“Under the pressure of developing countries, dams are once again on the agenda because we are realizing their potential,” says Johan Kuylenstierna, an expert from the International Water Institute in Stockholm, where an international conference on water, the Stockholm Water Week, concluded on Friday, reports the Word Bank press review Monday.
African ministers attending the conference in the Swedish capital pressed for the construction of dams last week. According to the World Bank, while two billion people have gained access to water over the past twenty years, only 36 percent of the African population has access to a basic sanitation system, and 300 million people do not have access to clean water in a sustainable way. Dams allow to stock water in case of a drought, writes the daily
South African Minister of Forestry and Water noted at the conference that Europe and North America have developed 60 percent of their hydroelectric potential, compared to only five percent in Africa. The minister said that hydroelectricity was a clean form of energy and that dams should be promoted as a remedy for poverty, disease and under-development.
Meanwhile, experts at the Water Week symposium said the UN should give water issues center stage in its goals to reduce hunger and poverty in the world. Meeting the UNs “Millennium Development Goals”, which call for poverty and hunger to be reduced by half within a decade, would require todays water access levels to double, they said.
– Achieving the hunger goal will require a massive quantity of fresh water, said Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), adding: – We have 800 million undernourished people. To give food to 400 million people we must mobilize 2.200 km3 of fresh water in the next 10 years, which is equivalent to irrigation today.
Participants said the huge increase in the required water supply should be achieved with sustainable, often traditional techniques, and not by using Western technology without regard to local conditions and the environment.
“Environmentally sustainable management strategies are a prerequisite for long-term and resilient improvement of the lives of poor people,” the SEI said in a report to be submitted to a UN Millennium Goal summit in New York on September 14 and 15.
Rockström said the additional needs of agriculture should be met primarily with a better management of “green water” from rainwater and underground wells, rather than “blue water” from rivers and lakes. This means that the construction of dams should be reduced in favor of updating ancient techniques like rainwater collection, particularly adapted to India, and fighting ground erosion.
Furthermore, experts said at the Stockholm Water Week that men and women are not faced in the same way by water scarcity. Easier access to clean water was a key factor for gender equality. Hundreds of millions of girls and women walk long distances for hours every day to provide their families with water, leaving little time for anything else.
In Africa and Asia, the average daily walk for girls and women to fetch water is six kilometers and they each carry 20 kilograms of water on average on their heads. And if young girls are not too exhausted to go to school afterwards, their parents may well pull them out anyway, judging that their help at home is more important than an education and the opportunities that come with it.
Marcia Brewster, task manager at the UN gender and water task force, said water access was also about empowering women. “Once women have water, they can enter training, improve childcare and contribute income.”
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
