I’m working in Panama at the moment, looking at a number of water and effluent treatment plants. (More accurately, I’m stuck here – inside a Covid-19 related cordon sanitaire!)
But anyway, fairly early on in the job, I discovered that my normal rules of thumb for water use per head were wildly out for Panama and it made me think about how and why they use so much compared to other parts of the world.
Panama, it turns out, is in the world super-league of water wastage, even when leaving aside the enormous quantity which is used by the canal. It may not be quite up to the standards of the UAE (where they get through more than 550 litres per head per day) but up there nonetheless.
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There are regional variations in water use based on climate and degree of economic development, but other Central and South Americans on average consume less water than we do in the UK – only around 100 litres of water per person a day – whilst Panamanians use 365.
The problem seems to be that the Panamanians see themselves as water-rich, and this is culturally important to them. They have a carnival in the early part of the year, at which conspicuous water waste is a key feature. It’s not just water fights with balloons and buckets; tankers hose the crowds down.
Cultural issues also seem to be at the heart of high consumption in another country I have spent a fair bit of time in: Qatar. Native Qataris get their tap water for free, and this clearly influences how they use it.
I know it’s really hot in Qatar, but in my experience, people spend most of their time in aircon, and it’s a dry heat, unlike Panama. You don’t need three showers and three changes of clothes a day.
To return to Panama, on top of all that personal water use there is the canal, which most people do not realise is actually more of a bridge than a canal. That is, it takes ships up to a freshwater lake and back down again, running on freshwater from the highlands.
I’m not sure we can call something which represents 40% of their national economy a waste of water, but it certainly uses it – each ship transit uses 202,000 m3 of water, and they are now running low.
Panama is at the tip of the spear of climate change. Temperatures have risen by over 1° C in the region of the Panama Canal over the last few years, and there has been an extended drought. The lakes are not filling up, and evaporation losses are higher than before. Events are moving faster than culture can keep up with.
On my way out to site on my current trip, I noticed the signs of numerous small undergrowth fires by the side of the road, and more generally a parched appearance in places which was not evident the last time I came.
This is supposedly the dry season here, though I’m working in the rainforest, which lives up to its name. It’s either raining, about to rain, or it just rained.
I guess a lot more of Panama used to be like this before development, so you can see how they got the idea that they aren’t short of water, but it’s patchy and, in common with many countries, where it’s used doesn’t match where it falls.
This is the case even in the UK, where Essex is officially semi-arid and has a desalination plant, working on the retreating (but still salty) Thames tide. This is a very expensive way to make drinking water, usually only used in counties which have no other option and/or with locally cheap energy. The water they waste in Qatar is desalinated, powered by (currently) plentiful Qatari gas. Few other nations can afford to waste such water.
Australia, the driest continent, has related problems. People don’t live where the rain falls, and they recycle very little of the rain that does fall. Droughts and fires, as we all know, are becoming increasingly commonplace, and they are considering an approach used in another place I have worked – Singapore – direct reuse as drinking water. Again, the major barrier here is cultural, not technical. Singapore actually brands its recycled water “NEWater”, rather than “filtered sewage”.
There is an old trope that the water Londoners drink has been through six people already, on the basis that far more water is added to the Thames as treated sewage and removed to make drinking water than the natural flow of the river.
Whilst this is an exaggeration, the Thames does have a high and increasing proportion of treated sewage, and it is used as a source for many drinking water plants. Why is no one other than Greenpeace excited about this? It seems that passing the water through a river washes away customer concerns about its source.
So, all over the world, it seems that a key barrier to less wasteful use of water is cultural, but I’ll have to leave that to the marketing department. Technically the issues can be resolved, but imposing cultural change is another matter – something which people and governments are now increasingly aware of, in our new covid-dominated world.
