The News Review:

- Water and Resistance
- KARACHI: Wells being dug to combat water shortage
- Sin City’s Continuous Flow
- Phoenix – an oasis city with more people and less water
- Alandur demands better water and power supply

Water and Resistance
International Middle East Media Center – May 26, 2007
” [1] Stuck between the “Green Line”—the 1949 Armistice Line that separates Israel from the West Bank—and the Wall, Palestinians from Nahhalin find themselves among some 60,000 Palestinians living in the “seam zone,” that is that western segregation zone between the Wall and the Green Line which includes roughly 11 percent of the West Bank and that will ultimately be annexed to the “state of Israel” in Israel’s unilateral plan to define its own borders. When I last visited Nahhalin, I was joined by my friends at the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ). [2] ARIJ had begun a waste water treatment project in Nahhalin that will now be duplicated to provide rural Palestinian areas in the West Bank with new sources of water for irrigation. ARIJ’s water and environment research unit will install on-site waste water treatment systems for 180 homes, providing direct benefits to about 1,800 people. The project gets underway this year and will be completed in 2010. Hrimat from ARIJ pointed out to me that scarcity of fresh water supplies and restricted access to traditional water supplies creates ongoing shortages of water for agricultural purposes…
This hydrology project in its various phases has sought to assist farmers in keeping a presence on their lands on the other side of the Wall, the “seam zone,” by maintaining well pumps and irrigation systems. Projects such as these give Palestinian people greater control over their natural resources, explained Nader. Water resources, he noted, are particularly vulnerable because Israel controls over 80 percent of the Palestinian groundwater resources in the West Bank, restricting access to water for agricultural irrigation and other purposes. [6] Abdul-Latif also pointed this out to me. With Israeli control over water resources, and Palestinians captive to Israeli water companies, Abdul-Latif asks, “Where is the infrastructure for this ‘Palestinian state’?” Abdul-Latif then pointed out to me the citrus lying on the ground having rotted off the trees as another sign of the economic strangulation on these communities. These fruits go unpicked because Palestinian farmers have very limited access to a market of any sort to sell their goods due to the Israeli closure system in the West Bank. And when they can sell their goods somewhere, Israel has flooded the market with cheap fruits from Israel (and Jordan) that these farmers simply cannot compete with.

KARACHI: Wells being dug to combat water shortage
Pakistan Dawn – May 26, 2007
Most of the wells are nowadays being dug in huge housing complexes and multi-storied apartment buildings as the KWSB officials responsible for ensuring equitable distribution of water have failed in normalising the water supply situation, despite the number of complaints lodged with them. The residents of multi-storied apartment buildings, where water supply continues to dwindle, are the worst-affected as in the absence of piped water they cannot even purchase water from tankers on an individual basis. In some cases, according to office-bearers of residents welfare associations of different buildings of Gulistan-i-Jauhar and Gulshan-i-Iqbal where wells are being dug, the suggestion of digging wells to meet the water requirement had been given by the KWSB engineers themselves. SHORTAGE: Meanwhile, several other parts of the city remained in the grip of an acute water shortage. The hard-hit localities included Baghdadi, Kalri, Pakistan Chowk, Haqqani Chowk, Clifton blocks 2, 4 and 5, Mehmoodabad, Manzoor Colony, North Nazimabads Block H and Q, Gulshan blocks 2, 5, 10, 10-A and Gulistan-i-Jauhars blocks 1, 2, 3 and 17. When a senior official of the KWSB belonging to its water distribution system was contacted to know the cause of the persisting water shortage, he said that they have been getting less supply from the Indus source.

Sin City’s Continuous Flow
CBS News – May 26, 2007
Swapping the current use-it-or-lose-it annual system for a more flexible, market-style approach, the hard-fought deal among the states marks the biggest change in the controversial “Law of the River” since it was inked some 80 years ago. It lets downriver states like Mulroy’s create liquid bank accounts, allowing them to save up surplus water in wetter years, in reservoirs for instance, to use during later periods of drought, and also lets them bolster their water supplies, in part, by paying for other states to conserve, so more water might be available for Nevada-a scheme that is expected to win final approval from Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne by year’s end. “What we got was huge,” the 54-year-old Mulroy boasts of what could mean a near doubling of southern Nevada’s total water supply. That’s enough not only to keep the Las Vegas Strip’s famous fountains dancing through even the worst droughts but also to maintain the city’s status as one of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas; 29 percent growth just between 2000 and 2006. “It’s our bridge to the future,” she says. That bridge, which she plans to reinforce with everything from cloud-seeding campaigns to south-of-the-border desalination plants, is but the latest proof that when it comes to the booming but arid American West, water increasingly defies the law of gravity. As the old saying goes, “water flows uphill.

Phoenix – an oasis city with more people and less water
abc.net.au – May 26, 2007
Climate change and water supply are major problems. Phoenix is an oasis civilisation. Water is taken from the upper Colorado River. Reduced water availability will mean major lifestyle changes…
We can support three million more people by just retiring agriculture. ‘ But I come back and say that given the uncertainty about climate, if there was a drought here, if there was serious climate change, we could retire the agriculture and the urban area would continue to grow. Forty years from now we’ll have twice as many people, we’ll have no agriculture, and if climate change reduces our water resources by 50% it’s a problem. So what I see happening is that with every year we’re growing bigger and bigger but we’re losing our flexibility, we’re losing our resilience, we’re losing our capacity to respond to the unknown. But it’s a hard message to deliver. People want to know if there’s a big water shortage next week, then they’re going to change their behaviours. If someone comes and tells them you’re losing your flexibility to respond to climate change 30 years from now, that’s a tough message to get people to respond to.

Alandur demands better water and power supply
Hindu – May 26, 2007
Anbarasan on Friday urged Metrowater to improve water supply in the Alandur municipal limits. Participating in a meeting organised by Alandur Municipality to review water and electricity supply within its limits, especially in thickly populated Adambakkam and Nanganallur, he called upon the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board (TNEB) to speed up pending projects in order to augment power supply in the areas. He assured TNEB and Metrowater officials that impediments in the way of the projects to improve the supply would be cleared.