Water: Developing Countries

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Wednesday 24th January 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Cameron of Dillington]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure the availability, and sustainable management, of water in developing countries.

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, first, I thank all those noble Lords who are taking part, including the Minister, in a debate on what I consider to be a very important issue.

Water is the source of life. The value of water to the developing world is more than that of all its minerals put together—the gold, diamonds, uranium and copper, et cetera. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the world’s population live with water scarcity for at least one month of the year, and 1.8 billion people suffer from water scarcity for at least six months of the year. Probably the most terrifying fact is that 500 million people live in parts of the world where the water abstraction is more than twice the annual recharge rate.

Of the 7 billion-plus people in the world, nearly 6 billion have access to a mobile phone, while only 4.5 billion have access to a working toilet. Lack of access to clean and safe water kills a child every 20 seconds. Additionally, water availability is inextricably linked to food production and a healthy environment. Nothing grows without water. As the population increases, more food is needed, requiring yet more water for agriculture. The growing urban population also needs water for consumption. A complex trade-off is emerging in many countries and regions.

We now have problems, and they can only get worse. We have a demographic time-bomb already exploding. For instance, the population of the Sahel region of Africa has grown by more than 100 million in the last 10 years and is likely to continue to grow at that rate for the next three or four decades. There is less and less rainfall in the region, and already the soil is degrading faster than we can control. Meanwhile, the situation in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where more than 1 billion people live, is not much better. In India alone they are extracting from their aquifers 100 cubic kilometres of water more than the recharge rate. Some agricultural areas of China, and even of the USA, have similar problems. According to a UN study, 50 million people will be forced to leave their homes over the next 10 years because of drought and land degradation.

By 2050, 75% of the world’s population will live in urban areas, and we will have to supply them with enough water and provide suitable sanitation to prevent the spread of water-borne diseases. Again according to the UN, even today, half the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from water-borne diseases. In the developing world, more than 80% of waste water is discharged untreated into rivers or the sea, and life is becoming extinct in parts of rivers in many countries. Water of poor quality cannot be used as a resource for wildlife, humans or agriculture. Some rivers are also littered with floating plastic waste that will probably eventually find its way into our oceans or the human food chain.

Meanwhile, hydro power is failing due to water shortages in places as diverse as Venezuela, Italy and California. This can only lead to more coal-fired power stations, which not only damage our climate but—a little-known fact—account for 7% of global water consumption, lost mostly through cooling towers. In other words, coal-fired plants consume enough water to supply 1.2 billion people.

There are many other doom-laded statistics about water problems between now and 2050, and if only half or fewer prove correct, it is likely that humanity, our environment and our planet will face a challenge never seen before. We have 20 years to prevent this looming water crisis, and the World Bank and the World Water Council believe that it will need an investment of some $600 billion per annum.

The World Water Council is clear:

“There is a water crisis today. But the crisis is not about having too little water to satisfy our needs. It is a crisis of managing water so badly that billions of people—and the environment—badly suffer”.


So what can we in the UK do to make a difference? First, we have some of the best hydrological research institutions in the world: the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, the British Geological Survey and several universities with world-calibre research facilities. I should at this point declare an interest as chair of the CEH advisory council. Our organisations can do more than most to inform the debate around the world over the best sustainable management of the rivers, lakes and aquifers of the developing world. While their expertise is desperately needed to deal with the already glaring problems throughout India and eastern Asia, I suggest that the greatest long-term gain will come from focusing on the sustainable management of water in sub-Saharan Africa—before the real problems arise.

The people of sub-Saharan Africa use some 3% of their rainfall, 2% being used by agriculture. This is a tiny percentage. In the Middle East and far eastern countries, figures of 40% to 50% are not unusual. Most of Africa’s rainfall washes off and disappears downstream and out to sea. So above all, the UK needs to help with community-based capture and storage—and I stress the community base. Large reservoirs have their place but, quite apart from the social and environmental problems associated with such schemes, the distances in Africa are so great that moving water to where it is needed becomes a problem and a drain on energy. It is worth noting, for instance, that the state of California uses 19% of its total energy budget to transport water over long distances to meet the needs of its people.

The UK also needs to help African agriculture with the practical introduction of drip irrigation, including underground pipes, to ensure minimum wastage. We must never forget that 40% of the world’s food comes from the 20% of its agricultural land that is irrigated. Efficient irrigation is vital to feeding the continent of Africa from its own resources.

We also need to help with the sustainable use of shallow aquifers. We should support village boreholes, where the water is shared by farmers and households alike— always providing that the extraction rate is less than the recharge rate; again, we can help with the facts. It is believed that Africa has an amazing number of underground aquifers that are currently untapped. But we can also now help to recharge these aquifers by pumping surplus clean water underground during the rainy season. As a storage facility, an aquifer is better than a reservoir because it has minimal evaporation.

Above all—and this is the trickiest area—we need to improve the long-term governance of water. Management of water resources needs to be rooted in shared data describing how much water is available in space and time. Again, the UK institutes lead the world in designing hydro-meteorological monitoring networks and the tools required to make full use of the information derived. What is the recharge rate of your local aquifer? On a river such as the Nile, with nine riparian states, what is the optimum sustainable abstraction rate for wildlife and humans in each country?

It is said that the great early civilisations of the world, such as Babylon and Egypt, developed because local tribes got together to discuss the annual management of water, and then went on from there. We need to encourage such long-term planning—and local planning as well—rather than imposing our own solutions, although our researchers should definitely be informing the debate. The Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom called it a “polycentric system of governance” where, from an international perspective, down through a national perspective, to a village perspective, everyone gets involved in the decision-making process to ensure that everyone’s grandchildren will have enough water to live and flourish. It creates just the sort of long-term thinking that Africa really needs.

I will end there. This is an issue of immense importance to the future of our planet and I believe that we in the UK have an important role in finding and promoting the best sustainable solutions.