Global Issues

As a private water and sanitation provider, PDMU strives to act in a socially and environmentally responsible way, conscious of the global water issues, while continuing to build a strong, vibrant and economically sustainable business.

• World Water Challenges
• Increasing water scarcity
• Developed countries appear to have more water resources available than developing
• Global warming and climate variability (floods, droughts, sea level)
• Lack of accessibility to clean drinking water and sanitation; waterborne disease outbreaks
• Increasing levels of water pollution
• Fragmentation of water management
• Decline in public investment in water resources, especially in developing countries
• Lack of public attention until crisis
• Water shortages leading to political unrest (especially internal)

Water Politics

Because water is so important to people, it can bring out the best and the worst in them. A host of inter-linked factors affect the allocation of historic water rights and the prospects for reforming them. External participants such as water companies need to draw on psychology and anthropology to understand the intricate arrays of power relationships to achieve mutually beneficial solutions.

Access to Water

Freshwater is a vital renewable resource that in many locations suffers from excessive demand, excessive pollution or both. The United Nations has been forced to draw up formal definitions of ‘water stress’ and ‘water scarcity’ despite human beings using only 15% of the total available rainfall and groundwater each year.

 The Environment

Some of the key challenges to successful water management are social and political, but many are environmental. A range of pollution threats exist, some old and some barely understood. Climate change in particular has the potential to make a difficult set of circumstances even worse, everywhere.

Water Scarcity

Water is a unique resource that we cannot do without. It makes economic and environmental sense to use it sparingly and to eliminate waste.

Water and Energy

Water and energy have a symbiotic relationship, not least with climate change now a reality. Suitable hydropower resources are nearing their exploitable limit. Wave and tidal power may be able to boost the renewables sector contribution to energy needs. With energy recovery, some sewage treatment plants are self-sufficient in terms of their energy needs.

New Solutions

Freshwater resources are increasingly scarce even in the developed world. New ways to use and reuse water resources to meet various human needs have to be researched, tested and then disseminated, with appropriate incentives. In coastal areas, unlimited supplies of saltwater could be made available for human and agricultural use through desalination. However, this is energy intensive and adds to climate change if conventional energy sources are used in the desalination process.

Public or Private?

No single sector of society can possibly afford to meet basic human needs for water and wastewater services. While meeting these needs is a core responsibility of governments, they can and must draw on the technical, managerial and financial resources of the private sector to help them.

Groundwater supplies serve about 80% of the population, whereas up to 4% of usable groundwater is already polluted. There are 12,000 different toxic chemical compounds in industrial use today, and more than 500 new chemicals are developed each year. Over 70,000 different water contaminants have been identified. The principal sources of contamination are associated with the post World War II chemical age. If all new sources of contamination could be eliminated, in 10 years, 98% of all available groundwater would then be free of pollution.