제주평화연구원

  [caption id="" align="alignright" width="150"] SUNG Jung Hee
Research Professor, Institute of East and West Studies, Yonsei University[/caption]

The Jeju Special Self-Governing Province has been working intensively on 17 peace-related projects since Jeju’s official designation as the Island of World Peace by the central government in 2005. Among those projects, the “Northeast Asian hub of water education” project may be the only one that is not instantly associated with the word, “peace,” typically given greater salience in the context of confrontation between South and North Korea or as a general indication of some diplomatic settlement of conflict. The principal reason why the public does not consider the pertinence of the issue of water to peace can be attributed to its fundamental lack of understanding concerning the very nature of the water issue, which I believe underscores the crucial necessity of education about water.

Vandana Shiva, an internationally recognized environmental activist, pointed out in her book, Water Wars, that many important conflicts of our time have actually been “water wars” in the guise of territorial, religious or ethnic conflicts. The war between the Israelis and Palestinians was waged over water resources in the Jordan River basin. The Aswan Dam on the Nile River is another site of ongoing water conflict between Egypt, the Sudan and Ethiopia, which share the longest river in the world. Rising in the Tibetan Plateau, the Mekong River runs through six countries, including Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, to flow into the South China Sea. With its length estimated at 4,880 km, the Mekong River basin drains an area of approximately 810,000 km2, making it the sixth longest river in the world. The Mekong is home to about 65 million farmers and fishers of those six countries. China’s large dams built on the upper reaches of the Mekong River to generate electricity have been criticized for causing water shortages downstream, escalating disputes among Mekong River basin countries. The countries around 214 transboundary river basins over the world are faced with ever-present threats of conflict in the event of a water crisis. The United Nations Environment Program reports that one-third of the world’s population will face serious water shortages by 2025 if the global population and water consumption per capita continue to rise at their current rates. Climate change is also likely to make water shortages more severe, increasing the likelihood of water conflicts. Water is closely linked to food production, in particular. Rapid population and economic growth as well as urbanization in China have drastically increased demand for fresh water, which has resulted in the Yellow River drying up often since 1972, when it ran dry for the first time in China's recorded history. With agriculture demanding the largest amount of water, water shortages in China may lead to the rise of grain prices, as 70 percent of China’s grain production depends on irrigated fields, as opposed to the 17 percent of U.S. agricultural production reliant on irrigated farming. This may also lead to worse famines and greater poverty in the least developed countries that cause an increase of environmental refugees and displaced persons, whose obscure status imperil peace by fomenting conflicts and clashes over their much maligned presence. Ismail Serageldin, former Vice President of the World Bank, claimed in 1995 that “if the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.” Water is about poverty and about peace. The substance and causes of the water problems that we face today can be summarized as follows. First, there is a lack of scientific understanding of water and the water cycle. The physical properties of water are so unique that water cannot be replaced by any other matter. Some 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water, but 97.5 percent of that is unusable salt water meaning, only 2.5 percent of the Earth's water is fresh, leaving less than one percent of that tiny 2.5 percent freshwater potable. Moreover, these limited sources of fresh drinking water cycles naturally. Water shortages are unavoidable if the Earth's water resources are not consumed in a sustainable manner that conforms to the harmony of the water cycle. Second, there exists a real concern about the accessibility of water. Water shortages are caused not only by the material scarcity of water resources, but also by social and economic inequalities in having access to water. Simply put, it is a matter of artificial barriers to gaining water access. The social disparity in the distribution and access to water threatens sustainable development, because it is closely related to the health of women and children, education and poverty. Third, low levels of public awareness of water issues remain a major cause of water shortages. Contrary to popular belief, well-built water supply and drainage systems in urban areas act as an obstacle for raising public sensitivity to water problems and awareness of the seriousness of water overconsumption, and thus making it more difficult to cope with the water problems. Fourth, the impact of climate change is demonstrated by water problems in everyday life. Compared to climate change, however, the seriousness of water issues garners less attention in the collective efforts of the global society towards the remedying of such global challenges. For the last 60 years, Mongolia has suffered from various effects of climate change, with 78 percent of its land turning into desert 90 percent of its pasturelands facing desertification and 887 rivers and streams, 2,069 wells, and 1,166 lakes drying up, which have produced climate refugees across the country. Given the characteristics of water issues, the most effective way to deal with water problems would be to invest in public education about water issues. In 2000, the UN General Assembly declared 2003 the International Year of Fresh Water to raise public awareness about the seriousness of the water issue. Also in 2003, the High Level Committee on Programs of the UN System Chief Executives Board for Coordination established UN-Water, a UN inter-agency coordination mechanism for all freshwater- and sanitation-related issues. In the same year, the UN General Assembly declared the years 2005-2015 as the UN Decade for Action for “Water for Life” to promote efforts to fulfill Millennium Development Goals for water and water-related issues. In recognition of the need for regional water education in Northeast Asia, South Korea proposed at the 6th World Water Forum in 2012 the creation of a water education center to respond to climate change by 2018. In addition, the Korea-China-Japan Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat called for the establishment of a research council comprising the three countries’ administrators and experts in water resources in a meeting at the 7th World Water Forum held last year. Given the repeated calls, it is very meaningful that Jeju included a scheme to promote itself as the “Northeast Asian hub of water education” as one of the 17 projects for the Island of World Peace. I would like to propose a few ideas that I hope will help Jeju to further serve as a water education hub for Northeast Asia. First, water issues should be set not only as a local or domestic agenda but as a regional one for the sustainable development of Northeast Asia. To that end, it would be sensible to address these issues as part of the global agenda as outlined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Second, the scope of education should not be confined to water resources and water quality, but extended to cover its many convergent subjects, including climate change, desertification, and international development cooperation. Third, it is necessary to offer water education for all and to develop educational content that takes advantage of the entire island of Jeju as a water education hub. Jeju has often experienced severe water shortages in the past because of the island’s volcanic soil that fails to contain rainwater. Spurred by such an adverse condition, due to which Jeju women had to carry water jars and baskets home, Jeju developed its commercially available best-selling underground water “Samdasoo” that reshaped Korea’s water industry. More efforts should be made to develop educational content that conveys and disseminates local human experiences to broader audiences at large. Lastly, strategic efforts should be made to draw synergystic effects with the proposed water education center and the existing training facilities such as the Jeju International Training Center under the wing of the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). As water issues are related to the agendas of sustainable urbanization and environment, health, and human security, it would be possible to make specialized approaches, based on water education, towards these agendas. Water education will not only raise the trainees’ awareness of water problems and improve their ability to respond to them, but also provide water experts who live all around Northeast Asia with opportunities to gather at the water education site in Jeju and formulate alternative ways to address water issues and climate change, eventually contributing to the sustainable development of their respective regions.