Water Resources Policy

By Choi Yearn-hong

Spring is coming. Spring means the dry season in the rivers, reservoirs and dams, and wildfires in the mountains in Korea. The Nakdong River's bottom is revealed. One dam in Gangwon Province cannot supply drinking water to residents. This is a critical situation in this spring. Naturally, people come to discuss the scarcity of water. Under the circumstances, the constructions of small dams or reservoirs can be proposed, but environmentalists are not supportive of the dam idea.

Any dam construction will harm the environment. Dams block the natural flow of rivers. That is why Korea and other nations in the world are seeking new environmentally friendly dams. As long as Korea lacks water, we should store more water and conserve more water for the dry seasons. How? The answer is the dam's capacity to store. There is no other choice.

The scarcity of fresh water is becoming a global problem. China, Turkey and Japan are going to build many major dams in the future. The difficulty of securing a sufficient supply of fresh water is becoming more serious in a growing number of countries. It is appalling to hear that nearly a quarter of the world's six billion people have no access to safe drinking water, while almost half lack adequate sanitation. A more chilling prediction has it that more than three billion people will suffer from water shortages by around 2025.

The United Nations has already said a water crisis is looming and predicted that by 2010 the crisis could develop into conflicts and wars. Dramatic improvements in providing, managing and saving water are urged immediately. There are already 80 countries with inadequate water supplies, and almost 40 percent of the world's population must struggle daily to try to meet their water needs, according to statistics released by the U.N.

In an effort to address the global water crisis, the Global Water Forum was held in The Hague under the theme of ``Water for the 21st Century,'' in March 2000. The conference, also aimed at enhancing public awareness of the seriousness of the situation, was attended by thousands of politicians and representative of non-governmental organizations.

What makes matters worse is that while a growing world population must meet its needs with a finite amount of water, usable supplies are being reduced by pollution from industry and sewage, waste through leaking pipes and human greed. The World Bank estimates that as much as $600 billion needs to be invested in water delivery systems.

Among countries, Korea is a fortunate nation in water. Mountains and valleys are green. However, it is not totally fortunate as we see long dry seasons. Korea has annual precipitation of 1,274mm, 1.3 times higher than the world average of 973mm. But per capita rainfall stands only at 2,755 tons, far lower than world average of 2,296 tons due to the large population size on a relatively small landmass.

The U.N. Population Action Institute (PAI) classified South Korea in a group of countries lacking adequate water supply, having a per capita supply of less than 2,000 cubic meters per year. Moreover, the situation is getting worse. Korea's per capita water supply, which stood at 1,470 cubic meters in 1993, is forecast to drop to 1,199 cubic meters in 2025. Other nations on the PAI list include Cyprus, South Africa, Morocco, Egypt and Poland.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Construction and Transportation, Korea will see a shortage of two billion tons in 2011. However, few Koreans seem to regard water shortages seriously. They have long considered abundant water for granted.

Despite the dwindling resources, Korea's per capita daily water consumption of 395 liters is the highest among the 29-member nation of the OECD. The amount stands at 296 liters in France, 132 liters in Germany, 246 liters in Denmark and 393 liters in Japan. Something is seriously wrong in the Korean consumption of water. Rather I don't trust the number. Or I would like to suggest that too much leaking in the pipeline from the water treatment plant to every house's faucet.

Water scarcity will deteriorate water quality. Environmentalists who have been advocating strong water conservation measures and steep water price hikes oppose the dam construction. South Korea needs dam construction, water conservation and water price hikes at the same time.

Agricultural water consumption is almost half of all water consumption, so agricultural water conservation and price hikes are necessary, but they are extremely sensitive policy suggestions, because farmer's income is just about half of urban dwellers. Water price actualization is nevertheless badly needed in all sectors, including the agricultural sector.

There is a serious conflict between environmentalists and government water policymakers in South Korea. Developing a win-win policy is desirable. Win-win is called super-optimizing or doing better than the previous best of all major groups. There are basically five major steps to win-win policy analysis.

1.

What are the major goals of environmentalists, or other major groups who are disputing what policy should be adopted for a given policy problem?

2.

What are the major alternatives of these groups for dealing with the policy problem?

3.

What are the relations between each major alternative and each major goal?

4.

What new alternative is there that might be capable of (a) achieving the environmental goals even better than the environmental alternative, and (b) achieving the developmental goals even better than the developmental alternative?

5.

Is the proposed win-win alternative capable of getting over various hurdles ― political, administrative, technological, legal, psychological and economic ― that frequently exist?

A win-win policy can be possible on available resources both conflicting sides can use and scientific minds of negotiators on both sides. At the present time, Korea is unfortunate in finding suitable dam sites and lack of scientific minds among the environmentalists and developers. Rebuilding the existing dams will be one good idea for Korea.

The writer is an environmentalist. He can be reached at yearnhchoi@gmail.com.