March 14, 2003	Friday	Muharram 10, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, March 13: The 21st century faces water wars as communities and countries are becoming increasingly thirsty and increasingly desperate for the world’s most precious and most fundamental natural resource, says the United Nations.

The World Water Day is being observed on March 22.

The UN Information Centre here on Thursday issued a statement in connection with the day saying that a third of the world lived in water stressed areas, where consumption outstripped supply. By 2025, two-thirds of people would be trapped in the plight, if the current trend continued, it said.

A fifth of the world’s population was without access to safe water supplies, the UN said. Roughly 6,000 people, mainly children in developing countries, died every day as a result of dirty, contaminated water, it said. Annually, it was the equivalent of the population of central Paris being wiped out, it said.

According to the statement, eating of contaminated shellfish was causing an estimated 2.5 million cases of infectious hepatitis annually, resulting in 25,000 deaths and a further 25,000 people suffering long-term disability due to liver damage.

Around half of the world’s rivers were seriously depleted and polluted, it said.

Some of the most important wetlands and inland waters, including the Aral Sea and the marshlands of Mesopotamia, had shrunk, triggering environmental calamities for people and wildlife and the fisheries upon which they depended, it said.

It said two billion people depend on groundwater supplies. In some countries, such as parts of India, China, west Asia, including the Arabian peninsula, the former Soviet Union and the western United States, groundwater levels were falling as a result of over-abstraction, it said.

Groundwater in western Europe and the US was also becoming increasingly polluted by chemicals used in agriculture, it said, adding the situation indicated that inter-communal and international conflict and disputes over water resources would inevitably occur as the population climbed to over eight billion by 2050 and global warming took hold in the form of extreme weather, including droughts. “But, if history is our guide, then we have quiet optimism for hope that we can steer the world’s water policy away from the rocks of inevitability,” it said.

In South Asia, access to improved sanitation systems between 1990 and 2000 has benefited some 220 million people but the progress had been overwhelmed by population growth, it said.

Research, to be presented at the 3rd World Water Forum in Japan this month, based on a analysis of freshwater agreements stretching back 4,500 years indicated that cooperation rather than conflict has been the norm over recent centuries in managing rivers and their catchment areas, it said.

The work showed that nations and communities more often than not took the path of peace and shared rather than hoarded water resources for drinking, wildlife protection or hydro-power.

Until the middle of the last century, many rivers on North America and Europe, especially those running through big industrial areas, were so polluted they were classed as “dead”. Today, after billions of dollars of investment in water treatment works and agreements with industry on effluents, fish were again spawning and migrating to their upper reaches, it said.