile water.

This move sparked extensive arguments considering how that would affect Egypt's share of the Nile water.

Egypt and Ethiopia are members of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), a partnership among Nile states aimed at sharing the river's socio-economic benefits and promoting regional security.

Three of the Nile Basin countries - Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan - formed an expert committee to study the project.

The committee issued a report, unanimously approved by the three countries, on the potential damages of the dam and recommendations to avoid them in June.

The experts convened again in December and agreed to form another committee to look into the means of implementing their final recommendations.

Representatives of Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan are scheduled to meet in January in order to discuss issues related to the Nile water security. More

 

Will we ever see water footprint labels on consumer products?

That 130 litres of water goes into making your average coffee is a statistic that amazes most people. Even more surprising is that hardly anyone, even in the business community, has the foggiest idea how much water goes into manufacturing our favourite consumer products, from field to factory.

Seeking to address the dearth of information on the water required to produce a single product, from ready meals and soft drinks to t-shirts and electronic items, a variety of organisations have over the years floated the idea of water footprint labelling.

The general premise is that quantifying water inputs, like nutritional and calorie labels on food items, will help to influence purchasing habits, encouraging consumers to resist highly water intensive products. It would incentivise product manufacturers to scale back unnecessary waste and awaken consumer consciousness about water insecurity.

According to Dr Zafar Adeel, chair of UN-Water, the United Nations thinktank, not only does water footprint labelling make sense, but it is just around the corner. "People are often surprised and then ask, 'why didn't we know about this before?'

"I wouldn't call it a pipe dream," he says. "It will take five to 10 years for it to become fairly common."

Adeel suggests that a few pioneering companies may take the lead, rather than the government intervening. This in turn would spur industry-wide initiatives.

Growing consumer demand will be an important driver, he explains. "As we come up with new ways of measuring sustainability and the green economy, that will create back pressure on the private sector to come up with these schemes to provide more information."

Not everyone shares Adeel's optimism, however. Many critics regard any water footprint labelling scheme as a well-intentioned but ultimately meritless initiative, which risks further bamboozling already confused consumers.

Alistair Knox, chairman of the Association of Suppliers to the British Clothing Industry, is one influential voice in the clothing industry to pour cold water on the idea. The proposal is just not on the clothing industry's agenda, he says, and is far below issues such as the durability of garments or energy usage.

"It would be a bit pointless. There is already a huge amount of information on garment labels that people very rarely, if ever, look at," he says, adding that the industry would regard any serious proposal as a "little bit bizarre".

In Knox's view, any figure assigned to a clothing product for water usage is "dubious" as it is "from difficult to impossible" to calculate accurately beyond a generic average. He uses the example of a cotton yarn, the fibres of which may have come from several regions, each of which may have had different irrigation systems.

"How are you going to average that? Whatever number you come up with is just somebody's thumb in the air." The same could be said for many other consumer industries, such as electronic goods.

Knox also challenges the idea that water volume use is an important consideration for consumers. "The bottom line is that water recycles … Where is that water now? It's back in the system."

The sense that water volume labelling is too simplistic is shared by Felix Ockborn, environmental sustainability coordinator for water at high-street clothing retailer H&M. While Ockborn welcomes product scoring on sustainability performance, he says it is just as vital to consider the context of the water consumption in any labelling system.

"Only providing a volumetric product footprint would be misguiding if it does not incorporate where the water was taken from," he says. "What is most important is what we and other companies do to ensure that water is used responsibly."

Simon Davidoff, senior director of strategy for industrial services at Siemens, supports the idea of water footprint labels alongside energy use indicators. Technological advances mean it is relatively easy to quantify consumption and wastage in factory environments, he says.

Like Adeel, Davidoff believes water footprint labels are now inevitable. "Consumers will demand it," he says. The challenge will be in agreeing how far back companies should go to measure water inputs. More

 

The Water, Food and Energy nexus

Water, food and energy nexus: how are water and energy connected?

In the first of our live broadcasts exploring the water, food and energy nexus, the Guardian's Jo Confino speaks to Sir Gordon Conway from Imperial College London, Tim Fox from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and Andy Wales, senior vice president sustainable development, SABMiller about the connections between water and food

Let's Quit This Most Dangerous Game with Drought

On a recent visit to Niger, I met a woman in Batodi village with some very bold claims. Fifteen years ago, she and her fellow women would travel a day's journey to fetch water.

Today, they fetch it from a local well, having turned the situation around by rehabilitating their badly degraded land using traditional practices. In that period, the water level has “jumped up” by 14 meters. Moreover, the village had withstood the severe food and water challenges others in many parts of Niger suffered during recent droughts.

The researcher who had invited me backed the claims that the water table had risen from a depth of below 18 meters to about 4 meters below the ground. That was precisely why he had invited me to the field; to witness – contrary to claims otherwise – that it is possible to restore the health of even badly degraded land.

On 17 June, we unveil the winners of the 2013 Land for Life Award from 137 submissions worldwide. At the national level, Eritrea, Hungary, Kenya, Portugal and Thailand unveil their first Drylands Champions to recognize the local heroes making laudable steps in the fight against desertification and drought.

These kinds of stories, from the ground, inspire me to advocate unceasingly for policies in favor of investments to strengthen both sustainable land use practices and drought resilience. Grabbing more fragile lands to meet growing food demand is neither the answer nor is improving relief delivery the ultimate solution.

Rather, we must boldly move to a land-degradation neutral world where clearing new land is not an option, and, where it is inevitable, our collective target becomes offsetting such action by rehabilitating degraded land at the same pace and in the same ecosystem.

Political contestations over whether a land-degradation neutral world is possible should not prevail for lack of generalizable scientific claims to demonstrate it. Until massive investments in small pilot projects such as these by communities fail, their viability is not in question; the status quo is.

The achievements in Batodi, the submissions to the Land for Life Award and the work of the Drylands Champions affirm the claims of the recent report, A Dangerous Delay – The cost of late response to early warning in the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa, that “the response to drought was too little too late, representing a systemic failure of the international system.”

Indeed, the international community has been here before; in the mid-1970s, with the Sahel drought disaster, in the mid-1980s with the drought and famine disaster in Ethiopia and, most recently, in 2011, with the tragedy in the Horn of Africa.

But the best evidence that we, as an international community, are playing the world's most dangerous game with drought lies in the fact that only one country in the world – Australia – has a comprehensive national drought policy.

There are more reasons for concern.

Drought affects more lives than any other disaster, yet unlike most disasters, it has a slow onset. And not only has every region in the world experienced more severe droughts in recent times, but droughts are set to increase in intensity, in spread and in frequency due to climate change.

About a billion people, among them people living in the arid and semi-arid parts of the world, have access to little or no renewable water resources. With the climate change scenarios, that estimate shoots to about half the world's population living in areas of high water stress by 2030.

Neither desertification nor droughts are fated, but the path to change is through a radical transformation in our view of the land and attitude towards drought.

Land is a strategic natural asset for our future sustainability. So let us give life to the aspiration of a land-degradation neutral world by setting a target date for its achievement as part of the Sustainable Development Goals to be agreed by 2015. We should follow in the steps of Africa. At its Summit last month it declared this part of its future agenda and called on the global community to do the same.