Asia’s Water Woes

Asia’s Water Woes

By Dr Arvind Kumar

Water is a vital ingredient for life and human civilization. Yet recently, there have been new warnings about an imminent water crisis. John Beddington, a British scientist, has recently warned that water shortages would be the world's most pressing problem in the next decade, compounded by population growth; rapid urbanization; rising demand for food, energy and other water-intensive goods and services; and climate change.

By 2025, about 52 countries containing two-thirds of the global population are expected to be short of water. According to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), China and India alone are forecast to have a combined supply shortfall of 1 trillion cubic meters in 2030. Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines and Vietnam are other countries near water stress conditions.

In early October this year, a conference organised by ADB was told that Asia faced ‘unprecedented stress’ in water supply and that Asia needed to spend around $8 billion each year to improve water efficiency and security in both rural and urban areas. Otherwise, the region could face a 40 percent gap between water demand and supply in 2030 — a shortage that could sharply reduce economic growth, cut the supply of food and energy, and cause serious instability. Asian governments would be faced with the problems of having to allocate inadequate amounts of water between competing sectors: burgeoning cities, the main food-producing centers in the countryside, and industry and electricity generation.