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[BDMUNC 2013] Committee Update

United Nations Development Programme Topic: Sustainable Water Resource Utilization for Developing Countries

Inside:

A. Welcome Letter B. Water Resources C. Technical Tool: Integrated Water Resource Management D. Case Study E. Recommended Readings F. Assignment 2012.12.19

UNDP Update 1219 BDMUNC 2013

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Attribution

Dais of United Nations Development Programme,

Bright Dream Model United Nations Conference 2013


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Welcome Letter

Dear Delegates,

Now you have entered the kaleidoscopic world of UNDP, and started this wonderful journey with water. In the last update, we have introduced UNDP, water resources and other key words in this committee to help you quickly grab the theme of our discussion.

In this update we shall turn to substantial academic information. Why are water resources so vulnerable and precious? From the aspects of technic and international relations, how does a country maneuver to find a way through the competition and a collective thirst for resources from adjacent countries? We will present them to you in the form of statements, case study, and assignment.

We know that development topics may be a challenge for you, especially when the working language is English, but it is also a great opportunity to develop yourselves through discussing development.

Therefore, enjoy the meeting! If you have any questions at hand, please feel free to direct your questions to [email protected]. We would be more than happy to answer your questions, both substantial and procedural.

It’s a worthwhile journey, and you are not alone.

Dais of United Nations Development Programme

Haonan Zhou, Dais Head

Weigang Du, Dais Member

Ke Ning, Dais Member

Tianyu Li, Dais Member


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Water Resources

A. Overview

Water is a critical necessity: humans cannot survive without it. Water has various important uses across agricultural, domestic, and industrial categories. Approximately 70 percent is used for irrigation. Industrial use claims some 22 percent and domestic use claims 8 percent. Water use is linked closely to development because of its important role in agriculture, industry, and human sustenance and sanitation.

However, despite the need for clean, accessible water, a huge majority of the population in this world lacks it.

Numbers talk!

According to the statistic released by the World Health Organization:

Over 1.1 billion people lack access to water (WHO, 2012).

Over 1.6 million die every year due to unsanitary water which is often polluted by improper sewage treatment.

90% of them are children under the age of five.

The international community has recognized that the utilization of water resources and its provision are significant global problems urgently waiting to be solved. Sustainable utilization of water resources is aligned with the seventh Millennium Development Goal, to ensure environmental sustainability. Yet issues dealing with water use and provision continue to be pressing and require international attention.

Recent progress

On March 6, 2012, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that the target of sustainable water resource management was the priority. According to the findings of the Joint Monitoring Program for Water Supply and Sanitation’s report Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation 2012, at the end of 2010, 89% of the world’s


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population, or 6.1 billion people, used improved drinking water sources—this is one per cent more than the 88% MDG target.

However, challenges still remain. No less than 783 million people still lack access to safe drinking water and some regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, continually struggle to make progress in improving access to safe water. Additionally, poor water resource management constrains agriculture and industrial development, poses health risks, and does not mitigate disaster risk or adapt to climate change. Despite recent progress, the international community must continue to work towards improving access to water, especially through the improvement of the sustainability in water resource management.

B. Water Security in Conflict or Disaster Zones

Water security poses its own set of challenges to a disaster zone. Water security is of extreme importance since disaster zones or areas of conflict suffer heavily from environmental damages, particularly harmful substances entering sources of drinking water. Harmful substances range from toxic products and chemicals to nuclear materials like in the case of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor explosion.

Tracing back to March 2011, the Japanese government officials reported that they have found high levels of radioactive iodine in the ground water surrounding the nuclear reactor. The report later severely hampered rescue efforts since a new source of water must be found in addition to providing aid in rebuilding the surround areas.

In addition, an analysis of the location of the most devastated areas and the mechanisms of resource allocation must be reviewed. Any disaster will destroy a crippling proportion of the available water resources. Soil takes a long time to become arable and the destruction of poultry and livestock is almost impossible to replace immediately.

Furthermore, water resources are also heavily damaged during the course of a conflict. The Rwandan Genocide in 1994 had put the water resources for irrigation in extreme scarcity, which did not recover until 1998. Thus, any solution must involve the eventual regeneration of these resources.

C. Water Pollution and Diseases

There are various degrees of water pollution, which negatively affects water ecosystems and human populations. Water sources are sometimes contaminated by runoff—which can originate from human activities. Urban sources like roads and highways can cause threats to the water quality in the region. There is also pollution from industrial, agricultural, and domestic waste where regulations are not in place or enforced. Human


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activity contaminates the original water sources, creating a barrier to access to safe water throughout affected areas.

In addition to pollution, there are several examples of water borne diseases that thrive throughout the developing world because of poor water quality. For example, diarrhea is a disease caused by microorganisms that can be ingested in water that leads to dehydration and kills millions every year. UNICEF finds that diarrhea is the “most important public health problem directly related to water and sanitation”. In some cases, diarrhea can be linked with cholera, a serious intestinal bacterial infection.

Other diseases, such as arsenicosis, fluorosis, and guinea worm disease are linked to water contamination. The international community has made a great amount of effort towards eradicating water borne diseases. In 1986, guinea worm disease was spread across 20 countries and affected more than 3.5 million people. However, guinea worm disease was eradicated from Asia in 2004 and fewer than 1,800 cases were reported in 2010. Furthermore, in July 2011, the Carter Center recognized that the disease had been eradicated from Ghana, leaving Sudan, Mali, and Ethiopia as the only endemic countries. The world’s progress with Dracunculiasis demonstrates the enormous potential of international cooperation and assistance in combating water borne illnesses and promoting safe water use.

Because of common water borne diseases, especially diarrhea, and other contaminants, water treatment and purification technologies are incredibly important.


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Technical Tool: Integrated Water Resource Management

The competition for available water resources in much of the developing world is growing rapidly due to ever-increasing and conflicting demands from agriculture, industry, urban water supply and energy production. The demand is fueled by factors such as population growth, urbanization, dietary changes and increasing consumption accompanying economic growth and industrialization. Climatic changes are expected to further increase the stress on water resources in many regions (UNDP). Across the world, government bureaus and private sector companies manage water. These managers allocate country’s water resources, and balance the constantly increasing consumption demand with limited supply. In the past, water resource management has been traditional and fragmented. Facing these problems, the international community has developed the concept of Integrated Water Resources Management, namely IWRM which incorporates the concept of equity, efficiency, and environmental sustainability into apportioning and distributing water.

IWRM has developed into an internationally accepted practice after decades of international discussions around distributing the scarce and valuable resource of water. While the concepts behind IWRM have existed in traditional resource management schemes, the issue was on the floor of international society for the first time in 1977 at the United Nations Conference on Water in Mar del Plata. Later, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 1992, international community first recommended courses of action to improve global practices with Chapter Eighteen of Agenda 21. At the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, IWRM was clearly defined as: “A process, which promotes the coordinated development and management of water, land and related resources in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems.” The Global Water Partnership also stressed “water should be managed in a basin-wide context, under the principles of good governance and public participation” (Global Water Partnership).

IWRM has evolved over the past decades and become a critical component of sustainable development. IWRM stresses finding a balance between the following three important objectives:


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Economic efficiency with water use attempts to minimize waste and ensure the productive use of water resources.

Equity recognizes the social role of water as a basic human need because of its function for sustenance.

Environmental sustainability incorporates the future use of water resources and ecological importance of water systems—both of these components are affected by present water use.

These factors will be given different weights across countries and regions that vary in development status, climate, and other areas; IWRM is different in its implementation across the world, reflecting different priorities. IWRM balances different economic, social, and environmental needs, which can be described by these three E’s, economic efficiency, equity and environmental sustainability.

These goals of IWRM are implemented through combinations of hard and soft components. The hard components associated with IWRM revolve around infrastructure. In water resource management, infrastructure is used to allocate and distribute water for productive uses in agriculture, industry, and households. Additionally, infrastructure protects and manages water with extremes in fluctuating supply, chiefly from droughts and floods. The soft components associated with IWRM involve “institutions and management interventions needed to ensure [water’s] efficient use, safeguard the resource and the ecosystems that depend on it, and mediate between competing users and uses (Global Water Partnership)”. Accordingly, these parts of IWRM are particularly useful investment management, controlling pollution, monitoring water use, and basin planning.

While IWRM will vary in its implementation in different countries and regions, the concept involves consistent approaches and processes. One example of this is IWRM’s consideration of multiple sectors and institutions. Whereas a single actor conducts traditional water resource management for a single objective, IWRM incorporates a collective decision-making process that balances complex issues and overriding interests. This integrated approach is beneficial in deciding where to make investments because of the scarcity of financial resources and the aforementioned economic, social, and environmental concerns associated with water.

Another consistent aspect of IWRM is adaptability. Using the framework of IWRM, nations can “accommodate emerging challenges, constraints and changing social


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priorities (Global Water Partnership)”. These examples show similarities in IWRM across different countries and regions. IWRM is a continual process, viewing water in a holistic context. While it varies significantly across countries and regions—reflecting the different development priorities of unique situations—it consists of many similar approaches, processes, and strategies across its implementations. Moving forward, the international community should try to resolve shortcomings and pitfalls associated with IWRM. For example, the context-specific nature of tools and approaches in the IWRM arsenal are sometimes misapplied. Also, managers sometimes struggle to balance too many variables and priorities, failing because of complexity and poorly coordinated information. Policies and solutions should consider remedies to these problems, while cognizant of consistent underfunding of infrastructure development projects and political barriers to IWRM.


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Case Study: Central Asia Controversies

Due to the indivisible character of rivers, it is often impossible to partition the river construction and its benefited regions according to national borders. The integral flood retention and water storage projects require damming upriver, which may cause inevitable conflicts among countries.

A. The Case

One of the typical examples of this problem is the clash among Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan on the issue of irrigation and electric power generation. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there was no unified management of the usage of water resource. As the increase of the international price of energy resources and of the domestic demand, Kyrgyzstan had to augment the amount of hydroelectric generation, which inevitably affected the runoff of Syr Darja (the river which flow through those three countries.). Thus, the available irrigation water for the other two countries greatly decreased.

Realizing the seriousness of the problem, the three countries formed a frame agreement in 1998 and updated the agreement every year. According to the agreement, the other two countries would provide Kyrgyzstan with natural gas and coal. In return, Kyrgyzstan should increase the release of water to the lower reaches for irrigation.

However, those three countries encountered many problems in the agreement implementation. The natural gas and coal were not regularly offered and Uzbekistan


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exerted pressure on Kyrgyzstan on political issues because of Kyrgyzstan’s reliance on natural gas. In order to reduce dependence on others, Kyrgyzstan again augmented the amount of hydroelectric generation. Therefore the problems remained unsolved.

In 2001, legislation was issued by the Kyrgyzstan government that water had its own economic value and should belong to the country which produced it. The law suggested that the water generated in Kyrgyzstan was Kyrgyzstan’s domestic property, and the neighbor country should pay for their usage. The law at once met with controversies and attacks, which forced those nations to reconsider the issue on water resource more seriously.

Nowadays, although the dispute has been greatly eased, the contradiction still exists. Over the years, the farmers of the Fergana basin near the border fight against each other so as to compete for water, which is historically called “mattock war”. It is said that 30% of the land stops farming in South Kazakhstan because of the excessive water use of Uzbekistan.

B. Questions to Consider

In your opinion, what is the prime cause of the conflict among those three countries?

Why has the problem not been solved for almost 15 years?

Can you think about some solutions in order to solve the conflicts among countries on the water resource? You can either use the case mentioned above or find a case yourself as is required in the assignment.


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Recommended Readings

Webpages:

For more information on IWRM, please refer to:

http://waterwiki.net/index.php/IWRM Integrated Water Resources Management

Past Cases:

Kenya: Water Scarcity (Video Reports from UN WEBCAST)

http://webtv.un.org/search/kenya:-water-scarcity/1556091175001

Rwanda: Hydropower Brings Hope (Video Reports from UN WEBCAST)

http://webtv.un.org/search/rwanda:-hydropower-brings-hope/1556195495001

Books on Water Resource Situation:

A. Bell (2010), Peak Water: Civilisations and the World's Water Crisis, Luath Press Ltd.

(《水文明的崩溃》，亚历山大·贝尔，2012)


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Assignment

Please read the assignment prompt carefully.

Conduct a research on one of the most significant international water resource controversies that have not yet been settled.

1) Write a brief summary on its history. You can refer to the case study for your summary writing. Please be specific, using plots, statistics or maps wherever you think necessary.

2) Evaluate the cause and effects of that problem. Technically speaking, what natural, social or economic factors have hampered with the settlement and solution process? From an international relations aspects, evaluate the positions of adjacent countries and international society. Be sure to take the profits of the respectively involved countries’ into account.

3) Integrating your summary and evaluation, write a few suggestions or solutions for the issue.

Please be logical and consistent through your assignments. We hope to see your work after a thorough research and independent thinking.

Delegates MUST hand in their assignments no later than 23:59:59, Jan. 1st, 2013. Please direct your assignments to [email protected]. Feel free to send an extension request to this mailbox if you have anything that interferes with the assignment.

Also, please join the BDMUNC 2013 UNDP QQ group: 274725711.


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Bibliography

Dhawan, K. (2012). Dracunculiasis. Dracunculiasis, Medscape Reference, Retrieved from http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/997617-overview

FAO & UN WATER (n.d.). Statistics: Graphs and maps. Retrieved from http://www.unwater.org/statistics_use.html

Global Water Partnership. (2012, MAY 26). Integrated water resources. Retrieved from http://gwptoolbox.org/

Workers at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant exposed to radiation above previous limit. (2011, March 19). Los Angeles Times

Staub, E. (2011, July 28). Jimmy carter congratulates ghana for halting guinea worm disease transmission. Retrieved from http://www.carter¬center.org/news/pr/ghana-072811.html

UNDP, (n.d.) Integrated water resources management. Retrieved from http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/ourwork/environmentandenergy/focus_areas/water_and_ocean_governance/integrated-water-resources-management/

UNICEF. (2012, May 30). Water, sanitation and hygiene. Retrieved from http://www.unicef.org/wash/index_wes_related.html

UNICEF & WHO (n.d.). Millennium development goal drinking water target met. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2012/drinking_water_20120306/en/

Yang, S., & Wang, T. (2010). On the impact of water resources dispute on international relations. Journal of Lanzhou University, Retrieved from http://www.cssn.cn/news/418134.htm

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