Introduction to Drinking Water Management - Global Drinking Water Management and Conservation - page 7

are more likely to be treated as calling for voluntary acts of charity than as a matter
of equity, requiring compensation for the actions of the industrialized countries.
That will be the greatest inequity of global climate change. The patterns sketched
above have now been con

rmed with even greater con dence by the IPCC Fifth

Assessment Report (IPCC 2014 ).
The above section is a brief outline of ; the adverse

consequences of human actions coupled with advances in medicine and economic
development are likely to have contradictory impacts on the world. Perhaps the
most serious threat over the next 50

“ the state of the biome ”

100 years will be the impacts of climate
change, and the most severe impacts are likely to be on water resources: dry areas
getting even drier and wet areas enduring more precipitation, with more extremely
heavy precipitation causing

-

flooding, property damage, and loss of life. It is this
rather precarious context within which human societies will have to manage the
provision of safe drinking water.

1.3 What This Topic Is About

This topic is concerned with the comparative management of drinking water in the
developed, richer countries, who in principle have the resources to give their citizens
the best and highest quality drinking water and yet so often fail to do so. The
management of water in the developing countries is an even more daunting task, as
they do not have the financial resources or the knowledge of treatment technologies.

Both in the developed and the developing world, the crisis is partly due to lack of
public funding for small and rural communities, partly due to government com-
placency, but also due to lack of knowledge. For example, some jurisdictions (such
as Alberta, and Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, and parts of Europe) are
more proactive and innovative in capital support and in the adoption of new tech-
nology; some communities are prepared to pay a higher price for water when water is
privatized, as in some countries in Europe. But there is a serious knowledge gap
about (a) water treatment technologies and their costs, (b) risk assessment methods,
(c) adverse health effects of chemical contaminants, (d) management protocols, and
(e) varying regulatory practices in different jurisdictions, and what successes are
possible even with small nancial outlays. This topic is about these issues. It begins

with a record of waterborne disease outbreaks, and the lessons learned from that.
That lesson is the need for a multi-barrier approach to the protection of drinking
water. The

first component of the multi-barrier approach is adequate watershed
protection. The topic then proceeds with a comparative classi cation of water

treatment technologies. The classi cation is based on the contaminants removed;

“ ”

this is an indirect way to get to water quality, which also depends on the quality of

source water in the first place. By focusing on the contaminants removed, we get a

sense of the water quality associated with any given treatment technology.
It is also obvious that drinking water can be made safer if watershed contami-
nation from human activities is minimized; these principles of watershed