Urbanization and the Global Water Crisis
Urban Water Management
Cities account for just 2% of the planet’s surface, yet by 2005 they will be home to half of the world’s population. The concentration of people and the increasing rate of urbanization place cities squarely in the center of the global water management challenge. Cities today account for 60% of all water allocated for domestic human use. With political power and money concentrated in the larger metropolitan areas, governments face growing pressures to reallocate water from other sectors (most notably agriculture) to meet growing urban demands. In China, farming communities are being cut off from water supplies so that Beijing’s domestic, industrial, and tourist demands can be met. Similar competition occurs in and around virtually every city today.
The challenge of urban water management is multifaceted, but includes a lack of freshwater sources within feasible proximity to sustain water demand in many cities, especially the growing number of ‘megacities.’ The population density and intensity of economic uses of urban water also lead to water quality degradation that is often most critical in urban settings.
Reliance on Groundwater
Many urban areas have come to rely on groundwater as their primary source for various reasons, including degraded quality, intermittent supply, and the typically higher cost for surface water. This puts special pressure on this resource. In fact, nearly one-third of the global population relies on groundwater as the source of drinking water, including residents in many of the world’s largest cities, such as Jakarta, Dhaka, Lima, and Mexico City. Aquifer depletion rates and pollution, however, threaten to foreclose this option for many cities.
Improving Land Use and Water Infrastructure Planning
Poor or nonexistent urban planning and enforcement of existing land use regulation compound water management problems in most cities. Low-lying areas are inappropriate for development and are vulnerable to riverine and storm-surge flooding. Illegal settlements on precarious sites, including floodplains and unstable slopes, are at grave risk from mass land movement and other water-related disasters, and are exceedingly difficult to provide with needed water supply and sanitation services. Finally, local governments’ inability to work with stakeholders to provide for integrated management and long-range infrastructure planning to manage solid and liquid waste from household, industrial, and commercial activities jeopardizes the viability of all sources of water for the city.
If cities and governments are to make tangible improvements in water management, they must become increasingly proactive and cross-sectoral in their planning and reform. They must, for example, be capable of simultaneously dealing with risks to physical infrastructure, threats to public safety, and sustainability of critical habitats and resources while still providing water supply and sanitation services.
Embracing Cost-recovery, Decentralization and Privatization of Urban Water Services
Governments and public financing alone cannot be expected to accomplish the needed expansion in such services, but must decentralize the authority and responsibility for service provision and build capacity to design and manage private sector partnerships. The goal of full cost-recovery must be quickly embraced, so that leveraged financing and economic sustainability can become reality. In Bogor, Indonesia, when the water utility installed meters and raised fees in 1988, household water conservation rose dramatically, allowing the utility to connect more families to the system without increasing the amount of water used.
The management of urban water quality, supply, and demand will become more complex and politically charged as the world’s urban population doubles to 5 billion by 2025. Integrated planning and water resource management, together with the use of new technologies for water supply, treatment, conservation, and reuse, offer the most viable options for meeting these daunting challenges.
Learn more about USAID’s Urban Programs.
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