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Rivers in the Media

Global targets for safe drinking water - are we on track?

PUBLISHED: 18 MAY 2012 SOURCE: BBC UK (Harrabin's Notes)

Put the champagne away! It seems that the number of people in the world without drinking water may be as much as five times higher than the UN has stated. It's miserable to be a party-wrecker, but it appears that the UN's recent achievement on global targets for safe drinking water isn't quite as impressive as it sounds.

Is the number of people without access to safe drinking water much higher than the UN reports?

The UN recently trumpeted: "The goal of reducing by half the number of people without access to safe drinking water has been achieved, well ahead of the 2015 deadline (set under Millennium Development Goals)."It was a welcome piece of good news for the Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon.

In two decades to 2010, more than two billion people got safe drinking water, leaving "only" 800 million people with potentially unsafe drinking water. The 800 million figure is still huge. But, it appears, the real number of people without guaranteed access to safe drinking water is greater still; apparently as much as five times greater.

Who says so? Well, the man who deals with the statistics at the World Health Organization (WHO). Members of the Secretary General's own independent advisory group on water, known as UNSGAB, have also voiced their concerns. I understand some of them have let Mr Ban know in no uncertain terms that his office has badly understated the scale of the drinking water crisis.

The UN's technical experts and advisers alike estimate that the true number of people without reliably safe drinking water is between one and four billion people. The latter figure is more than half the world's population.

Egypt will need more than 50% more Nile water by 2050

PUBLISHED: 09 MAY 2012 SOURCE: Ahram online

Egypt will need nearly 50 per cent more Nile water by 2050 to cater for an estimated population of 150 million people, according to experts at Egypt's National Planning Institute.

Speaking to the state-run Al-Ahram newspaper, the institute's director said Egypt will require an extra 21 billion cubic metres (bcm) of water per year from Africa's longest river to meet the needs of industry, agriculture and households in 40 years' time.

Egypt is currently entitled to 55 bcm of the Nile's total annual flow of around 84 bmc under a treaty with the eight other countries which share the river basin.

Fadya Abdel-Salam, director of the NPI, said that if Egypt's current share of the Nile remains the same, by 2050 each Egyptian will have a Nile "stake" of 400 cubic metres in the river's waters -- well below the global water poverty index of 1,000 cubic metres.

Should the Nile's total flow remain constant, Egypt will eventually need some 92 per cent of the 6,695 kilometre-long river's waters, according to NPI's estimate.

NPI's research estimates that Egypt's industrial and agricultural needs will rise by 2050 to 10.5 bcm and 10.4 bcm, respectively.

According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, Egypt's water resources are limited to the Nile River, deep ground water in the Delta, the Western Deserts and Sinai, sporadic rainfall and flash floods.

Read full article

Keeping our rivers alive

PUBLISHED: 01 MAY 2012 SOURCE: Government of South Australia - Adelaide & Mt Lofty NRM Board

An exciting three-year trial is underway to return water to three key South Australian rivers. The trial, managed by the Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges Natural Resources Management Board, will create environmental flows which will aim to mimic natural river flows in the South Para River between the Barossa Diversion Weir and Gawler Weir,; the River Torrens and the Onkaparinga River.

Professor Chris Daniels, Presiding Member with the Board, said the trial has been designed to improve ecosystem health, helping these rivers support aquatic animals and plants whilst ensuring enough water is available for human use.

“The trial will test the volume and timing of flows required to improve the ecological health of some of our most important waterways,” Professor Daniels said.

“For some of these sections of river, flow periods have been reduced by up to 90 per cent downstream of weirs. This has come at a cost to river health and together with other changes in the catchment, has lead to the local extinction of the Purple Spotted Gudgeon in the Western Mount Lofty Ranges, and threatens the survival of several others."

Professor Daniels said the environmental flows had been designed to make conditions more favourable for native fish and other aquatic animals to complete their life cycle.These same environmental flows will disadvantage non-native fish as they have evolved to survive under different flow conditions.

“The trial environmental flows have been developed to cue certain life-stage events in native aquatic animals. This includes periods where rivers will only run at a trickle flow as well as larger flushing events, similar to moderate winter flows that last a few days,” Professor Daniels said.

“It will also include periods when no flows occur, to reflect natural variation.”“These flows will be historic - the last time these rivers flowed freely was in the late 1800s and early 1900s – before we started large-scale diversion of water to develop Adelaide.”

Professor Daniels said some of the native fish to benefit from this trial include Climbing Galaxias, rare in the Onkaparinga River, and Mountain Galaxias in the South Para River and River Torrens, rated as vulnerable in South Australia.

The trial has been developed by the Board, SA Water and the Department for Water. It follows on from 10 years of work to determine how much water is needed to maintain healthy rivers. This trial aims to fine tune a future ongoing scheme.

Results will be monitored and evaluated by the Board with the assistance of expert scientists including the Australian Water Quality Centre and the South Australian Research and Development Institute.

Photo: Congoli is a native fish found in the South Para River [Credit: Dr D McNeil and Dr M Hammer]

Read full media release | Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges NRM Board

BLOG - 'Rivers need a revolution' by Graham Harris

PUBLISHED: 30 APRIL 2012 SOURCE: The Conversation

I’ve been away in the UK for a few years – and what do I find when I come back? In the Murray Darling we are still arguing over inputs (the amount of water to be returned to the river) instead of focusing on the state we actually want the river system to be in, and how to make it so.

Water is no more than a means to an end, and if I have learned one thing it is that means don’t guarantee ends in this game. Restoring the ecological condition of rivers is not easy: we rarely achieve large-scale ecological management and restoration. European Union member states have spent over €80 billion (A$102 billion) to little effect in an effort to return their rivers to “good” ecological condition, and statistical analyses of thousands of river and catchment restoration projects around the world indicate that success rates are low: one sometimes needs a stiff drink when reading about research into restoration projects, with only around 10% of such projects achieving documented success.

The European Environmental Bureau, a federation of 140 EU citizens groups, reviewed what had been achieved 10 years on from the EU’s Water Framework Directive, which was aimed at cleaning and restoring waterways. The federation’s report has an appropriately depressed tone: “massive procrastination”; “generic excuses”; “unnecessarily drowning in complexity and ignorance”; “lack of transparency and robust assessments”, and so on.

So this is the elephant in the room: river restoration is rarely successful, so we talk about inputs instead: money invested, volumes of water diverted, meetings held, kilometres of fences built. Then we do a lot of hand waving about time lags – and hope.

You can get people to talk about this problem privately but not publicly. It is time for a more public debate. We have a major policy conundrum on our hands. Just now, when “evidence-based” policy is so popular, the lack of real success stories from ecological research is striking. More often than we care to face up to, we are flailing around with little idea of whether our actions work or not. As MJF Taylor and his peers found when they studied conservation efforts for threatened species in Australia, “there is surprisingly little evidence about which conservation approaches are effective in arresting or reversing threatened species declines.” What was clear was that most species continued to decline.

We do achieve many minor victories, but the big picture is not so good. Large-scale global assessments such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the 3rd Global Biodiversity Outlook show widespread declining biodiversity and ecosystem degradation, especially in freshwaters. We have achieved success with many individual species but at the community and ecosystem level (particularly at regional and catchment scales) we are failing.

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Rivers in the Media

Global targets for safe drinking water - are we on track?

Egypt will need more than 50% more Nile water by 2050

Keeping our rivers alive

BLOG - 'Rivers need a revolution' by Graham Harris

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