More than 75 percent of Asia-Pacific countries lack water security, according to a new report released last week by the Asian Development Bank. Compared to other regions, South Asia is a hot spot where inequity of access to water is the highest. The region supports more than 21 percent of the world’s population, but has access to just over 8 percent of global water resources. As rapid population growth and urbanization increase demand, water is increasingly a scarce and precious resource in South Asia.

The Teesta flood plain covers nearly 14 percent of the total cropped area of Bangladesh, providing livelihood opportunities directly to approximately 7.3 percent of the population, or 9.15 million people. Photo/Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association

Even as the complex environmental consequences of climate change, deteriorating river ecology, and growing urbanization continue to unfold new challenges for the region, South Asia’s water woes could be significantly mitigated through improved water governance of its major transboundary rivers: the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra, which straddle international boundaries and support the lives of an estimated 700 million people. Effective regional cooperation in managing these and other transboundary rivers in the region will only be achieved when countries work together.

The Asia Foundation recently concluded a study on the political economy of the Teesta River Basin, in partnership with civil society organizations in India and Bangladesh. Based on field work on either side of the India and Bangladesh border, the study examined the social, political and economic factors influencing basin governance, and mapped key stakeholders, their incentives, relative stakes, and capacity to influence water governance decisions in the basin. The Teesta River originates in the northeastern Indian state of Sikkim and flows through West Bengal before entering Bangladesh. It has been a source of dispute for decades as both countries have significant populations that depend on the Teesta’s waters for food, energy, and livelihoods. For example, the Teesta flood plain covers nearly 14 percent of the total cropped area of Bangladesh, providing livelihood opportunities directly to approximately 7.3 percent of the population, or 9.15 million people, in five districts of Rangpur. The Teesta River Basin is a fascinating microcosm of the complexity that surrounds the politics of transboundary water governance in South Asia.

Through the study, we discovered that a host of individuals and groups have found little voice in the formal negotiation process about how the Teesta’s waters are shared between India and Bangladesh. These include fishermen and environmental activists interested in maintaining the ecological balance of the river; developers and financial institutions looking to construct mega dams and hydropower projects in the Indian state of Sikkim; farmers in West Bengal and Bangladesh who are putting pressure on their governments to build barrages and irrigation canals as the river hits the plains; “hydrocrats” (hydrologists in the national capitals of both countries) who disagree with their foreign affairs colleagues on the meaning of “national interest;” and hundreds of thousands of farmers on both sides of the border who are marginalized, and who suffer up to eight months of drought and floods year after year.

With such a broad range of stakeholders with an interest in the river and its management, arriving at a widely acceptable solution is a difficult task. One of the study’s key takeaways is that workable solutions in transboundary water governance will not materialize until the following three features of South Asian water governance policies change:

• The discourse on transboundary water becomes less nationalistic so that reasonable compromises are possible in water negotiations.

• Benefit sharing is broadly constructed beyond just volumetric measures of water that reduce negotiations to a zero-sum game. In the Teesta River Basin, for instance, lean season augmentation of river flows has seldom been discussed, the bilateral negotiations to date have mostly centered on the quantity of water that each country can claim.

• The search for workable solutions is no longer limited to within state hydrocracies alone, but rather involves a larger set of actors within as well as outside the state.

While these changes will not happen overnight, the report identifies the following strategies to help promote the process of reform:

Working with an unbundled state. The state is made up multiple individuals, groups, and agencies that compete for resources and power. They carry different perspectives on necessary policy responses and are able to provide checks and balances on the system. For example, the courts, the parliament, and political parties all have varying degrees of influence over formal policy processes. It is necessary for civil society and other stakeholders to identify and engage with a diverse set of actors within the state to drive reform efforts rather than to wait for state hydrocracies to evolve.

Dialogue first, negotiations second. Negotiations on transboundary water are state-controlled, single-track processes that have failed to understand the diversity of claims on water and the potential for benefit sharing of transboundary rivers. This has kept broadly agreeable solutions on transboundary water from emerging. An expanded, multi-track dialogue process can actually change the agenda of negotiation and help to make it broader in terms of the potential for benefit sharing. On the Teesta alone, negotiations have been going on for over four decades. Unless approached differently, an alternate result is not likely to materialize in the future.

Alignment of stakeholder interests. Our analysis suggests there are shared interests between different sets of stakeholders in the Teesta River Basin. For instance, civil society activists in Sikkim are seeking to protect the ecological health of the river by limiting hydropower and dam development on the Teesta to ensure a basic minimum flow in the river. Their interest matches those of boatmen and fishermen in Rangpur, Bangladesh, where availability of water in the dry season is affecting transit and fishing activities. Such alignments can be fostered and used to build grassroots coalitions around shared objectives.

Transboundary CSO coalitions. Civil society organizations can serve as important conduits for fostering dialogue and linking grassroots issues to the negotiation process. In particular, CSOs can work outside the confines of foreign policy, work across borders to engage with a range of stakeholders, and support informal dialogue processes to support formal negotiations. The dialogue platforms provided by transboundary CSO coalitions can help pave the way for more effective formal negotiations between states.

Open access to information. Government monopoly over data and information in the Teesta River Basin has prevented civil society and other non-state actors from effectively engaging and intervening in the river’s management. By bringing a greater volume of information in the public domain, through support for programs on the Right to Information (RTI) and other transparency enhancing activism, state control over data can gradually be eased, opening up new spaces for civil society engagement and participation.

The United Nations has declared 2013 as the International Year for Cooperation on Water, recognizing that “water is a shared resource and its management needs to take into account a wide variety of conflicting interests.” As water scarcity continues to confront South Asia’s populations and economies, understanding the issues, challenges, and opportunities that this study presents is a good place to start, and over time, will be critical to improving transboundary water governance in  the region.

Sagar Prasai is The Asia Foundation’s deputy country representative in Nepal and Mandakini Devasher Surie is the Foundation’s senior program officer in India. They can be reached at sprasai@asiafound.org and mdsurie@asiafound.org respectively. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual authors and not those of The Asia Foundation.

My colleague Lisa Hook and I are currently in the Pacific Island countries of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), two small island states that face some of the highest risks of natural disasters and climate change. We are here to examine issues and challenges surrounding disaster preparedness, relief, and reconstruction. While in consultations with the Micronesia Conservation Trust and Conservation Society of Pohnpei, representatives shared details about the high risk of water shortages that the outer atolls in FSM and RMI experience annually, particularly in the Yap state of FSM.

A majority of goods need to be imported to these Pacific Island countries, including many food supplies, fuel, construction commodities, and during a disaster, relief and reconstruction supplies. Photo/Lisa Hook

The FSM constitutes four major island groups totaling 607 islands with a population of 106,487, and the RMI is made up of two archipelagic island chains of 29 atolls, each with many small islets, and five single islands with a population of 68,480. Due in part to climate change and also to climate variability, such as the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, water insecurity is becoming more severe and more frequent on atolls and islets throughout both of these island nations, which are largely dependent on rainfall as their main fresh water source. Droughts have a severe impact on water availability and quality, agricultural and energy production, and ecosystem health. Depending on the acuteness of water shortages, in some instances, outer atolls have had to seek emergency assistance from state and national government agencies.

Despite this reality, conservation organizations that we have met with said that vulnerability is also a result of a lack of preparedness and capacity to adapt to changes in climate. They expressed an urgent need to develop better drought monitoring and risk management systems, and for outer atolls to have frameworks in place to manage drought risks through integrated methods, including water catchment systems, reverse osmosis machines, and improved watershed management. The FSM in particular needs to develop a coordinated national drought policy. There is also a need for improved monitoring and early warning systems to deliver timely information to decision makers, effective impact assessment procedures, proactive risk management measures, preparedness plans to increase coping capacities, and effective emergency response programs to reduce the impact of droughts.

Mangroves are important to protecting against large ocean waves and salinity intrusion. There are efforts to manage these natural resources, conducted in part by the Conservation Society of Pohnpei, but competing factors, such as local people using them for firewood and coastal development pose some threats. Photo/Lisa Hook

Predictive climate data can also be a powerful tool to increase drought resilience. Small island developing states, like FSM and RMI, can utilize improvements in climate prediction capabilities. The conservation societies warned though that better dissemination and understanding of such information and services, especially for the most vulnerable, is needed in order for them to be helpful. This begins with increasing public awareness about climate change, climate change adaptation, and disaster preparedness. Local conservation societies that are working to educate communities in the outer atolls on water insecurity have the available indigenous resources and talents that can be tapped by larger international organizations to provide the in-depth knowledge and understanding of the local context in order to more effectively implement ecologically sensitive interventions.

Read about The Asia Foundation’s work in the Pacific Islands to prepare communities for effective disaster management.

Kourtnii S. Brown is a program officer and Lisa Hook is a senior program officer for The Asia Foundation’s Environment Programs in San Francisco. They can be reached at kbrown@asiafound.org and lhook@asiafound.org, respectively. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual authors and not those of The Asia Foundation.

As we reflect on the state of global water on World Water Day 2012, measurable progress has been made over the last two decades, but much more remains to be done. Looking ahead, who are the catalytic change agents? The answer: women.

In the least developed countries in the Asia-Pacific, women and girls generally have primary responsibility for collecting and managing water, spending up to six hours per day traveling as far as six kilometers to collect water, and often adolescent females are forced to drop out of school to assist in this household task. Photo by Geoffrey Hiller.

On March 6, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) published a report stating that, as of 2010, 89 percent of the world’s population had access to safe drinking water. This exceeds the international target set by the seventh Millennium Development Goal on environmental sustainability (MDG7) by one percent. Additionally, the goal to halve the global population suffering from water poverty was met five years ahead of the 2015 deadline. In the Asia-Pacific region, achievements made in India and China alone account for almost half of global progress toward the drinking water target over the past two decades.

While these accomplishments are commendable, sobering forewarnings highlight challenges for the road ahead, notably that:

1. nearly 800 million people still remain without access to clean drinking water, the majority of whom reside in regions experiencing severe water stress;
2. gender and wealth disparities continue to inhibit equitable access for certain populations;
3. the leading cause of child mortality in the developing world is still water-born diseases;
4. there are post-2015 sustainability issues in terms of water quantity and quality surrounding the achievements made to date; and
5. the parallel target on basic sanitation will not be met until 2026 at the current rate of change (in China, India, and Indonesia, twice as many people are still dying from diarrheal diseases as from HIV/AIDS).

These concerns highlight important gaps in the quest to end water poverty and hint at the direct threats that water and sanitation insecurities pose for women and children. Some major obstacles are the complexities surrounding the future water supply-and-demand dichotomy. First, the highest population growth rates are expected to occur in the areas where progress on water and sanitation access remain the slowest – in the most impoverished urban areas of the least developed countries, of which women make up the majority of the poorest of the poor.

Second, since women and their families often depend on a woman’s access to water to satisfy cooking and household needs, it will most likely become more difficult to prevent adverse consequences in terms of health, education, and hunger from such water scarcity issues. Women across the world spend a disproportionate amount of time interacting with water compared to their male counterparts. In the least developed countries in the Asia-Pacific, women and girls generally have primary responsibility for collecting and managing water, spending up to six hours per day traveling as far as six kilometers to collect water, and often adolescent females are forced to drop out of school to assist in this household task. Ann Tutwiler of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) says, “simple investments in water pumps alone could save women billions of hours a year,” which would allow them time to be more productive in their homes and their communities as well as care for healthier families.

Of further concern is the fact that global water demand is predicted to grow by 55 percent from 2000 to 2050. Meanwhile, the depletion rate of the quantity and quality of fresh groundwater during this period is also expected to increase exponentially. This means that societies will have to quench the thirst of more people on less potable water, while having limited water resources available for agriculture will likely cause food prices to become more expensive. Additionally, the effects on water availability and access due to climate change, such as prolonged droughts, decreasing groundwater tables, and declining food production, have also been observed to threaten women’s livelihoods more than men’s. In South and Southeast Asia, over 60 percent of the female work force is engaged in agriculture and food production, but just 1 in 10 of those women owns the land they farm; therefore the majority of these women don’t qualify to receive government benefits to invest in new innovations such as climate-change-resilient crop seeds.

The recent MDG7 progress announcement was made just before last week’s UN World Water Forum (WWF6) convened in Marseilles, France, where diplomats, business leaders, and scientific experts gathered to debate global water policy. On the first day of the conference, UN WWF released the fourth edition of the World Water Development Report, which painted this more accurate, yet grim, picture of global water supply in contrast to the MDG7 announcement. The UN WWF’s report warned that unprecedented growth in the demand for water is threatening global development goals and will exacerbate inequalities between and within countries.

A hot topic on the WWF6′s agenda was emphasizing the leadership role that women can play in using and managing water and sanitation resources to build sustainable progress in these sectors. This solution reflects similar discussions that concluded earlier this March at the Commission on the Status of Women in New York, where the theme “empowerment of rural women and their role in the eradication of poverty and hunger” recognized the wide impacts water use and sanitation can have on the development of a country as a whole and the well being of women in particular. These impacts are linked to better family health, higher household incomes, greater access to education, and improved gender equity.

The Women for Water Partnership (WfWP), which hosted a pre-conference and high-level dialogue at WWF6 last week, has been a strong proponent of water policy reform that takes gender into account. WfWP has created women’s networks throughout Asia and other parts of the world that play a significant role in lobbying local governments on reducing water consumption and increasing water supply. They also engage women in community-based conservation techniques such as rainwater harvesting, using composting toilets, and practicing home gardening techniques in order to actively engage women in work that makes a significant impact in communities. These efforts demonstrate that women are both ready to be a part of the solution and, in fact, need to be a part of the solution to tackle water security issues in a large-scale, long-term sustainable manner.

Water activists viewed last week’s UN WWF as an important step toward encouraging all stakeholders to set commitments at the Rio+20 Conference in June on sustainable development that promote more publically-owned and community-led water management. To achieve this goal, public and private solutions will need to integrate their efforts and create case-specific approaches toward water management in response to nuances in gender, levels of urbanization, specifics of water demand, and other factors. Engaging women in water use management is one sure way to speed up the process.

Kourtnii S. Brown is a program associate for The Asia Foundation’s Environment Programs in San Francisco. She can be reached at kbrown@asiafound.org. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual author and not those of The Asia Foundation.

Climate change combined with rapid population growth and urbanization is placing intense pressure on South Asia’s most precious resource: water. Per capita water availability in the region has decreased by 70 percent since 1950, according to the Asian Development Bank. Compounding the problem, rainfall intensity and variability make South Asia highly susceptible to floods, droughts, and disasters. Over the last decade, devastating floods have displaced millions of people in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Changing rainfall patterns and retreating glaciers are expected to further exacerbate the situation in the years ahead.

South Asia is home to three of the most densely populated river basins in the world – the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra – which support an estimated 700 million people.

South Asia is home to three of the most densely populated river basins in the world – the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra – which support an estimated 700 million people. The basins straddle national borders, making them a natural source of contention between neighboring countries. As water scarcity intensifies, effective management of these river basins is increasingly critical to long-term peace, stability, and economic development in the region, which houses a third of the world’s poor. Tragically, nationalism and narrow technical approaches to water management hinder this objective.

Although numerous bilateral treaties and agreements that govern water sharing and infrastructure development in the region do exist, deep historical mistrust and chronic political tensions surround their implementation. Nations accuse each other of controlling and damming rivers without regard for international impact, or of monopolizing water flows, often without verifiable data or analyses. Usually it is India – both an upper and lower riparian with a stake in all major river basins in the region – that neighboring countries paint as the villain, although nationalism and self-interest cut both ways.

In 2010, Pakistan filed a case in the International Court of Arbitration accusing India’s Kishanganga hydropower project on the Neelum River in Kashmir of violating the Indus Water Treaty of 1960. The court issued an interim order allowing India to continue work at the site, but the dispute continues, adding to tensions between the two countries. In September 2011, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s state visit to Bangladesh was undermined by his failure to sign a new accord governing the Teesta River and its tributaries, which millions of farmers in West Bengal and Bangladesh depend upon for irrigation. India’s Farakka Barrage across the Ganges River has been a sore point in Indo-Bangladesh relations ever since its completion in 1975.

Similarly, the Kosi River is a major source of friction between Nepal and India, with leaders and politicians on both sides of the border locked in an unconstructive blame game. Highly prone to seasonal variations in river flow and sediment charge, the Kosi is notorious for devastating downstream floods. In 2008, Nepal and India suffered one of the worst river disasters in their histories when the Kosi River breached its embankment, flooding vast areas of both countries. An estimated 50,000 Nepalis and 3.5 million Indians were affected.

Ismail Serageldin, a former vice president of the World Bank, presciently noted that “many of the wars of the 20th century were about oil, but wars of the 21st century will be over water.” A U.S. Senate report issued last year, “Avoiding Water Wars: Water Scarcity and Central Asia’s Growing Importance for Stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” echoes this view. Its authors argue that water scarcity is fueling “dangerous tensions” with negative implications for security and stability in the region. They stress the need for better sharing of data among countries and more holistic approaches to water management.

Both official and public discourse on water in South Asia tends to be highly political, driven more by national and local interests than shared regional concerns. Water management itself is overwhelmingly technical in its approach. Across the region, scientists and “hydrocrats” have dominated policy formulation and implementation for years. Information on water resources is closely guarded, with river flows sometimes considered state secrets. Social and ecological perspectives are underrepresented, and there are limited opportunities for the public to sufficiently understand issues or advocate on their own behalf.

During the 1990s, when multinational development banks supported large-scale dam construction for hydropower in South Asia, the debate on water management was enhanced through the involvement of civil society organizations that advocated for social and ecological considerations. One of the most famous cases was the World Bank-funded Arun III multipurpose hydropower project in Nepal. Following protests and an independent review by the Morse Commission, which concluded that the economic analysis of the project was flawed, benefits overstated, and the social and environmental costs understated, the World Bank pulled out of the project in 1995. The bank eventually revised its approach to large-scale dams, and collaborated with the World Conservation Union and other civil society organizations to create the World Commission on Dams in 1997.

Unfortunately, over the past decade civil society engagement on issues of transboundary water management in South Asia has declined. Governments have avoided headline-grabbing, high-cost mega-projects and settled instead for multi-faceted schemes that attract less scrutiny. Increasingly, they have privatized development rights on water and mobilized foreign investors to finance projects, circumventing the social and environmental review processes developed by the multinational banks. Local communities have few opportunities to express their voice at the policy level, leaving them to settle claims at the project level where compensation is attractive and longer-term ecological costs less understood.

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), an approach the Global Water Partnership defines as “coordinated development and management of water, land, and related resources,” can best maximize sustainable use of water resources in the region. The consideration of civil society perspectives is a vital part of this process. Input from civil society and stakeholder groups can help to address the social and ecological dimensions of water use, curb environmental degradation, and mitigate the potential for conflicts stemming from resource depletion. It can also help to reduce uncertainty in investment decisions and increase legitimacy for large-scale projects among affected communities by ensuring “buy-in” early in the decision-making process.

While research studies and data exist on the ecological and social dimensions of transboundary water management and its implications in South Asia, the information is often incomplete or inaccessible to lay audiences. Media coverage of water issues tends to be sporadic and nationalistic or locally oriented, perpetuating myths and fueling antagonism. Better public access to information can provide the basis for broader, evidence-based debate. With better training, the media can disseminate more accurate information in less provocative ways.

Effective implementation of existing governmental checks and balances can also help to ease the technocratic grip on water resource policies. Some civil society organizations have successfully used legal tools such as public interest litigation and right-to-information laws to access information. Active and frequent use of litigation to draw technical information into the public domain can gradually pressure governments to become more proactive in disclosing information.

Less nationalistic and more holistic approaches to water management are needed to achieve more gainful, sustainable, and equitable use of water resources in South Asia. Governments have made poor progress on this front, in part because the political benefits of maintaining nationalistic postures have outweighed the benefits of equitable use of shared resources. It is up to civil society groups across South Asia to challenge this dominant paradigm. Otherwise, water scarcity and related conflict will increasingly shape the region’s future.

This article is published in cooperation with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.

Nick Langton is The Asia Foundation’s country representative in India. Sagar Prasai is the Foundation’s deputy country representative in Nepal and team leader for the Foundation’s upcoming political-economy analysis of the Teesta River Basin. They can be reached at nlangton@asiafound.org and sprasai@asiafound.org. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual authors and not those of The Asia Foundation.

A bowl of rice, vegetables, and tofu is a meal that has been eaten for hundreds of years throughout Asia. It is a meal that requires approximately 571.5 liters of water to produce. And, it is a meal that is, slowly but surely, being replaced. Throughout the region, people are increasingly filling their bowls with meat and their glasses with milk. And this small change, multiplied by billions of eaters, has large implications for Asia’s future water consumption. That same meal, substituting beef for tofu, requires 2,183.5 liters of water to produce.

Once Asia's main food staple, rice consumption is declining, while meat and dairy consumption is rising dramatically. Photo by Karl Grobl.

Asia has the highest annual water withdrawal of all the world’s regions. The blistering pace of both demographic and economic growth in countries such as China and India has brought with it a rapid rise in water usage, which has more than tripled in the last 50 years.

Where is this water going?  Overwhelmingly, Asia’s freshwater is being turned into food. A modest 10 percent is used to fuel the region’s booming industry; and a mere 6 percent is put to domestic use, including all drinking, washing, and cooking. The rest, almost 84 percent of all water withdrawn in Asia each year, goes to agriculture, compared to 71 percent for the world. The majority of this water goes to cultivating rice, long the region’s staff of life.

But the role of this centuries-old staple food is changing: as Asia gets richer, it is becoming less rice-reliant. As the region’s rural population shrinks, and cities and pocketbooks swell, the traditional diet of poor rural farmers is being replaced by a new diet of middle-class urbanites. Rice consumption per capita is declining, while meat and dairy consumption is rising dramatically. From 1980 to 2005, consumption of both meat and milk in East and Southeast Asia nearly quadrupled, and consumption of eggs rose almost six-fold. The trend is most striking in China, where milk consumption jumped from approximately 2 kilograms/capita/year to 23 kilograms/capita/year, and egg consumption from 3 to 20 kilograms/capita/year. And this trend is expected to continue, with Asia’s demand for meat products to reach 51 kilograms/capita/year.

This drastic change in diet is putting pressure on Asia’s already-scant water resources. It takes about 10 times as much water, approximately 15,000 liters, to produce one kilogram of beef as it does to produce one kilogram of rice, and approximately 135 liters of water to produce eggs, versus 50.5 liters to produce beans. Asia will have over 1 billion more mouths to feed by 2050, and it is projected that the region’s food and feed demand will double in the next 40 years. In order to meet projected dietary demands, South Asia would require 57 percent more water for irrigated agriculture, and East Asia 70 percent more, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). International experts agree this is an impossible scenario. Many areas of South and East Asia are already reaching alarming levels of water scarcity, and water demand for cities and industry is increasingly overriding water demand for agriculture.

The region, therefore, faces a formidable challenge:  the need to grow more food for more people with less water on the same amount of land.

How will the region ensure enough water to feed its growing and changing population, and overcome the increased threat to water availability due to climate change?  Clearly the solution is not for Asia simply to return to its primarily vegetarian roots; nor to halt urbanization and cap water flow to industry. The solution lies in recognizing water for what it really is – a finite, and critical natural resource – and enacting management and conservation policies accordingly.

Broadly, such measures should include:  1)  valuing water as a precious resource, while ensuring that all citizens have access to enough water for basic daily needs; 2)  improved regulation of water withdrawal to prevent water waste; 3) updating irrigation systems, many of which are outdated and inefficient; 4)  tapping into the great potential of water recycling and re-use; 5)  focusing on rainwater management; 6)  and educating citizens on water scarcity, responsible water use, and water conservation.

The above reforms are obviously not easy, nor are they new. But Asia has proven itself up to the challenge of change. In order to ensure that ever growing numbers of Asia’s population have access to the new middle class staples of meat and milk, Asia must recognize and adapt to the limits of natural resources.

Sierra Ewert is a program associate for The Asia Foundation in San Francisco. She can be reached at sewert@asiafound.org. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual author and not those of The Asia Foundation.

Tomorrow is World Water Day. Tragically, by the end of the day, 4,300 children somewhere in the world will have died because of contaminated water and poor sanitation. That’s one child every 20 seconds. This is an appalling statistic, but still represents a marked improvement from 12 years ago when a child died every eight seconds. The United Nations (UN) announced earlier this month that the world had reached the Millennium Development Goal target of halving the number of people without access to clean drinking water, five years ahead of the 2015 deadline. That’s good news, but it’s not the whole story.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 783 million people, about one for every 10 on the planet, have no access to safe drinking water, and 2.5 billion people – more than a third of humanity – still lack proper sanitation. The problem is particularly acute in Asia, where more than half of the 2.5 billion people without improved sanitation live. On the positive side, of the almost 2 billion people who have gained access to safe drinking water in the past decade, 47 percent live in China and India; testament to both nations’ economic growth and improved standard of living.

Agriculture consumes a massive 71 percent of global freshwater use. Many Asian farmers are accustomed to free or cheap water. This has led to a system of wasteful consumption throughout the region. However, Asian governments are reluctant to raise water prices because they either are wary of angering people who have grown used to having cheap access to this precious resource, or want to continue to provide access to the poorest of the poor who otherwise could not afford it. In many cases, governments are not able to effectively regulate water. Many farmers in India and Pakistan, for example, can readily tap into groundwater, often illegally, further depleting groundwater resources and access to water for others.

It takes about 1,000 tons of water to produce one ton of rice, Asia’s main food staple. According to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), farmers will need an additional 19 percent of water by 2050 to meet the demands for food, much of it in regions already experiencing water scarcity. The FAO estimates that food output must rise 70 percent by 2050 to feed a world population expected to grow from 7 to 9.3 billion. This demand is foreboding in light of the projected decrease in water availability in the region due to climate change.

Moreover, increasing urbanization is also causing city dwellers and factories to compete with farmers for increasingly scarce water. Many Asian cities, where 56 percent of the continent’s population is expected to live by 2025, will be challenged to provide ever larger number of residents with the sanitation and safe water they will need. The UN and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have called for the more efficient use of waste water, 80 percent of which is currently not collected or treated.

Over time, water will have increasingly important national security implications. Nearly half of the world’s land surface consists of river basins shared by more than one country. But the situation is particularly acute in Asia, the world’s most water-stressed continent. Asia has 47 percent of the global average of fresh water per person, but also has 65 percent of the world’s population. Although China ranks fourth in global fresh water reserves, it possesses the second lowest per-capita water supply of any nation in the world.

As we mark World Water Day, it is important to underscore that greater public awareness is needed to create policies, strategies, and incentives in improving management of water resources. Local non-government and community-based organizations can play a crucial role by supporting farmers, urban dwellers, and factories to recognize the value of water and encourage more efficient usage. Given the threat of water scarcity, governments should implement fair and equitable water pricing policies that also encourage water resource conservation. Governments that share waterways should negotiate agreements with neighboring countries to share water fairly, and not waste it. Clearly, this is easier said than done.

This will require nations – both developing and developed – to look at water both as a national security issue, and as a natural resource and conservation issue. Unlike oil, where there is the potential to develop alternative energy resources, we cannot live without water.

John J. Brandon is director of Regional Cooperation Programs for The Asia Foundation in Washington, D.C. He is a member of a water management security in Asia study group, organized by the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, which has convened meetings over the past year in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Japan. He can be reached at jbransdon@asiafound-dc.org. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the individual author and not necessarily those of The Asia Foundation.