Conserve water, create green jobs

On March 22 every year, the World Water Day (WWD) is observed. It is an international event that puts the spotlight on themes related to water issues. Every year, it focuses on a specific aspect or topic that is relevant to water issues.
The theme of the event in 2016 is “Water and Jobs,” which is a great opportunity to discuss the importance of water in creating jobs, which promote sustainable development.
WWD 2016 is a crucial day for the Arab world in general and the GCC in particular. Most Arab countries suffer from water problems such as scarcity, pollution and poor quality. In fact, the Arab world is the most water scarce region on Earth. The annual per capita availability of this renewable resource is less than 500 cubic meters in 70 percent of the region; the average annual rainfall is below 250mm in 70 percent of the region and less than 100mm in the GCC.
Water issues are very important as the 2030 agenda for sustainable development with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets aims at nothing less than “transforming our world” to a sustainable one.
The SDGs covers a wide range of drivers across the three pillars of sustainable development and include a dedicated goal on water and sanitation (SDG 6) that sets out to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.” SDG 6 focuses on the entire water cycle, including the management of water, wastewater and ecosystem resources. Realizing SDG 6 would, in fact, go a long way towards achieving much of the 2030 agenda.
On the other hand, today according to UN, almost half of the world’s workers — 1.5 billion people — work in water-related sectors and nearly all jobs depend on water. There are direct and indirect water-related jobs. The direct ones are those related to irrigation and agriculture, water maintenance, desalination, water treatment, water science and research, and many other water engineering jobs. The indirect ones include nearly almost all other types of work related somehow to water such as tourism, construction, steel, food industry, manufacturing and so on.
Many Arab countries are facing a major challenge of youth unemployment. According to the World Bank, the total percentage of unemployed youth population in the Arab countries reached 23.8 percent in 2014. The rapid growth in population will boost the demand for water as consumption rises steadily. In addition, many water resources will dry up due to climate change, rapid urbanization and industrialization.
Water stress is expected to reach about 80 percent in 14 Arab countries by 2014. Therefore, the WWD 2016 is an opportunity to tackle water issues that are affecting households, businesses, farms and communities.
Arab countries need to solve water issues to solve other related issues, including youth unemployment, that are troubling them. Besides investment in water infrastructure, there is a need to develop precise policies and strategies in this regard. Arab countries need to focus on promoting regulations that protect clean water and create jobs at the same time. In fact, the social and economic consequences could be enormous if governments do not accelerate reforms to deal with water issues in the region.
Thus, governments can seize this occasion of WWD and the relevant theme of this year to hit two birds with one stone. Governments of the region should use the occasion to launch a plan for investment in water-related businesses. In turn, this will help both in solving water problems and creating many green jobs —a necessity to reduce unemployment.
Each government can decide on the best type of water-related jobs it can focus on, based on its needs, human resources and comparative advantage in this field. In this regard, one must point out that agriculture is not the favorable sector as thought for many years. In fact, on average, agriculture consumes around 89 percent, industry 6 percent and household 5 percent of water supplied. However, the agriculture sector share in GDP in 2015 was 2.3 percent in Saudi Arabia and as low as 0.1 percent in Qatar, 0.3 percent in Kuwait and Bahrain, 0.6 percent in the UAE, and 1.4 percent in Oman.
In contrast, the industry sector’s share of GDP in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, for instance, was 61.6 percent and 46.9 percent respectively. While the services sector share of GDP was 38.2 percent in UAE and 50.8 percent Saudi Arabia.
Needless to say, in Muslim societies, efforts to increase awareness and find solutions to water scarcity issues should have been easy because it is our religious duty not to waste water. The use of religious guidelines and principles must be an integral part of any awareness campaign.
The governments need to act right now to secure water and employment needs.
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The writer is the Sustainability Research Program Manager at the Gulf Research Center.