YEMEN: Rapid urbanisation threatening capital’s water supplies [Archives:2007/1078/Health]
August 20 2007
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Sanaa today extends well beyond the ancient clay walls. In 1975, the city's population was 135,000. Today it is over two million and, according to government estimates, growing at a rate of 7 to 8 percent a year. At around 3.5 percent, Yemen's population growth rate is one of the highest in the world today.
Over 70 percent of Yemen's 21 million inhabitants still live in rural areas, but rapid urbanisation is fast emerging as a considerable challenge for this largely desert nation – one of the driest, poorest and least developed countries in the world.
Sanaa's rapid growth, fuelled by a boom in investment, construction and a steady influx of labour migrants from rural areas, has not been without consequences: Many migrants live in misery, face disease, and lack the most basic requirements for a dignified life, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) reports. The municipal authorities are increasingly unable to provide basic services.
While the provision of health, education, and housing services, are a problem, it is the rapid depletion of the city's already scarce water resources that is putting its very survival in jeopardy.
“Probably the city will become a ghost town,” Dr Mohammed Al-Hamdi, deputy minister of Yemen's recently established Ministry of Water and Environment, told IRIN in Sanaa. “You can't imagine life without water, and without water, people will just have to leave and migrate somewhere else,” he predicted.
His admission is telling, but one often echoed by senior members of the government and indicative of a real crisis at hand.
“The root problem is water,” Abdul-Ghani Jamil, deputy governor of Sanaa Governorate told IRIN. “Without water there is no life, making all these other issues secondary.”
Nationwide water scarcity
Sanaa's water problems are indicative of those of the nation – only magnified.
Yemen faces a chronic imbalance in the population-water resources equation as a result of its increasing population and absolute scarcity of water resources.
The National Water Resources Authority (NWRA) estimates that the total renewable freshwater resources for the country are just 2,500 million cubic metres (MCM) a year, of which 1,500 MCM is surface water and 1,000 MCM groundwater.
At the same time, however, experts say current demand is 3,200 MCM a year – a gap of 700 MCM.
NWRA Deputy Chairman Abdullah Al-Dhari said the average Yemeni's share of renewable water resources was155 cu. m. per year – one tenth the average of most Middle Eastern countries and one fiftieth of the world average.
As the population grows that share shrinks further, the government official told IRIN, warning: “In the years to come only 80 cu. m. will be available.”
But in Sanaa that reality is closer than ever: Water levels are already dropping by six metres a year in the Sanaa basin, the NWRA said.
The last aquifers
So serious is the deficit in the city's total renewable freshwater resources that the authorities are now digging deeper into the city's ancient strategic aquifers – resulting in lower water tables and declining water quality.
“The water is becoming more salinised,” Qahtan Al-Asbahi, a UNDP programme officer with the NWRA conceded, leading to a rise in health problems, particularly kidney ailments.
“We're using well beyond what we can,” Al-Asbahi said, citing a commonly held view of water experts that water would run out in 15 to 20 years in Sanaa as a result of urbanisation, water scarcity, waste, and poor management.
In most countries in the region, wells rarely go deeper than 200 metres, while in Sanaa it is not uncommon today for wells to reach aquifers 600-1,200 metres down.
“These are the last aquifers. We don't have any more water resources after that,” Al-Asbahi said. “This is where the water stops.”
Buying water
But for many residents in the city, the water stopped long ago.
“I have been living here for two years and have always had to buy my water from outside,” Haider Mohammed Alsady, a 21-year-old literature student, complained, pointing to the waterless tap in his simple two-room Sanaa flat.
Only 15 to 25 percent of residents drink from the city's official network. The rest buy from an army of private water vendors that roam the streets selling water from the city's private wells, as well as from nearby villages.
The fact that water and sewage pipes run in parallel with each other means that a similar proportion of people are not hooked up to the city's fledgling sewage system either.
“Water supply is linked to sanitation. There is no getting around that,” the UNDP's Al-Asbahi said, noting that many of the large-scale housing projects now springing up in the city have their own water resource systems as well as sewage systems.
Future strategies
The debate over how to tackle the city's water crisis continues. The government has raised the possibility of changing the country's economic base so that people switch away from water-based activities to non-water based activities. But this is politically very sensitive in a country where 50 percent of the population works in agriculture.
A series of dams to collect rainwater have been mooted, but there are questions as to whether the ambitious multi-million dollar plan could ever get off the ground.
“Unfortunately, the cost of this is very high,” Al-Hamdi said.
Feasibility studies show that a dam near Sanaa would provide the city with a sustainable seven MCM of water a year, while at the same time eight MCM was currently being lost in the irrigation system, he said.
“We could use the money for the dam to improve the irrigation system instead, resulting in greater savings over the long term,” he suggested, stressing the need for integrated water management, including wiser water usage and irrigation efficiency.
As the debate goes on, time is running out: “This capital city is under threat of being the first in the world to run out of water,” the deputy minister said bluntly. “And we don't want to be famous for that.”
Source: IRIN
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