"There's no question that water issues have been among the more contentious topics in Central Kentucky politics for several years now. In fact, it continues in the Parting Thoughts section of this edition of Business Lexington. Perhaps the time has come to leverage the ongoing discussion to raise awareness about water issues in a more global context.
Make no mistake: the "water debate" in Central Kentucky is really about who profits from it. The water debate in the rest of the world, however, is about who has access to it. The resource many Kentuckians take for granted is a life-or-death issue for billions of people.
The World Water Council reports that 1.1 billion people do not have access to clean drinking water. That's about one out of every six people on earth. About 2.6 billion people lack access to adequate sanitation. A United Nations report states that the Southwestern United States will face severe shortages by 2025, and over 4 billion people worldwide will be affected by water shortages in 2050. Start listing the areas of the world where the political or security situation is the most volatile, and you'll notice that they also tend to be the places where water is the scarcest.
For example, some in Kentucky might think that recent debates about ownership of the local water utility exposed a brand of bare-knuckle politics that may have ended friendships or even careers. We sometimes forget, however, that there's another resource "ownership dispute" taking place half a world away that has as much to do with water as it does land. Many historians note that the Six-Day War in 1967 can be traced directly to a dispute over water — namely the efforts to divert the Jordan River, an important freshwater source for Israel. During the peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s, water issues were actually the most contentious and were never ultimately resolved.
The fight over water resources isn't limited to the Middle East, however. The WWC reports that 260 river basins are shared by two or more countries — most without adequate legal or institutional arrangements.
The governance disputes are only one challenge facing global water advocates. Another is acquiring the financing and human resources necessary to build water systems for over a billion people. The challenge that has been disappointingly difficult is cajoling those in the industrialized world to use water more responsibly. Addressing this last challenge requires two things: asking people to be mindful about conservation, and using existing and new technologies to reduce our reliance on water.
How much water a person uses can typically be associated with where they live: In the broadest possible terms, people in residential areas in North America and Japan use roughly 91 gallons of water per day. In Europe, people use about 52 gallons per day. In Africa, they use between 2 and 6 gallons per day.
However, water usage is a very complicated indicator and the numbers don't always tell the complete story. Sometimes people don't use a lot of water because they're particularly good at conserving it, or they live in places where they don't manufacture the things that require a lot of it. Of course, others don't use water much because they simply don't have it.
For example, some toilets in Kentucky still consume between five and seven gallons of water in a single flush. That's more water than the average person in Uganda consumes in an entire day, where clean water is incredibly scarce. If you wash the dishes with the water running, that's up to thirty gallons of water — or about the amount used by someone in Switzerland on an average day there, where people work hard not to waste it.
There are a number of very small lifestyle changes people in Kentucky can take to conserve water.
Of course, the amount of water used for household purposes is very small when compared to the amount needed for agriculture and manufacturing. It takes a gallon of water to process a pound of hamburger. About ten gallons of water are used to refine one gallon of gasoline. By some estimates it takes about 39,000 gallons of water to make a car. This is one area where we have to rely on technological advances to conserve. Businesses that focus on bottom-line costs are already placing more emphasis on conservation.
The "water issues" we're facing in Kentucky are certainly important, but let's maintain the proper perspective — after all, there are people all over the world who would love to have our problems.
David Wescott is a Lexington-based senior associate for APCO Worldwide, a global public affairs firm headquartered in Washington, D.C. He writes a blog about technology and communications issues called "It's Not a Lecture," which can be found online at http://itsnotalecture.blogspot.com.
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