Spanish festival’s serious side: scarce water

With its cable cars and stylish architecture, Expo Zaragoza 2008 is the pride of this northeastern Spanish city, offering a feel-good theme of water and sustainable development until mid-September.

Boisterous summertime crowds pack sprawling exhibits showcasing European rivers and lakes and Middle Eastern oases. But there is a sobering message behind the international fair: a growing demand for water and the effects of climate change are making water an increasingly scarce and fought-after resource, experts say - not just in the Middle East or Africa, but also in countries like Spain.

“National and regional governments in Spain have a problem when it comes to water - primarily because of the intensifying competition among agriculture, tourism and urban development, especially along coastal areas,” said Kevin Parris, an economist at the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. “And also climate change, which suggests the problem of water scarcity, will increase in the next 20 to 30 years.”

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Source: The San Francisco Chronicle

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German water is most expensive on the planet

British gardeners infuriated by hosepipe bans despite seemingly year-round rain can take some comfort, after a new survey revealed the situation is worse in Germany.

Germans pay more for their water than anybody else on the planet according to the study. At £1.50 per 1000 litres, prices are four times as much as in America, and twice as much as in parched Australia. Britons on average pay £1.18 for the same amount, a little less than the Belgians.

As the Berlin summer was interrupted by yet more showers on Monday, German water users reacted to the news with grumbles familiar the length and breadth of the UK.

“We have masses of water,” wrote one reader to Die Welt newspaper. “It’s just that the water companies let everything leak into the rivers. Germans are being ripped off because our politicians are useless. Everything has been run wrong for 20 years.” The survey was produced by energy consultants NUS, which monitors electricity, gas, oil and water prices every quarter.

Senior energy analyst at NUS, Bruce Blazey, said that British customers still have a lot to complain about.

“In the UK it seems to be constantly raining and yet the reservoirs seem to dry out so quickly,” he said. “You have towns flooded the whole time and yet hosepipe bans are in force.

“There’s just not enough being spent on infrastructure, and the pipelines are just really bad. Thames Water is dreadful. They blame it on the wartime damage - that nothing’s been really properly repaired since the 1940s.”

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Source: The Telegraph

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Olive oil consumption leading to ’serious environmental problem’

UNITED KINGDOM-Parts of Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal are turning into deserts and suffering water shortages because of the intense olive farming that has developed in the area, according to The Ecologist magazine.

The magazine says trees are densely packed, planted in massive irrigated lowland plains and harvested by machines that shake the trunks, which uses more water and chemicals than traditional farms on upland terraces.

It says: “To meet this new appetite mass-market brands are produced intensively, so supermarkets can sell it in high volumes at lower prices. Demand for cheap, mass-produced oil is making it a struggle for the smaller, traditional farms to be economically viable.”

Between 2000 and 2005, UK olive oil sales have risen by 39 per cent and more money is spent on it than all other cooking oils. A World Wildlife Fund report from 2001 said the more intensive plantations are of “little or no conservation value, and create environmental problems - desertification, pollution from agrichemicals, depletion of water resources.”

Guy Beaufoy, a consultant on agricultural and environmental policies in Europe said the situation was “an environmental catastrophe”.

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Source: The Telegraph

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Epidemic threat to Serbs due to water shortage in Kosmet

KOSMET, SERBIA-Due to weeks-long water shortage in Majority Serb villages of Susica and Novi Badovac, in central Kosmet, there is the threat of epidemics and humanitarian catastrophe, reports the Press Center in Gracanica.

These days the chronic water shortage has culminated. Because of the restrictions imposed by the Regional Water Supply center in Pristina, the two aforementioned villages have been without water for 20 days now, reads the communiqué.

The inhabitants are searching for the water in natural springs, kilometers away, in order to fill couple of containers, since the restrictions have included Gracanica and other villages of the central Kosmet.

The citizens have announced the blockade on the regional road Pristina-Janjevo, unless the water is provided soon.

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Source: EMPORTAL

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