HOW DO WE FEED A GROWING WORLD POPULATION IN A SITUATION OF.pdfVIP

HOW DO WE FEED A GROWING WORLD POPULATION IN A SITUATION OF WATER SCARCITY? Hubert H.G. Savenije, Professor of Water Resources Management, IHE, P.O. Box 3015, 2601 DA, Delft, The Netherlands Presented at the 8th Stockholm Water Symposium 1998 1. Introduction In the eyes of the public, water scarcity is associated with lack of drinking water. That is not so strange. Drinking water, although in terms of quantity a very small consumer of water resources, is closest to people’s environment and experience. Consequently, in the discussion on water scarcity, the image most commonly conveyed by the media is that of thirst. We see pictures of people standing next to a dry well, or people walking large distances to collect a bucket of water. Or, on a more positive note, people happily crowded around a new water point that spills crystal clear water. Thirst, however, is not a problem of water scarcity; it is a problem of water management. There is enough water, virtually everywhere in the world, to provide people with their basic water needs: drinking, cooking and personal hygiene. Shortage of water for primary purposes (essentially household water) is much more a problem of lifestyles and poor management than of water availability. As a result of the “sanitary revolution” of the Victorian age, drinking water is mainly used to convey our waste over large distances to places where we then try to separate the water from the waste. This way of sanitation, which probably was highly efficient at the beginning of this century when there was no scarcity of water nor an environmental awareness, is now highly inefficient in terms of energy consumption, money and water alike. An extra-terrestrial visiting the Earth would be very surprised to see that clean and meticulously treated drinking water, which is considered a precious and scarce commodity, is used for the lowest possible purpose: to transport waste.