Exhausted groundwater puts the world at risk

  "There's not an infinite supply of water and we need to get our heads together on how we manage groundwater because we are running out of it"

 It is less than six months since the government decided to drill eight wells that would supply clean and safe water to residents in Nanjirinji A village in Kilwa district, Lindi Region, as part of its effort to improve welfare status.

Earlier the villagers used to fetch water from dubious sources, a distance away. Though the village had not experienced any outbreak of waterborne diseases, the leaders opted for an option that would guarantee better quality.

Najirinji A is a reflection of other villages across Tanzania.

However, reports suggest that even such alternative water sources at villagers’  disposal are depleted at an alarming rate.

A recent report by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) suggests that four billion people are at risk as the water table is dropping almost throughout the world. 

It says water scarcity is a global problem affecting a two third of the world’s population, a major problem that the Tanzanian government will also have to deal with in this century.

Though it is not a new problem to mankind given the devastating impact of climate change on water resources, the gravity of the problem is what is ringing alarm bells in all corners of the world.

While previous studies looked at water scarcity at an annual scale and had found out  that  it affected between 1.7 and 3.1 billion people, the new study, published recently  in the Science Advances journal, assessed water scarcity on a monthly basis focusing on in-depth analysis seasons of the year. 

“Water scarcity has become a global problem affecting us all,” says co-researcher  Arjen Hoekstra, a professor of water management at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

The good news for Africa generally and for Tanzania in particular is that they do not belong to areas severely hit by water scarcity as half of the 4 billion affected are in India and China while millions others live in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan and Mexico. 

However, the situation is bound to change given the rate at which ground water is being depleted, the effects of climate change notwithstanding. The way water resources are managed may also intensify the problem.

There are also half a billion people who face severe water scarcity year round, according to the study.

The irony is that direct victims of the overconsumption of water resources are the users themselves, who increasingly suffer from water shortages during droughts.“This leads to reduced harvests and loss of income for farmers, threatening the livelihoods of whole communities,” reads part of the study.

“Businesses depending on water in their operations or supply chain also face increasing risks of water shortages. Other effects include biodiversity losses, low flows hampering navigation, land subsidence and salinization of soils and groundwater resources.”

The study concludes that “meeting humanity’s increasing demand for freshwater and protecting ecosystems at the same time … will be one of the most difficult and important challenges of this century.”

The new publication follows two other studies led by researchers from the University of California Irvine depicting the impacts of global warming along with growing demand to have caused world’s water supply to have dropped to alarming levels.

“The water table is dropping all over the world,” says Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

“There’s not an infinite supply of water and we need to get our heads together on how we manage groundwater because we are running out of it” Famiglietti added.

The bottom line is how governments, communities, businesses and other stakeholders manage the available water resources, bearing in mind that these are finite.   

Highlighting the water challenge in Tanzania, UNESCO Commission in Tanzania says deterioration of water supply schemes caused by inadequate management and inadequate availability of spare parts due to non-standardized investment are some of the problems facing the water sector.

 It cites other problems as inadequate investments in water schemes due to high capital requirement and scattered settlements in rural areas. Others include improper and uncontrolled allocation of water resources to different users, inadequate involvement of beneficiaries in managing and controlling water supply schemes resulting into communities’ lack of sense of ownership.

Shedding some light on water risks facing the world, the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) says water risks shared by businesses, government and communities include resource depletion, pollution, drought , floods, inadequate infrastructure, investment  and governance.

“There is a need for collective action to improve water management at community, municipal, basin, national and international scales,” reads part of the organisation’s recent publication.