Pollution, urbanization and climate change is sucking Asia dry with experts predicting that the continent’s megacities will face an unprecedented water crisis in the coming decades.

One out of five people in the region do not have access to safe drinking water while half of the population in the Asia-Pacific region, equating to a staggering 1.6 billion people, are still without adequate sanitation.

 “Water scarcity threatens economic and social gains and is a potent fuel for wars and conflict,” said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to delegates at the first Asia-Pacific Water Summit held in Japan this month.

“This planet faces a water crisis that will hit Asia especially hard,” he said.

“If the present unsatisfactory trends continue, in one or two decades, Asian developing countries are likely to face a crisis on water quality management that is unprecedented in human history,” said Prof. Asit K. Biswas, who led an international group of water specialists in preparing am Asian Development Bank (ADB) report on the issue.

The report, written by a team of water specialists, covers 12 Asian countries: Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Samoa, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.

The ADB report recommends major changes in water governance practices in most Asian developing countries, and to look to successful models such as in Singapore and Cambodia which had improved monitoring of water consumption.

It was tabled at the The 1st Asia-Pacific Water Summit, held this month, in Beppu, Japan, and attended by ten Heads of State and Government, 31 Ministers, and representatives from over 36 Asia-Pacific countries, in a bid to mobilize the political will and commitment required to put water higher up in the region’s national agendas.

“Water quality management has mostly been a neglected issue in Asian developing member countries.

The annual economic cost is likely to be billions of dollars,” Biswas wrote.

The report said massive urbanization will present new types of water-related challenges.
In contrast to cities in developed countries such as Tokyo, developing countries have fallen behind in the collection, treatment, and safe disposal of wastewater, it said.

Climate change is likely to increase the frequency of extreme events like droughts and floods and introduce high levels of risks and uncertainties that the water industry may not be able to handle with confidence, Biswas said.

China is among the countries with the most severe water problem.

Beijing predicts it would have exploited all available water supplies to the limit by 2030, and has ordering officials to prepare for worse to come as global warming and economic expansion drain lakes and rivers.

China’s surface and underground water supplies are under strain from feverish economic growth and a population passing 1.3 billion. And scarcity will worsen with global warming.

“In recent years economic and social development has led to increasing water demand, and with the impact of global warming, drought and water scarcity are increasingly grave,” said a directive issued by the office of the State Council.

The document urges officials to make emergency plans for coping with drought and promises more spending on water-saving technology and artificial rainmaking. Local governments must also develop policies to aid and compensate drought-hit farmers.

China has about 7 percent of the planet’s water resources to nourish one- fifth of the global population, the government has estimated.

Drought is already a chronic burden for many farmers, especially in the country’s west.
One contributing factor to wastewater management problems is massive and rapid urbanization, such as that seen in megacities like Dhaka, Bangladesh; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Karachi, Pakistan, the report said.

Wastewater collected from cities is often discharged to nearby rivers, lakes or oceans with little or no treatment, which heavily contaminates water bodies around urban centers and is already causing health and environmental problems.

 In the Philippines, there are 16 Philippine rives and lakes are already biologically dead during summer and only 33% of river systems are suitable as water supply source.

Up to 58% of the country’s groundwater is now contaminated and over-exploitation has already resulted in the intrusion of salty water following the lowering of water level.

Depletion of groundwater resources has been an increasing problem in Metro Manila and Metro Cebu.

Although groundwater resources are generally abundant and of adequate quality for domestic purposes, the study states that poor environmental management of extractive resource industries—such as uncontrolled forestry, mining and minerals extraction—has been leading to the pollution of downstream water courses and aquifers.

“The majority of solid waste disposal and landfill sites are poorly operated and maintained, permitting leachate to pollute some water resources,” the study stated.

In Manila, for instance, the study noted that less than four percent of the population was connected to the sewer network, with many high-income households constructing their own facilities.

“Flush toilets connected to septic tanks are widely used, and often serve large housing developments.

However, sludge treatment and disposal facilities are rare, resulting in indiscriminate disposal of untreated or poorly treated effluent into the Pasig River, one of the world’s most polluted rivers,” the study pointed out.

South Asia faces another challenge as it is expected to be hit hard by water shortages due to global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned.

The IPCC -- the UN body that shares this year’s Nobel Peace Prize - says: “Glacier melt in the Himalayas is projected to increase flooding and rock avalanches from destabilized slopes and to affect water resources within the next two to three decades.

This will be followed by decreased river flows as the glaciers recede.”

This is particularly worrisome as the Himalayas provide most of the water to the two most populous nations in the world -- China and India.

The IPCC predicts that freshwater availability in Central, South, East and Southeast Asia will decrease due to climate change, particularly in large river basins.

“Along with population growth and increasing demand arising from higher standards of living, (this) could adversely affect more than a billion people by the 2050s.”

The report -- written by over 1,250 scientists and reviewed by over 2,500 from all over the world -- says “coastal areas, especially heavily populated mega delta regions in South, East and Southeast Asia, will be at greatest risk due to increased flooding from the sea and, in some mega deltas, flooding from the rivers”.

On the health front, the report predicts that climate change will mean more diarrhoeal diseases due to more frequent floods and droughts in East, South and Southeast Asia.
It also predicts that increases in coastal water temperature would worsen the abundance and/or toxicity of cholera in South Asia.

The ADB report said governments should step up efforts to build new wastewater treatment facilities on a massive scale to reduce contamination.

It recommended a target of quadrupling access to wastewater treatment facilities to 50 or 60 percent of the population of Asian developing countries.

 

"This will not be an easy task, and yet this must be the real target for Asian countries," Biswas said.

 

"Water quality management has mostly been a neglected issue in Asian (developing member countries)," he wrote, adding that the problem likely costs the region's economies billions of dollars annually.

The report noted, however, that progress in urban water management was being made in some parts of Asia, such as China, which has some of the world’s most polluted waterways and cities after two decades of breakneck industrial growth but is making efforts to reduce the contamination.

Official awareness of the importance of providing clean drinking water and proper wastewater management services is increasing to the point that the issues have become priorities for policymakers on many levels, it said.

For example, the government is constructing a massive network of canals to supply its dry north with water from the wetter south.

In the southern industrial city of Shenzhen, officials have introduced measures to conserve freshwater by flushing toilets with seawater.

The report also urged officials to study Singapore, which despite a lack of internal water resources, has harnessed technologies in recycling water and desalination to provide continuous, high quality drinking water to its dense, urban population. Similarly, Cambodia’s Phnom Penh Water Authority has managed to reduce unaccounted for water from about 90 percent in 1993 to about 8 percent now, and provides a continuous drinking water supply.
Asian commentator Andy Mukherjee said the commodity that poses the biggest threat to long-term prosperity in Asia isn’t oil, it’s water.

“The very survival of Asian cities is at stake,” he wrote.