Punjabe Wise Saying 2: Water, sticks and unions

Punjabee: "Panee wich sotaa maryaan panee do totey naheen hunda"

Translation: Water does not break into 2 pieces when you hit with a stick

Explanation: Strong unions don't break that easily. If you hit water with a stick, it doesn't break--- instead the energy from the stick is dissipated as ripples and eventually whithers away. The water returns to the same state as it was before and if you hadn't seen the stick striking the water, you wont even notice that an attempt had been made to break it. Thats how our bonds of kinship and friendships should be i.e. calm and unperturbed like water.

Water contamination in Pakistan

Recently World Wide Fund for Nature and Several NGOs in Pakistan completed a report on the water situation in Pakistan. Some of it's findings as pe rthe Dawn newspaper were:

Water contamination in the country is continuing unabated as the issue does not feature high on the agenda of the government which also lacks commitment to enforce laws it has enacted for protecting water for future generations.

This apathy on the part of the government, enforcement agencies and the industrial and agriculture sectors responsible for contamination is resulting in the death of at least 250,000 children every year while adults are facing severe health hazards.

This was revealed in a report launched by the World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan in collaboration with Actionaid Pakistan, Pani Pakistan, Sungi, Pakistan Environmental Lawyers Association, Shehri and Human Welfare and Nature Conservation Society at a press conference here on Thursday.

WWF-Pak Fresh Water and Toxics Programme director Hammad Naqi told the newsmen that all the data for the report “Pakistan’s waters at risk” had been collected from various official studies so that the authorities could not challenge its authenticity.

The News, another leading Daily newspaper expands furthur on the situation:

The picture becomes more disturbing if one looks at it more closely. For instance, the government's own data reveals that 99 per cent of industrial effluent and 92 per cent of urban wastewater is discharged untreated into rivers and the sea (the extent of damage to marine life and the ecosystems of these bodies of water can probably not even be imagined). Drinking water in most urban cities such as Karachi, Lahore, Hyderabad, Peshawar, Multan and even Abbotabad and Islamabad has been found to be laced with biological and chemical pollutants (according to a survey conducted by the NGO Network and the National Institute of Health, three-quarters of all water in the federal capital is not suitable for drinking). Equally alarmingly, 36 per cent of the population of Sindh and Punjab is exposed to arsenic levels in water that are five times more than the safe limit as prescribed by the World Health Organisation. The picture is quite dismal and reflects, regrettably, the government's misplaced priorities since some other areas receive more attention and funding (the most obvious being defence).

As the figures above suggest, it would actually not be a cliché to say that improving the quality of water in Pakistan is a life and death issue -- it is precisely just that. What is needed is a government that displays the political will and commitment to address this issue seriously, gives it the priority that it deserves and does not dismiss it as a fashionable issue advocated by the NGO sector for its own ends such as funding and so on (one suspects that is what the government partly tends to think of the matter).

I dont think Pakistan is alone in it's struggle to balance development and water protection. I have heard people say that the economy supersedes the environment when a country is developing. But the where do you draw the line? how many people need to die from water pollution before one realizes that sanctity of life is more important then the economy.

What drives landowners and others to remove pollution causing sources in the developed world? I thinnk it is the legal implications of the impact their land may cause to human health. As in, the threat of a legal suit and/or heavy fine from the government drives water pollution protection.

In summary the key components of water pollution protection is as follows:

• Government Regulations that set limits for different contaminants
• Government regulators who oversee the implementation of these regulations
• Some sort of check or audit on the government to make sure it is doing it's job
• Public awareness and consultation
  
• A justice system to seek out pollutors
• technical skills ( includes consultants, lab technicians, contractors, etc)

I am sure I have missed some components.in the above bullets but the point is that it is not easy to implement regulations that the developed world currently has and use them in a devleoping country. This is a multi step and multi tiered process which could take decades to implement. So what is the solution?

A question to explore on another blog post.

Water and Development

Water is an essential need. One of those things we take for granted every day. It is essential in almost everything we do. Water and development have a close connection which this article discusses.

The parts which I find most interesting are quoted below:

The documentary’s look at Coca Cola (Coke for short) company’s activities in India highlighted problems also seen around the world. Because Coke had been pumping water from local wells and aquifers, this led to farmers digging deeper and deeper to search for waters, under sometimes dangerous conditions. Some farmers were digging as deep as 450 feet without finding water. The documentary noted that they wanted Coke to leave for they brought them nothing but misery. Indeed, earlier in 2000, violent protests by farmers in the state of Kerala led to the closure of Coke there.

The documentary also noted that for each liter of drink from Coca Cola, some 3 liters of water was needed.

When asked, Coke noted all the activities they were pursuing to be a more responsible neighbor. Coke also claimed that government figures showed they did not cause the drop in water levels, yet those figures showed otherwise. They also noted that agriculture is responsible for more water usage than Coca Cola. While this is partly correct, this applies more to industrial agribusinesses, not small farmers.

Furthermore, farmers are arguably using the land for more productive (and necessary) purposes than Coke. In addition, Coke, typical of many global companies, have used the lands (and, in this case, water) of the poor countries, to produce products to be mainly consumed by people in wealthy countries.

n Tanzania, the documentary noted the hardships and struggles of the poor when the country followed rich-country and World Bank advice and privatized their water services. In a region where currently 11 million lives are at risk from water shortage, these policies are having serious impacts. Privatization led to increased prices and lack of access, rather than increased access.

In Bolivia, even though much of the major city covered by the documentary was connected up by the global water company, the poor could not afford the connection charges. Some 200,000 people in that city—a quarter of the population—were not connected. (The French company that owned the water services there said in the documentary that the poor “chose” not to be connected.) Numerous health and social problems developed, especially for the children and the poor were resorting to illegal connections. (We can often see such actions by poor as being “illegal”, but when the system itself encourages such last-resort actions and “corruption” we hear less of that aspect.)

In Detroit, USA, the documentary noted that the poor in the richest country in the world were also affected by similar global problems. Like families in Tanzania, many African Americans in Detroit were finding they needed to make daily trips to get water. The documentary followed the struggle of a woman who had fallen behind on her water bills because her disabled husband’s medical bills had grown so much. Yet, some 40,000 households (some 100,000 people) in Detroit were facing water shortages in similar ways, simply for being too poor to afford the bills. In this particular case, city officials were also accused of running down the water service so that it could be privatized and thereby reduce their accountability.......

..Throughout Latin America and Asia, massive industrialization in rural communities is affecting the balance between humans and nature. Water use is being diverted from agriculture to industry. Huge corporate factories are moving up the rivers of the Third World, sucking them dry as they go............

Many of the world’s most water-stressed areas will get less water, and water flows will become less predictable and more subject to extreme events. Among the projected outcomes:

• Marked reductions in water availability in East Africa, the Sahel and Southern Africa as rainfall declines and temperature rises, with large productivity losses in basic food staples. Projections for rainfed areas in East Africa point to potential productivity losses of up to 33% in maize and more than 20% for sorghum and 18% for millet.
• The disruption of food production systems exposing an additional 75–125 million people to the threat of hunger.
• Accelerated glacial melt, leading to medium term reductions in water availability across a large group of countries in East Asia, Latin America and South Asia.
• Disruptions to monsoon patterns in South Asia, with the potential for more rain but also fewer rainy days and more people affected by drought.
• Rising sea levels resulting in freshwater losses in river delta systems in countries such as Bangladesh, Egypt and Thailand...........

............Agribusinesses growing crops for export are claiming more of the water once used by family and peasant farmers for food self-sufficiency. The global expansion in mining and manufacturing is increasing the threat of pollution of underground water supplies and contaminating the aquifers that provide more than 50 percent of domestic supplies in most Asian countries.

To feed the voracious global consumer market, China has transformed its entire economy, massively diverting water use from communities and local farming to its burgeoning industrial sector. As the big industrial wells consume more water, millions of Chinese farmers have found their local wells pumped dry. Eighty percent of China's major rivers are now so degraded, they no longer support fish. Economic globalization and the policies that drive it are proving to be totally unsustainable.

In the thick of it...

Apparently this is the "in" blog these days....

This guy on the 10th floor of an office building in New Orleans has been blogging away since the Hurricane struck....

He has pictures and even live Cam feeds!!!

Here is how he describes himself:

"For those of you who haven't been reading this, I'm on the 10th/11th floors of a 27 floor high rise at 650 Poydras in downtown New Orleans. If you go to Google Earth or some other map program, we're the big brown building between Poydras ave and Lafayette Square and between Camp Street and St. Charles Ave. We're about 6 blocks from the river. We have a view (in the daytime) of the river, the twin spans over the river, the interstate, the Entergy building, the landmark building, the federal court of appeals building, a bunch of hotels, etc."

Naturally Unnatural

As an Environmental Engineering student one of the things that really struck me about the Hurricane Katrina was the failure of levees and the enormity of the flood......

I took a Hydraulics course last term with Dr. Annable, one of the top stream restoration Engineers in North America. His solution to a lot of stream/waterway problems is to restore the streams along with the flood plains in the most natural way possible-which means you dont have concrete lined streams; you allow the streams to flood once in a while rather than have a HUGE flood after many years;you have natural vegetation along the stream shoreline, etc etc......

I found this article by NYT on the Hurricane which agrees with Professor Annable's line of thinking :

'....When most transport was by water, people would of course settle along the Mississippi River, and of course they would build a port city near its mouth. In the 20th century, when oil and gas fields were developed in the gulf, of course people added petrochemical refineries and factories to the river mix, convenient to both drillers and shippers. To protect it all, they built an elaborate system of levees, dams, spillways and other installations.

As one 19th-century traveler put it, according to Ari Kelman, an environmental historian at the University of California, Davis, "New Orleans is surprising evidence of what men will endure, when cheered by the hopes of an ever-flowing tide of dollars and cents."

In the last few decades, more and more people have realized what a terrible bargain the region made when it embraced - unwittingly, perhaps - environmental degradation in exchange for economic gains.

Abby Sallenger, a scientist with the United States Geological Survey who has studied the Louisiana landscape for years, sees the results of this bargain when he makes his regular flights over the Gulf Coast or goes by boat to one of the string of sandy barrier islands that line the state's coast.

The islands are the region's first line of defense against hurricane waves and storm surges. Marshes, which can normally absorb storm water, are its second.

But, starved of sediment, the islands have shrunk significantly in recent decades. And though the rate of the marshes' loss has slowed somewhat, they are still disappearing, "almost changing before your eyes," as Dr. Sallenger put it in a telephone interview from his office in St. Petersburg, Fla. "Grassland turns into open water, ponds turn into lakes."

Without the fine sediment that nourishes marshes and the coarser sediment that feeds eroding barrier islands, "the entire delta region is sinking," he said. In effect, he said, it is suffering a rise in sea level of about a centimeter - about a third of an inch - a year, 10 times the average rate globally................................."

Another relevant article from the BBC website :

".......The levee system meant that the Mississippi, a vast river that drains the whole of the eastern US, was tamed by man.

Without regular river floods to feed the swampy delta with precious silt and nutrients, vast swathes of Louisiana's coastal wetlands have disappeared in the past 75 years.

Sprawling coastal wetlands can bear the brunt of a hurricane better than the concrete passageways of a modern city.

The US Geological Survey calls the wetlands a "natural buffer" in a high-risk area. Plans to stop further erosion have run aground in Congress.

Erosion meant that instead of falling on the delta, Katrina's rains swelled the Mississippi and filled Lake Pontchartrain.............."