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Essay: Middle East Water Crisis: Understanding Physical Water Scarcity in the UAE

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  • Published: 1 April 2019*
  • Last Modified: 29 September 2024
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  • Words: 1,396 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 6 (approx)

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The Middle East is lately facing many environmental concerns. Water resources are becoming progressively scarce physically, especially for the millions there who already lack access to sanitary water. Physical water scarcity occurs when the water consumption exceeds 60% of the usable supply, and it is what most of the Arabian countries are experiencing, as shown in Figure 1.

The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iraq, are going through a similar problem: their neighbouring location in which water resources lack and their poor water management are causing a serious water scarcity in all four countries. With the world’s largest oil reserves, which produces the area’s wealth, the countries in the Middle East invest a lot of this so-called “oil money” to solve the water shortage problems. They commonly have a climate naturally unsuitable for agriculture and the environment is even becoming harsher for life due to the increasing desertification: leading to a huge amount of water resources required to produce the food needed for the population within the area.

United Arab Emirates, located in the Arabian Desert of the Arabian Peninsula, is currently facing a physical water scarcity as it has very small amount of underground water, little rainfall and no rivers. The country is well known for its luxurious cities with splendid resorts, attractions, and shopping places, proving its wealth and the rich livelihood of the Emirates, creating assumptions that water scarcity is not a big problem to them. However in reality, the UAE was ranked the first among the world with 15 other countries in facing water stress. The nature freshwater resources of the UAE will be depleted in next fifty years at the current rate of usage. This is partially because of its well-established welfare, where the UAE citizens were provided with free domestic water supply by the government until early in 2015 – people tended to spend water without recognising the amount and cost.

Since the UAE physically lacks water, the desalination of sea water is what the government is currently relying on as a water resource. Thus, desalinated water is what mainly fills the bottles, costing approximately 11.8 billion AED (Arab Emirates Dirham) every year although it takes around 3L of seawater to make 1L of bottled water. Additionally, the desalination process itself is harming the environment, producing its own carbon footprint, using up a large quantity. Large quantities of fossil fuel are used in the production, releasing various carbon compounds to the atmosphere and therefore contributing to the global warming. Seventy per cent of the desalination plants in the world are located in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain, causing manufacture problems for health and environment – seawater has high amounts of boron and bromide and the process often removes essential minerals like calcium, while the filtered salt is dumped back to the oceans, leading to an increased salinity affecting the ocean’s environment.  However, desalinated water source is vital for the UAE to insure enough drinking water. The way to reduce the amount of desalinated water usage is to reduce the water usage as a whole, by lessening the amount of water being wasted.

The private household use of water takes about 24 per cent of total water consumption of the UAE. The air conditioning system is crucial for a good standard life in the UAE because of its geographical location in desert and climate of high temperatures throughout the whole year, and this requires a lot of water via chilled water pumps to operate. Emirates Industrial Bank in 2005 said that the UAE had the world’s highest per capita consumption of 550 litres per person per day, compared to the world average of about 200 litres.

To fix the problem of private household overuse of water, the government decided to have the citizens pay for their water usage – 1.7 AED, equivalent to 0.46 USD, per cubic metre of water for the first block of consumption. This is a relatively low cost, but is a good way to reduce the waste in private household. Government also is promoting water conservation in households by introducing new tariff system based on a water meter for each household, supplying safe drinking water through taps, and presenting mass awareness on water conservation measures to its citizens. Educational programmes are being held while new measures are being introduced. Such efforts of Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa) to conserve water resulted in saving approximately 6 billion gallons of water in past 8 years, according to Saeed Mohammad Al Tayer, Managing Director and CEO of Dewa.

Agricultural sector takes up about two-thirds of the total water consumption in the UAE. The rapid population growth of the country caused a sudden increase in food demand, additionally stressing the water resources needed for agricultural uses. Low irrigation efficiency is one of the main problems of water waste in terms of agriculture, while it is also a problem in private households where the Emirates grow plants and garden.

Water misuse often is a major factor in private households and in agriculture. For instance, water occasionally get irrigated through spray for gardens and landscapes, consuming about 12 to 15 litres per square meter on a daily basis. In Dubai, capital of the UAE, puddles and small ponds of water is easily seen in the city, as shown in Figure 2. These are due to the irrigation of green patches and plants – and certainly these are a great waste of water, especially in a country like the UAE, where water is in a very short supply. Although spray irrigation is an explicitly wasteful and inefficient method of irrigation, it is the cheapest and fastest way of irrigating plants, and thus people choose this method. In an arid climate like as in the UAE, only 40 per cent gets absorbed by the plants unevenly while the other 60 per cent of the water evaporates before reaching the plant.

However, as awareness of water scarcity is constantly being aroused and educated by the government and several organisations, more efficient methods are being introduced and utilised within the country. One of the alternatives is called “Drip irrigation” (shown in Figure 3), and it can be done by perforated tubes placed along the floor or buried near the plant roots, depositing water directly from the tube to the roots of plants. If majority choose to alternate the initial spray irrigation to drop irrigation, 35% less water than the traditional systems would be needed with a dramatic decrease in the amount of water evaporated. The government also is encouraging its residents to take the following steps when spray irrigation is employed: adjusting the sprinklers so that water is only sprayed at plants not the streets, watering during cooler times of the day to avoid large amount of evaporation, taking seasonal rains into concern when organising irrigation, and growing more drought-tolerant crops. The government is also carrying out the experiments in national labs with use of wastewater for irrigation.  As these changes to less water-intensive crops and changes in irrigation methods are adapted, the amount of water in this sector has radically decreased.

Industrial factor consumes about 9 per cent of water consumption in the UAE. Most of the water in industry is used to cool and clean impurities from machinery. Although the portion is much less than the agricultural sector, most of the water used in industry end up wasted and resulting pollution.

The government has taken steps to deploy this wastewater from the industry. Many of the wastewater now is being used other uses. For example, a total of 600 million cube meter of wastewater from industry was treated annually in Abu Dhabi, and 352 million cube meter is used for landscaping and district cooling. The UAE government is currently searching for ways to use the wastewater in irrigation for agriculture, and surely re-using the wastewater from industry for irrigation in agricultural factor is a great way to conserve a huge amount of water.

Like this, the government of the UAE in cooperation with other organisations is trying to solve the severe physical water scarcity. The three main factors of water usage within the country, each one closely related to each other, is now in the progress of reducing the wastewater by reuse, education, and introduction to new techonology and measures. As the “oil money” is supporting those tactics, those strategies and management seems to be successful and is expected to solve the water scarcity of the United Arab Emirates to a certain extent.  

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