Published on IDRA Global Connections Fall 2019 Issue

By Carlos Cosin

As we all know, water is a basic and irreplaceable resource for the very existence of life. Drinking water and sanitation are recognized as basic human rights since they are indispensable to ensuring the health and dignity of all human beings. But there has never been a sector that, being so vital and widely recognized as such, is however so forgotten by governments and institutions when it comes to finding solutions to its major problems.

Strange as it may seem, the most crucial problem facing the sector is not scarcity or lack of treatment. The world’s real problem is the negligible value that the citizens place on water. It is so meagre that most citizens do not even know how much they pay for water, whereas they are perfectly aware, for example, of how much their electricity or telephone service costs or the price of their weekly tankful of gasoline. We will not be able to take proper care of water, save it, reserve it, or use with due care and attention until we value its real importance.

The concept of the costs associated with water is a subject that regrettably has not been treated with transparency. In a context of scarcity, this debate can no longer be delayed. The generation, transport and treatment of water entail associated costs for use and service that must be paid by someone. As long as we continue talking about scarcity while it does not affect our day-to-day lives and we fail to educate the new generations about the immense value of water, none of the measures we implement to solve the consequences will be effective (note that the identification of consequences, not problems). The consequences, I repeat, of scarcity and lack of proper treatment.

What would the cost be, not only the economic, but also the social, environmental and opportunity cost, for a country, a company, a city or a municipality of not having water or not treating water for the citizens? If the calculations were made public – the world would be in for an enormous surprise and surely would react.

Closely linked to this we encounter the second problem of the water sector: the lack of political will of some governments to solve a problem vital to their citizens. Political will has endowed most citizens with cell-phones and networks even in the most inaccessible places and with political will we have developed land, sea and air transport systems to reach any point in the world and even to travel far from our blue planet. I would like to remind you that today there are more than 3,500 satellites circling the Earth every day, that we have sent an unmanned spacecraft to Mars, and yet 2,100 million people still lack access to drinking water in their homes and 4,500 million people do not have safelymanaged sewage systems.

According to the World Health Organization, only 50 liters of water per person per day are needed to ensure that their basic needs are met and the risks to public health are kept at acceptable levels, but we have not yet been able to achieve this goal.

Therefore, I am convinced that until we solve these two problems:

• Public awareness about the value of water
• Political will to meet water needs

We will not be capable of making progress to solve the problem of water scarcity, quality and lack of treatment.

If you are reading this article you probably know that both the scarcity and treatment of water are easily overcome, as you are probably working on a daily basis to implement measures to mitigate and reduce their consequences.

The problem of drinking water shortage can readily be solved by means of distribution or transport from areas with more resources or by generation of unconventional resources such as re-use systems and desalination of water from salinated aquifers or by desalination of seawater in coastal areas Use of drinking water for domestic consumption accounts for only 5 to 10% of the demand, which means that the problem of scarcity of water to drink, cook, take care of personal hygiene and wash clothes is tiny in comparison to the rest of the challenges.

The vast majority of water worldwide is devoted to the agricultural and industrial sectors. The agricultural sector consumes between 70% and 80% of the demand and for years – sorry, decades – we have failed to find a solution beyond measures that I would describe as minor or with merely mitigating effects.

Taken together, irrigation and industrial processes account for between 80 and 95% of the demand for fresh water. All of us here know that the regeneration of wastewater constitutes a source that could easily replace conventional drinking water resources for these uses.

Today we have the necessary experience and technology, ranging from regeneration by simple filtration that removes suspended solids to elimination of salts by reverse osmosis technology. We can achieve zero concentration and discharge to obtain the required qualities depending on the use to which the product water is put. We know, therefore, that when the political will has existed, the necessary measures have been implemented to solve these problems:

• Singapore reuses 90% of its water for industrial uses.
• Israel reuses 85% of its wastewater for irrigation.
• Saudi Arabia uses desalination to supply 95% of its citizens with drinking water.

Thus, we have the technically viable solutions and some advanced countries are showing us that they have the will to implement them.

On the other hand, some governments, ministries, departments, etc. have informed me of their grave concern about not having the budgets required to implement these solutions.

We know how the international infrastructure investment paradigm has changed over the years, except in well known cases with special regional connotations such as China or India.

The application of funds by private enterprises ensures the economic support, which relieves the pressure on global and regional economies, drives professionalization of the sector and provides solutions to the aforesaid challenges. As an example, I would like to highlight the public-private model in combination with Project Finance that has achieved excellent results over the past decade, implementing many water solutions and upgrading infrastructures with record rates. This allows all the stakeholders involved to make progress to obtain a risk optimization model under which each stakeholder assumes the risk for which it is best prepared.

Some assume the technological and construction risks; others assume the financial risks; and still others the demand and regulatory aspects. And the beneficiary is the end user, who receives good quality water in the amounts required for consumption.

I must also mention the crucial importance of water in the fight against climate change, a fight that provides a great opportunity to implement a sustainable solution:

• We can produce water and transport it without emissions, as many facilities are now doing, because we can design our desalination and treatment plants to operate with renewable energy sources.
• We can recharge our aquifers with drinking water by using and treating wastewater and prevent its salinization as a consequence of sea water intrusion.
• We can reuse water as an alternative source to water extracted from lakes and rivers, thus providing a water reserve for future generations or simply respecting the ecologically sustainable flow of the waterways.

We can do all this and much more to contribute to placing water as the backbone of the fight against climate change which, rather than a problem, becomes a substantial solution on many transversal lines of action.

Lastly, to be fair, a little self-criticism would not be amiss. On the debit side of our ledger we have the paucity of investment in R&D. We always score at the lowest levels – when we score at all – in the rankings for investment in this area.

There is no reliable data available, but I believe that the entire R&D effort of the water sector worldwide would not exceed US$ 500 million per year, in other words a mere 0.07% of annual spending in the sector. These figures are a far cry from the effort needed to achieve ground-breaking progress and key technological advances.

We expect that demand for water, its uses and the number of users will increase considerably in the future. Therefore, the required strengthening of the guarantee of availability, its quality and improved service will be provided precisely by a new, enhanced resource management based on innovation and investment in R&D and this in turn will become one of the driving forces of a new water governance model.

There is still a wide gap between the need for water and its availability and treatment in all the niches. This gap can be bridged, but need to be accompanied by the following factors:

• Firm political will with a long-term vision and decisive action, and
• Educational policies that properly value water and its associated costs to ensure that we adapt our behavior to proper use and/or conservation of the resource.
• The search for more generalized financial tools complementary to those used until now but that can change the current financing paradigms and structure the projects with a level of guarantees and adequate returns for investors.
• Progressive increase of the investment in R&D+i to enable us to face the challenges with a competitive, advanced technological base.