10 November 2006
(Page 2 of 3)
Especially in Africa, this has a special relevance. It's one thing if you have more variability in rainfall in an irrigated system – because an irrigated system is a sort of guarantor against risk. You don't have that in Africa. If it doesn't rain, you don't grow food, and that's the end of the story. So it's more vulnerable than any other part of the world.
The evidence is that if you put together the changing rainfall patterns with the changing temperature patterns, you've got a story slightly less rain in many countries – but, even in countries where you might get more rain, it's going to be hotter. You've got more evaporation, and there will be less moisture in the soil. We have a map which shows parts of Africa where the projection is for declines in food staple productivity of 25 per cent or more.
Now, if you said to the average person in America, "How would you adjust to a 25 per cent drop in your income in the next 5 years or so?" it would create a big panic. This is a greater drop then you had in the great depression. Yet this is something which is pretty predictably coming down the line for sub-Saharan Africa.
What we've tried to do, rather than just looking at rainfall patterns, is to take the rainfall patterns, plus temperature change, and look at the implications of that for moisture in the soil and then go from that to crop productivity. You've got a whole belt across southern Sudan and the Sahel, but also in southern Africa; there are chunks of Zambia and Namibia, which are really adversely affected.
If you look at the Horn [of northeast Africa] for example, this is already chronically vulnerable to drought and hunger. So you are superimposing this on what is already a pretty disastrous situation. If you look at a map of the United States, most of the agriculture benefits from global warming. But even if it didn't, you've got populations who can adapt and adjust to these sorts of pressures. How do you adapt, when you're living on a dollar a day, to a 25 per cent drop in production? There's no adaptation capacity for that.
The problem, in terms of the response, is that at an international level, the whole debate about climate change is about mitigation: how do rich countries produce less carbon? Which is fine, and they should be producing a lot less carbon and do it very quickly, but even if they do, it's not going to change these outcomes. The carbon stock is up there, and you can't really change this projection. So the real question for a lot of Africa is: how do you adapt to the problem?
If you look at the adaptation story globally, some countries are drawing up really serious adaptation plans. For example, the Netherlands, has got a very good adaptation plan, and so do Britain and California.
You will not find a single credible climate-change adaptation plan in sub-Saharan Africa, even if you look up poverty-reduction strategy papers for sub-Saharan Africa adaptation to climate change. There is almost no funding for it. In fact, aid to Africa for agriculture has been cut really heavily over the past decade or so.
So this is a totally predictable disaster. This isn't like the tsunami, where you couldn't anticipate it. You can absolutely anticipate, over the next thirty years, that we're going to see more droughts, more floods, more rural livelihoods in jeopardy. And yet there's no real policy response, either at the national level or the global level. We are really trying to highlight that particular threat.
Across National Boundaries
There is map in the report that shows shared river basins – and I think more Africans live in shared-river-basin countries, as a proportion of total population, than in any other region. So trans-boundary water is the real water story actually in sub-Saharan Africa.
How it affects water scarcity is not clear cut. There are parts of Kenya that have a lot of water and parts without. There are parts of the Sahel that have got quite a lot of water, and then parts without.
But there are trans-boundary water disasters in sub-Saharan Africa, as you find elsewhere. Lake Chad, in a way, is Africa's Aral sea [shared by Uzbekistan and Kazakstan]. It has shrunk to something like half of its 1970 parameters, and that's really a consequence of countries not negotiating how to manage a shared water resource. You've got Nigeria building big irrigation schemes, which has drained it, and Chad itself, which has diverted large amounts of water from it. It's a classical example – if you don't negotiate and come up with a shared solution, in the end everybody loses.
You have to look at how the water is used. I think I'm right in saying irrigation would be one of the major uses of water from Lake Chad, or from river sources feeding into Lake Chad. By and large, these are enormously inefficient systems, because they haven't been maintained – the investment hasn't been there. So there's a loss of water. In a lot of cases, the irrigation systems themselves were not properly designed, so you get saturation and flooding, which lead to problems with sanitation. That reduces the productivity of the irrigation system.
As with any problem of scarcity, you have to ask how efficiently the resource is being used? And it's very interesting. In most of the world, irrigation systems are far more productive then rain-fed systems. In a lot of sub-Saharan Africa, you find the opposite. The people who are producing in floodplains are very, very efficient producers. Parts of the Sahel do have very good irrigation systems, but around Lake Chad, those systems are notoriously inefficient, which, again, is why it's not only a scarcity issue.
The analogy I often draw about scarcity is that if you ask people, "What is it that you mean by scarcity?" they say, "Well, it's in short supply." If you ask what they mean by short supply, they say, "People want more water than there is available." To which my response is: well, if I open a garage selling Porsche cars for 2,000 dollars, Porsche cars will be in short supply. It's the same way with water. If you treat it like it's a completely infinite resource – you don't price it properly, you don't manage it properly – it's in short supply. A lot of scarcity is manufactured scarcity - the result of poor governance.
Prescriptions
The report is in two sections. There is "Water for Life" – the water in peoples' houses for drinking, sanitation – and "Water for Livelihood", which is how you manage water as an environmental resource. In the Water for Life part of the equation, we say this is one of the great development challenges facing Sub-Saharan Africa. If you look at the research we did in-house, we show that just introducing clean water into a household or providing sanitation in the household can reduce the risk of childhood death by something like 40 per cent.
We say governments need to legislate for water as a human right, and they need to mean it. Don't just put it in the constitution; legislate for it. South Africa has made it a right of citizenship that water providers have to provide everybody with 40 liters of water free. They have been progressing towards that, and there are huge debates about it in South Africa – whether to do it public or private. But at least they're moving in the right direction, and at least there's a debate about it. In most countries, there's not even a debate about it.
We also say governments should be spending around one per cent of GDP on developing water and sanitation systems in rural areas and in urban areas, which doesn't sound like a lot. But the current average is probably about 0.2 or 0.3 per cent. And then you get the question, "Is it affordable?" Well, if you compare it with military spending in a lot of countries, it's a tiny part of the military budget. Ethiopia spends maybe 20 times more on the military than it does on water and sanitation. You'd have to ask where the biggest risk for the average Ethiopian comes from. It's actually water and sanitation.
We then argue that even if you had African governments moving in the right direction, which some of them are trying to do through national policy towards water, there's a financial constraint. That constraint is partly because aid donors haven't prioritized water very much at all. So we argue that aid donors ought to double their commitment to water, which means about $4 billion per year increase, and most of that should go to sub-Saharan Africa.
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