Water security and stability in the Kingdom of Bahrain

Abstract

Water security has been recently defined as the capacity of a population on ensuring that they continue to have access to safe and properly sanitised potable water. Today, water security issues encompass increasing concerns arising from population growth, drought, climate change, oscillations between “El Nino” and “La Nina” effects, urbanisation, increasing salinity (e.g. the Arabian Gulf region), upstream pollution (for rivers), over-allocation of water licences by government agencies and over-utilisation of groundwater from artesian basins. All these distresses combined have resulted in a rapid decline in water security for many parts of the world, triggering off impacts of suffering to regions, states and countries, while tensions tend to exist between “upstream” and “downstream” users of water within individual jurisdictions (as throughout history, there has been much conflict over the use of water from rivers (such as the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers)). In modern days, in many parts of the world, water security is mostly sought by implementing water desalination, pipelines between sources and users, water licences with different security levels and (sadly to say) war; while water allocation between competing users is increasingly determined by application of market-based pricing for either water licences or actual water. As water desalination is a crucial topic on the water security agenda worldwide, this paper shall examine interrelated issues concerning water management and water privatisation (global and in the Kingdom of Bahrain, with some focus on the preparedness of Kingdom of Bahrain for emergency situations), and shall briefly underline the countries and regions of the world that are suffering most from water stress (like North Africa, Middle East, Central Asia, China, Chile, South Africa and Australia).

Keywords:

• Access to safe and sanitised potable water
• Population growth
• Drought
• Climate change
• Urbanisation
• Over-utilisation of groundwater from artesian basins
• Water security
• Water desalination
• Pipelines
• Water management
• Water privatisation

Notes

Presented at the International Conference on Desalination for the Environment, Clean Water and Energy, European Desalination Society, 23–26 April 2012, Barcelona, Spain