Data makes it difficult to predict future water needs in UAE

Experts and academics outlined a water scarcity challenge facing the UAE and the Gulf.

ABU DHABI // On the second day of the annual Climate Change and Future of Water Conference, experts and academics outlined a water scarcity challenge that the UAE and the Arabian Gulf region will soon face.

During a panel discussion entitled “The Future of Water in the Arabian Gulf”, Dr Ahmed Murad, vice dean and associate professor of hydrogeology at UAE University, said that aside from the inherent challenges of living in an arid environment, data posed the greatest obstacle. “We’ve been collecting data for the past three decades, but the 30-year cycles are not clear and therefore we can’t predict as accurately as we’d like the effect of climate change on the region,” Dr Murad said.

Hydrogeologists and climate-change experts depend on documented 30-year cycles of precipitation and temperature change to determine whether shifts in those variables are due to natural causes or otherwise. Without this data, it is difficult to determine whether the change is affected by human-related influences.

However, some data is readily available and can provide experts with solid information on which frameworks, scenarios and government policies can be put into place.

“We know that there is an increase in total temperature, approximately 1.6°C, which is consistent with the temperature increase in the Arab region,” Dr Murad said. “Precipitation, on the other hand, has been consistent. The general trend of the five-year rainfall data suggests that there is a cycle of increase and decrease.”

Dr Murad said that the temperature increase in the region dramatically affected water retention and sourcing issues because each degree of temperature increase corresponded with about a 5 per cent increase in evaporation rates.

Because a significant portion of the GCC’s water is sourced from underground aquifers, the temperature rise over the past 30 years suggested an almost 7 per cent increase in water evaporation of underground and surface water resources.

Although that might not seem significant, said Dr Peter Werner, director of the National Water Centre at UAE University, those available underground water sources are further reduced when contamination rates and the lack of policies to protect those sources are taken into consideration.

“All it takes is one millilitre of oil to contaminate one million millilitres of water,” he said.

He cited the example of Europe, which is today dealing with water contamination from the years before protection and policy laws.

“In Germany, and most of Europe, we have this problem of contaminated underground water resources, from before the policies in the 1970s and the protection efforts. We had been doing this for many decades and now we are trying to recover,” Dr Werner said.

He said that because of a lack of data, it was unknown how long it took for water in the GCC to decontaminate itself through natural processes.

Although the issue of water contamination from oil sources, hydrocarbons from organic processing plants, or heavy metals and pesticides might actually be less of an issue owing to the inherent filtration ability of sand, underground waters are still in danger.

The GCC has had contamination issues only since the 1970s, because industrialisation and the issues prevalent in Europe had not surfaced in the region until that time.

“This is when I use the quote, ‘a penny in prevention is worth a dollar in cure’,” Dr Werner said.