On the picture, Mr Fritz Holzwarth with students at the UNESCO-IHE.
By Fritz Holzwarth, Rector a.i. UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education.
Access to clean water and sanitation is an issue of human dignity and it extends the choices available to poor families around the world. Food security and livelihoods depend on water access, with drought for example desiccating crops and increasing hunger and malnutrition. The availability of clean water can influence whether or not children attend school, especially girls. Tragically, inadequate water supply also contributes to the death, through the spread of disease, of millions of people every year.
Indeed, when in September 2015, UN member states and interested stakeholders created a new international development agenda for 2015-2030, one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was dedicated purely to achieving ‘access to water and sanitation for all’ by 2030 (Goal 6).[1] While there have been many successes over the years, we still face many water challenges around the world, with actual water scarcity high on the list. According to a UN World Water Development Report, ‘’By 2050, at least one in four people is likely to live in a country affected by chronic or recurring shortages of fresh water.’’
As the world’s largest international education facility for water professionals, the UNESCO-IHE Institute based here in the Netherlands, is uniquely placed to make a contribution to these challenges. Our expertise enables us to be at the forefront of adaptive, innovative solutions to water related problems.
Contributing the UNESCO-IHE expertise to global water scarcity?
While reducing water consumption and water loss through leakage reduction are obvious solutions to the challenge of diminishing water supply, waste water reuse and desalination will also be required to meet fresh water demands in many arid parts of the world in the future. . One, out of many technological solutions which have garnered hope in recent years, is for ‘desalination’. This process removes salt from both seawater and “brackish” water. It can also be used to treat wastewater (sewage) to make it available for different users. A membrane based process, Reverse Osmosis is the most common process used today, whereby water is forced through thin-film composite polyamide membranes, filtering out salt and other impurities.
With rainfall becoming less predictable and droughts more common, as a likely consequence of climate change, a growing number of countries are looking to desalination to increase their water supply. In many places such as the Middle East, China, India, Spain, Chile and the Caribbean, there are few alternatives. However, there remains a number of barriers to fully capitalize on the desalination solution, the principal one being the energy required, making it currently prohibitive for many developing countries. While recent developments in energy recovery technology have significantly reduced the energy consumption for seawater desalination, further reduction in energy consumption is envisaged thorough research and innovation.
As one of UNESCO-IHE’s goals is to, “Develop innovation, provide new knowledge, and promote the uptake of technologies and policies’’, it is uniquely placed to substantively contribute to efforts to render desalination a credible option. An example is with our participation in the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 supported MIDES (MIcrobial DESalination) project. Launched earlier this year and due to run until 2020, MIDES is developing the world’s largest demonstrator of an innovative and low-energy technology for drinking water production. It uses Microbial Desalination Cells (MDC), a new technology which simultaneously treats wastewater as well as generating enough bioelectricity to achieve desalination, as a pre-treatment step for Reverse Osmosis (RO). As well as reducing running and manufacturing cost, the project will improve desalination rates, reduce equipment degradation and ultimately propose an economically feasible plan to scale up. Demonstration sites are currently planned for Chile, Spain and Tunisia.
Tapping into the wider enabling environment
Water scarcity is driven by a variety of social phenomena such as population growth and urbanisation. Where water is actually available, barriers to access can come from poor infrastructure or poor governance. In some cases, solutions to problems can themselves create unexpected consequences, such as with the push for biofuels to fight fossil fuel induced climate change, which requires 1,000 – 4,000 litres of water to produce just one litre of biofuel.
As the SDG 6 targets make clear, by referring to the need for integrated water resources management, international cooperation and capacity-building support, solutions to water problems are rarely purely technical in nature. That is why projects such as MIDES seek to integrate implementation solutions along the entire water value chain. It is also why the UNESCO-IHE cross disciplinary approach complements technical expertise with skills to optimise the wider enabling context; whether it be policies for protection of water-related ecosystems, raising environmental awareness with decision-makers or local community participation. We know that for solutions to be truly life changing for our ultimate beneficiaries, they must also prompt behavioural and mind-set change.
We are proud at UNESCO-IHE to witness the exciting ways in which sustainable and equitable water solutions emerge from necessary cross disciplinary and trans-border collaborations.
[1] More information about the SDGs available here: http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/summit/
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Photography by Hans de Lijser.
