In particular, the report considers how the European Union and the European Parliament can increase support for non-EU countries facing problems around provision of drinking water for all citizens. Such problems often result from competing water uses and poor enabling environments and power dynamics, and where water use in one sector can have adverse impacts on others.

Currently, efforts towards ensuring that everyone in the world has access to drinking water are frustrated by competing uses between agriculture, energy, extractive and other industrial activities relying on large quantities of water resources. Because the global economy facilitates foreign activity and business in these sectors, this often has the knock-on effect of generating concerns around the local availability of water for human consumption and its quality.

In particular, the report examines the impacts of agriculture and industry on drinking water availability at household level, and considers the involvement of states and businesses in large-scale agricultural activity and industry, and the resulting impacts on the right to drinking water.

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The regulation on minimum requirements for water reuse sets out the quality of water for reuse in agricultural irrigation and the requirements for safe water reuse. Proposals put forward by the European Commission have been scrutinised by the European Parliament.

EurEau said the amended version voted on by the European Parliament’s ENVI Committee “will benefit everyone and ensure human health protection through strict water quality requirements for water reuse in agricultural irrigation”.

However, EurEau noted that it “failed to put all actors in water reuse practice at the same level of responsibility”. The trade body particularly criticised the fact that, despite the end-user being the one asking for the water to be treated and delivered, they have few responsibilities under the current amended text.

Bertrand Vallet, policy officer for water services with EurEau, said: “We are in favour of the water reuse project approach where the initiator of the project – the one who needs the water – takes responsibility for it, working with all the stakeholders along the way. This helps guarantee the safety of the water being reused, from the treatment to the point of use. The European Parliament’s proposal omits the permit for the last actor in this chain, and puts the administrative burden and the risk assessment on the shoulder of the reclamation facility operator.”

Vallet continued: “We can produce reclaimed water of the highest quality, but if the user is not using it properly, there is no point doing it.

“We see a vast improvement in the European Parliament’s proposal, but we hope the Council will facilitate its implementation by introducing the water reuse project in it and a permit for the end-user.”

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Rapidly drying aqueducts mean there are progressively fewer sources of drinking water available, which is forcing people are dig up wells up to 250 meters deep.

United Nations data show that in 2018, more than twenty provinces in Afghanistan have suffered or continue to experience the effects of drought. The UN estimates that 2.5 million people need assistance in the affected areas.

Officials from the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Rehabilitation on Monday have been summoned to parliament to address the drought, which it claims is the result of climate change, a global threat to which Afghanistan is proving increasingly vulnerable.

Mujib Rahman Karimi, Minister of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD), told parliament that measures are being taken to restore agricultural resources. These include provisions of fodder and distribution and storage of wheat, and the creation of water dams and reservoirs.

“As far as I know, we have [already] dug 768 semi-deep wells in different parts of Afghanistan,” said Karimi.

Hashmat Ghafoor deputy Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock, said all three ministries must devise plans that cover the next eight months, detailing procedures to roll out of emergency infrastructure in the case of a repeat drought in 2019.

Afghanistan has experienced drought since 1995, when the Taliban, a fundamentalist militia, began seizing and occupying precious natural resources. Years of conflict has displaced populations that continue to live in poor conditions and depend on low incomes away from their farmlands. Agriculture has been especially affected by low levels of rain and snowfall, which has caused multiple annual crops to fail.

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The scheme, named the Catchment Sensitive Farming, was launched on 18 September through a three-way partnership involving Defra, the Environment Agency and Natural England.

According to the UK government, farming produces around 88 percent of the country’s ammonia gas emissions. These emissions can travel long distances, forming harmful particulates with other pollutants that damage environmental and human health.

“As custodians of the land, farmers have an important role to play in protecting the environment. But reducing ammonia emissions can also bring real business benefits,” said Bob Middleton, programme manager of the scheme.

Farmers expected to benefit from the assistance will use the Code of Good Agricultural Practice (COGAP) for Reducing Ammonia Emissions to achieve more sustainable targets. Specialists working as part of the newly-funded team will provide training events, tailored advice, individual farm visits and support with grant applications, all funded by the programme.

The amount of nitrogen lost to ammonia emissions in the UK amounts to £138 million per year. The scheme is also designed to save farmers money by reducing the cost incurred through emissions and increasing the value of their fertiliser.

George Eustice, UK Farming Minister, commented that the specialist team will “advise farmers on steps they can take, such as improved slurry handling facilities, and grants are available where investment is required”.

The UK’s government’s Clean Air Strategy has been welcomed by the World Health Organization, with the new scheme following a landmark Agriculture Bill to set out ambitious proposals to protect the UK environment.

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FAO and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) have released the report entitled More People, More Food, Worse Water? on behalf of the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems.

Its aim is to flag the fact that agriculture causes more ecological damage in many countries than human settlements or industry.

“Industrial agriculture is among the leading causes of water pollution, especially in most high-income countries and many emerging economies, where it has overtaken contamination from settlements and industries as the major factor in the degradation of inland and coastal waters,” the report states.

Pesticide accumulation in water that is later carried down the food chain threatens human health, and has led to the widespread ban on certain pesticides, including DDT, a common insect control chemical once used in the United States until its cancellation in 1972. DDT was also banned in China in 1983, but is still used in India.

The report also adds that nitrate used in farming ranks among the most common contaminants found in groundwater aquifers. To tackle the problem, the report recommends a wider range of data-driven outcomes, including data collection that can help develop water quality models and produce better water policies.

Authors of report conclude that the report 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is designed to shape policies and strategies around the reduction of water pollution, in particular those that are based around SDG target 6.3. FAO launched the report at the High-Level International Conference on the International Decade for Action ‘Water for Sustainable Development’ 2018-2028 in June 2018 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

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Around 600 million people suffer under high to extreme water stress, and two hundred thousand die every year due to inadequate access to safe water, the institution argues in its latest report. Within 12 years, the growth of cities and subsequent demand for water is likely to reach twice the current supply and could wipe as much as 6 percent off India’s GDP.

“The crisis is only going to get worse,” NITI Aayog states.

Around the same number of people – 50 percent of the Indian population as a whole – live in the populous northern states of UP, Bihar, Rajasthan and Haryana, among others, all of which pose a management risk for the country.

The National Commission for Integrated Water Resource Development of MoWR claims that the total water available remains lower than the projected demand for 2050 (currently around 1,180 billion cubic metres).

NITI Aayog’s report was produced using data from The Composite Water Management Index (CWMI), which is a collection of country-wide data on groundwater restoration, irrigation management, on-farm water use, rural and urban drinking water supply and water policy frameworks. The think tank says the tool could promote competitiveness among Indian states to improve their performance in the corresponding areas.

The highest risk states in the north account for 20 to 30 percent of India’s agricultural output, yet struggle with declining groundwater levels which policy is slow to address. This poses a food security risk as well as water scarcity. In addition, around 80 percent of India’s water is used for agricultural production, underscoring the severity of the shortage.

The Index has been developed in collaboration with several national and state stakeholders. It is designed to incentivise companies to improve their water management and governance systems and increase federal cooperation in the sector through centre-state collaboration in its annual update.

States shown to perform better in water management include Gujarat, which came top in the report’s rankings. Madhya Pradesh in central India and Andhra Pradesh in the south came next on the list. Of the 24 states assessed, 15 showed an improved score since 2017. The north-Eastern and Himalayan states of Meghalaya, Sikkim, and Tripura were among the top five performers.

“There is an imminent need to deepen our understanding of our water resources and usage and put in place interventions that make our water use efficient and sustainable,” the report said.

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The rules aim to meet new UK obligations under the European Union’s Water Framework Directive. Growers will now be expected to test pollution risks in soil every five years before planting, as well as account for the slope of the land and proximity to fresh and coastal wetlands. Farmers will also be encouraged use organic fertilisers to reduce ammonia pollution, using a £12 million grant from the UK government.

“Farmers must manage their land responsibly, using fertilisers and pesticides with much greater care — all the more so as the government considers new payments that increasingly reward environmental and public benefits,” said Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the Environment Agency In February 2018 the Environment Agency responsible for enforcing the new rules published a report stating that agriculture remains the main cause of water pollution.

It said that while water quality has improved overall since the early 1990s, only 14 percent of rivers reached “good overall ecological status” in 2016. This was found to be the result of high levels of phosphorus residue transfers from farmland and sewage systems. Groundwater had also deteriorated, with less than half showing healthy chemical consistency.

“There are still far too many serious pollution incidents which damage the local environment, threaten wildlife and, in the worst cases, put the public at risk,” Boyd added. The UK government has a 25-year environmental plan to rehabilitate three-quarters of the country’s waters to their natural state. It is expected that the new rules announced by DEFRA will be instrumental in achieving this goal.

Thérèse Coffey, the UK environment minister said the new rules would “help improve water quality, set a level playing field for all farmers, help businesses save money from better resource efficiency and improve their resilience”.

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FAO’s report maps 184 peer-reviewed empirical research articles chosen for their focus on the linkages between these phenomena. The authors say the aim of the report is to provide “a diversity of water stress-migration relationships across different contexts”. “Increased water stress can cause people to decide to migrate.

There also appears to be a consensus that increasing mean temperatures are correlated with, and are thought to be a cause of, increased water stress,” the report states. This link reveals another connection pointing to the the role of rising temperatures as result of climate change. Many of the studies show that this has a particular impact on water stress affecting agricultural land.

One 2004 study showed that “short-term rainfall deficits increase the risk of long-term internal migration to other rural areas and decrease the risk of short-term distant migrations”. Heat waves were said to decrease international mobility among certain populations, such as Burkina Faso in west Africa. Food insecurity affecting regions such as Senegal was also shown to have adverse affects on cross-border migration.

Some of the reviewed articles argue for policies and programmes that seek to reduce migration through investment in sustainable agriculture and better rural living standards. “In water-stressed areas, experience suggests that such policies and programmes can both slow rural-urban migration and reduce the incentive for people to attempt to move across international borders out of desperation rather than out of choice.”

The report warns that policies such as India’s Sons of the Soil movement in 2015, which attempt to accommodate migrants moving from one drought-affected area of the country to another relatively stable area, can cause friction if these do not meet the needs of both the migrant and host communities. “While this is only one case study, it highlights a causal pathway where natural disasters and, possibly, adverse climate change impacts in one area can lead to violence in another,” the report says.

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The Forum addressed one of the region’s most ecologically complex and politically sensitive issues, and elevated groundwater on the foreign policy front, leaving India and its neighbours open to multilateral engagements.

“All who came, did so with an open mind to engage and learn from each other,” said Sushmita Mandal, IWA’s India Programme Manager and one of the report’s editors. “It was an opportunity that made the issue of groundwater visible. The timing was critical, as the region was reeling under the impacts of drought, poor monsoons, and improper management of available resources in the summer of 2016.”

How reliant is South Asia? Consider that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh together pump almost half of the world’s groundwater used for irrigation. Groundwater supports the livelihoods of 60-80 percent of the population, and has, as during the Green Revolution, helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

Yet groundwater has also been undervalued and overexploited. Excessive, intensive, and unregulated use has resulted in dry wells and declining water tables. Depletion itself can be fixed. But related land subsidence, saline intrusion, or contamination from arsenic, fluoride, sewage, effluent and chemicals may be too costly or impossible to reverse.

The 100-page synthesis is comprehensive, but more valuable than its words are the unique process and diverse people who spoke them. In a thirsty region often known for quarrelling over shared water resources and transboundary basins, the gathering was marked by mutual respect and active engagement.

The Forum provided the first transnational meeting of its kind, a platform to address groundwater management and governance. By generating broad consensus that there is scope to engage, interact and learn from each other, the new report provides a stable foundation for the next.

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In the first stage, the Sahara Forest Project aims to produce up to 130 tonnes of organic vegetables per year from just 7 acres of previously deemed ‘unusable’ land. The full scale of the project is set to reach 490 acres in the coming years.

“This is one of the most technically complex and satisfying projects we’ve had the pleasure to work on,” said Tom Bentham, Senior Partner at Max Fordham, an engineering firm collaborating with the Sahara Forest Project. “We’ve collaborated with experts across many countries and disciplines to bring this project to fruition. The salt water and desert environments are both testing on their own; when put together they create one of the harshest environments there is for engineering components.”

Max Fordham carried out research into technical aspects of the project including thermodynamic analysis of the greenhouse (to provide optimum growing conditions for crops with minimum resource input), desalination techniques, and the potential climatic effects of adding moisture to desert air.

The research included building and operating an experimental rig in the Qatari desert, to verify conclusions in the field. This culminated in the development of a mathematical computer model of the entire Sahara Forest Project system, which Max Fordham and SFP then used to investigate resource flows through the system and projected investment costs and returns.

“Jordan has a lot of sunlight, it has a lot of desert, it has sea water, it has CO2,” said Joakim Hauge, SFP Project Director. “That is what we need to produce food, water and renewable energy.”

The second stage of the collaboration was focused on the engineering design of the Sahara Forest Project system, firstly for the Pilot Project in Qatar, which opened in 2012 and operated for a year, then more recently for the larger launch station opened in Jordan. Max Fordham designed the saltwater cooling system for the greenhouse, as well as the services infrastructure, which joins up and enables the different energy and growing technologies, which comprise the SFP system.

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