…a little light reading

World Water Day (March 22) has come and gone, but the urgency of this year’s theme, “Clean Water for a Healthy World”, is still with us.  A very good new source of information on the subject is the April issue of National Geographic Magazine.  If you have one, read it and then lend it to a friend.  If you don’t, buy one or borrow one, and read it.

Some startling facts come out of the magazine and the Water Day reports.  For example, about 780 million people (13% of the world’s population) don’t have a source of clean drinking water.  They don’t all live in Africa’s deserts or India’s slums.  An estimated 30% of Jamaican households don’t have their own piped-in water supply, and at least 9% don’t have any access to treated drinking water.

Every 20 seconds, somewhere in the world, a child under five dies of a water-borne disease ranging from simple diarrhoea to cholera and typhus.  That’s 1.5 million children every year.  We don’t know how many of them are Jamaicans.  We do know that in just the first two months of this year, more than 12,000 Jamaican children went to clinics and hospitals to be treated for diseases caused or carried by dirty water.

Your diet is probably the biggest part of your water footprint.  More than 70% of the world’s available fresh water is used to grow crops and raise livestock.  The table shows the “water cost” of some common foods, including both direct consumption and water used to grow animal feed.

Simple changes in farming methods –including replacing ditches and sprayers with drip irrigation – would cut the amount of water applied to farm fields by 30 – 70%, and raise crop yields by getting water directly to plant roots.  Drip irrigation is used on less than 2% of irrigated land worldwide, but some forward-thinking Jamaican farmers are already profiting from low-volume watering combined with water-saving methods like composting and mulching.

The Water Day campaign’s three simple steps to water security are worth repeating.

1. Prevention – Don’t let the fresh water we have get dirty or poisoned.  For Jamaica, this means taking better care of our rivers, ponds and gullies.  We can’t keep using them as garbage dumps, car washes, sewage systems or sand mines.  It also means better farming practice – more use of mulch and compost, better livestock management, less chemical fertilizer and tree-cutting.

1. Treatment – clean up used water, and use it again if possible.  Our tourism sector is doing its part.  Sewage treatment has become a requirement in new development plans.  Many resorts also have water-saving measures in place, catching rainwater and processing greywater (from laundry and showers) to use for irrigation.

1. Restoration. Natural systems – wetlands, flood plains, grass and trees – are very efficient water cleaners.  They also have a lot of other values, as air cleaners, flood controllers, and homes for birds, animals and fish.  We need to save what’s left, and plant more.

None of these steps is very complicated.  They can all save us money.  And they will make Jamaica a safer, healthier, more beautiful place.