Water security

My friend, Ed Yap, was wondering in our Viber group how it can be that the water level in Angat Dam is now below minimum operating level when we are having a lot of rain these past few weeks. A possible answer is that our denuded mountains can no longer hold enough water for us to use when we need it.  We get flash floods instead.

Trees absorb rainwater and release it slowly into streams, rivers and eventually dams like Angat where we get our daily supply. Without trees, flood waters just gush down the slopes flooding our communities as it carries the topsoil as well.

Rappler’s Pia Ranada explains that “A typical tree breathes out 250 to 400 gallons of water per day through its leaves, humidifying the air. This process, called evapotranspiration, is responsible for most of the rain that falls inland, far from oceans. Thus, without trees, there is no rain and it is rain that supplies much of the freshwater we need to live.

Water is very expensive to store and distribute, as should be obvious. An expert in water told our Viber group that water security requires storage facilities which we don’t have. “I recall the World Bank estimate of water storage in the Philippines at 50 cubic meters per capita. The figures for Vietnam and Thailand are approximately 500 cum and 1500 cum.”

Not only that… it is very difficult to build the big enough sized dams we need without getting into all sorts of political problems. It has been decades since it was proposed to build the Kaliwa Dam to support Angat Dam, which is not only silted, but is on top of an active fault line. Yet, after so many decades, we are still over 95 percent dependent on Angat.

There is something more basic that was highlighted in a couple of articles by Henrylito Tacio that I came upon as one of the judges in a journalism awards contest among journalists covering agriculture and natural resources. Tacio’s article warns it is just a matter of time until the country will experience a water crisis as its watersheds continue to be destroyed.

No, it’s not dwindling land areas that pose the biggest threat to food security, it’s water shortage. The challenge, according to specialists, is to get sufficient water to produce food. Tacio quoted a number of experts on the issue:

The cutting of trees growing in watershed areas will definitely affect the water volume from aquifers. Elizea Gozun, a former DENR Secretary, said “We cannot talk of providing sustainable water to the people unless we protect the sources of the commodity – the watersheds.”

Dr. Patrick Durst, former regional forestry officer of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said the main benefit trees provide is helping to intercept precipitation and facilitate its infiltration into the soil and groundwater storage areas.

“Trees, through their leaves and branches, intercept rainfall,” the former FAO official explained. “But more importantly, healthy forests’ ground cover – organic litter, twigs, small plants and fallen leaves, among others – help trap water and hold it until it has an opportunity to soak into the ground soil.”

“In addition, roots – whether alive or decaying – provide additional pore space above that of normal soil texture for water to infiltrate into the ground. This is the reason why local springs and streams maintain a healthy flow when surrounded by protected micro-watersheds,” Durst pointed out.

Father Pedro Walpole of the Environment Science for Social Change, Inc., said that in a watershed, there is the interrelation of many resources. “There are (also) ecological services that a watershed provides, such as delivery of water as part of the water cycle, stable land-water dynamics, nutrient cycles, and a diversity of life forms,” he explained.

As such, “watershed management is not just a matter of managing water, but also of managing the land that delivers the water and coordinating the people in that management,” Fr. Walpole urged.

“Many of our watersheds have been denuded,” commented Leila C. America, a science research specialist of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST). “As a result, accelerated soil erosion, flash flooding, and drought have become more prevalent causing much destruction.”

“Watersheds provide vital resources, which include soil, water, forest range, wildlife, and minerals, Water is a key watershed resource that can be used for power generation, agriculture, industry, domestic, drinking and others.” America noted.

Tacio reports that watersheds constitute about 75 percent of the total land of 30 million hectares. The Philippines has a total of 110 proclaimed and 154 priority watersheds with a total land area of 1,376,455.10 hectares and 11,690,695 hectares, respectively.

A DENR report said that 90 percent of the 99 watershed areas in the country are “hydrologically critical” due to their degraded physical condition. Massive destruction of the once-productive forested watersheds by illegal loggers and uncontrolled land use from mining, overgrazing, agricultural expansion, and industrial utilization have contributed to water depletion.

Lester R. Brown, the president of the Washington, D.C.-based Earth Policy Institute, told Tacio in an interview that “The challenge is not to get enough water to drink, but to get enough water to produce our food.  We drink, in one form or another, perhaps four liters of water per day.  But the food we consume each day requires 2,000 liters of water to produce, or 500 times as much.”

Rice is a case in point, Tacio points out. In his book, Water: The International Crisis, Robin Clark reports that an average farmer needs 5,000 liters of water to produce one kilogram of rice.

We may be worried about Angat Dam’s ability to provide our water needs in Metro Manila, but the water situation in the rest of the country is more serious. We take for granted that we get safe potable water from our faucets most times. Outside of NCR they might as well be living in the medieval ages.

Water availability is an urgent problem. Then comes water security. Government, through the years, has done little to address these problems. And little still is being done now.

Boo Chanco’s email address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco