MARGARET FUTHANE moved house recently. Unimpressed? Well, read on. The story of Futhane and her country’s water could scarcely be a better advertisement for what sustainable development ought to be about.
Futhane moved out of her shack in the township of Tembisa, near Pretoria, where she’d had to buy a few litres of water of dubious quality from a neighbour each day, at a cost of $18 a month. Now she lives in a proper house with clean, running water, and her monthly water bill has fallen to less than $4 for as much as she wants. Millions in South Africa want to do the same.
Futhane was able to move thanks to her job: running a 10-man gang rehabilitating a reed swamp near her home. The Rietvei wetland, just a 45-minute drive from the Johannesburg summit, cleans and stores water from a polluted river before it enters the city’s main reservoir. Killing off pathogens and removing nitrates and phosphates, it is both a natural sewage works and a sponge that soaks up water in the wet season and releases it when it is needed in the dry months. The swamp had been partly drained by farmers. “Now we are making it wet again by digging new channels and stopping up drains,” Futhane says.
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Managing water supplies is one of the critical issues facing humanity. On current trends, by 2025 half the world’s population will live in countries facing water scarcity. And by then the driest countries will be using all their potential water supplies. How can the inhabitants of Africa all have clean running water, and still leave some for wildlife?
Futhane’s wetlands work suggests, on a small scale, how it might be done. She is improving water supplies, cleaning pollution, alleviating poverty and recreating a waterhole that’s frequented by the surrounding park’s population of waterbucks and rhinos – in one go. Green activists see such people as living proof that environmentalism need not put up unnecessary barriers to economic development – and as living symbols of what the summit has failed to deliver.
One of the summit’s most important decisions was to set a target of halving the number of people without access to clean drinking water from 1.1 billion today to 550 million by 2015. But many delegates, including senior UN officials, were angry that the summit delivered few rules or guidelines as to how this target can be met. This will leave countries and companies free to pursue approaches to managing water that are either wasteful or potentially damaging to the environment.
Rand Water, the state company funding the work at Rietvei and 50 other wetland rehab projects around Pretoria, believes this approach will help secure water supplies for the city, and ensure that many more people from the city’s poor black townships can have homes with running water. But South Africa is an exception, with one of the most progressive water policies in the world. Many countries are still fixated on large engineering solutions to water problems. Some Saharan countries spoke at the summit of a plan to pipe water thousands of kilometres north from the giant Congo river, and even in South Africa engineers dream of tapping the Zambezi.
“Summit agreements to improve water access will not work if natural sources of water are not conserved and water used more efficiently,” says Jamie Pittock, water director of the wildlife group WWF International. “But measures to conserve the sources of water have been substantially removed from the draft plan under discussion here.”
Torkil Jonch-Clausen of the Global Water Partnership agrees. “This summit has reduced the debate on water supply to arguing about money and pipes. There is no discussion about managing our river systems. It is a step back to the 1980s, before Rio.” Many see it as a prime example of how the development lobby has snatched back the sustainability agenda from environmentalists.
Even in engineering terms, the list of lost opportunities is a long one. UN experts wanted the summit to call for a 10 per cent improvement in the efficiency of irrigated agriculture worldwide. No deal. There is no adoption of recommendations from the UN World Commission on Dams to make large dams less damaging to people and the environment,and no target to cut leakage of water from rickety African urban water-supply networks from the typical 50 per cent of today to 25 per cent, as proposed by UN Environmental Programme director Klaus Töpfer.
The summit has even ignored a call by Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, for action to prevent future water wars by getting countries on international rivers to strike deals to share their waters. The draft summit text included such a clause, but it was deleted in the final hours of the pre-summit negotiations at Bali in June – apparently at the insistence of Turkey, which is busy damming the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, to the anger of downstream Syria and Iraq. “What is a world summit for if it can’t tackle such a critical international issue,” asks Pittock.
The summit has declared a laudable end: clean water for all. But it has barely considered the means to achieve it. “We’ll run out of water here by 2020. We can’t make more rain. So we have to manage water better,” says Futhane.
Wise words. Shame she didn’t get to the summit.