 | [December 11, 2002]New Water Poverty Index Defines World Water Crisis Country by CountryWorld Water Council and Secretariat of the Third World Water Forum •P R E S S R E L E A S E•
Secretariat of the 3rd World Water Forum, 5th FL. 2-2-4 Kojimachi Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo 102-0083, Japan
World Water Council, Les Docks de la Joliette, Atrium 10.3, 10 Place de la
Joliette, 13002 Marseille, France
Center for Ecology & Hydrology, CEH Wallingford, Maclean Bldg., Wallingford,
Oxon, OX10 8BB, United Kingdom
EMBARGOED: 4:00 p.m. EST, Wednesday, December 11, 2002
Contact: in UK – Juliet Heller +44-208-531-1055
in US – Marshall Hoffman, Nils Hoffman, Ian Larsen +1-703-820-2244
(Dr. Caroline Sullivan of the UK’s Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and William
Cosgrove of the World Water Council will be available for interviews in London
on Wednesday, Dec. 11th, either in person or by telephone. Kenzo Hiroki, Deputy
Secretary General of the Secretariat for the 3rd World Water Forum
is available for telephone interviews from Japan. Please call to schedule time.)
New Water Poverty Index Defines World Water Crisis Country
by Country
Haiti Worst, Finland Best
The newly developed international Water Poverty Index (WPI) finds that
some of the world’s richest nations such as the United States and Japan fare
poorly in water ranking, while some developing countries score in the top ten,
say researchers from the UK’s Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and experts from
the World Water Council.
The Water Poverty Index has been developed by a team of 31 researchers in
consultation with more than 100 water professionals from around the world. At
the international scale, it grades 147 countries according to five different
measures – resources, access, capacity, use and environmental impact
-- to show where the best and worst water situations exist.
According to the WPI, the top 10 water-rich nations in the world are, in
descending order: Finland, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Guyana, Suriname, Austria,
Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland.
The 10 countries lowest on the Water Poverty Index are all in the
developing world -- Haiti, Niger, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Malawi, Djibouti, Chad,
Benin, Rwanda, and Burundi.
“The links between poverty, social deprivation, environmental integrity, water
availability and health becomes clearer in the WPI, enabling policy makers and
stakeholders to identify where problems exist and the appropriate measures to
deal with their causes,” says Caroline Sullivan, Ph.D., who led an
interdisciplinary team to develop the WPI concept at the Centre for Ecology &
Hydrology in Wallingford, United Kingdom, part of the UK government’s Natural
Environment Research Council.
The new index demonstrates the strong connection between ‘water poverty’ and
‘income poverty.’ This link will be a prime subject of the upcoming 3rd
World Water Forum, where some 10,000 government officials, representatives
of international and non-governmental organizations, industry and water experts
will discuss the world water crisis and its solutions. The Forum, to be
held in Kyoto, Japan in March of 2003, is expected to be the most important
international water conference ever held.
When thinking of the poor and vulnerable, there is a general tendency to think
of them as helpless people for whom the only solution is aid. “The reality is
that marginalized people are usually highly motivated to help themselves,” says
William Cosgrove, Vice-President of the World Water Council and a contributor to
the development of the WPI. “They are very often held back by constraints
imposed on them by society. In every case, these people should be looked upon as
an important and powerful resource to be involved in planning and implementing
solutions to their own water-related problems, whether access to drinking water
or adapting to floods and droughts.”
One of the advantages of this new index is that it draws on information already
available from a number of sources, including the United Nations Development
Programme’s Human Development Index. This makes it easy to update without having
to create new data gathering systems.
“The international Water Poverty Index demonstrates that it is not the
amount of water resources available that determine poverty levels in a country,
but the effectiveness of how you use those resources,” says Dr. Sullivan. “The
best illustration of how the utilization of water resources affect a nation’s
water and poverty situation can be found by comparing Haiti and the Dominican
Republic.”
The two nations share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola and have more or less
the same amount of water, but Haiti ranks last at 147th while the Dominican
Republic ranks 64th. “The reasons for the wide divergence are partly due to the
fact that Haiti’s resources are less well developed, with less infrastructure,
and the people of the Dominican Republic have significantly better access to
water than those in Haiti,” says Dr. Sullivan. “However, perhaps more
meaningfully, the capacity scores for the Dominican Republic are also very high,
indicating a healthy, well-educated population with a reasonable financial base.
In terms of both use and the environment, Haiti’s scores are much lower,
reflecting the much lower level of development in that country than in the
Dominican Republic.”
The WPI assigns a value of 20 points as the best score for each of its five
categories. A country that completely meets the criteria in all five categories
would have a score of 100. The highest-ranking country, Finland, has a WPI of 78
points, while Haiti, the last, has a WPI of just 35.
According to statistical analysis, capacity, one of the five WPI
components that defines a country’s level of ability to purchase, manage and
lobby for improved water, education and health, has Iceland, Ireland, Spain,
Japan and Austria as the top five countries. Four of these are in the top 10
percent as measured by the WPI as a whole. These countries, along with many
others, have high incomes and healthy and well-educated populations. The bottom
five are Sierra Leone, Niger, Guinea-Bissau, Mali and the Central African
Republic. Besides being among the world’s poorest, these countries also suffer
from inadequate health and education provision. Niger and Sierra Leone, for
instance, have the highest rates of under-5 mortality in the world, respectively
320 and 316 per 1000 live births. Furthermore, four of these countries are among
the 10 percent of countries with the lowest overall WPI rating.
For Resources, which measures the per capita volume of surface and
groundwater resources that can be drawn upon by communities and countries, the
top five countries are Iceland, Suriname, Guyana, Congo and Papua New Guinea.
The bottom five are United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and
Israel. The top countries all have abundant resources, but most importantly they
have small populations in relation to the amount of resources. The bottom
countries are all in desert areas with minimal rainfall and no major rivers
bringing water from outside. Despite the scarcity of water, Israel, Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia are in the top 50 percent as measured by the WPI, reflecting their
ability to overcome these shortages through effective management and use.
In Access, which measures a country’s ability to access water for
drinking, industry and agricultural use, 21 countries garnered very high scores
– Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,
Iceland, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia,
Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States. So many countries
achieved this rating because they have the economic capacity to provide safe
water supplies and sanitation to their whole populations. The lowest five
countries in this category are Eritrea, Chad, Ethiopia, Malawi and Rwanda.
Besides poor levels of access to safe domestic water and sanitation, these
countries also need irrigation for food production, but the demand is not being
met adequately.
"The economies of the countries at the lower end, and many others, are unable to
generate the user fees or tax revenues needed for infrastructure development,"
says Mr. Cosgrove, a Canadian water engineer. "They will certainly require
assistance from the developed world."
For Use, which measures how efficiently a country uses water for
domestic, agricultural and industrial purposes, the lowest ranking country is
the United States, because of wasteful or inefficient water use practices. For
instance, despite the massive consumption of water in agriculture, the
contribution of agriculture to the national GDP is tiny. The USA also practices
high per capita domestic water use and high volumes of water used per dollar of
industrial production. Also in the bottom five are Djibouti, New Zealand, Cape
Verde and Italy. All have heavy agricultural water use for relatively little
return, while in the case of Djibouti and Cape Verde domestic use is below
acceptable levels. The top five countries are Turkmenistan, Indonesia, Guyana,
Sudan and Equatorial Guinea. They have acceptable levels of domestic use, and
industrial and agricultural production is relatively efficient in terms of the
amount of water used, in comparison with the revenue generated by that use.
For Environment, which provides a measure of ecological sustainability,
issues included are water quality, environmental strategies and regulation, and
numbers of endangered species. The top five countries in this category are
Finland, Canada, United Kingdom Norway and Austria. The USA is number 6. The
bottom five are Haiti, Morocco, Mauritius, Jordan and Belgium. The top countries
here are all rich with well-developed environmental awareness and regulation,
while in the bottom five environmental concerns are low on the agenda. Some, for
instance Haiti, have a high proportion of endangered species, while Belgium’s
surprisingly low position seems to be mainly a result of poor water quality
status.
Haiti is in a particularly disastrous situation. Lack of fuel or means to
purchase it has forced the population to denude the forests of the
mountainsides. This leads to soil erosion, increased flood runoffs and decreased
recharge of groundwater aquifers. As a consequence, rivers dry up during long
periods without rain, and the groundwater sources are also disappearing. As one
of the poorest countries in the world, Haitians do not have the means to build
physical storage infrastructure
Guyana scored #5 and Suriname #6 overall. They come out
surprisingly high because, although they are developing countries, they have
small populations in relation to their abundant water resources and at the same
time have good access to safe water and sanitation and relatively good health
and education provision. Turkmenistan at #13 is another developing
country that scores highly because of the provision of good access to safe
domestic water, combined with good access to irrigation, essential in this
desert area.
On the WPI measure, Japan takes the 34th position, scoring very highly in
access and capacity but earning only 11.6 points in environment. In relation to
its high position, Japan’s resources are relatively scarce, but it also scored
very lowly in use, at 6.2 points out of 20.
“The main water management problem in Japan relates to scarcity of per capita
water resources, accounting for the low score on the resources component,” says
Kenzo Hiroki, Vice Secretary General of the Secretariat for the 3rd
World Water Forum. “In terms of use, its low score reflects the low economic
return on water use in agriculture, where the contribution of that sector to
overall GDP is relatively low.”
The situation in other Asian countries varies a great deal. While China,
with its huge population, scores quite well on capacity, and moderately on use,
its scores on resource, access and the environment are all low. In India,
a very low resource per capita score is counteracted by a relatively high score
for use and capacity, but access and the environmental components are weak.
In Bangladesh, while access and use are relatively moderate scores, the
per capita resource and the environment are low, with capacity being no more
than average. In comparison, Indonesia scores moderately well on most
components, with the environment being its weakest point on the WPI score. In
other countries in the region, Nepal, Laos and Vietnam all
have very low scores on access, coupled with relatively poor scores on the
environment, but their capacity to manage water and their per capita resource
estimates are moderate, with use scores relatively high.
In the same region, Cambodia has the lowest score for access, at only
4.9, while at the same time having quite high resource availability per capita.
This is in stark contrast to the Republic of Korea which in spite of having a
very low per capita resource score, manages to score very highly on access,
possibly due to its high level of capacity. In the case of the Philippines,
the weakest component is the environment, coupled with relatively low resource
availability, while in Pakistan, the problem clearly relates to water resource
availability more than any other factor. This situation is also found in
Singapore, but in that country, where almost no resources are available,
capacity and access are very high, bringing its overall position on the WPI
score up to a respectable level.
In South America, the pattern of the WPI values for most countries is quite
similar. With by far the largest population, Brazil scores an overall
61.2 WPI points, with use and environmental components being the weakest. By
comparison, countries with much smaller populations have higher scores, with for
example Venezuela having quite high per capita water resources, coupled
with moderately good access and capacity to manage water. While capacity in
Argentina is high, its score on water use is low, reflecting some degree of
inefficiency particularly in the industrial and agricultural sectors. Similarly,
in Uruguay, high access and capacity scores are offset by low use and
moderate environmental performance. With a score of 68.9, Chile features
well on this index, with good or moderate scores on each component.
Egypt is ranked #71, which is relatively high when its scarcity of
resources is considered. “However, Egypt scores highly on access, including
access to irrigation, and its long cultural heritage of water management means
it has developed the capacity for management,” says Dr. Mahmoud Abu Zeid,
Egypt’s Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation, as well as President of the
World Water Council.
Canada scored #2 overall on the WPI. It scored high in four categories,
but slipped to 19th worse in the use component, because of some wasteful
or inefficient water use in industry and for domestic supply.
“Canada has nine percent of all the world’s fresh water, so that it can serve as
a model of what a water-rich, wealthy country can do,” says Mr. Cosgrove.
The United Kingdom, placed #11 on the WPI, scored highly on four
categories, including number 3 in environmental use of water. It did not fare
well in the resource category, because some regions of the UK are dry enough to
be classed as a semi-arid area. Since the UK’s climate is cooler than the
tropics, the impact of its relatively scarce water resources is not too severe,
and what resources are available are relatively well managed through the use of
large storage capacity and long distance water transfers.
In a similar position, France scored #18 overall, again scoring very
highly on access and capacity, in spite of the relatively low score on
resources, and a slightly lower position on the environment component. “Both
France and the UK are amongst the most developed nations of the world, but there
is still room for improvement in terms of how their water resources can be
managed, and how this management may impact on ecological integrity. Both
countries are certainly actively engaged in addressing both these issues,” said
Dr. Sullivan.
The United States, at # 32 overall, scored only 10.3 out of 20 on
resources because large stretches of the country, especially in the West, are
arid or semi-arid. The U.S. did better than many other industrial nations in
environmental terms, with 15.1 points for 6th place in this category, but it
came last in terms of use, with just 2.8 points.
“The U.S. is at a relatively low position because of wasteful or inefficient
water use practices in domestic, industry and agriculture,” says Mr. Cosgrove.
“This is illustrated by the fact that per capita water consumption is the
highest in the world.”
Germany, which ranks 35th, achieves the high scores in access and
capacity, which are counteracted by the low score on resources, and use. Like
France and the UK, Germany is making progress in reducing wastage and increasing
water use efficiency.
Australia at #44 has an overall profile that is similar to the USA, but
its score is reduced by the lack of access to irrigation in this dry country,
and a lower score on the environment component.
The commonly used number for those without access to safe water is 1.2 billion,
based on the latest survey by WHO and UNICEF. Mr. Cosgrove believes the number
could be twice as high and points out that the definition used in the WHO/UNICEF
survey was access to an "improved supply" of water, not a safe one.
Experts say that 20 percent of the world’s population in 30 countries faced
water shortages in the year 2000, a figure that will rise to 30 percent of the
world’s population, in 50 countries, by 2025. They have warned that unless
action is stepped up, the number of people living under threat of water scarcity
will increase to 2.3 billion by 2025.
“Water demand is increasing three times as fast as the population growth rate
even though no new water can be created anywhere on this planet,” says Dr. Abu
Zeid. “However, in many countries, water shortages stem from inefficient use,
the effective loss of available water too polluted for use by humans or nature
or by the unsustainable use of underground water in aquifers, which can take
thousands of years to replace. The WPI lays this out statistically in a valuable
road map.”
The World Summit on Sustainable Development, held earlier this year in South
Africa, gave a commitment by the global community to cut the proportion of
people without access to water and sanitation by half by 2015. This consolidates
the agreements on the Millennium Development Goals, first outlined at the
Millennium General Assembly of the United Nations in 2000.
"We are expecting that the political commitment expressed on these occasions
will be turned into concrete action plans at the 3rd World Water
Forum," says Mr. Hiroki. The World Water Forum will be the marquee event of
the International Year of Freshwater (www.wateryear2003.org), to be launched
Dec. 12 at the United Nations in New York.
On World Water Day, March 22 (www.waterday2003.org), the 3rd World
Water Forum in Kyoto will be the venue for the release of the World Water
Development Report, the first-ever United Nations system-wide report on the
state of the world's freshwater resources, three years in preparation and the
foremost water-related information product to be issued by the UN during the
International Year.
Water & Health
“Because the WPI includes indicators of health and of water quality, it can
be used to address the link between lack of water access and ill health,” says
Dr. Sullivan. It provides a means of focusing on the communities where there is
the greatest need for investment in water, so targeting the poorest people who
suffer the greatest incidence of water-related illness.
According to the WHO, diarrheal diseases alone account for more than 3 million
deaths per year, and give rise to one billion incidences of illness, many of
which involve loss of capacity to work. Every year, more than 5 million people
die from some kind of water related disease, and more than 3 billion incidence
of disease occur.
“In economic terms, this represents a great loss, both in terms of a reduction
in the labor force, and in terms of the loss of productivity associated with
this,” Dr. Sullivan adds. “At the national scale, this undermines economic
growth, and reduces GDP (gross domestic product). On a personal level, this
means a reduction in capacity to sustain one’s livelihood, and this loss of
human capital gives rise to an increased incidence of poverty within the
community. Tens of millions of adults lose workdays every year to the same
illnesses.”
Dr. Sullivan estimates that the economic losses worldwide stemming just from
diarrhea alone amount to more than $6 billion per year in both lost salary and
production value. The ten countries which have the greatest numbers of people
without access to safe water – China, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Ethiopia,
Vietnam, Brazil, Turkey, Pakistan and Congo – account for around 68 percent of
these losses, and not surprisingly, they rank amongst the poorest nations.
An estimated one half of people in developing countries are suffering from
diseases caused either directly by infection through the consumption of
contaminated water or food, or indirectly by disease-carrying organisms
(vectors), such as mosquitoes, that breed in water. These diseases include
diarrhea, schistosomiasis, dengue fever, infection by intestinal worms, malaria
and river blindness (onchocerciasis).
Developed countries also have problems because of bad water and sanitation. In
the U.S., the incidence of waterborne diseases has dropped from roughly eight
cases per 100,000 person-years between 1920 and 1940 to under four between 1970
and 1990. An exception was a severe outbreak in Minneapolis in 1993 when over
400,000 cases caused by Cryptosporidium occurred, resulting in over 100 deaths.
In Canada recently, seven people died and roughly 2,300 others were stricken
with diarrhea, nausea, fever and headaches -- symptoms of an E. coli bacteria
infection -- after heavy rain flooded an Ontario town's wells with cow manure
from area farms.
Water Poverty Index
Researchers created the WPI by developing a standardized data set from a
number of pilot sites, on which different methodologies of generating a WPI were
tested. Consultation with a wide range of stakeholders was conducted to evaluate
each methodology. To illustrate how the WPI can be applied at various scales,
information was also collected from 147 countries that had sufficient data on
the main WPI criteria, and WPI scores were calculated from publicly available
datasets. “The information given here is at the national level only, but of
course, water resources vary considerably in any country”, says Dr. Sullivan.
This kind of macro assessment does not address local variability, which is
crucial for effective management. Community level assessment must be
carried out to capture this, and the main reason for developing the WPI was to
help in that process”.
The researchers adopted what is called a “holistic” approach that includes as
essential components institutional issues, adaptive capacity and the maintenance
of ecological integrity, necessary because the WPI attempts to promote equitable
and sustainable water management. They are added to the more conventionally used
water availability measures provided by hydrological science, enabling the
assessment to be much more representative of what is actually happening on the
ground.
"The WPI is work still in progress," says Dr. Sullivan. "It is not a definitive
statement. Only the inception phase has been undertaken so far, and considerable
further development is needed. The country rankings are not by any means the
most important aspect of the WPI. It has been designed ultimately as a tool for
monitoring progress, mainly at the community or district level, but these
preliminary national comparisons are of interest." The Centre for Ecology and
Hydrology has already carried out pilot projects to test and use the WPI in Sri
Lanka, Tanzania, and South Africa.
For more information on the countries included in the international scale
assessment, visit the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology website at
http://www.ceh-wallingford.ac.uk/research/WPI.
The WPI has been developed as a consensus of opinion from a range of physical
and social scientists, water practitioners, researchers and other stakeholders
in order to ensure that all the relevant issues were included in the index.
“The WPI is one of the very few policy tools that incorporates the environment
explicitly as an essential component with other parts of water management,” says
Dr. Sullivan. “In the past, water problems were often dealt with by providing
engineering solutions, which to a large extent were productive, but sometimes
neglected important social or cultural issues. Today however, with increasing
public empowerment, devolution of responsibilities in the water sector, and an
increasing awareness of ecological issues, such solutions are no longer adequate
to address most water management problems.”
The World Water Vision, presented to the Second World Water Forum in
The Hague in March 2000, argued that while there are water crises in many parts
of the world, they are not crises caused by a lack of resources but crises
caused by poor water management. The WPI to be discussed at the 3rd World Water
Forum in Kyoto in March 2003 will attempt to describe the various factors that
influence relative water poverty.
* * *
Attached References 1 :
2002111984640WPI press release.pdf
Attached References 2 :
2002112075012wpi_report.zip
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