Water flux and facts

Abstract

Any environmental imbalance directly affects sustainable development. Most of the issues on various dimensions of sustainable development directly or directly depend on the availability of water. Pre-existing tensions can be exacerbated by resource scarcity or invite new ones, and water is no exception. Within a decade, water could overshadow oil as a scarce and precious commodity at the centre of conflict and peacemaking. Hence, the then UN Sectary General Boutros Boutros Ghali (Egypt’s Minister of State for foreign affairs in 1985) warned that the next war in the Middle East will be fought over water, not politics. The already evident symptoms of an imminent environmental crisis like severe water resource depletion and ecological degradations at all levels is not just ecological phenomena alone. While the persisting demographic pressure on natural resources and the increasing reliance on resource/energy-intensive technologies have aggravated the environmental crisis, the real cause of the problem lies in the very world view and the meaning of development underlying a purely material growth-cantered development paradigm and its attendant social, economic, and legal policies and institutions. Unless the present development paradigm and its associated institutions and policies are reoriented to focus on the neglected ecological and equity dimensions of human development, the environmental crisis will eventually culminate in still more diabolic economic, social, and even, political crises. It is with this kind of diagnosis, sustainable development has been proposed as an alternative development paradigm. Adoption and implementation of the new paradigm of sustainable development, i.e., development that simultaneously ensures ecological security, economic efficiency, and social equity, demands far-reaching changes in two major directions. First, to have an altogether new concept of development rooted in the principles of co-existence and mutual dependence on the one hand, and ethical commitments in man-nature relationships on the other hand. Envisioning sustainable development is a strategy to achieve immediate economic gains while maintaining indefinitely the productive potential of the renewable resource base. The main focus is on the development, management and utilization of water resources in harmony with environmental conservation and the concept of sustainability.