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[BELLS] SPEAKER 1: This is a production of Cornell University.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 2: Losing Paradise presents case studies from across the Mediterranean region to provide an interdisciplinary framework for understanding problems of diminished and polluted water supplies. Stressing the importance of traditional and historical cultural understanding in addressing the Mediterranean water crisis, the authors demonstrate the need for an integrated legal, social and scientific management system appropriate to each country's stage of development and cultural heritage. In a book talk at Mann Library on November 4, 2010, contributing authors and co-editors Gail Holst-Warhaft and Tammo Steenhuis presented insights for identifying more promising approaches to critical issues of water management. The suggested solutions also serve as a paradigm for the rest of the world, as it faces similar issues of water shortage.
GAIL HOLST-WARHAFT: Since this is a chat in the Stacks and not a formal lecture, I don't think I'll read anything to you. I will wave the book about because a part of what I want to say is how this book came to be and what we feel about interdisciplinary research into water and the necessity for it.
So the picture here on the front of the cover of a woman at a well with a water jug is a picture that could have been taken 2,000 years ago. It's one of the oldest icons of the relationship of water to people in the Mediterranean and in dry regions. But it's also interesting that it's a woman.
And the slide you see here is from rural Greece from the island of Karpathos, taken about 50 years ago, maybe less, maybe 40 years ago. And when I first went to Greece, women were still principally the people who went to fetch the water at the well. And each house had a well on the island.
And one compared water a little bit as one did olive oil. People would say, we have a really good well, and the water tastes wonderful. And if you went for a walk in the Greek countryside, you would be greeted, first of all, by the housewife who would say, come in, have a glass of water. And she would take out a little tray and put a glass on the tray. And the water, of course, would be the water from her well.
And I'm a person who was not particularly interested in water, nor was I interested in technical or-- and I'm still not knowledgeable about the technical sides of water. But I got particularly interested in water when I went back a few summers ago, maybe five years ago, to an island where I had spent quite a lot of time researching a book on Greek music.
And all the villagers were drinking bottled water. And I said, what's the matter with the water on the island? And they said, oh, you can't drink the water on the island. It's not fit to drink anymore. And I said, well, where do you get your water? And they said, well, it comes on the tankers, of course.
And I discovered that not just this island but almost every island in the Aegean imported water all summer from tankers. And the tanker draws up at the wharf, and a long hose comes out. And people fill tanker trucks and so on. It is very much the new oil in every sense in that it costs money.
I also discovered that, of course, because of this, the whole notion of hospitality no longer revolves around offering people water, although people will offer you a bottle of water occasionally, which is a rather different thing. And I thought about what a shame this was and how much life-- what it did to people's lives, this lack of available drinking water. And I realized I wanted to know something about it.
This is a typical Greek island house, a fairly modern one, and all houses have an external staircase, as you realize. On those staircases, they used to put a jug, which was unglazed, and the well water would sit there. And the wind, which is a prevailing wind all summer, would go right through the jug, cooling the water. And this was a standard place to keep your water jug.
And there's a wonderful song that I remembered by Theodorakis with words by Iakovos Kambanellis, the poet. And it says, "The bread is on the table. The water is in the jug. The jug is on the staircase. Give the thief a drink.
Mother, give to the passerby, to the thief and to Christ. Give him his fill, mother. Give him, my love, a drink."
This was, to me, the epitome of what Greek hospitality was once, that you never asked any questions of the passerby. You simply offered a drink to the passerby. So there's a big difference once you get a tap that you can turn on. Water comes out. Any kid can go and fill the bucket, but it's still not in your house.
It's still something you have to go and fetch. It's one stage removed from the well. And now we take it for granted that a child can fill a glass with water, and it will be pure enough to drink. At least in this country, we do.
Now, I began to think about also the culture of Greece and what it was losing by losing its natural resources like clean water. And it was at a time, and still is, when a huge modern museum was built on the side of the Acropolis to house the Elgin Marbles, which, as you all know, are sitting quite comfortably in the British Museum. The Greeks want these marbles back. They think they're their cultural patrimony.
And so there was a huge campaign to build. It was started by Melina Mercouri when she was the minister of culture to bring these Marbles back. And one of the draw cards was to have a fabulous museum where they could fit and would be close to the Acropolis.
So nice old buildings were torn down. A great big modern building was put there. And there is a life-size replica of the Acropolis in that building and the plaster casts in the places where the statues that Lord Elgin carried off with him to Britain will presumably one day be, if the Greeks get their way. So when I came back to Cornell, having been in Greece, I thought, I want to do something about water in Greece.
I didn't think any further than Greece at the time, but I thought, well, the problem is, obviously, Mediterranean wide. And I contacted people in various departments. I rang up, and I said, look, I direct Mediterranean studies here.
I don't know anything about water, but you must have somebody in civil engineering who knows about water. You must have somebody in BEE who knows about water. And to my surprise, all these people turned up all over the campus who were water experts. And I said, I will give you a Mediterranean lunch if you can tell me something about water.
[LAUGHS]
So I invited them all to lunch. We had a nice lunch. And at the end of it, we thought-- I said, well, let's do a conference or something or meet again. And at our second meeting, when the numbers had shrunk a little bit because some people thought I was a nutcase, I was left with a handful of engineers and a lawyer who said, why don't we teach a course on water? Which we developed together and taught in the law school with Keith Porter and with Tammo and with Gil Levine and various other people who were interested in water. We team taught a course in the law school on water, the water crisis in the Mediterranean.
And we also held a conference, and we decided that we would take a team of people from here and other places who were experts in water to Greece to look at problems of water in Greece. And again, Tammo Steinhouse, my colleague here, had people who knew about water, who really knew about water, to-- and I knew about Greece.
And we also had a wonderful ex-student of Tammo, who was a young professor in Greece, who was able to be our go between and find us sites which were extremely polluted or where there was desertification or where there was serious water problems. So we left him more or less in charge of picking out the worst places.
And I put this slide in because everybody's idea of Greece is two things. Either it's Ancient Greece, where it's the Parthenon and the Marbles and so on, or it's modern Greece in which everybody dances and is full of good fun, including politicians, like this one. We used as much of all this as we possibly could in our campaign to do something in Greece. We used culture in all its senses, modern and ancient, and the Zorba factor we did not neglect.
We actually took-- This is the man who wrote Zorba. This is Mikis Theodorakis, who also wrote that beautiful song about water. And we traveled around Greece with a very famous Greek singer. And wherever we went, she had sent a musician ahead to teach the children of the village old songs about water, of which there are many. In a dry climate, water becomes a very precious substance, so folk songs about water are very plentiful in all this region.
So she taught the children some water songs, and they performed. So all their mothers and fathers were captive audience. Who's not going to watch their little boy or girl sing a little song about water with a famous singer? So they came along. And there were hundreds and hundreds of people that would not have come to hear us talk about water, and so we used our cultural weaponry as well as we could.
This is a typical valley of Greece. You see these very dry hills everywhere with plantations of either olives or citrus in the valleys. And one of the most serious cases of water destruction in Greece, destruction of the groundwater, is in the plain of Argos.
Homer talks about well-watered Argos as the most luscious, wonderful valley, where everything would grow. It is now-- there isn't a town in that area-- and there is something like 13 municipalities. And not one of them has drinking water that is potable.
And this is because of illegal drilling in order to cultivate crops that are thirstier than olives, mostly citrus. But sometimes things like avocados are grown and pistachio nuts. Before that, there was no trouble with water when they grew olives and vines, the two traditional crops. Once-- and of course, with Europe demanding more and more fresh oranges on their breakfast tables and so on.
Although a lot of money for agriculture came in to Greece via Europe, there was also a high demand for Greek produce. And Greeks began to cultivate citrus on a larger and larger scale and illegally drilled straight into the groundwater. And of course, salt infiltrated into the groundwater, and it was polluted by agriculture, in general, fertilizers and so on. And the water became undrinkable, so more bottled water on the mainland.
Here we are at the conference that we organize, walking-- going around from one part to another of Greece. This is actually close to where the photograph was taken in the town of Nafplion, where we gathered the mayors from all the towns around. And they talked and we talked about the terrible thing it was, all these illegal drillings. But when we left, we had the feeling that things would go on exactly as before.
Why? Because the mayors of all these towns depend on the votes of farmers to get into office. And who's going to suddenly start prosecuting them for something that everybody does, which is to sink illegal wells? Here we are with the gentleman-- the gentleman facing us with the rather large [GREEK] the Greeks call it, is actually the Venezuelan ambassador.
And he got interested in our project and decided he would ride along with us. So he came on this trip with us, and there we are, looking at a canal in Crete. One of the things that Greeks used to do to preserve rainwater was to dig out a pit and make a water tank, a sealed water tank. You can see steps going down into it to fetch water when the level of water was lower.
Rainwater collection was ubiquitous in Greece, and there wasn't practically a house without such a tank. One of the projects that we've been asked to investigate because of our work on water in Greece is a project that, actually, Coca-Cola is funding. With one hand, it steals the water. With another, it gives back.
And in this particular case, they are trying to improve rainwater conservation on the driest islands of the Aegean. And so instead of these tanks, they are installing metal tanks and plastic tanks and more convenient water tanks on the islands that have almost no water at all.
And here we are with the person who changed our whole project in Greece, was the mayor of a town, a medium-sized town in Crete. And you can see him second from the right in this line of people next to the singer. The singer is the woman with the long blonde hair, Mariza Koch, a very famous singer in Greece.
And next to her is the mayor of a town called Neapolis in the Lasithi province of Crete, a town that is on the brink of a water crisis. And the mayor of that town said, come back in two years, and I will show you what I've done following at your input in this meeting we've had. And I'm really going to try to do something about water conservation in my area.
One thing he did was to make brochures that were handed out at the school so that kids were told to tell their parents not to waste water. And another thing he did was to investigate all the old-fashioned means of conserving water, old water tanks particularly, and decided that he would renew some of these and grow a park around them. He had various ideas about what could be done.
So we last summer went back again with two students. One of them is here, Margaret Kurth, two women students, one man student, all from different disciplines-- law, BEE and natural resources. And we gave them a project for three weeks.
Meantime, of course, we had befriended the mayor, and he opened any door that they wished to have opened for them. And we said, we want a water profile of the town. How do they spend water? How much water falls? Do they know how much they are losing? What is the situation if something changes? If the climate gets hotter, if they change crops and stop growing olives and start growing citrus, how much water will they use?
And it was very gratifying. Last week, we entered-- they entered the poster competition for the CCSF, which is now the ACSF, having been given rather a large sum of money. And they made a board game in which, at a throw of the dice, they were-- people were allocated little tiny buckets of water. And they had to decide how they would spend that water and what they would do with it.
And they were able to see by the quantity of water, the number of buckets that they used on each throw exactly what things would raise the use of water to a level that would be a tipping point. They call their game The Tipping Point. And I think one day might make a million out of this board game. It was such a clever board game.
Here is Mariza with two of the little children that have learnt a water song, and they're singing in the town of Nafplion in the square. The worst case of pollution we saw by far was the case of the Asopus river, which forms the border between Boeotia and Attica in Greece, a very ancient river with a lot of mythical associations, which is now an industrial and agricultural dumping ground and has been written about all over the world as a scandal.
We went there to see the mayor, and we're hoping to have a public meeting about the state of the river. But it was such a contentious issue. Both industrialists and farmers were so opposed to the mayor's involvement in trying to clean up the river that we were followed everywhere we went by some guys in SUVs, saying, don't listen to the mayor. He doesn't know anything. This river is perfectly clean.
And the water, you can't see it quite so well in this slide. But the water was the color of blood. It was so disgusting that you wouldn't want to put your finger in there, let alone drink it. This water is being used to irrigate root crops that are sent to the market in Athens, and the state of pollution is something quite scary.
All right, so that's the end of my slides and nearly the end of my time. I just wanted to say that this book that we put together was the result of cooperation between lawyers, engineers, cultural people like myself and anthropologists. And we came to the conclusion, as we were doing this work, that it was impossible to look at water any other way.
Water involves politics, as we saw in this last town in Greece, very much. Water involves culture. It involves people's attitudes to what they're prepared to invest in. Do you invest in the Parthenon Marbles coming back to Greece? Or do you invest in cleaning up your water?
In the Greek case, they've clearly decided to invest in culture, which brings in tourism, rather than in cleaning up their water. And so culture, tradition, history and, of course, the music and song that we use are all effective ways to, I think, to look at water issues in the Mediterranean. And I'm going to leave Tammo to do the talking about the nitty gritty of what the water situation is, is in other parts of the Mediterranean. Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
TAMMO STEENHUIS: I'm the engineer, and we like to talk about solutions. But more important is we want not to lose water. We want not to lose paradise. And we want to do that by sustainable use and governance of water in the Mediterranean basin. So we must look for solutions.
And then the solution needs to be cultural and the whole business more. So we can come up with all kinds of solutions, but they need to be OK. So I want to talk about is, indeed, water, and the Mediterranean is one of the most severely-- is the regions where water is most short, likely.
The other regions too, but the Mediterranean has increasing population and has really little water. And the water is declining. So there is really worry about it. There's also-- there's other [? areas, ?] but granted, they are not as well developed, and they use less water.
Here, you see the same picture. Both the amount of water is declining and the quality, too. It is not only more you cannot use water anymore. If it is not there, you can also not use it. It is becoming toxic. So they're both things, and both is occurring in the Mediterranean. And Gail showed you that clearly, and here you see the same picture.
There's all this water in the Mediterranean. Look around, water everywhere. But it is all salt. You cannot use it.
In order to use it, you have to use these big pumps. You can desalinate it. Got a big pile of salt. You generate carbon. So there is an engineering solution if you live close by. It is extremely expensive, so it might be not the solution. So there's all that water and so little to drink, especially on these islands.
Water has a-- Gail already said, was on ABC News, what you see over here. And they did it in all graphic terms, they told you about it.
Also, this is another one that you can find. And this is actually here. This worldwide water shortage we are talking about, and we'll little bit explained later why it is worldwide right now and why it was not 50 years worldwide. Why it is we're talking now about it.
And they're talking about wars, water wars, if that this is true or not. And that every minute, seven people die from bad water or no water, especially in Africa, dysentery. You can get really, really sick from water, cholera on Haiti right now. And seven people die from water is probably pretty correct. That's lots and lots of people. If that would happen in traffic, we would not allow it.
And of all the water, I told you already, less than seven-- but little. I mean 0.007% is readily available for people to rivers, lakes and things like that. So we have all this water, and a tiny, tiny, tiny portion is available for us to use. That is becoming contentious, that is.
The water is coming less, one third over the next-- one third less over the next 30 years. This is, of course, all estimates. Even the military leaders step up for the fight for global warming because global warming will cause water shortages and flooding, and they think that will cause conflict.
So that is why our-- and this was in the time of Bush. This was not the time of Obama. This was Bush who was worried about it. And Bush was warned about-- was worried about it because of the water shortage in causing more war and probably could not go to Iraq.
So why is all this water suddenly in the news? Why is this? There must be some reason.
And water use depends on population density. More and more people are coming in the world, and the water supply is the same. We are more-- using more water each. And actually, in class, we always ask-- and we can ask you, too-- you know how much water you are using, you will be using today, your quantity of water?
Each of you had [? enough ?] gallons per day. So we can count. Going to the bathroom, washing your cars, go taking a shower-- a little bit of water you drink really doesn't make much difference. This bottle of water, which I will not drink-- that is bad news. But it's really not the quantity you're worried about. You're worried about all these things.
The clothes you're wearing is made with water. The clothes is grown. Water is needed for that. The electricity, Niagara Falls, cooling, and that is not included in the ton of gallons of water, only what we use ourselves.
And in addition to that, I think another 500 gallons we need each. So that is lots and lots of water. And if you don't have it, this water, like in Jordan, in the Mediterranean, you cannot-- industry is hampered, too, and other things, too.
And the only thing is tourists, they don't use that much water. That was the game, actually. So actually, Gail [INAUDIBLE] came up with this stage of development of water development and why we need now more water. And the first stage is long, long time ago, even before Gail was-- Gail's history, that is, the food was gathered from the land or sea.
That was at the time of Adam and Eve, I suppose. And you did not cultivate any crop. You gathered stuff, and you eat the fish out of the sea. And you did not have to do anything formal. So there was-- nobody worried about water. There's always something to eat.
At a certain stage, it became not enough. And crops became being-- became-- you started cultivating crops and. And the if land didn't have enough water, you started-- You took another piece of land, and you started growing there. It was actually slash and burn, nothing wrong with it.
Some part didn't produce enough food. You went somewhere else, and there's food. So nobody worried about water. If it doesn't produce enough, not enough, not big enough, then you make your land a little bit bigger. Land was plentiful.
At some place, at some time, you could not expand anymore. The land-- there were so many people. All the land was used for agriculture. And the only way to increase production was by growing more food per unit area, per acre, per hectare. And that is when agronomy became important because agronomy taught us how-- with fertilizers, with manure, how to get more food per unit area of land.
Economists are not worried about water. They assume always water is plentiful. And that is why we sometimes don't get along that well. But OK, so fertilizer, at a certain time, we couldn't apply any more fertilizer. And this is in-- actually, this is in Egypt, where they show where they do organized agriculture already.
And at some point, we used all the fertilizer. And that this time in the United States right now. We have lots and lots of [? pollution. ?] We add as much fertilizer as we can. We add that the yield is as high as possible, and the only way to increase productivity is by adding more than the natural rainfall.
So that is the fourth stage, and now we need water. And that is the stage we're in here right now. We have-- all the land is being grown, but [INAUDIBLE] what can produce, what you can produce agriculture profitably on. And now we need more water, and that is what is being happened. So we are now using our water resources.
And now the engineers, we know about water, how to capture water, how to build dams, not many. Most people don't like those things, but we know how to build dams, how to-- and how to use the water and during the summer or doing when it is dry.
And then the last stage is essentially all the available water is being used. And that is in the Mediterranean right now. There is no drop that is not being used. And about equality becomes a dominating factor. If you look to the Nile basin, for example, all this water is coming in, and nothing is going to the Mediterranean anymore. All the water is being used except what is too salty and too polluted to be used.
That is-- so a little bit is going to the Mediterranean, and that is all-- that is the only water that is-- you cannot use it anymore. So that is the fifth stage. And much of the world is right now in that.
There's an heavy competition of water. Water is being sold. You have to pay for water at this point. It becomes a scarce, scarce object.
And in order to deal with this, in order to deal with this situation, I said the first phase, the first three, the agronomist. The fourth phase, the engineers could deal with it. Stage 5, we all need to be involved. There has to be all disciplines to do that. We have to convince the politicians that they make the right reasons.
And so what can we do? That is the question. What can we do about the water shortage in the 21st century. And I will give you some examples. This is only an example to-- simply, in order to do something about it, the first rule is we cannot use more water than the difference between rainfall and evaporation. If we use more than that, we borrowed from our children.
That is the simple rule. There's so much rain. We know approximately how must have operation that is, and then we can argue there's a little bit more, a little bit less. But it is approximately 2 millimeters per day here, on the average, here in New York. And that water is left, and that water what we can use.
If we use more-- and this is not rocket science. This is simple. So much comes in. So much goes out. And the rest you can use for something.
You can reuse it to an extent, agriculture on Crete, same picture again. And here is Michael and the mayor. They grow olives, and they grow-- and olives is a crop which use approximately 2 millimeters per day. And if you multiply that times 360, you get to 720 millimeters per day. That's the amount of water that olives need.
So if the rainfall is more than 720, no shortage will occur. And in most areas, we have approximately 720 millimeters, sometimes 600. Sometimes it's 800.
But the 720 is not accurate exactly. Sometimes rains a little bit more, and if it rains a little bit less, the olives will probably evaporate a little bit less. So olives essentially is a crop that doesn't use water.
That is why Gail was talking about plenty of springs in the time from-- I don't know. I forgot who-- what time it was. But there was plenty of water. If you grow olives, it's really a sound crop you can grow.
So and most [? presentation ?] on Crete, for example, was 720 millimeters per year, no problem. And there is-- at the town of Nafplion, there was approximately 720 millimeters of rain, olives everywhere.
And they really did not have yet a water problem. And here are the olive trees. Good crop, whatever they say.
Now you're going to change it to oranges or kiwi trees. An irrigated crop takes about 4 millimeters per day on the average, maybe a little bit less. This is ballpark figures.
You can argue with that. It can be 15. It can be 12. It can be 16 millimeters. But that is ballpark figures.
There are few areas in the world that have more than 1,500 millimeters of rain per year. We, here, have approximately 700, 800 a year, maybe 1,000. That's what is here in New York.
I don't know. West Coast of Oregon has more than 1,500 millimeters of rain. It's the only place. So going-- and Florida is fine, too. Florida, you can go orange juice without too much problem.
That has lots and lots of rain, too. California? No. California doesn't have that much rain, and that has to come from somewhere. And it comes from Washington.
So in that case, using [INAUDIBLE] will result in groundwater drawdown, and then saltwater intrusion if you're close to the sea. And importing water from elsewhere is usually not very popular with the people from that elsewhere. There's always a conflict.
Ethiopia-- the people in Ethiopia doesn't like the Egyptians because they use water. The West Coast of Greece, yes, brought a ship to the East Coast of Greece to all these islands, not very popular either. And in Spain, the same thing. Israel and Palestine also has to do with water, don't have it.
And finally, you see, he had this box of oranges of Egypt. And this went a little bit fast. But essentially, this box of oranges is equivalent-- the amount of water you need to grow this box of oranges in Egypt is equivalent to the amount of water you will drink in water bottles your whole lifetime. This requires approximately 10 square meters to grow this you need approximately 1.5 meters to grow the crop.
You get to 15 cubic meters. You use water. If you use a lot of water-- I think this is half a liter. So you use a liter per year-- liter per two days-- I can't. I lost track of the whole thing now.
So you use 200 liters per year. You use a cubic meter in five years. And I add 15, so 15 times 5 is 75 years. One bottle a day is the same as these oranges grown in Egypt.
So there's this whole campaign about water bottles. And it is-- absolutely. the plastic is bad news. But if you worry about the water, you should not worry about these plastic bottles. You should worry about the oranges you eat out of Egypt.
That uses the water out of Israel. Finally, you eat them from Florida and Brazil. They have plenty of rainwater. They don't irrigate them. But if they come out of a dry country, they use lots and lots of water that the people could have used upstream.
Or there is debate going on if Ethiopia can use this water to increase the welfare of its own population. And if they want to do that, Egypt might send the army the upstairs. And actually, thank you for listening. But now, I mean, you're not done yet, a quiz.
You thought we had [INAUDIBLE]. And we need a quiz at the end. OK, we think that increasing irrigation efficiencies in the Mediterranean make more water-- will increasing irrigation efficiencies in the Mediterranean make more water available for crop growth?
That is the argument that everybody is making. And I see some shaking of no. And I can give you the answer, too. It is not-- oh, I need to see. And the example is about North China Plain.
The North China Plain, they went-- this is 1960, 1982, and it is 2000. This is the water level in the aquifer. And they went at the time to the Cultural Revolution, and most of you know that.
And in the Cultural Revolution, it was huge, lots and lots of water in. Irrigation efficiency was very poor. Right now, they said, OK, now, we need to increase the efficiency. And we're going to put drip irrigation in.
And what happens-- and you look at the groundwater reservoir, it is going steadily down exactly at the same rate, if you use lots and lots of water or a little bit of water. And the reason is they went from one crop over here to two crops. And the two crops use more evaporation, and the only water that is used because the water-- only the only water that is used that is lost out of the system is by evaporation.
But the exercise you applied goes back to the groundwater, and you pump it up. So you need a little bit more energy. But water wise, you lose only the evaporation. And that's what you see steady decline.
So I told you all about the Nile basin. If one farmer doesn't use it, the farmer downstream will use it because back to the Nile, and they use it again. The question is, how much comes out to the sea? If there's nothing coming out of the sea, it must be used efficiently.
And the Mediterranean, very little water right now is going out to the sea. And that is an ecological disaster also because it's getting more salty and no fresh water. OK, that's what I had to say, losing water with one [? hour. ?]
[APPLAUSE]
[BELLS]
SPEAKER 1: This has been a production of Cornell University on the web at cornell.edu.
Losing Paradise presents case studies from across the Mediterranean region to provide an interdisciplinary framework for understanding problems of diminished and polluted water supplies. Stressing the importance of culture and history in addressing the Mediterranean water crisis, the authors demonstrate the need for an integrated legal, social and scientific management system appropriate to each country's stage of development and cultural heritage.
In a book talk at Mann Library in November 2010, contributing authors and co-editors Gail Holst-Warhaft and Tammo Steenhuis presented insights offered by this framework for identifying more promising approaches to critical issues of water management. The suggested solutions also serve as a paradigm for the rest of the world as it faces similar issues of water shortage.
