With a nature-related international event calendared this week – World Water Day on March 22 – I am compelled to continue with what I discussed last week on the world’s sinking cities, which listed four ASEAN capitals, including Manila, in the Top 10.
World Water Day focus may be on people’s access to potable water but we realize the connection between the basic resource and the threat to human lives and property by the alarming state of inundation in many parts of the world and of the country.
What is causing many cities to literally lose ground other than the downflow to oceans of melting polar ice caps due to the climate change phenomenon?
My readings point to glaring facts: poor urban planning and environmental degradation, among others. Traditional disaster risk reduction measures must be made holistic, too, and sufficient enough to address concerns on a warming planet, a Daily Inquirer article said.
A case in point: the extraction of groundwater by industries and urban centers is pumping water from underground at a rate faster than what can be replenished, thereby causing the sinking of land over it.
What can be done to alleviate the situation in sinking cities?
Greenpeace, the environment conservation advocate, recommends the enabling of cities and communities “to build climate resilience by updating infrastructure, including establishing early warning systems, decentralizing climate information to enable more people to plan for climate impacts, and strengthening community-based disaster risk reduction and response to climate impacts.”
Another overseas organization, the Denmark-based COWI (short for an international consulting group named after founder civil engineer Christen Ostenfeld and eventual corporate partner Wriborg Jonson), had issued recommendations anchored on well-integrated and responsible urban planning. COWI is an international consulting group specializing in engineering, environmental science and economics.
The COWI recommendations are anchored on:
• Sustainable water management
• Restoration of water ecosystem in urban centers and
• ‘Waterproof’ urban planning
COWI further mentions the position of some researchers – that, instead of ‘fighting’ with the ocean, urban planners and decision makers must ‘cooperate’ with it by, among others, building floating cities fully adaptable to changing water levels.
Unless our national and local governments adopt workable and immediate measures, we have to prepare ourselves to live in a water world, where we are reminded of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime, “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”
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World Water Day is focused on the theme: “Water for Posterity and Peace”. Explaining the theme, the United Nations noted that tension can rise between communities and even countries when people have no access to clean water.
“More than 3 billion people worldwide depend on water that crosses national borders. Yet, only 24 countries have cooperation agreements for all their shared water,” UN said, adding: “As climate change impacts increase, and populations grow, there is an urgent need, within and between countries, to unite around protecting and conserving our most precious resource.”
Consequently, it added, any malfunction and mismanagement of the natural resource have an immediate impact on public health and prosperity, food and energy systems, economic productivity and environmental integrity.
Here are some water-related facts UN shared to highlight this year’s observance:
• 2.2 billion still live without safely managed drinking water, including 115 million people who drink surface water.
• Roughly half of the world’s population is experiencing severe water scarcity for at least part of the year.
• Water-related disasters have dominated the list of disasters over the past 50 years and account for 70 percent of all deaths related to natural disasters.
• Transboundary waters account for 60 per cent of the world’s freshwater flows, and 153 countries have territory within at least 1 of the 310 transboundary river and lake basins and inventoried 468 transboundary aquifer systems.
Our situation in the province may not be that alarming and we may not be experiencing poor access to the supply, but elsewhere the problem is of a-here-now-urgency.
On WWD, the world body continued, “we ALL need to unite around water and use water for peace, laying the foundations of a more stable and prosperous tomorrow.”
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Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” (John 7:37-39) | NWI
