More Energy, More Water

Debates on energy generation often neglect a crucial factor: water resources

As Asia’s emerging market economies continue to enjoy high levels of economic growth, their demand for energy is soaring. From the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to Indonesia, and India to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), electricity needs are increasing sharply.

In many of the region’s developing nations, the yearly rise in electricity consumption is around 5% and, in some cases, as high as 8%.

Despite the economic slowdown in big industrial powers such as the US, and the spike in oil and food prices, developing Asia is still forecast to post solid growth rates in 2008. According to the Asian Development Outlook released in April by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), developing Asian economies will grow 7.6% in 2008. The PRC’s growth rate will moderate, but still expand at a rate of 10%.

Pressure will therefore remain on expanding electricity sources for an energy-hungry region. Lao PDR, for example, is developing a profitable market in electricity exports by undertaking a massive expansion of its hydroelectric power plants system to feed the needs of its energy-deficit neighbor Thailand.

Amid the scramble to enlarge electricity generation capacity through the construction of hydropower and more traditional coal and gas-fired thermal plants, a key issue has mostly escaped the attention of regional energy and water planners.

According to the Asian Water Development Outlook, released by ADB in November 2007, the large and growing energy needs of Asian countries will likely increase the water requirements of the energy sector, including the new biofuels subsector, as well.

Electricity generation—whether through fossil fuels, alternative fuels, or nuclear plants—requires large amounts of water. This thirst could well outstrip the regional agricultural sector’s water use in years to come, as has happened in some industrial economies with strong agricultural sectors like France. Crops that produce biofuels will require ever-rising access to water. The risk of polluting surrounding water sources is high as the production process includes the use of fertilizers and pesticides.

One of the authors of the Asian Water Development Outlook, Professor Asit K. Biswas, is a world authority on water management, head of the Third World Centre for Water Management, and editor of the journal Water Resources Development.

He argues: “It will become increasingly important for planners and policy makers to concurrently consider water and energy policies, especially in terms of their symbiotic relationship: each affects and is affected by the other.”

Professor Biswas is an aggressive champion of genuinely integrated water resources management. This mantra has gained popularity since the 1980s. Yet many water authorities and water professionals in Asia and elsewhere have remained sectioned off from policy makers dealing with energy, land use, transport, the environment and climate, and social policies aimed at reducing poverty.

There are some exceptions, such as water management in Singapore. But Professor Biswas has issued a challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy among many water management specialists in national governments, regulatory authorities, and regional bodies that they can and should operate in relative isolation.

“The current and foreseeable trends indicate that water problems of the future will continue to become increasingly complex, and will become more and more interlinked with other development sectors such as agriculture, energy, industry, transportation and communication, and with social sectors such as education, the environment, health, and rural or regional development,” he says.

Unfortunately in Asia, as in other parts of the world, the rush to develop alternatives to fossil fuels as sources of energy is taking place mostly outside the policy debate about water security. The formulation of national and regional policies for energy security is rarely discussed in the same breath as water policy.

Much of the policy debate surrounding biofuels, often developed from oil harvested from palm oil plantations, stresses the environmental threat posed by deforestation for crop development.

This is one highly important factor to consider. However, much less attention in the policy and public debate has been paid to the long-term implications for water, land, and communities as forests are turned into palm oil plantations.

A good example is the push to develop crops for biofuels in Indonesia, which wants to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, create millions of jobs on bioenergy plantations, and earn export dollars from biofuel crops such as palm oil.

Indonesia is the world’s number one exporter of palm oil. It also leads nations undertaking the most rapid campaign of deforestation, legal and illegal, with almost 2 million hectares of tropical forest destroyed annually.

In 2007, Indonesia’s government announced a massive program of billions of dollars of overseas foreign investment by multinational oil and energy giants in the development of plantations for the biofuel sector.

While the public discussion of the new investment initiative centered on preventing the large-scale destruction of Indonesia's remaining forests, the other complications of the biofuel boom—including pollution of surrounding water supplies, and factoring the boom into national water policy—were neglected. The complexities can be managed; however, as the Asian Water Development Outlook noted, “As of now virtually no country has carefully analyzed the water, land, and social implications of increasing biofuel production, and then made appropriate policy decisions.”

2008 is the United Nations’ International Year of Sanitation, and according to the Japan Water Forum, Asia, like Africa, “stands at the crossroads of water and sanitation woes, which cause dire challenges to social, cultural, and economic well-being.”

Almost 700 million people in Asia and the Pacific have no access to safe drinking water, representing 63% of the world’s unserved population. Within the same area, 1.9 billion people, or 74% of the world's population, lack basic sanitation.

Even in a relatively developed Asian nation like the Philippines, according to the World Bank, almost one third of the population has no toilets. Only a small fraction of homes with toilets have sewerage pipes that transport wastewater to treatment plants.

Public health, social, and political pressures are prompting political leaders and policy makers in many developing nations to respond to the challenge by building an increasing number of wastewater and water treatment plants. But this impressive growth can only occur with a marked increase in electricity used to run the plants, interlinking the water and energy sectors even more closely.

For all the traditional separation of water and energy policy spheres, momentum is gathering in Asia to develop a region-wide policy framework for water resources management.

At last November’s inaugural Asia-Pacific Water Summit, regional leaders met for the first time in Beppu, Japan, and agreed to prioritize the development of a coordinated regional approach to solve the region’s water and sanitation problems.

Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands declared in his opening address: “Human history is intimately intertwined with water. Social and technological progress can be linked to successful attempts to live with water. Solving water problems in rural and urban contexts is one of the keys to unlocking economic growth.

“Integrated water resources management is an internationally acknowledged approach that seeks to avoid the lives lost, the money wasted, and the natural capital depleted because of decision making that did not take into account the larger ramifications of sectoral actions.” •