Water world

Africa is synonymous with crises, and the one that's not making headlines is the lack of water across the continent. A problem that is snowballing into a major crisis. Dr Richard Robarts, director of a UN programme on monitoring water resources (which partnered with National Food Product Company on an awareness programme in the UAE), sheds light on the problem and what we can do about it.

Two of the longest rivers in the world – the Nile and the Congo – run through Africa and yet it is riding the crest of a water crisis. Twentyone of the world's most arid countries, in terms of water per person, are said to be located in Africa. The Nile and its tributaries flow through nine countries: Egypt, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.

The Congo, the world's fifth longest river, flows primarily through DRC, People's Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, and partially through Zambia, Angola, Cameroon and Tanzania. And yet in many of the arid and semi-arid countries, rivers only flow for short periods in the rainy reason, and dams are required to store water for the dry periods.
"The need for water resource infrastructure in Africa is clear.

The same arguments are also applicable to many other countries in the developing world," says Robarts, who coordinates the collection of data on water in more than 100 countries as director of the Global Environment Monitoring System (GEMS) – a branch of the United Nations Environment Programme.

The urgency is evident from UN figures which indicate that 4,500 children die each day in Africa from unsafe water.

A more comprehensive worldwide database on water quantity and quality is desperately needed to help governments and organisations tackle and prevent a water crises, he says.

The pressing need to preserve natural supplies of water helped institute the United Nations GEMS Water Programme to monitor and facilitate the location of water sources that are hygienic and suitable for human consumption. The GEMS programme complements the global efforts of the United Nations Water Programme by measuring water quality and making global water quality information available to all.

By connecting with NGOs and private enterprises to raise awareness about this universal need for clean and safe water, the UNEP GEMS Water Programme attempts to spread the message as widely as possible.
Dr Robarts has targeted Africa as his top priority since he's spent 14 years researching and teaching in Africa as an aquatic microbial ecologist.

So, when a UAE company National Food Product Company (NFPC) – which produces Oasis bottled water – wanted to partner with GEMS Water, they chose a programme to provide the continent's poorest people with
access to clean drinking water.
"But it's not just the quantity of water, it's quality as well. So many diseases are transmitted through water," says Dr Robarts. "It affects every aspect of our lives.

Whether it's children going to school and unable to stay awake in class or adults going to work."
"During the Oasis "Water for Africa" campaign, money from each bottle bought funded GEMS work in raising awareness of the importance of clean water and how to access it, increasing data and improving infrastructure," says Gregory Henderson, spokesperson for NFPC.

"The Water for Africa campaign is contributing and driving the philosophy that everybody should have access to pure, clean drinking water and that people around the world, including the UAE, should be more conscious about a national resource like water in order to assist less fortunate people across the world to get access to it. We decided to partner with GEMS because we share the same philosophy and the same synergies of empowering people through education and conscious-awareness building. The campaign started on October 15, 2008 and ran for two months.

GEMS plays a very active role in many parts of the world and its primary focus is on Africa where it plays a large role in spreading awareness, and facilitating the process of enabling people and empowering communities to get access to water."

The GEMS programme was started in 1978 and is a global assessment programme that will provide data assessments to 24 UN agencies to carry out water programmes. "That was the initial concept behind it, and since then a big part of our mandate is to educate people about water, train people in countries on how to collect water, how to measure it, to analyse it and tabulate the information.

We also teach people about how they can empower themselves to bring about changes in terms of water quality," says Robarts. "More recently, we got into research; we've got this huge information base called GEMS database which is updated every week and spans from 1965 to 2008, in about 100 countries."

University professors and graduate students from around the world, and other organisations have access to
this database. "Water issues can be fundamentally divided into two categories: water quantity (how much or how little) and its quality. Many issues about water transcend political boundaries. A country has the responsibility to manage and conserve water at the national level, but GEMS Water works at levels that transcend them because we have 263 international rivers that flow across political boundaries.

Many of them flow to coastal areas and we have lakes and reservoirs, all of which cross borders. So there's a need to try and understand and redress issues that transcend political worlds. That's where GEMS Water comes in." GEMS Water's fundamental operation is to compile a global database from information provided from countries or NGOs.

"We put them together and that is the core," says Dr Robarts. "We also have a lot of publications and provide services to developing countries that address the questions on water quality and the implications of free, consistent human health. We have services to help countries design water-quality monitoring programmes, laboratory operations, etc."

"The crazy thing about this is that we do it all for free! It's a very strange business model. The basic GEMS programme costs about $1 million to run a year, but costs are always increasing and so are the demands on our services," says Dr Robarts. "That's the reason I don't think this is a sustainable model. We're looking for partnerships with industries,
and this partnership with NFPC is
a first for the region."

The services that GEMS Water offers include information available via their website. "We are linked with Google Earth, and if you go to our website you can fly around the world with us and see where our monitoring stations are. You can move your mouse to an icon on the map and you can zero in on the geographical location of the station. When you click on that, the database will come up with all the information.

"Depending on your interests and needs, you can generate statistical tables, graphs, etc. Which is fine for scientists, academics and technical people. Politicians are more interested in simple things like whether the water there is good or bad, and that's there too.
The primary questions that drive the programme are: what is status of water quality throughout the world, how is it changing, and the hotspots or the potentially problematic areas.

"In the last couple of years," says Dr. Robarts, "we have been taking the lead role in compiling the water quality indices, which are a series of different water quality parameters, which are then looked at in mathematical terms with 100 being the best and 0 being the worst. We've also developed a water quality index for drinking water resources. We made one for the World Economic Forum in Davos which ranked all the countries in terms of water quality.

"It's quite a grand idea; we are the only such programme in the world," he says, "We have a sister programme which collects hydrological data in Germany and is a part of the World Meteorological Organisation. With the kind of information and data we provide, you can develop national plans, policies, and come up with solutions. We hope it helps make the world a better place."
A possibility he strongly believes in. "On our website, you can see the table on water quality improving in some places," he says.

"One case is the reduction of pesticides in rivers in China, another is in the UK, where fish have started to breed again in the rivers; in fact in some areas there are even reports of seahorses reappearing. There is also the positive news of the restoration of marshes in Iraq. As you can see, among all the bad news there is some good too. Generally, it's hard to arrive at such information."
The reason for that according to Dr Robarts is that the United Nations was earlier hindered by a chronic lack of data on water issues and an outdated or incomplete information was used in many reports.

"Without information, you can't develop management programmes; without information, governments can't develop policies. GEMS has stations in more than 100 countries but that is still only half the countries participating. The database is from 1965 to 2008 but even now, we have big gaps," he said. "The picture could be considerably worse or considerably better."

The importance of the GEMS Water Programme can be gauged by a report of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) that states – "the progress that is currently being made towards peace and the democratisation of the Democratic Republic of Congo can unlock the hydropower potential of the Congo River, and this can be the key to unlock the economic potential of the entire African continent".
According to SIWI estimates, poor countries with access to improved water and sanitation services enjoyed an annual average growth of3.7 per cent in gross domestic product (GDP) while those without grew at just 0.1 per cent.

In Kenya, improved resilience to the effects of floods and droughts made its GDP grow at an annual rate of at least five to six per cent – the amount needed to start effectively reducing poverty – rather than the current 2.4 per cent annual growth rate,
The epicentre of the current global economic crisis is said to be sub-Saharan Africa, "where rapidly growing populations are exposed
to endemic disease, hunger, environmental degradation and lack
of access to basic education and infrastructure," says a SIWI report.

"The bottomline is: we have the knowledge, we have the technology and the expertise," says Dr Robarts. "If you have the political will to make the resources available then you can get to see improvements. The situation isn't hopeless, it is possible to make huge changes, dramatic changes in future. It just needs political will to make the effort. And when that happens, you'll have a great example of how things can be improved."

He feels that it would help improve the situation if GEMS Water was made a statutory body which could insist on certain rules to be followed in all countries. "We feel it can work in each country individually if the programme is implemented on a national level," says Dr Robarts. "We have submitted documents to the Canadian government, as we are based in Canada. If accepted, it could be a test case and we hope it will work out."

GEMS Water has no water-monitoring partnership with the UAE yet, although it has worked with Jordan, Iraq and Afghanistan. But Dr Robarts is hopeful. "We'd like to be a lot more active in the Middle East than we are now. It is an arid region, and water is going to be a problem.

My understanding is that the UAE doesn't have a national water quality monitoring programme or a hydrological monitoring programme. Those things are fundamental if you want the information you need to manage the resources. You have to have those programmes in place to participate in our programme. GEMS Water is always willing to provide the information on how you go about setting up these programmes.

"We'd be delighted to work with the government here," says Dr Robarts. "The UAE, of course, is an arid region. So conserving water is of utmost importance. Where there is political will and resources, we can make it happen. There is no reason why the UAE can't be a showcase for water management."

– Shiva Kumar Thekkepat is Feature Writer, Friday