By Paolo von Schirach
President, Global Policy Institute; Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Bay Atlantic University, both in Washington, DC
There is a major freshwater crisis affecting many regions of our planet. However, desalination may provide a viable solution. Significant technological progress is making desalination plants—those that turn salty seawater into drinkable fresh water—much more affordable. This is a blessing for an overcrowded world in need of increasing amounts of fresh water—for humans, farm animals, agriculture, and industry.
For those of us living in temperate climate regions of the world, blessed with fairly regular rainfall and plenty of rivers and lakes, the availability of safe, affordable, drinkable fresh water is not an issue. We take it for granted.
But in many regions of our planet—some of them very poor—fresh water is very scarce and therefore very expensive. This is a huge constraint on economic development, as water is essential for almost everything.
In other parts of the world, due to changed weather patterns partly caused by global warming, water is no longer available in volumes that can support agriculture, industrial use, and human settlements. Consequently, people will have to migrate elsewhere. Should these migrations from regions that have become deserts become mass phenomena, they may trigger violent conflicts as more and more people fight for the same essential, yet very limited resource.
While this predicament is serious and, in some places, becoming truly dramatic, technology is coming to the rescue. Desalination technology has been around for quite some time. Built on coastlines, desalination plants pump in seawater—an inexhaustible water supply—and, through various technological modalities, remove the salt from seawater, turning it into fresh water that is perfectly safe for human consumption and other uses.
The problem with desalination used to be that it was prohibitively expensive, even in developed, wealthy countries, and completely out of reach for poorer countries in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East that need it the most.
That said, technologies have improved, and the high cost of operating desalination plants—desalination is an energy-intensive process—is decreasing, thanks to renewable energy. For example, Israel, which once faced a huge water scarcity problem due to very limited freshwater resources, is now completely self-sufficient in freshwater due to many state-of-the-art desalination plants. The Israelis have enhanced the technology, increasing the productivity of desalination plants while reducing the energy needed to operate them. Saudi Arabia and other water-poor but energy-rich Gulf countries do not face affordability issues with desalination.
But there is hope for the rest of the world as well. Overall, the cost of desalination plants has decreased by about 45 percent in recent years. Further cost reductions are expected because renewable energy, now much more efficient and affordable, can be used to operate the plants.
Moreover, new technological advances will address the problem of disposing of the salt brine collected by desalination plants. Disposing of brine into the sea can cause significant environmental problems due to its high salt concentration, which drastically affects coastal ecosystems. However, scientists have developed methods to extract salt from the brine, along with other valuable minerals that have important industrial uses. This means brine can be recycled, resolving the disposal issue.
It should also be noted that while large desalination plants are required to supply cities, small coastal communities or even individual households can now acquire scaled-down desalination plants to meet their freshwater needs.
That said, while desalination is becoming an affordable solution to the global water crisis, initial capital costs need to be financed, operating costs (even if reduced) need to be considered, and additional costs are incurred to pipe the fresh water to population centers located away from the coastal areas where the desalination plants will be situated. Nonetheless, even considering these challenges, it is no longer a certainty that certain regions of the planet will have to be abandoned due to a lack of drinkable water, potentially becoming uninhabitable deserts.
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