Cities soaking up countryside鈥檚 water
Print Edition
Expanding cities are sucking up ever more water, exacerbating the effect of climate change and threatening to create a 鈥渄usty and deserted鈥 rural hinterland, scientists said yesterday.
An international team of researchers calculated that globally at least 16 billion cubic meters of water 鈥 almost the annual flow of the Colorado River in the United States 鈥 were pumped out of the countryside into cities every year. The figure is the tip of the iceberg of a global problem that is bound to worsen, with the United Nations estimating 2.5 billion more people will move into cities by 2050.
鈥淯rbanization is increasing competition between cities and agriculture,鈥 said Dustin Garrick of the University of Oxford鈥檚 Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a significant problem already and it is likely to grow.鈥
Garrick said the world was 鈥渨oefully underprepared鈥 due to a lack of data, particularly in South America and Africa.
The research reviewed almost 100 scientific studies looking at the impact of water reallocation from rural areas to cities. They identified more than 100 projects 鈥 be it pipelines or dams 鈥 that had diverted water into 69 cities, supporting the needs of 383 million people, mainly in North America and Asia.
In many cases, water reallocation benefited cities to the detriment of rural populations, often causing protests from farmers whose taps ran dry.
With global warming due to worsen droughts and other extreme weather, tensions are set to deepen, said Mbaye Mbeguere, senior water, sanitation and hygiene manager at charity WaterAid. But good planning could help, said Garrick.
The Mexican city of Monterrey provided farmers with compensation and city wastewater for irrigation, after diverting water from a tributary of the Rio Grande river in the 1990s, Garrick said, and the project also helped regulate water flows and reduce the risk of flooding.
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