Water management is an important of pollution control and environmental management policies. The domestic regimes for maritime law and policy arise from a number of disparate sources including relevant international treaties and instruments, the Constitution, the Offshore Constitutional Settlement and our sectoral-based approach to marine management.
As a result of our system of government, there are a number of government departments and agencies which have an interest in pollution, dumping and maritime accidents in the marine environment. Since there are no national borders in the atmosphere, pollutants disperse over the entire Earth although taking a long time to create damage.
Thus the distantly intimate link today between Japan and Argentina. In this regard, the issue of ozone layer depletion makes us aware of the importance of the planetary interest. It is indispensable for us to have international frameworks in order to sustainably utilize the atmosphere, oceans and natural resources without polluting water, without exhausting resources and without destabilizing the ecological balance of the planet.
In this regard, the Montreal Protocol is a valuable legal document since it lays down ways to reduce or abolish the production of specific substances in a concrete manner, allows for the reduction schedule to differ between developed and developing countries and stipulates ways of channelling financial support. Water is a renewable resource but it requires time to purify and sanitize it.
In order to address the environmental problem, which is becoming increasingly globalized, we must grasp internationally the reality of the problem, set up measures that take into account technical and economic capacities, provide legal frameworks and follow-up and review measures. To this end, I hope that international environmental organizations such as UNEP will be strengthened further.
We are now facing environmental problems which transcend national borders, while we still have an international system based on the sovereign nation-state. We need to address the difficult problems of evaluating and protecting the global commons, which are complicated and interrelated while maintaining the free trade systems of the world. The planetary interest concept will be useful in helping us to realize this goal in the twenty-first century (Arlosoroff, 1995).
A rough assessment of the four major human requirements shows that the current appropriation of natural resources and services already exceeds Earth’s long-term carrying capacity. Agriculture already occupies 4.8 billion hectares (3.3 billion hectares of pasture and 1.5 billion hectares of cropland). Sustainable production of the current round-wood harvest, including firewood, would require a productive forest area of 1.7 billion hectares. To sequester the excess CO2 released by fossil fuel combustion, a further 3.1 billion hectares of carbon-sink land would need to be set aside.
This totals 9.6 billion hectares, some 30% above what is available today, and 10% above all potential land. The “sustainability deficit” or “ecological deficit” is a measure of overshoot (van der Straaten, 1994). The “global ecological deficit”, unlike “national ecological deficits”, cannot be subsidized through trade and draw-down from other surplus countries. It depends instead on the liquidation of natural capital stock. It cannot be spatial, imposing the burden on other areas at a single point in time. It can only be temporal, imposing the burden on future generations. The current generation, then, is drawing down on Earth’s natural resource base at an unprecedented rate. If this continues, today’s inhabitants of Earth will leave a degraded planet for future generations—possibly to an irretrievable degree.
Without a concerted effort today to reduce material throughput, the generations of the twenty-first century will be left to satisfy their needs from a much-diminished stock of natural capital From this work it is clear that the ecological footprint of the North exceeds its fair “EarthShare” by a factor of two to three. If all humanity maintained the same consumption pattern, three planets would be required to satisfy aggregate demand, on current technology. In the words of the authors (van der Straaten, 1994).
Sustainability turns equally on each of these factors. But the international community has not yet demonstrated an equal commitment to each. The term “sustainable development” tends to prioritize development overconsumption. While the UN conference at Rio addressed development (along with the environment) and Cairo stressed population (along with development), no global conference has to date focused on consumption. The result is a lack of clarity over the global limits to Earth’s carrying capacity and an implicit political premise that there is no limit or that the constraints are considerably elastic.
Two decades ago we experienced the Green Revolution—a breakthrough in the rice yield and at the same time a significant increase in the use of water, insecticides and pesticides. Productivity increased by a factor of two. It was just as well for this also allowed us to keep pace with the population growth which doubled in this period and yet people did not starve. A more important conflict has shown up recently (Lee, 1994).
On the one hand, there is a lucrative shrimp culture in the bay areas along the coastlines which are resulting in the depletion of the naturally occurring post-larvae of shrimp. On the other hand, this is resulting in brackish water pools along our southern coasts, thus destroying the more environment-friendly paddy fields and resulting in massive land degradation of coastal areas. Consequently, open water, as well as marine fishery management systems, have to be considered in careful detail with a view to increased productivity and sustainability involving the fish population dynamics (Björnlund and McKay 2006).
Artesian water has its own problems. There is arsenic poisoning in the ground around the wells and the sub-soil water is drained off to support irrigation for modern agriculture. People dig deeper but the concentration of arsenic in the water has risen to dangerous levels already resulting in fatal diseases. And in the southwestern part of the country, there is a different problem with the soil. We could further develop the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest in the Ganges delta (Bateman et al 2005).
Thanks to UNESCO for its belated inclusion in the list of world heritage. But the Sundarbans already suffer from “top-dying”—the leaves at the top of the trees are dying away due to the increased salinity of the soil resulting from the massive withdrawal of the water at the upper reaches of the Ganges. More recently, however, some flood control projects have upset the natural balance, in many cases resulting in man-made flash flooding and other ecological imbalances.
On top of the surface water system management which had its own shortcomings, severe depletion of the groundwater resource in Bangladesh resulted from irrigation water needs for the HYVS. These two apparently distinct yet interrelated areas of surface water and groundwater systems have already seriously impacted the environmental aspects of Bangladesh (Andreoni, 1990).
Expressed differently, the international community can realize hope for the planet’s future only by subjecting excessively selfish interests to the vital planetary interests. This will take care of Earth’s environmental integrity as each nation-state, in turn, takes care of its own environmental integrity. Excessively affluent consumption styles to be found in industrialized countries have been, until recently, basically selfish. But the acceptance by the same countries of some system of a just distribution of wealth in the interests of poorer countries is a step forward towards global environmental conservation (Amin, 1994).
Equally, excessive dependence on over-grazing, deforestation and surface water erosion in the developing countries is environmentally extractive and scarcely survivalist. Kenya is a signatory to the UN declarations and action programs that address the environment and development. It has been argued that the North should contribute more towards the costs of rectifying the damage to the planet from air and water pollution. And it has been argued that no sustainable development can take place in a world sharply divided into the affluent North and the deprived South (Allan and Karshenas 1995).
Kenya’s national policies have revolved around the alleviation of poverty, the attainment of high educational standards, modest population growth, health for all including clean drinking water by the year 2000 and, now, industrialization. The National Development Plan, 1997-2001, contains four policy objectives central to sustainable development.
In the agricultural sector, budgetary increases will ensure increased productivity, additional storage and processing plants and intensification of extension services in an effort to achieve food security. In population, it contains measures to accelerate the decline in the fertility rate. In health, policies for the alleviation of past constraints of underfunding, low staffing and uneven distribution of personnel by 1999. In the shelter, the attainment of adequate housing for all while ensuring sustainable rural settlement and urbanization (Allan 1995).
In sum, water is a renewable resource but it cannot restore in a short period of time. In order, to save water resources and the planet it is crucial to introduce strict policies and protection measures against water pollution.
List of References
Allan, J.A. 1995. The political economy of water: reasons for optimism but long term caution. Nature (1995:33-58).
Allan, J.A. & M. Karshenas 1995. Managing environmental capital: the case of water in Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, 1947-1995. Nature 32, 25.
Amin, A. 1994. Corporate concentration and interdependence in Europe. Environmental Protection 1994: 85-91).
Andreoni, J. 1990. Impure altruism and donations to public goods: a theory of warm-glow-giving. Economic Journal 100, 464-77.
Arlosoroff, S. 1995. Managing scarce water recent Israeli experience. Economic Journal (1995:21-8).
Bateman, I., I. Langford, A. Graham 2005. A survey of non-users’ willingness to pay to prevent saline flooding in the Norfolk Broads. Working Paper GEC 95-11, CSERGE, University of East Anglia.
Björnlund, H. & J. McKay 2006. Can water trading achieve environmental goals? Water, 31-4.
Lee, F. 1994. Administered prices. Environmental Protection 1994: 4-9.
Randall, A. 1981. Property entitlements and pricing policies for a maturing water economy. Australian Journal of Agricultural Economics 25(3), 195-220.
Van der Straaten, J. 1994. The distribution of environmental costs and benefits: the case of acid rain. Paper 94.09.037/2, Work and Organization Research Centre, University of Tilburg.