BRAHMA CHELLANEY

A column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate.

Over the last 15 years, the bottled-water industry has experienced explosive growth, which shows no sign of slowing. In fact, bottled water – including everything from “purified spring water” to flavored water and water enriched with vitamins, minerals, or electrolytes – is the largest growth area in the beverage industry, even in cities where tap water is safe and highly regulated. This has been a disaster for the environment and the world’s poor.

The environmental problems begin early on, with the way the water is sourced. The bulk of bottled water sold worldwide is drawn from the subterranean water reserves of aquifers and springs, many of which feed rivers and lakes. Tapping such reserves can aggravate drought conditions.

But bottling the runoff from glaciers in the Alps, the Andes, the Arctic, the Cascades, the Himalayas, Patagonia, the Rockies, and elsewhere is not much better, as it diverts that water from ecosystem services like recharging wetlands and sustaining biodiversity. This has not stopped big bottlers and other investors from aggressively seeking to buy glacier-water rights. China’s booming mineral-water industry, for example, taps into Himalayan glaciers, damaging Tibet’s ecosystems in the process.

Much of today’s bottled water, however, is not glacier or natural spring water but processed water, which is municipal water or, more often, directly extracted groundwater that has been subjected to reverse osmosis or other purification treatments. Not surprisingly, bottlers have been embroiled in disputes with local authorities and citizens’ groups in many places over their role in water depletion, and even pollution. In drought-seared California, some bottlers have faced protests and probes; one company was even banned from tapping spring water.

Worse, processing, bottling, and shipping the water is highly resource-intensive. It takes 1.6 liters of water, on average, to package one liter of bottled water, making the industry a major water consumer and wastewater generator. And processing and transport add a significant carbon footprint.

The problems do not stop when the water reaches the consumer. The industry depends mainly on single-serve bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the raw materials for which are derived from crude oil and natural gas. In the 1990s, it was PET that turned water into a portable, lightweight convenience product.

But PET does not decompose; and, while it can be recycled, it usually is not. As a result, bottled water is now the single biggest source of plastic waste, with tens of billions of bottles ending up as garbage every year. In the United States, where the volume of bottled water sold last year increased by 7% from 2013, 80% of all plastic water bottles become litter, choking landfills.

Of course, higher rates of recycling could improve this situation substantially. For example, Germany has successfully promoted recycling with a combination of smart regulations and incentives, such as machines at supermarkets that return deposits in exchange for bottles (often brought in by the poor). But recycling entails the use of even more resources.

Some might argue that the safety and health benefits of bottled water offset these environmental consequences. But those benefits are little more than a marketing ploy. Although tap water in the West occasionally has quality problems, so does bottled water. The industry’s own production process sometimes causes contamination and forces major recalls.

Indeed, tap water is often healthier than bottled water. Chemical treatment means that processed bottled water may lack fluoride, which is naturally present in most groundwater or is added in tiny amounts to municipal water supplies to promote dental health.

There are also health concerns over the potential leaching of chemical compounds from PET bottles, as well as from the large reusable polycarbonate containers in which bottlers deliver water to homes and offices. Suboptimal storage conditions – which include, for example, prolonged exposure to sunlight and heat – can cause potent estrogenic activity in bottled water, exposing consumers to chemicals that alter the function of the endocrine system by mimicking the role of the body’s natural hormones.

To be sure, these consequences are not going unnoticed. In the US, environmental concerns have prompted some university campuses and at least 18 national parks to ban the sale of bottled water.

The bottled-water industry sees the danger as well – and is doing everything possible to keep public opinion on its side. To that end, big water bottlers like Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola Company have taken a page out of the playbook of energy behemoths like ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell, by pursuing “green” initiatives.

But make no mistake: Bottled water is compounding the world’s resource and environmental challenges. It is making it harder to deliver potable water to the world’s poor. It delivers no health benefits over clean tap water. And it does not even taste better; indeed, blind taste tests reveal that people cannot tell the difference between bottled and tap water.

Obviously, tap water needs an image overhaul. Unfortunately, it lacks the marketing muscle and advertising budgets that have powered the dramatic growth of the bottled-water industry. When a product that is cheaper and better does not prevail, that is bad news for consumers. When the product is water, we all lose.

© 1995-2015 Project Syndicate.

Asia’s water woes take many forms — and they’re about to get worse

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Nikkie Asian Review

The centrality of water is a recurring theme in various religions. The Bible — largely written amid water scarcity — associates drought with the wrath of God. “By means of water,” says the Quran, “we give life to everything.” Hindu gods and goddesses related to water are tied to fertility or to new beginnings.

Asia, the world’s driest continent per capita, symbolizes the paradox of water: a giver of life that can also be a destroyer when it becomes a carrier of deadly microbes or takes the form of a flood.

Asia struggles with water problems of almost every kind. The region’s biggest natural disasters this century have been water-related: The tsunami that struck Japan’s northeastern coast in 2011 caused a triple nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami left behind a huge swath of death and destruction.

Flooding this summer has caused fatalities and widespread damage in parts of southern China and eastern India, and a serious drought is ravaging countries as disparate as North Korea, Thailand and Vietnam. Contaminated water, meanwhile, continues to be a major problem across much of Asia, which has some of the world’s worst water pollution.

Unfortunately for Asia, these problems are set to become even worse. Global warming and El Nino — a warm, irregularly occurring current in the Pacific Ocean that can cause significant changes in temperature and rainfall — are triggering more frequent droughts and flooding, especially in the summer monsoon season.

El Nino events occur at unpredictable times, sometimes more than five years apart. The current El Nino threatens to inflict serious economic damage in South and Southeast Asia. The agriculture sector, the leading employer in many countries, is particularly vulnerable. According to a Citigroup report, prolonged drought and the resultant crop losses could lead to higher food prices in several Asian nations.

Over the longer term, freshwater supplies are likely to come under increasing strain as oceans rise and the intensity and frequency of storms and other extreme weather events increases. Cycles of severe flooding and drought brought on by climate change will render the availability of potable water even more uncertain. This could exact significant human and economic costs, especially in financially strapped countries such as densely populated Bangladesh — the world’s seventh- most populous nation.

A parched field in North Korea

North Korea says an unparalleled drought is currently exacerbating its food crisis. Pyongyang, having learned from a famine in the late 1990s that killed at least 600,000 people, has improved its agricultural management and set aside stockpiles of food, putting it in a somewhat better position to deal with the latest drought. But because copious amounts of water are needed for energy extraction, processing and production, North Korea’s severe water shortages have hit electricity generation, leading to frequent blackouts.

In much of Southeast Asia, parched conditions and above-average temperatures have forced farmers to leave their fields fallow. A prolonged drought has affected all five provinces in Vietnam’s coffee- producing Central Highlands. As a result, the country’s coffee exports have dropped 40% compared with last year.

In Thailand, the government has unveiled a $1.77 billion aid package for farmers affected by drought. About 1 million farmers have received loans so far. The drought is concentrated in seven of the country’s 67 provinces, but its wider impact on rivers and lakes has prompted water rationing in nearly a third of the country.

Drought conditions have also affected rice cultivation in parts of neighboring Laos and Cambodia, where some water sources have dried up, though a partial rebound in rainfall in July has brought respite to some drought-stricken regions. At the opposite extreme, heavy flooding this year has affected up to 4 million people in China, while torrential monsoon downpours displaced many in eastern India.

Australia’s extremes of drought and flooding, which seesaw with the cycles of El Nino and its cold-current counterpart La Nina, should serve as a warning for Asia. The country’s longest drought in more than a century lasted from 1996 until 2010 (even longer in some areas) and was followed by serious flooding in 2010 and 2011.

Global warming threatens to increase morbidity and mortality.

As floods and droughts become more severe and runoff patterns shift, variations in Asia’s hydrological cycle — the sequence of precipitation, evaporation and transpiration — are set to grow. This could threaten food production in some countries, unless crop varieties emerge that are more drought- and flood-resistant.

The accelerated melting of snow in mountain ranges and faster thawing of glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas will likely trigger serious flooding in downstream countries in the warm months, followed by an irreversible depletion of river flows.

At the local level, persistent water scarcity is already leading to the use of strong-arm
tactics. Villagers in some parts of South and Central Asia now hire private security guards to protect their wells, tanks and ponds from water thieves. In these parched areas, water has become a precious resource worth fighting for.

Solutions needed

Given the current situation, Asia must begin finding ways to mitigate its water challenges through intelligent, efficient resource management. Without such efforts, the region could become trapped in a vicious cycle of increasing water stress, environmental degradation and conflict. Large numbers of subsistence farmers would
also be forced into cities and other areas with relatively better water availability.

For starters, Asian governments must change policies that are exacerbating human impacts on ecosystems. Water subsidies, for example, keep prices low, encouraging wasteful use, while subsidized electricity and diesel fuel for farmers has
promoted the uncontrolled extraction of groundwater, causing wetlands, lakes and
streams to dry up.

Overexploitation of coastal aquifers, meanwhile, allows seawater to intrude and replace the lost freshwater. The failure of governments to check deforestation and the depletion of swamps — important natural water absorption and storage systems — contributes to cycles of chronic flooding and drought and spurs the desertification of grasslands.

Asian countries must enhance their water infrastructure to increase distribution efficiency and mitigate imbalances in water availability. Storing water in the wet season for release in the dry is one way to ease seasonal imbalance. But most nations in Asia, with the exception of dam-dotted China, have a relatively low per capita water storage capacity by global standards.

Because warmer air carries more moisture, the increase in average temperatures has helped to raise global rainfall, especially in the tropics. Asia’s monsoons are projected to strengthen further. To compensate for decreased river flows, rainwater capture on a large but environmentally sustainable scale will likely be critical.

Rainwater harvesting is, in fact, an ancient and relatively low-cost technique invented in Asia. Its revival in cities ranging from Singapore to the southern Indian metropolises of Bangalore and Chennai makes it one of the most promising frontiers in the battle to ease local water shortages.

Water stress is often accompanied by a fall in water quality. But when water quality is maintained, the impact of water scarcity can be better managed. If the region’s water-stressed economies are to raise their water productivity levels, they must begin by increasing their water quality.

Asia needs new market mechanisms, public-private partnerships, innovative practices, conservation and astute water management to advance affordable solutions. Increasing the diversity of water supply for agriculture and energy should be a key goal of improved water management. The power sector’s role in contributing to water stress, for example, could be curtailed by utilizing non-freshwater sources — including seawater, impaired groundwater and recycled water — for cooling.

The close nexus between water, energy and food demands that these three critical resources be integrated into national policy frameworks to promote synergistic approaches. Asian governments cannot afford to waste time to address their pressing resource and environmental challenges.

Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist and author of “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” is currently a Richard von Weizsaecker fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.

© Nikkie Asian Review, 2015.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY

A column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate.

How we are slowly killing the planet with our love of meat.

This December, world leaders will meet in Paris for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, where they will hammer out a comprehensive agreement to reduce carbon emissions and stem global warming. In the run-up to that meeting, governments worldwide should note one critical, but often overlooked, fact: the single biggest driver of environmental degradation and resource stress today is our changing diet – a diet that is not particularly conducive to a healthy life, either.

In recent decades, rising incomes have catalyzed a major shift in people’s eating habits, with meat, in particular, becoming an increasingly important feature of people’s diets. Given that livestock require much more food, land, water, and energy to raise and transport than plants, increased demand for meat depletes natural resources, places pressure on food-production systems, damages ecosystems, and fuels climate change.

Meat production is about ten times more water-intensive than plant-based calories and proteins, with one kilogram of beef, for example, requiring 15,415 liters of water. It is also an inefficient way of generating food; up to 30 crop calories are needed to produce one meat calorie.

At any given time, the global livestock population amounts to more than 150 billion, compared to just 7.2 billion humans – meaning that livestock have a larger direct ecological footprint than we do. Livestock production causes almost 14.5% of global greenhouse-gas emissions and contributes significantly to water pollution.

Moreover, livestock production consumes one-third of the total water resources used in agriculture (which accounts for 71% of the world’s water consumption), as well as more than 40% of the global output of wheat, rye, oats, and corn. And livestock production uses 30% of the earth’s land surface that once was home to wildlife, thereby playing a critical role in biodiversity loss and species extinction.

It took more than a century for the European diet to reach the point at which meat is consumed at every meal, including breakfast. But, in large parts of Asia, a similar shift has occurred in just one generation. Meaty diets have created a global obesity problem, including, of all places, in China, whose expanding international clout is accompanied by expanding waistlines at home.

Americans consume the most meat per capita, after Luxembourgers. Given the size of the US population, this is already a problem. If the rest of the world caught up to the United States – where meat consumption averages 125.4 kilograms per person annually, compared with a measly 3.2 kilograms in India – the environmental consequences would be catastrophic.

Already, the signs are worrying. The demand for meat is projected to increase by 50% from 2013 to 2025, with overall consumption still rising in the West and soaring in the developing world, especially Asia.

In order to meet this demand, meat producers have had to adopt an extremely problematic approach to raising livestock. In order to ensure that their animals gain weight rapidly, meat producers feed them grain, rather than the grass that they would naturally consume – an approach that is a major source of pressure on grain production, natural resources, and the environment.

Making matters worse, the livestock are injected with large amounts of hormones and antibiotics. In the US, 80% of all antibiotics sold are administered prophylactically to livestock. Yet this has been inadequate to stem the spread of disease; in fact, with many of the new and emerging infectious diseases affecting humans originating in animals, veterinarians, microbiologists, and epidemiologists have been trying to understand the “ecology of disease” (how nature, and humanity’s impact on it, spreads disease).

Though the environmental and health costs of our changing diets have been widely documented, the message has gone largely unheard. With the world facing a serious water crisis, rapidly increasing global temperatures, staggering population growth, and growing health problems like coronary disease, this must change – and fast.

For starters, to ease some of the resource pressure, livestock producers should switch to water-saving technologies, including drip irrigation. At the same time, governments and civil-society groups should promote healthier diets that rely more on plant-based proteins and calories.

According to recent research, if the world stopped producing crops for animal feed or diverting them to biofuels, it could not only end global hunger, but also feed four billion extra people – more than the number of projected arrivals before the global population stabilizes. Meat consumption actually leads to more greenhouse-gas emissions annually than the use of cars does.

This is not to say that everyone must become vegetarian. But even a partial shift in meat-consumption habits – with consumers choosing options like chicken and seafood, instead of beef – could have a far-reaching impact. Indeed, beef production requires, on average, 28 times more land and 11 times more water than the other livestock categories, while producing five times more greenhouse-gas emissions and six times more reactive nitrogen.

Adopting a balanced, largely plant-based diet, with minimal consumption of red and processed meat, would help conserve natural resources, contribute to the fight against human-induced global warming, and reduce people’s risk of diet-related chronic diseases and even cancer mortality. Just as governments have used laws, regulations, and other tools with great success to discourage smoking, so must they encourage citizens to eat a balanced diet – for the sake of their health and that of our planet.

© 1995-2015 Project Syndicate.

Asia’s vulnerability to disasters arises from five factors: geography, geology, natural climate extremes, human-induced changes to the environment and global warming.

The most common and potent hazards in Asia are water-related: floods, cyclones and droughts, for example. Geological hazards, such as earthquakes, landslides and volcanic eruptions, also claim lives and displace residents regularly, wreaking serious economic damage at the same time. Asia’s poor bear the brunt of the recurrent cataclysms.

People stand among debris and ruins of houses after Typhoon Haiyan pulverized the city of Tacloban.

The region’s geographical vulnerability — Asia has suffered 40% of the world’s disasters in the past decade and 80% of the disaster-related fatalities — is compounded by two factors. The continent’s high population density in low-lying areas and its vast stretches of coastline, the world’s longest, lead to increased risk. Southeast Asia, in particular, stands out for its coastline-related vulnerability: It has 3.3% of the global landmass, but more than 11% of the world’s coastline. The majority of the 600 million people in the world living in areas less than 10 meters above sea level are Asian, residing mainly in Southeast and South Asia.

Moreover, the areas of Asia experiencing high economic growth are located along coastlines, which tend to be heavily populated and constitute prime real estate. Indeed, many of Asia’s major cities, energy plants and industries are located along the coasts. The vulnerability of coastal infrastructure has emerged as an important concern.

Nuclear-power plants, for example, guzzle water. All new nuclear plants in Asia — the center of global atomic energy construction — are located along coastlines, allowing them to draw on seawater for cooling. Seaside reactors face big risks from the global-warming-induced increase in natural disasters, as was highlighted by Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster, in part caused by a tsunami.

Cursed land

Geologically, Asia is one of the world’s most complex and vulnerable zones, as the interaction of the region’s tectonic plates shows. Its vulnerability extends from where the Indian plate meets the Eurasian plate in the Himalayas to the northern margins of the Australian plate. The edges of the plates meet along Pacific’s Ring of Fire.

Tectonic plate interactions make Asia vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis. Two of the world’s biggest ever combined earthquake and tsunami disasters have occurred in Asia in the past decade: in the Indian Ocean in late 2004 and in Japan in March 2011. The 2004 disaster led to more than 230,000 deaths, while Japan’s cost more than 15,000 lives.

Asia’s climate extremes are shaped by water: There can be too little, or too much, of it; it can be too dirty, becoming unsafe to drink; when it rains, it often pours; dry periods can go on too long; and weak monsoons can trigger serious droughts.

Much of Asia receives most of its yearly rainfall during monsoon periods, which can last from three to four months. Flooding in this season is endemic, exacting heavy economic and human costs. But drought — a slow-onset hazard with crippling effects — often tends to be a bigger problem, as this year has shown. Indeed, global drought risks, in terms of the number of people exposed, are concentrated in Asia.

Human-induced changes to the landscape — which are distinct from global warming, though they can be a stepping stone to it — are also contributing to extreme weather events and aggravating their impacts. Environmental change arises from human actions such as reckless land use, contamination of surface-water resources, groundwater depletion, environmentally unsustainable irrigation, degradation of coastal ecosystems, waste mismanagement, and the destruction of forests, mangroves and other natural habitats.

Coastal erosion, for example, has become a serious problem in certain zones, in part because of the clearing of coastal forests. The over-exploitation of coastal aquifer systems is accelerating seawater intrusion. When freshwater reserves are depleted in coastal aquifers, seawater seeps in to supplant the lost freshwater. This factor is beginning to affect drinking-water supplies in coastal cities such as Manila, Jakarta, Bangkok and Dhaka.

Consider another example: The rivers originating on the Tibetan plateau form 11 Asian mega-deltas, which are home to cities such as Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Bangkok, Dhaka, Kolkata and Karachi. But these megadeltas, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have become “much more vulnerable” to the effects of global warming and sea-level rise because of deforestation in Tibet’s upstream catchment areas and the over-damming of the rivers.

Global warming is a fifth factor. There are some gaps in our scientific understanding of this phenomenon. Climate science, after all, is still young. Yet what we know should be a cause for concern for Asia, which must cope with new challenges, such as greater variability in the movement, distribution and quality of water. Natural climate events, such as the intermittent El Nino and La Nina ocean currents that cause secondary disasters in tropical regions, including forest fires with trans-boundary haze, further complicate the problem.

Two water-related implications of global warming for Asia are beyond dispute. First, water stress will intensify and spread to new areas. Asia already has the lowest per-capita water availability among all continents, with large parts of the region now facing water crises. Second, shifts in precipitation and runoff patterns will mean greater variability in water availability, potentially affecting Asian food security.

To deal with their disaster vulnerability, Asian states must do two things: develop greater institutional and organizational capacity to manage environmental stresses and increasing susceptibility to natural hazards; and build resilience. As underscored by the Indian Ocean tsunami and the more recent typhoons that hit the Philippines, building resilience is at the heart of the challenge.

Warning not enough

Resilience is the capacity to absorb shocks and disturbances in such a way as to be able to reorganize fairly quickly. But to be able to reorganize rapidly, a state must have the necessary institutional and organizational means, including implementing forward-looking measures.

Along with developing early-warning systems and preparedness, states must establish smart water-resource management, adapt to water stress by adopting innovative practices and technologies, and develop new crop varieties more tolerant of drought and flooding. Not just governments but also communities and companies need to become more resilient by going beyond traditional risk management to prepare for systemic changes and unforeseen events.

When a disaster strikes a country, the crucial first response cannot come from outside. It must come from within. When nuclear meltdowns occurred at Fukushima, even the International Atomic Energy Agency, a specialized agency, was not initially in a position to offer any concrete assistance to Japan. In the early phase, the IAEA offered criticism but little else.

Yet it is in this critical early phase that a country’s institutional and organizational capacity can make an important difference in saving lives and rescuing people. Rapid-response capability, including local emergency action and providing clean water, food and shelter to survivors, can significantly limit fatalities.

More fundamentally, risk-reduction measures, including protecting or restoring ecosystems that buffer the impact of natural disasters, can help limit both fatalities and economic losses from cataclysms. But the ability of states to adopt best-available practices and technologies to mitigate their disaster-related vulnerabilities very much depends on their political and economic capabilities.

Simple preventive actions, such as the mass evacuation of residents on the basis of early warning systems, can save countless lives. For example, the evacuation of half a million residents from the southeastern Indian coast in October in advance of Typhoon Hudhud — one of the fiercest cyclones to hit the region in years — kept the death toll to fewer than 50. When a typhoon struck the same area in 1999, 10,000 were killed. In contrast to India’s improvement, the failure to evacuate residents caused an estimated 84,500 deaths in Myanmar’s 2008 Typhoon Nargis, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

In Asia as elsewhere, countries must develop institutional, organizational and financial capacity as a bulwark against disasters. States with good governance and adequate financial resources will deal with their vulnerabilities in a much better way than cash-strapped nations wracked by internal turmoil and corroding governance.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” the winner of the 2012 Bernard Schwartz Award.

© Nikkie Asian Review, 2014.