A Global Treaty on Rivers:Key to True Water Security/On Safe Drinking Water,Skepticism Over UN Claims

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19 Nov 2012: Analysis

A Global Treaty on Rivers:
Key to True Water Security

No broad-based international agreement on sharing rivers currently exists, even though much of the world depends on water from rivers that flow through more than one nation. But that may be about to change, as two separate global river treaties are close to being approved.

by fred pearce

Is peace about to break out on the world’s rivers?

It is amazing that until now there has been no global agreement on sharing international rivers. From the Mekong to the Jordan and the Niger to the Euphrates, there has been nothing to stop upstream countries from building giant dams that cut off all flows downstream. Yet in the coming weeks we could have two such treaties.

First, the continuing bad news: Belligerent countries are still exerting their hydrological muscle. Just this month, Laos began construction of the first dam on the main stem of the lower Mekong River in Southeast Asia. It hopes that the Xayaburi dam will help it become the region’s hydroelectric powerhouse.

On the upper Mekong, China has already built four giant dams, including one taller than the Eiffel Tower. These dams are all being constructed without the approval of downstream neighbors, including the 60 million people in Cambodia and Vietnam who fear the barriers will block fish migration and deprive them of fertile silt for their rice fields.

Meanwhile in Africa, Ethiopia last year began work on the Renaissance Dam on the Nile, which will be the largest hydroelectric dam in Africa. Again, downstream nations Egypt and Sudan had no say. And in the Middle East, fears grow that Turkey could use its control of the Euphrates

as a weapon in any future border conflict with war-torn Syria, a downstream nation that is heavily dependent on the river.

Water is the most important global resource that does not have any international agreement.

More than 40 percent of the world’s people live in 263 river basins that straddle international borders. The Danube, Rhine, Congo, Nile, Niger, and Zambezi rivers all pass through nine or more countries. Transboundary rivers contain 60 percent of the world’s river flows — for two-thirds of them, there are no agreements on water sharing.

This is dangerous. Guinea threatens to barricade the River Niger, which could dry out the inner Niger delta, a wetland jewel on the edge of the Sahara in neighboring Mali. In September, Vladimir Putin visited the mountain states of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, where he announced financial backing for more dams on the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers to generate hydropower in those countries. But he ignored opposition from downstream Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan who fear the dams will deprive them of summer flows to irrigate their cotton crops.

Water is today the most important global resource that does not have any international agreement, says World Bank lawyer Salman M.A. Salman. Abstractions of water from rivers have tripled in the past 50 years, mostly for irrigation. The entire flows of some rivers are now being taken for human use. And the natural flows of many others are disrupted by hydroelectric dams that only allow water to pass when the dam owners want electricity.

What treaties there are, often date back to colonial times. In international law, the Nile is governed by deals drawn up by the British in 1929 and 1959, which give all the water to downstream Egypt and Sudan and none to the eight upstream nations. Those laws are discredited, and in 2010, six upstream nations led by Ethiopia reached their own accord — a treaty that Egypt and Sudan have not joined.

Back in 1997, the UN adopted the Convention on the Non-Navigable Uses of International Watercourses. It did not lay down hard and fast rules for sharing waters, but it was a statement of principle that nations should

ensure the “sustainable and equitable use of shared rivers.”

In refusing to sign a UN treaty, China asserted its sovereignty over waterways flowing through its territory.

Only three countries voted against: China, Turkey and Burundi — all of them upstream countries on major rivers. China is the water tower of Asia. Its Tibetan plateau is the source of the Indus, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, and Mekong rivers. But in refusing to sign the treaty, China asserted that it had “indisputable territorial sovereignty over those parts of international watercourses that flow through its territory.”

To come into force, the treaty required 35 nations to ratify it in their legislatures. To date only 28 countries have done so. Other refuseniks include the U.S. and Britain, an original sponsor of the treaty. But the momentum for ratification is picking up. Eight of the 28 ratifiers did so in the last three years. France has become a cheerleader for the convention. Jean-Pierre Thebault, France’s environment ambassador, told a meeting I attended in Helsinki in September that he hoped enough nations would join for it to come into force in time for the UN’s International Year of Water Cooperation in 2013.

Meanwhile the treaty has a counterpart: the Helsinki convention. This began as a 1992 deal on river cooperation between European nations under the UN Economic Commission for Europe. But at a meeting in Rome set for Nov. 28-30, its members are likely to vote to allow any nation to join. Early potential signatories include Iraq and Tunisia.

France’s Thebault says the two treaties could complement each other. For while the 1992 treaty is a statement of principle about water sharing, the Helsinki convention is “bolder,” with formal arrangements for drawing up deals.

The Rome meeting of the Helsinki convention is also likely to extend its purview to drawing up rules for sharing underground water reserves. It could, for instance, help save the ancient water beneath Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which the two countries are currently racing to pump out before the other does. Likewise, it could manage the Nubian aquifer beneath Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Chad, which is currently being tapped by Libya;

and the Guarani aquifer that straddles the borders between Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina.

Hopes are high that greater sharing of the world’s rivers could be imminent.

Whether global governance of water can help the aquatic environment is another matter. WWF, which has lobbied for countries to ratify the UN treaty, wants future river deals to keep some water as “environmental flows” to maintain freshwater fisheries and wetlands. But the danger is that the opposite could happen. If downstream nations are more confident of how much water will reach them, they may build more dams to capture it.

This has happened on the Indus River, where a 1960 treaty brokered by the World Bank shared out the river and its tributaries between upstream India and downstream Pakistan. The result has been more dams and an ecological disaster downstream. The Indus dries up for months at a time, the coastline is retreating, its giant delta is peppered with dead mangroves, and salty seawater has invaded farms.

But hopes are nonetheless high that greater sharing of the world’s rivers could be imminent. David Grey, a water policy expert formerly with the World Bank and now at Oxford University, says there is growing recognition of the need for global oversight of the world’s water. He says it could, at the least, end the habitual hydrological secrecy of many upstream nations, who treat river flow data as state secrets.

Speaking in Vienna last month, Grey pointed out that India rarely tells Bangladesh what flows are coming down the Ganges. The result is

disruption to farming and unnecessary damage and deaths from flooding. Likewise, he believes better sharing of Nile flow could assuage Egyptian fears about the capacity of upstream dams on the Nile to cut off its vital supplies. But in reality, Grey said, there is so much water in the Nile that “you could take as much water out of the river in east Africa as you want, and Egypt would never notice the difference.”

Authorities in the U.S. and Mexico have carved out a new agreement on sharing the Colorado River.

Water peacemakers argue that sharing water isn’t necessarily a zero-sum game. Both sides can gain. In recent weeks, authorities in the U.S. and Mexico have carved out a new agreement on sharing the Colorado River, which irrigates much of the arid Southwest before passing over the border into Mexico and delivering a tiny saline trickle through its desiccated delta into the Gulf of California.

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An existing treaty, signed in 1944, is very one-sided, giving Mexico the right to only a tiny amount of the flow, which Mexico finds it difficult to use because it has few storage structures and because many irrigation canals were damaged in an earthquake. Under the new deal — which has been approved by U.S. regional authorities and awaits federal sign-off — Mexico would be able to store some of its water allocation in Lake Mead, the huge U.S. storage reservoir on the river in Nevada and Arizona. Meanwhile, U.S. water authorities will be allowed to invest in lining irrigation canals across the border in Mexico to save water. Those authorities will then be entitled to keep back the equivalent amount of water on the American side of the border and use it for their own purposes.

With this arrangement, everybody gets more water. There might even, U.S. regulators hint, be more left for the Colorado’s dried-out delta. It is an optimistic sign of how water peace could take hold — and one worth clinging to, amid the wreckage of the current hydrological anarchy on the world’s rivers.

POSTED ON 19 Nov 2012 IN Climate Oceans Sustainability Urbanization Water North America 

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/a_global_treaty_on_rivers_key_to_true_water_security/2594/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the UK. He serves as environmental consultant for New Scientist magazine and is the author of numerous books, including When The Rivers Run Dry and With Speed and Violence. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, Pearce has written about the environmental consequences of humankind’s addiction to chemical fertilizers and the promise of“climate-smart” agriculture.
MORE BY THIS AUTHOR

07 Jun 2012: Analysis

On Safe Drinking Water,
Skepticism Over UN Claims

With great fanfare, the United Nations announced in March that the world had reduced by half the proportion of people drinking unsafe water, meeting a critical development goal five years ahead of schedule. But a closer look reveals that the facts simply do not support this claim.

by fred pearce

It was rare good news. On March 6, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared that the world had halved the proportion of the world’s population drinking unsafe water. One of the key Millennium Development Goals set by the UN more than a decade earlier had been reached — and, moreover, it had been reached five years ahead of schedule. Ban Ki-moon called it “a great achievement for the people of the world.” And apparently, the world agreed, as most media reported the claim at face value.

There was just one problem. The claim is not true — and the experts know it.

A senior water professional with one of the UN agencies responsible for tracking progress to reach the drinking water target, said on condition of anonymity, “We should not say that the MDG water target has been met

since we know that the indicator used to measure it has too many limitations.” He called the UN claim “a drastic overestimate.”

The claim hides more than it reveals, including the failings of the UN and the international community.

I have spoken to many other development and water experts within the UN system and among water NGOs who agree. They say the claim is an institutional construct that says little about the true state of drinking water around the world. It allows UN officials to sign off with a successful outcome — but it hides far more than it reveals, including the failings of the UN and the international community.

The drinking water target was set at a UN General Assembly in 1999, where countries promised to “halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water.” Achieving that, from a baseline of 1990, was what the UN on March 6 claimed the world had achieved.

For water professionals, the target created an immediate problem. Few developing countries routinely measure the safety of drinking water. The UN World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, who are charged with monitoring progress on the target, say it would be “prohibitively expensive” to do so. They decided instead on a proxy for safe water — “access to improved drinking water.”

They defined an improved source as water from a piped supply, a drilled well, a hand-dug well or spring “protected” from sewage contamination, or collected rainwater. Unimproved sources included rivers and open wells and water delivered by carts, all of which face obvious risks of contamination. In so doing, they replaced a health target with an engineering target.

The UN says that, by this measure, the proportion of the world’s population without access to improved water sources fell from 24 percent in 1990 to 11 percent by the end of 2010. An increase in human population means that the actual number of people is only down by about 40 percent to 783 million, but the target has been met.

The big question, however, is whether it is right to conclude that an “improved” water source is safe. The answer is not very.

A 2011 report on progress toward the target prepared by a joint monitoring program of UNICEF and the WHO noted that the engineering proxy “does not guarantee the quality of drinking water consumed.” The experts said they thus “cannot report on the actual water safety aspect of the MDG drinking water target.”

UN officials had reached this conclusion after commissioning a five-nation “rapid assessment” of supposedly “improved” water sources. It found that more than half of the sampled water from supposedly

The big question is whether an “improved” water source is safe. The answer is not very.

“protected” hand-dug wells, which were being counted as safe sources of drinking water, was actually contaminated — so was about a third of the water from “protected” springs and drilled wells. As a result, in Nigeria and Ethiopia, two of Africa’s most populous countries, only about 70 percent of the “improved” sources provided safe drinking water, the assessment found; and in Ethiopia, only 27 percent of the population had access to safe drinking water, rather than the 38 percent that had been claimed.

But between the publication of that assessment in 2011 and a new joint-monitoring report this March, there appears to have been a change of heart.

The 2012 report, drafted as background to the new claim that the world had met the MDG target, did agree that “some sources... may not actually provide safe drinking water. As a result, it is likely that the number of people using safe water supplies has been over-estimated.” But it did not update or even repeat the worrying rapid assessment findings. Instead, it appeared to dismiss them, noting that “these partial data sets... are seldom robust enough to draw conclusions on a global scale.”

The water professional who asked to remain anonymous told me that if the rapid assessment findings are typical, then “the data would show that we have not met the MDG target.”

There are further concerns. Not only is much of the water from “improved” water sources not safe, it may not be available at all. The same water professionals report an epidemic of broken and abandoned pipes and pumps. They fear that many of the broken pumps were assumed to be functioning when the UN assessed access to improved sources.

Many broken pumps were assumed to be functioning when the UN assessed access to improved sources.

A widely quoted study for the Rural Water Supply Network, a group of water professionals that includes UNICEF experts, estimated from UN and government data in 2009 that 36 percent of hand pumps in 20 African countries were broken. In Nigeria, Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, fewer than half were working. That was 125,000 pumps in all.

Jamie Skinner of the London-based think tank the International Institute for Environment and development quotes other local studies that confirm‎ the finding. In the Menaka region of Mali, researchers found 80 percent of wells dysfunctional, and in northern Ghana 50 percent.

In their report, Clarissa Brocklehurst and her colleagues of the Rural Water Supply Network criticized the “shamefully” poor performance of drilled wells attached to hand-pulled pumps, the most popular “improved” water technology. A typical pump will break down within two years and most are abandoned within five. “Thousands of people who once benefited from a safe drinking water supply now walk past broken hand pumps or taps and on to their traditional dirty water point,” the report stated.

UNICEF spokeswoman Cecilia Scharp accepted that broken pumps were an important reason why the MDG target, while achieved globally, had not

been met in sub-Saharan Africa. But she said the household surveys used to measure access to improved water would not include broken wells because people would not mention them. The anonymous UN source disagreed. He said that from his experience of such surveys, “Many people will respond that they use a hand pump even if it is not working at the time of the survey.”

In India, only certain castes are sometimes allowed to drink from a particular well.

Another question is whether people actually use the water from the “improved” source, even if it is safe and functioning. The MDG target refers to “access” to improved water supplies. But the UN source questions what is meant by this word “access.” In practice, he says, “inspectors go to a village in, say, Burkina Faso, where there are 300 people and a new [drilled well], so they tick the box that says 300 people have access to improved drinking water — whether or not anyone uses it.”

Often there are cultural taboos — in India, for instance, only certain castes are sometimes allowed to drink from a particular well. And the water may be so far away that few people make the trek if there is another source, albeit a dirtier one, close by. According to the joint-monitoring program report, 18 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa supposedly using an “improved” water source are actually more than 30 minutes walk away.

Some experts argue that the obfuscation of data on drinking water hides a wider malaise over global strategy for providing safe water. A large part of the effort to meet the MDG target has been devoted by governments and NGOs to putting in drilled wells, usually connected to simple hand pumps. In rural areas in the developing world, including Africa and India, such wells are the most common type of “improved” drinking water source. But, despite their poor record, little attention is paid to keeping them functioning.

Brocklehurst and colleagues say water professionals have failed to come to grips with the chronic maintenance problem because it is regarded as “somebody else’s problem.” Many NGOs believe it is best to hand ownership of the wells to locals. But if the locals don’t have the training or skills to do maintenance, or any income for spare parts, then it is a recipe for failure.

The 2011 joint-monitoring report concluded that “increased reliance” on drilled wells that had a nasty habit of breaking down “raises significant concerns over water safety and sustainability.” Yet development agencies keep on installing new pumps to meet short-term targets without planning repairs.

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There are, it emerges, similar concerns about the box-ticking approach being adopted for achieving another MDG, the promise to halve the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation. Again, professionals fear that concern to reduce health risks from people coming into contact with faeces has been subverted into an exercise in installing technology.

Skinner points to recent research showing, for instance, that sanitation won’t have much effect on health unless virtually everyone in a community uses it. The biggest problem is children under three, who continue to defecate in the open and are the hardest to bring to heal. Skinner says that education programs to end open defecation might be more useful than a rush to install sewers.

David Zetland, an American water economist currently at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, also warns against the tendencies of bureaucracies to turn humanitarian objectives into inefficient technology drives. The MDG water target shows that tendency at its most dangerous, he says. “The original goal, to save lives, has been turned into a bureaucratic target that pays no attention to the quality of water that people actually drink.”

POSTED ON 07 Jun 2012 IN Biodiversity Policy & Politics Science & Technology Water North America 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the UK. He serves as environmental consultant for New Scientist magazine and is the author of numerous books, including When The Rivers Run Dry and With Speed and Violence. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, Pearce has written about the environmental consequences of humankind’s addiction to chemical fertilizers and the promise of“climate-smart” agriculture.
MORE BY THIS AUTHOR

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/on_safe_drinking_water_skepticism_over_un_claims/2538/