From Inter Press Service: http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/11/arab-world-faces-alarming-water-crisis-warns-undp/
Sunday, December 1, 2013
The Arab world is widely perceived as blessed with an embarrassment of riches: an abundance of oil (Saudi Arabia), one of the world’s highest per capita incomes (Qatar), and home to the world’s tallest luxury building (United Arab Emirates).
But it lacks one of the most finite resources necessary for human survival: water.
“The average Arab citizen has eight times less access to renewable water than the average global citizen, and more than two thirds of surface water resources originate from outside the region,” says the U.N.Development Programme (UNDP) in a new study released this week.
Titled “Water Governance in the Arab Region: Managing Scarcity and Securing the Future,” the report warns that water scarcity in the region is fast reaching “alarming levels, with dire consequences to human development”.
The region accounts for five percent of the world’s more than seven billion people, and 10 percent of its area, but accounts for less than one percent of global water resources.
Its share of annual renewable water resources is also less than one percent, and it receives only 2.1 percent of average annual global precipitation.
Over 87 percent of the region’s terrain is desert and 14 of the world’s 20 most water-stressed countries are in this region, the study notes.
Maude Barlow, a former senior U.N. advisor on water and author of “Blue Future, Protecting Water for People and the Planet Forever”, told IPS the Middle East is in “a water crisis.”
Desertification is a sweeping problem in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Iran.
Continue reading at: http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/11/arab-world-faces-alarming-water-crisis-warns-undp/
