Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor - News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

If you think the war for oil is bad, wait till you see the war for wa­ter. The world is go­ing wa­ter-bank­rupt, ac­cord­ing to a UN re­port pub­lished in Jan­u­ary. Glob­al­ly, hu­mans are us­ing wa­ter at a faster rate than na­ture can re­plen­ish it through rain or snow.

It may seem para­dox­i­cal. More than 70 per cent of the Earth is cov­ered by wa­ter. How­ev­er, a mere three per cent of that fig­ure is fresh wa­ter. It gets even more star­tling. Of the per­cent­age of fresh wa­ter, near­ly 69 per cent is locked away in glac­i­ers and ice caps, while rough­ly 30 per cent is ground­wa­ter. That leaves just one per cent ac­ces­si­ble through lakes and rivers.

The pos­si­bil­i­ty of a wa­ter war was first dis­cussed on Fa­reed Za­karia’s GPS pro­gramme in 2015. “Wa­ter is not a re­source that you need to en­hance your life. It is some­thing that you need to sur­vive. To me, that is some­thing that is very easy to lead to sig­nif­i­cant con­flict,” Dr Ronald Roop­nar­ine said in an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Guardian last week.

He’s the Deputy Dean at the Fac­ul­ty of Food and Agri­cul­ture at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine cam­pus.

“T&T not a pret­ty pic­ture”

Yet, de­spite the grim glob­al out­look for wa­ter, Trinidad and To­ba­go (T&T) and much of the Caribbean have en­cour­ag­ing amounts of fresh wa­ter avail­able through sur­face and ground.

A hand­ful of is­lands, in­clud­ing those in the Grenadines and St Lu­cia, are forced to im­port from neigh­bour­ing coun­tries. For oth­er is­lands like Bar­ba­dos, ef­fi­cien­cy in man­ag­ing lim­it­ed amounts of fresh wa­ter is key.

This coun­try, how­ev­er, has no such is­sue. Dr Adri­an Cash­man, who is the chair of Glob­al Wa­ter Part­ner­ship Caribbean’s Tech­ni­cal Com­mit­tee and has spent over four decades in wa­ter re­search, told the Sun­day Guardian, “If you look at some of the sta­tis­tics and the tra­jec­to­ry of wa­ter sup­ply in T&T, it is not a pret­ty pic­ture at all.”

He ref­er­enced high lev­els of wa­ter loss­es, “a great wa­ter en­dow­ment”, and high lev­els of leak­age.

In 2023, a study done on the 20-Year Do­mes­tic Wa­ter De­mand Fore­cast for T&T showed the av­er­age dai­ly con­sump­tion per capi­ta of 91 im­pe­r­i­al gal­lons, sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than that of re­gion­al coun­ter­parts.

Roop­nar­ine, who is al­so a se­nior lec­tur­er in agri-en­vi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter risk man­age­ment, said that T&T doesn’t have a do­mes­tic me­ter­ing sys­tem. The coun­try me­ters in­dus­tries and four per cent do­mes­ti­cal­ly, so ex­perts can on­ly guessti­mate the lev­el of us­age by the pop­u­la­tion.

The na­tion’s ram­pant con­sump­tion of wa­ter is sim­i­lar to that of elec­tric­i­ty. Both util­i­ties have com­mon de­nom­i­na­tors. They are both high­ly sub­sidised. Cash­man warned there are se­ri­ous con­se­quences ahead if this coun­try doesn’t start treat­ing wa­ter ef­fi­cient­ly.

He said, “Look­ing ahead at the scarci­ty, we can­not af­ford any­more to be los­ing wa­ter, to be pump­ing the stuff from a riv­er or from the ground, which is cost­ing us a lot of mon­ey, and then just let­ting it seep away. We have to do some­thing about it. So, if we start by re­duc­ing the loss­es, it means that we’re go­ing to have more wa­ter avail­able for the fu­ture, which will coun­ter­act some of the chal­lenges of re­duced rain­fall and pro­longed heat spells.”

But it wasn’t just leak­age; Cash­man al­so took aim at pol­i­cy­mak­ers.

He added, “You find that peo­ple’s con­sump­tion pat­terns are in­flu­enced by the en­vi­ron­ment in which they find them, es­pe­cial­ly be­cause the price we pay for our wa­ter is usu­al­ly very low. So, it is en­cour­ag­ing us to use more than we need to. We need to look at not just the waste of wa­ter that leaks away, but how we use wa­ter.”

The Bar­ba­di­an warned that if sys­temic prob­lems are left un­ad­dressed, in two decades, T&T and oth­er Caribbean coun­tries can find them­selves in a po­si­tion where there is not a con­sis­tent sup­ply of wa­ter.

Caribbean must

plan ahead

Cash­man said the Caribbean must plan for the fu­ture care­ful­ly, and he’s not the on­ly one sound­ing the alarm. This month, a World Bank op-ed called for the ad­just­ment of Caribbean util­i­ty com­pa­nies to be­come more mod­ern and da­ta dri­ven.

The opin­ion by Lil­ia Bu­run­ci­uc, World Bank Di­rec­tor for the Caribbean, al­so called for a stronger re­gion­al in­te­gra­tion on the is­sue.

In De­cem­ber, the In­ter­na­tion­al Wa­ter Re­sources As­so­ci­a­tion (IWRA) will meet in Ja­maica for its sec­ond Is­lands Wa­ter Con­gress, where such themes are sure­ly ex­pect­ed to be ex­plored over the three-day con­fer­ence.

Cash­man wants re­gion­al gov­ern­ments to think long-term in their plan­ning for the wa­ter sec­tor.

He said, “We need to step back and ask our­selves what do we need to put in place now that is go­ing to en­sure that in 30 or 50 years our cit­i­zens are still go­ing to be able to en­joy a good qual­i­ty of ser­vice? I say that be­cause the wa­ter in­fra­struc­ture is not some­thing that wears out, or cer­tain­ly the pipes, that wear out in five years or ten years. They can be there last­ing for 50 years, 70 years, in some cas­es 100 years, and still pro­vide a de­cent ser­vice. It has to be fit for pur­pose for our grand­chil­dren and great-grand­chil­dren.”

Roop­nar­ine, who is a re­gion­al IWRA ex­pert and mem­ber of the in­ter­na­tion­al sci­en­tif­ic com­mit­tee of the IWRA is­lands task force, added, “I do not think that it will re­main a sit­u­a­tion where we will al­ways have am­ple wa­ter. It may take some time, but if we con­tin­ue to utilise wa­ter in the way that we do, we may have an ab­solute amount of wa­ter re­sources or wa­ter avail­able. Un­less we in­crease ef­fi­cien­cy, in­crease the way in which we man­age wa­ter, im­prove our in­fra­struc­ture, we are nev­er go­ing to con­serve.”