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Autor: Ismael Clark | Fuente: CUBARTE | 05 de Junio 2012

Water is the condition for every form of life on the planet to exist and the right to water and to clean up constitutes a fundamental and inalienable human right. These are the strong terms in which a recent statement is expressed, signed by representatives of diverse social forces, grouped in the Movement for Water Common Wealth.

These gathered at the so called World Alternative Forum, which took place last March, 2012, in the Mediterranean French city of Marseilles, parallel to the 7th World Council of Water, sponsored by the UNESCO and other international organizations.

Through the mentioned document, the signers refuse every kind of water privatizing and they state that the management and control of water should be public, cooperative, participative, equitable and not oriented towards profit seeking, and they insist on the need to warrant solidarity among the present and future generations.

The threats and tensions on the availability and access to the precious liquid are multiplied in an alarming way and the present debates about drinkable water emphasize on the concept of hydraulic security, understood as the access of the population to the valuable resource in a sufficient, safe and accessible way to meet their needs for domestic use, food production and survival.

Factors of diverse nature attempt against the desired hydraulic security: the relative physical shortage can be the result of climatic and geographic factors, or be derived from unsustainable consumption patterns or the overexploitation of the supply sources; economic factors can also influence, which determine an inefficient infrastructure, an improper use or a limited capacity to access the available water resources.

In other cases, hydraulic insecurity can be determined by factors like contamination of diverse origin, which makes the water impossible to be used, or the incapacity to access the sources because of the property system over them, or due to matters of sovereignty on the underground aquifers or over great rivers or lakes.

It is estimated that about 40% of the world population—some three thousand million people—live  currently in areas in which the needs for water beat availability. The situation will have a tendency to worsen in the next decades as the population increases and industry and agriculture spread.

The relation between water availability and the demands of the agricultural productions, which represent 70% of the world consumption currently, has been well established. The situation is even more complex when other less evident inter relations are perceived, which are less evident at first sight, such as the ones existing between the hydraulic and the energetic resources.

A selected group of science academics, in anticipation to the meeting of the so called Eight Group, to take place in the United States, have pronounced themselves in relation with this singular interconnection. The mentioned institutions signed a statement that identifies this link between energy and water as one of the main challenges that it is necessary to overcome to achieve a sustainable future.

The matter refers to the growing need for energy to obtain enough water, as well as to the growing use of big volumes of the precious liquid in technologies aimed at the exploitation of non conventional hydrocarbon resources, such as bituminous sands and the so called chert or schist gas.

The pressure injection of water or other substances to multiply the performance of oil or natural gas deposits is a practice that dates from the middles of the last century, to the extent that it is estimated that it is present in up to 60% of the wells currently exploited.

But what happens now, nevertheless, is the generalization of the so called fracking methods to extract the natural gas, for example, from deposits in which this one is “locked” in more complex rock structures, which has allowed to spread the proved reservations of natural gas up to 40% in the United States.

The procedures described involve a considerable number of environmental problems. For the issue we are dealing with now, it is estimated that only one place for fracking can require some 40 millions of liters of water. During the process, toxic substances escape from the system, such as the methane gas and chemical additives, which contaminate the surrounding underground waters. In sweet water wells that are close to fracking places, methane concentrations have been reported up to 17% above the found in normal cases.

The bituminous sand deposits are exploited through superficial mining section techniques, or they are made flow towards wells through the applying of techniques that are used steam in situ or solvent to reduce the viscosity of the bitumen. In the case of the bituminous sands, between 2 and 4,5 units of volume of water are used to produce each unit of synthetic crude; all that water ends up in black ponds.

All these procedures, formerly ruled out for being cumbersome—and aggressive—have become economically feasible, due to the price rising derived from the progressive scarcity of the more conventional fossil fuel deposits. This profitability is determined by the fact, among other factors, of the unlimited access to water, as if this one was actually an inexhaustible resource. However, it becomes more evident each day that is not that way.

The report presented by the UNO to the last World Water Forum points out that water scarcity emerges each day more as one of the main problems of the 21st century, if we take into account that one thousand million people are affected by the lack of the vital liquid and the number increases annually. According to the report, the climatic change, the bad management and distribution of the resources, the fast urbanization and contamination constitute today a significant threat for the hydraulic sources.

The affectation that can be expected as resulting from the climatic change is worthy of special consideration, since it is an uncontrolled process up to now and which has already caused, in any case, after effects that will last for many centuries.

An article published in the website www.scidev.net signed by Lucina Milehan reminds us that the solar energy trapped in the atmosphere by the greenhouse effect gases handles the hydraulic cycle, therefore any increase intensifies the cycle efficiently, thus changing the rain patterns and exacerbating extreme events such as draughts and floods.

According to the author, the climatic change effects on hydraulic security can already be seen. At global level, the area of land classified as “very arid” by the International Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) has duplicated itself since the seventies. This has been accompanied by more severe floods in the middle-high latitudes, by longer and more frequent draughts in parts of Asia and Africa, and more frequent and intense events like El Niño (The Child), all of which changes the balance between the demand and the supply of hydraulic resources.

Cuba doesn’t escape the global circumstances involving the water resource. This can be verified in the chapter about Cuba included in the work Diagnosis on Water in America, which has been recently published on the initiative of the Inter American Network of Academies of Sciences (IANAS).

In the mentioned chapter, prepared by prestigious Cuban experts on the matter, several factors are explained, which condition the acting on the hydraulic resources in our country. The vulnerability proper of our archipelago condition, the long and narrow shape of the main isle and the big amount of karst in the underground aquifers stand out among those factors.

The climatic variability, expressed among other facets by the change in the rain pattern, is also a strong factor. Another important feature is the dominant nature of the agricultural activity in the development of the country, and its high relative consumption. All this is combined with the repercussion of the climatic change and the adaptation and mitigation measures associated to it.

The classic indicators of water availability place Cuba among the countries with low water availability per capita, taking into account the potential and usable resources. Specialized literature recognizes that these mediation ways reflect the relative potential wealth in water from the main natural resources—such as rains, in the Cuban case—rather than the hydraulic development reached by a given country.

In Cuba’s case, there are 239 big dams that store some 9000 hm3 (cubic hectometres) and deliver some more than 7000 hm3 every year. Other 730 smaller than 3 hm3 are added them.

A more recent indicator, the Hydraulic Trace, places Cuba in the place 30th among 142 countries, with values of 1712 cubic meters of water per habitant and per year. This number refers to the volume of sweet water used to produce the wealth and services consumed by each individual, and it includes the water that is actually consumed, the one that evaporates and the one that gets contaminated.

Cuba doesn’t escape the main problem for the evaluation of the future impacts on hydraulic security, which lies on the uncertainty of predictions. This uncertainty obeys to the internal variability of the climatic system as well to the uncertainty on the future emissions and the development stages.

The expressed above is joined by the uncertainty regarding the efficiency of the models that will be used to reflect the effects of the emissions to the atmosphere and the hydraulic models in general. The climatic change is already happening and even if a drastic reduction of carbon emissions could be achieved, the affectations to water supplies will continue. Hence that the adaptation strategies are very necessary since right now and that, in practice, means to focus with intelligence and in a systematic way on achieving a more efficient and sustainable handle of this precious resource.

In Cuba, the foreseeable effects of the climatic change include its relative incidence on the quantitative availabilities of the water resource, in direct relation with the draught periods, the probable increase of the occurrence of extreme phenomena that can, on the contrary, accumulate big volumes and the effect on water quality, due to phenomena like the biggest salt intrusion in the aquifers due to the rise of the sea level.

Hence that the Cuban adaptation strategy in this sphere points out at applying, in all its scope, an integrated management of the water resource in its own watershed, making use, as a starting point, of the national hydraulic development, which has already made it possible to secure the fundamental water supply for the sustainable development of the country.

It becomes evident that the handling of the hydraulic resources will have to become a permanent object of attention in the works and projections to face the climatic change, given its strategic nature for the national security. That is determined not only by its significance as a first need consumption object, but also by its decisive influence on the food supply security and sovereignty and for the preservation of  the health of our population.

Translation: Yusimi Rodriguez (Cubarte)