can we ensure water security in the future?

Can we ensure water security in the future  or is it simply not possible?

Quick little run through of the major points: location does not necessarily wholly determine the availability of water, whereas the ability to pay plays a major role. Like supply, demand varies from place to place, with richer groups often tending to consume more water as well as densely populated regions- urban and industrial locations.  In addition to human factors affecting supply and demand climate change will also increase the pressure on the supply side of water in certain regions and global warming will increase the  demand side pressure due to increased demands in domestic, irrigation, industrial and ecological use(Jakerskog, 2014). 

These two conditions show no sign of abating so it's no wonder various academia and models predict the issue of water scarcity increasing over the years.

 However in the article ' facing the freshwater crisis' Rogers argues that the existing technologies and policy tools are good enough to ensure long term security. I shall discuss the most effective techniques and policy tools to ensure water security in the future (Rogers, 2008):

Techniques and tools to reduce Demand

1) Given the importance of economics and income in water matters, it is clear that reasonable pricing policies that promote greater conservation by domestic and industrial users should be one of the top priorities adopted to conserving freshwater. As he notes which I very much agree with, if a commodity is too cheap no one thinks twice about waste. Another major consequences of pricing water too low is that insufficient funds are generated for future development and preventive upkeep. Hence higher prices may:

• spur the adoption of measures such as the systematic reuse of used water (so-called grey water) for nonpotable applications.

•  encourage water agencies to build recycling and reclamation systems.

• convince municipalities and others to reduce water losses by improving maintenance of water-delivery systems.

2) Considering the fact irrigated agriculture is by far the largest consumer of water, this places  conserving irrigated flows in the bulls eye to conserving the most freshwater. According to the IWMI study, to meet world food requirements in 2050  without any technological improvements to irrigated agriculture methods, farmers will need a rise in irrigated water supplies from 2,700 to 4,000 km3. Given such rising demands it is unlikely that water managers can significantly lower the quantity of water now dedicated to irrigated agriculture. Nevertheless such improvements can help hold any increases to reasonable levels:

•  stopping leaks in the water-delivery infrastructure 

•  implementing low-loss storage of water like underground storage -  the most common use to transfer water from high supply season to the high demand season is to hold surface water behind dams but the exposure evaporates much of this supply. If engineers were to find large subsurface reservoirs that can be recharged readily by surface supplies and that can easily return their contents aboveground when needed for irrigation like in Arizona, California and elsewhere this would solve the problem. 

• extensive use of  drip-irrigation systems, which minimizes consumption by allowing water to seep in slowly either from the soil surface or directly into the root zone( provided demonstration of this below). 

                                               layout of drip irrigation system 

• Investments in new crop varieties that can tolerate low water levels and drought.

And just let me add here there have been vast improvements in these innovations as the world water week in September announced 17 nominees for securing food using less water- check the prize winners here: (USAID, 2014). 

3) Keeping the demand for irrigation water in arid and semiarid areas down while still meeting the world's future food requirements can be supported by supplying “virtual water” to those places. Virtual water means agricultural ( and other ) products that have been produced with large amounts of water not the real water itself. The magnitude of annual global trade in virtual water exceeds 800 billion m³ of water a year; the equivalent of 10 Nile Rivers. 

                                                    virtual water trade in the world 
However in spite of these virtual water transfers, the populations of growing cities need real, flowing water to drink, as well as for hygiene and sanitation. Therefore removal of bulk water is a solution for this hence why it is a common practice in many parts of the world. This refers to the removal of huge volumes of water by man made versions not necessarily form one country to another but from one area to another. However in recent years because of increasing water scarcity and improvements in water transfer technology plans are being made to transfer water from water rich countries to water poor countries(Ojendal, 2014). Personally I think this should be the last point of call considering the many implications it entails: the most known detrimental effect being the Aral Sea example and recently I'v read( which I shall attach the newspaper article here because I'm so nice ;)) about the consequences of Chinas massive water diversion project(Kaiman,2014). We would not want to see these detrimental effects on a international scale, as regional scale consequences demonstrates its bad enough.

                                     An image you may have seen many times: the Aral sea transformation 

Increasing Supply

1)Beyond constraining demand for freshwater, the opposite approach, increasing its supply, will be a critical component of the solution to water shortages. Desalination tools are poised as the most obvious way to increase our supply considering 97% of our water is salty. A recent, substantial reduction in the costs for the most energy-efficient desalination technology—membrane reverse-osmosis systems—means that many coastal cities can now secure new sources of potable water. 

However despite the improvements in energy efficiency the applicability of reverse osmosis is to some degree limited by the fact that the technology is still energy-intensive, so the availability of affordable power is important to significantly expanding its application.

2) As for trying to remedy the effects of climate change on our water resource supply the only hope we have is to try and reduce global warming by reducing our greenhouse gases by all the many ways we all know but primarily entails by being more energy efficient. 

3) Before summing up I will like to add on a further suggestion which does not appear to be suggested in the fight for water security : reducing population growth. I believe if this was tackled by policies and education more seriously we would save ourselves a lot of extra effort and money as well as making the effects of climate change less acute. 

                                       I'm not quite suggesting this but you get my flow

The fight to stave off water shortage fourth and foremost  requires spending money and a
lot of it may I add. Analysts at Booz Allen Hamilton have estimated that to provide water
needed for all uses through 2030, the world will need to invest as much as $1 trillion a
year on applying existing technologies for conserving water, maintaining and replacing infrastructure, and constructing sanitation systems. Although this may appear as a daunting figure, it is only about 1.28%( I calculated this for 2014) of todays annual global gross domestic product, a seemingly achievable expenditure. 

There is, however, at least one cause for optimism: the most populous countries with the largest water infrastructure needs—India and China—are precisely those that are experiencing rapid economic growth. The part of the globe that is most likely to continue suffering from inadequate water access—Africa and its one billion inhabitants—spends the least on water infrastructure and cannot afford to spend much; it is crucial, therefore, that wealthier nations provide more funds to assist the effort.

So going back to answering my initial question: I believe the chance of a global water crisis maybe not completely avoided but surely can be reduced to a considerable amount if the the international community puts its collective mind to the challenge. The existing techniques I have discussed I believe are sufficient to do so but we just need to accelerate the adoption of these to conserve and enhance the water supply.