CONCLUSIONS - Hydrogeology: Objectives, Methods, Applications - page 310

cities are encroaching on agricultural zones, people live in their own trash,
and wash and cook in their sewers. Paradoxically, there is an explosion in
bottled water consumption in the poorest countries.
A question is asked: is free water a right? If air remains free (some
say, only because no one has invented a way to meter it!) the cost of water
increases continually. In most Western countries, water is free, but its
treatment and distribution must be paid for. Since public fountains are
rare, one must therefore pay in order to have access to water. In France,
the water budget for a family today represents approximately one month
of a minimum wage salary. What is acceptable, given that the average
revenue of French citizens, is not even reachable for the great majority of
the planet's inhabitants. And yet, it will inevitably, given demographics
and pollution problems, be necessary to launch vast projects to manage
and exploit aquifers, to treat sewage, and to carry water, in order to ensure
a water supply for poor countries. The use of deep aquifers, which are less
sensitive with respect to pollution than surface aquifer, should be developed.
But all of this has a cost, and many voices clamor to ask that free access to
water be conserved for the poorest people.
3 THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF WATER AND THE RISK OF
INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT
Aquifers do not care about borders. Great problems can arise from the
unilateral exploitation of an aquifer, which impoverishes other countries
dependent on the same aquifer by exhausting their springs and lowering
the water table below the depth of wells. Great dams diverting water for
irrigation can impoverish the aquifers downstream that relied on the river
for their recharge. The conquest of water, or at least the conservation of
existing rights to a resource can justify important confl icts. We have lived
with the rhythm of wars over black gold for the last few decades; wars for
blue gold are on the horizon.
3.1 Water history
3.1.1 Examples in Europe
a) Monaco
The Rock of the Principality of Monaco was, until the 19th century, furnished
by rainfall with tanks enabling 6 month autonomy in case of siege, with