Bruce Wills: Wiser not to waste

Bruce Wills.

World perception brings New Zealand's need to store water into focus, Federated Farmers president Bruce Wills says.

I recently returned from a United Nations-funded trip to Stockholm to present at the World Water Week Conference. Seventy per cent of the world's available water is used for agriculture, 20 per cent for industry and 10 per cent for domestic use.

Water is integral for the production of food and with farmers representing half the world's hungry, it is important to have a farmer's view. There were 2700 delegates and I think I was the only farmer there! As the largest water users and with the solutions to world hunger on our farms, we were conspicuous by our absence.

We heard a lot about the challenges this planet faces. How for 768 million people a glass of water is still a luxury, a dream; how 2.5 billion people have unreliable or no access to electricity (90 per cent of global power generation is water intensive), how for the first time in our history over 50 per cent of the world's population live in cities and the challenges this presents to water.

We know that the key drivers for increased water use are increasing urbanisation, increasing population and increasing wealth. Highlighting this challenge we have seen the world's population treble since 1900 but over the same period the water use per person has increased six-fold. Planet Earth is now screaming at us through a language called water.

The conference talked about "trans boundary hydro diplomacy", a term we don't hear about in New Zealand. Transboundary being rivers and river basins crossing country and state boundaries. An example is Africa's Nile River: at 6700km it is the world's longest, passing through 10 countries before reaching the Mediterranean.

What the country at the source of the Nile does matters a lot to those nine countries downstream. Add to this difficult "sharing" issue an exploding population (in 1950 six million people lived in the Nile basin; by 2050 the UN expects this to be 60 million) and you get a clear sense of the global water challenges we have.

The discussions in Stockholm highlighted for me that New Zealand is in an incredibly privileged position as regards water. Hardly a country in the world can match us in terms of water availability and water quality. New Zealand's overall rainfall is the same as Australia and 2.5 times the whole of the UK. We have plenty of water; our discussions are more about "water quality", whereas for much of the world the issue is "water quantity".

I came home more convinced than ever of the need for more water storage. Conference delegates looked at me in complete disbelief when I told them that in our little country we let 95 per cent of all our rainfall run unused, out to sea.

Of course we need to continue to focus on farming with less impact on the environment - farmers are very engaged in this - but taking a more global view, we also need to stop beating ourselves up so much about this water issue.

Compared with the rest of the world we have vast quantities of comparatively pristine water. We are in a lucky and privileged position. Yes we do need to use our water carefully and sensibly but with the challenges of population growth, increased urbanisation; climate and food security the really important thing for this country now is to store more water.