Battle for water has begun
THE WAR over water will not be waged in the future. It has started already.
This is according to Water Research Commission chief executive Dhesigen Naidoo, who was speaking at the Science Forum South Africa in Pretoria yesterday.
“When you look at the conflicts in the world over the past 200 years you will find a big correlation between the location of those conflicts and the areas with water.
“Some of these conflicts occur in a very physical way and some, like in the Colorado River, play out in the courts of the land,” he said.
“The Colorado River is interesting because it is a case that has run for more than 120 years and continues to run in the courts in the US as we speak.”
Locally, Naidoo said, there were allocation wars around water. “This country is in the process of changing the water allocation policy to a system of compulsory licences, and the wars are about that.
“The water tribunal in this country has been seized in the past 10 years, with a range of pre-emptive strikes. This is something that is played out in almost all the countries of the world,” he pointed out.
He said the devastating effects of the drought that has gripped South Africa in recent months have shown how the country is already a part of the war. As a result of the drought, five provinces have been declared disaster areas.
“None of those disaster areas are towns or cities. That is because we have designed it in a way that the economic paradigm that the cities are the winners in this war with the small towns.
“The water wars are real and some of us are not feeling it because we are on the winning side,” Naidoo said.
He added that in the future, countries should assess the level of water security.
Saliem Fakir, head of the living planet unit at WWF South Africa, said he was optimistic the water wars can be reduced “if we grow maturity in our knowledge of understanding the dynamics of abundance and scarcity, both in a natural sense and a non-natural sense. And if we improve co-ordination and administration of our water resource.”
The Department of Water and Sanitation’s deputy director-general for international water support, Lindiwe Lusenga, said the government was taking the issue of water scarcity seriously.
“There is a way of stopping this crisis. We need a different way of thinking. Desalination is one of the things we need to look at. Our minister has said we are not going to sit and watch while being dragged into the crisis; sea water is one of our solutions.”
Dr Chamunorwa Togo of the Innovation Hub said that when coming with solutions for water saving into communities, researchers must not ignore the people.
“How do we resolve issues of contention within the African context? If we can apply that and include it in our science and technology, we will have good solutions. We can use water as a tool for unity.”