Turning swords into ploughshares: Environmental degradation and water poverty are reaching a tipping point after which serious instability and suffering will be unavoidable

Good news does not sell newspapers. Nor, it seems, does the idea of respect for human dignity. In West Asia, where the majority of people have known little other than outright war or simmering conflict, it should come as little surprise that people have lost their faith in the possibility of real peace. Real peace can be a frightening prospect; it means burying the hatchet and beating swords into the proverbial ploughshares. No easy task when we are all burdened by historical and psychological baggage.

Ours is a hungry region: hungry for development, for work, for freedom, for democracy, for dignity, for the essentials of energy and, above all, water. It is broadly accepted that states have a responsibility to protect their constituents; protection of and access to basic natural resources for all should be seen as a similar responsibility.

According to figures released by the Strategic Foresight Group, the Middle East North Africa (Mena) region is set to experience a decline of per capita annual renewable water availability from approximately 750 cubic metres at present to approximately 500 cubic metres by 2025. Such general indicators hide bleak truths that are specific to individual societies. There are regions within Jordan, Syria, Israel and, apparently, water-rich Turkey, which already suffer from a serious deficit. Some of these countries (i.e. Jordan and Israel) have already crossed a water utilisation rate of 100 per cent, threatening not only future generations, but current wellbeing.

With a projected decrease as dramatic as that, the governments of the Mena region should be urgently implementing a long-term regional strategy for water management and planning, and I welcome the numerous conferences now being held across the region in this respect. A new and more ethical paradigm is needed in which individual rights, states' rights and international rights are seen as an indivisible and dynamic unity, not a source of polarisation and conflict. For too long people have come a poor second to investment considerations. This is particularly true when it comes to the privatisation of the commons. The nod is given to their needs by Corporate Social Responsibility, though these are substantially ignored. The people of the region must become the subject, not the object of development; the economy should serve them and not vice versa.

One positive strategy, which has been implemented implicitly in India, and more explicitly and effectively in South Africa, focuses on access to water as a human right. States in the Mena region should come together and recognise water as justifiable, as a human right, enabling the people of the region to seek legal recourse when deprived of access to basic water resources.

There is an urgent need for a supra-national water commission that looks thematically, on a non-partisan and inclusive basis, at water and energy for the human environment and develops a carrying capacity concept based on a factual analysis of the region's human, natural and economic resources. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. A concept was evolved facilitated by the United States and in the context of peace and the Middle East North Africa Summit of 1994, of a plan for the Jordan Rift Valley which could be expanded to the Greater African Rift Valley. This would not be a corridor, rather a fully-integrated regional development plan. Naturally, it would include the Dead Sea — the possible imminent demise of which is the subject of much discussion.

The point is that creative solutions, based on inter-regional collaboration across the West Asia-North Africa (Wana) region are required. The Euphrates, the Nile and other great rivers run through this region, the latter affecting 10 African states. Shared waters could mean shared opportunities, yet no agreements, partial or otherwise (such as the precedents in the Rhine or Indus Commissions) exist for these or for other important waterways.

Culturally attuned empowerment

The region needs to move away from heated rhetoric to forward thinking, consultation and conceptual mode. Of course, political issues must continue to be negotiated, yet in the interim, post-war reconciliation and reconstruction should continue for the sake of our people. Culturally attuned empowerment through the combination of modern technologies and authentic regional policies that have a traditionally proven record of success, such as the concept of al hima (Arabic for conservation) is within our reach when addressing the future water and energy needs of the region.

The Desertec concept of Concentrated Solar Power, for example, which involves the creation of a ‘solar technology belt' across the Mena region to harness the intense energy of the desert sun, could supply us with unlimited clean and affordable energy within the next 10 years. Another example is a plant, preferably on the Egyptian side of the Gaza border, which could provide clean drinking water and electricity for the people of Gaza. Likewise Yemen's capital Sana'a is on the verge of a major crisis. It seems short-sighted in the extreme that while the country's political volatility is the centre of international conferences, scant attention is being paid to recent projections suggesting Sana'a will run out of economically viable water supplies by 2017. The point is that while national grids may be able to reach large cities, small communities on the margins are all too often ignored by the official economy, and as a result, turn to the informal economy.

Continuous instability has conditioned the very way in which we approach every-day tasks; the way we plan our interventions and the way we monitor and re-evaluate them. Ad hoc existence and short-termism are the norm. The most terrifying thing is that environmental degradation and water poverty are reaching a tipping point after which all the best intentioned dialogue in the world will be unable to prevent serious instability and suffering. We must realign our thinking now, galvanise decision makers now, change our direction now. Above all, we must rekindle hope, through positive, inclusive and participatory action to meet the challenges we face.

 

Source: www.gulfnews.com

Image source: Nino Jose Heredia/Gulf News