Adequate water supply is defined as the provision of sufficient amount of water by public, private organisations or by individuals. An environmental challenge is a process of achieving a goal of environmental sustainability due to the problems that prevent overcoming obstacles. Climate change is a long-term change in the Earth’s climate, especially a change due to an increase in the average atmospheric temperature. The adaptation to this kind of change can be long and difficult. This essay will explore the methods of solving different environmental issues and will compare them.
Lesotho Highland Project is one of the successful problem solving systems. Project involves the building of dams, tunnels and power stations. It has started in 1980s and its main goal was to transfer water to Gauteng province for mining industry. The project also helps to earn money and generate hydroelectric power for Lesotho, although a lot of corruption cases occurred during the realisation of it (individuals and multinational corporations involved). Many social problems occurred due to the project, which involved the movement of people from the area of the dam and the default of a pay to hundreds of households affected by the building. When the critical shortage of water occurs in the region of Maseru (the capital of Lesotho), it is the Highland Project which transfers the water. The project is beneficial both for the government, since they get the revenue, and the citizens, as they get clean water. Another benefit of the Highland Project is the creation of infrastructure such as hundreds of kilometres of roads built to improve the communication between building sites. Today they are used by Lesotho’s citizens and tourists to travel within the country.
Large dual-function plants are built not in many places yet, but they are considered to be one of the solutions to the problem of adequate supply of water. Saudi Arabia has 27 desalinisation plants around the country in total, which costed a lot of money. Today the largest dual-function plant is located in Saudi-Arabia and costs around US$ 6 trillion(!). The annual production capacity of the project is 1.025 million m3 of desalinated water and 2.400MW of electricity. The project is very beneficial for the consumers, since they get drinkable water of hight quality, which is produced in there own country, so they do not need to pay more for the product to be transferred. On the other side, the project needs a lot of energy, land and, of course, capita to clean relatively small amount of water. There is also the risk of contamination of water, pollution of the environment by the chemicals emitted, which contribute to the greenhouse effect.
Climate change can bring different outcomes: it can be drought, sea-level rise, extreme temperatures or enormous floods. Many countries has already introduced environmental policies in order to adapt to a climate change. The most common effect of the process is the rise of sea-level, since it could be applied to many countries. In 2006 flows regulators in coastal embankments were built in Bangladesh, and due to the saltwater intrusion a lot of agronomic devices were replaced by low-technological. The country decided to tackle the problem of climate change and find a cheap and fast ways to solve it. The latest project, which begun in 2013, has a budget of US$ 400 million. It is still in progress until 2020, but people are working on it to achieve the goal of minimisation of climate change’s negative impacts.
Another way to tackle the problem of climate change is to cooperate with other countries in order to find a better solution. Kyoto Protocol was created in 1998 and enforced in 2005; it explained the need of a burden for the countries responsible for the high emission of greenhouse gasses due to the industrialisation. Protocol’s aim was to reduce the emission of those gases. Its principle was “common but differentiated responsibilities”, which highlights the idea of unity but also differences between the countries. Another example of good cooperation between countries is The Paris Agreement, which was created very recently, in 2015. Its main aim is to decrease the global temperature and prevent it from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius. 128 countries have signed the agreement and hope to achieve the best in the further years.
In a conclusion, I would like to say that adapting to climate change is reasonably easier than ensuring adequate water supplies. As the research shows, it takes a lot more capita to supply clean water to different regions than to install new devises or change the methods of cultivation. Some countries simply do not have money to build infrastructure and plants to supply water. Both processes take time, but nothing can be done immediately, since a lot of work is needed. It is hard to say which one is more of a challenge than the other according to the results, since there are lot more cases of solving the problem of water supply and climate change.