Adaptation to Water Scarcity
“Water scarcity?- Anyone have idea what it is all about? Just imagine that you are having a good shower after a long tiring day and in the midst suddenly no water flow from a shower. Doesn’t it a nightmare? Yes, this could happen to us if we not start saving water from now!”
Commonly, water scarcity is defined as a situation when water availability in a country or in a region is below 1000m3/person/year.
Do you realize, that water scarcity is one of the major problem faced by communities globally? The lack of access to water has major impacts on people’s well-being. Lack of reach to safer drinking water and sanitation, combined with poor personal hygiene, causes big health impacts, particularly through diarrhoeal diseases, estimated to cost the lives of 2.18 million people, three-quarters of whom are children younger than 5 years old, annually, and an annual global burden of disease measured as 82 million disability adjusted life years.
So how we going to adapt ourselves to this crucial phenomena?
Yes, water markets are one of the new and popular tool in the fight against increasing water scarcity problem. A voluntary exchange will be made possible between interested buyers and sellers of water rights. Besides that, water reform which is already implemented in Australia since 1994 is another important way to provide an effective framework for confronting water scarcity issue.
Following principle can help communities towards adaptation to water scarcity effectively:
· Understanding on how much water we have and how we use it
· Determining how much water we can take and still remain healthy rivers and secure groundwater
· Restoring over allocated systems
· Giving users clear entitlement to water
· Allowing users to trade their entitlements
· Effective water planning to protect key ecological assets
· Best practice pricing to encourage efficiency in water use
Bear in mind, most important is each individual should practices water conservation in their daily routine. Thus, proper adaptation with good practices of water usage is a must to overcome water insecurity problem globally as well as in Malaysia for make a good living in coming future.- ‘Save the water, save the world’
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