Water crisis looms as Himalayan glaciers melt

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http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/09/09/himalayan.glaciers.reut/index.html

Water crisis looms as Himalayan glaciers melt

Friday, September 9, 2005; Posted: 11:11 a.m. EDT (15:11 GMT)

NEW DELHI, India (Reuters) -- Imagine a world without drinking water.

It's a scary thought, but scientists say the 40 percent of humanity living in South Asia and China could well be living with little drinking water within 50 years as global warming melts Himalayan glaciers, the region's main water source.

The glaciers supply 303.6 million cubic feet every year to Asian rivers, including the Yangtze and Yellow rivers in China, the Ganga in India, the Indus in Pakistan, the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh and Burma's Irrawaddy.

But as global warming increases, the glaciers have been rapidly retreating, with average temperatures in the Himalayas up 1 degree Celsius since the 1970s.

A World Wide Fund report published in March said a quarter of the world's glaciers could disappear by 2050 and half by 2100.

"If the current scenario continues, there will be very little water left in the Ganga and its tributaries," Prakash Rao, climate change and energy program coordinator with the fund in India told Reuters.

"The situation here is more critical because here they depend on glaciers for drinking water while in other areas there are other sources of drinking water, not just glacial."

Experts are alarmed.

About 67 percent of the nearly 12,124 square miles of Himalayan glaciers are receding and in the long run as the ice diminishes, glacial runoffs in summer and river flows will also go down, leading to severe water shortages in the region.

The Gangotri glacier, the source of the Ganga, India's holiest river, is retreating 75 feet a year. And the Khumbu Glacier in Nepal, where Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay began their ascent of Everest, has lost more than 3 miles since they climbed the mountain in 1953.

"The cry in the mountains is that water has gone down and springs have dried up," Jagdish Bahadur, an expert on Himalayan glaciers.

"Global climate change has had an effect, but water has also dried up because agriculture in the mountains has increased," he said.

In Nepal, there are more than 3,000 glaciers that work as reservoirs for fresh water and another 2,000 glacial lakes.

Experts estimate numerous rivers originating in Nepal's mountains contribute about 70 percent to the pre-monsoon flow of the Ganges that snakes through neighboring India and Bangladesh.

"The glaciers are shrinking due to global warming posing a risk to water availability not only in Nepal but also in parts of South Asia," said Arun Bhakta Shrestha, an expert on Himalayan glaciers at the government Hydrology and Meteorology Department.

"But how soon or to what extent this problem will arise is difficult to say now."

Tulsi Maya, a farmer on the outskirts of Kathmandu, has never heard of global warming or its impact on the rivers in the Himalayan kingdom, but she does know that the flow of water has gone down.

"It used to overflow its banks and spill into the fields," the 85-year-old farmer said standing in her emerald green rice field as she looked at the Bishnumati river, which has ceased to be a reliable source of drinking water and irrigation.

"Maybe God is unkind and sends less water in the river. The flow of water is decreasing every year," she said standing by her grandson, Milan Dangol, who weeds the crop.

In the Indian Himalayas, there are already signs of water shortages in the summer: Tourists in the rugged mountains of Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh have to carry buckets of water while trekkers say temperatures are much warmer than a decade ago.

The effect can also be seen in the rest of the country.

During the summer, thousands of people in India's villages trek for miles in search of water and even in cities water is a precious commodity, sometimes leading to street fights.

Indian scientists studying Himalayan glaciers fear an acute shortage of natural drinking water in Himachal Pradesh state based on studies of the Beas and Baspa basins from 1962 to 2001.

Two scientists from India's Space and Research Organization using remote sensing satellites found a 23 percent drop in glacial water in 19 of 30 glaciers mapped in the region.

Already, the impact of climate change is evident in the soaring summer temperatures in South Asia, which go up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, and the erratic nature of the monsoon, one of the world's most widely watched phenomena.

"Our research indicates the economy of the region may be affected due to these conditions and investigations suggest that all glaciers are reducing which could create an acute scarcity of water," said Anil Kulkarni, who headed the team studying the Himachal Pradesh glaciers.

Copyright 2005 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Water shortage, another trojan horse for the privitization agenda.
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http://www.publicintegrity.org/water/report.aspx?sID=ch&rID=44&aID=44

"The investigation also showed that the water companies have joined forces with the World Bank and the United Nations to create an array of international think tanks, advisory commissions and forums that have dominated the water debate and established privatization as the dominant solution to the world's water problems.

"What we have seen during the 1990s has been the setting-up of a kind of global high command for water," Riccardo Petrella, a leading researcher on the politics of water, wrote in the French daily Le Monde in 2000.


Global Goals for Water Access
The Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council presented these global targets, called Vision 21, at the Second World Water Forum in the Netherlands in March 2000 to address water supply and sanitation issues facing the developing world.
 
By 2015, the council proposed:
 
To halve the number of people without access to sanitation facilities.
 
To halve the number of people without access to adequate quantities of affordable and safe water.
 
And by 2025:
 
To provide water, sanitation and hygiene for all.
 
Source: Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council




The leading think tank on water issues and the principal adviser to the World Bank and United Nations is the World Water Council, which was established in 1996 by the World Bank and the United Nations. It is headquartered in Marseille, France, and one of its three founding members is René Coulomb, a former Suez vice-president.

In 1998, the WWC created the World Water Commission to promote public awareness of water issues and to help formulate global water policies. The commission holds water conferences around the world and channels its policy statements through international forums held every three years.

Men with strong privatization backgrounds run the commission. These include former Suez CEO Jérôme Monod, Enrique Iglesias, president of the Inter-American Development Bank and Mohamed T. El-Ashry, CEO of the World Bank/U.N. Global Environment Facility. Commission chairman is World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin.

Both of these institutions strongly support privatization and a user-pay policy. "Global experience shows that money is the medium of accountability," the commission said in a 2000 report.

The commission has held two international forums on water with a third planned for Kyoto, Japan, in March 2003. At its forum at The Hague in March 2000, the commission issued a policy statement that said water management was the main problem facing mankind and the solution was to treat water like any other commodity and open its management to free market competition.

Serageldin stated that water delivery should be in private hands, but publicly regulated, in the same way as private companies run the food industry.

The ties that bind the World Bank to the major water companies include shared membership on the boards of various policy institutions as well as personal and business relations.

Monod was special counselor to the International Monetary Fund's director, Michel Camdessus, when Monod was Suez's CEO. After Camdessus retired in 2000, he was named chair of the "International Panel for New Investments in Water," an initiative organized by the water companies. The panel's directors include William Alexander, group chief executive of RWE's Thames Water of London, and Suez Vice President Gerard Payen.

At its first meeting in Paris in February 2002, the panel focused on "how to increase the rate of return on water projects, and the related difficulty of implementing the full cost recovery pricing of water."

Another panel member is the Global Water Partnership (GWP). The chairwoman of its steering committee is Margaret Catley-Carlson, a former Canadian deputy health minister. She is also chairwoman of the Suez Water Resources Advisory Committee. The GWP is a partnership of government, corporate and professional organizations examining water issues. It claims: "The water crisis is a governance crisis, characterized by a failure to value water properly and by a lack of transparency and accountability in the management of water. Reform of the water sector, where water tariffs and prices play essential parts, is expected to make stakeholders recognize the true cost of water and to act thereafter. . . "

full article at link

http://www.publicintegrity.org/water/report.aspx?sID=ch&rID=44&aID=44