Water resources management

Malta is considered one of the driest countries in the world and lacking in the precious re­source which is water. Over the years, our ancestors have managed to device ingenious ways how to capture water and distribute it to the population centres. However, a stage was soon reached when, because of drought and an ever-increasing demand for water, it was not technically possible to have an adequate supply of water even if all the rainwater falling on our islands was captured.

Two new initiatives were launched at the beginning of the 1980s to address the situation. A sewage treatment plant was constructed at Sant’Antin with the specific aim of providing second-class water to farmers while the government introduced (at the time) cutting-edge reverse osmosis technology for the production of water. The first RO plants were constructed by the US firm Polymetrics at Marsa (to treat brackish water), at Lapsi and at Tigné. To date, the Lapsi plant is still in operation.

After 1987, the Nationalist Administration continued the programme for the construction of RO plants with the building of a plant at Ċirkewwa and another at Pembroke.

Once all the RO plants were in operation we could meet the demand for water such that we were no longer dependent on water from the aquifer. However, this situation also brought about the attitude that water will always be readily available at a relative low price and, hence, we do not need to conserve it!

The construction of wells within residential units was abandoned, valleys were not maintained and left to silt up such that their retention capacity was reduced significantly while farmers and other commercial enterprises abandoned the construction of reservoirs and started drilling boreholes for their water requirements.

During the 1996 - 1998 Labour Administration, the situation started being addressed. An intensive programme of cleaning of valleys was launched while the Water Services Corporation launched an exercise to register all boreholes and water carriers, thus enabling the WSC to monitor groundwater extraction. The Sant’Antin sewage treatment plant was also upgraded to double its original capacity.

Unfortunately, with the change of government in 1998 all these initiatives were abandoned and it is only recently that a new exercise in borehole and water carriers registration was re-launched. Furthermore, at last, the government has proceeded with the construction of new sewage treatment plants so that, in the near future, all our sewage will be treated.

The increase in the price of fuel and the consequential rise in electricity rates have refocused our attention on the problem of water supply. Furthermore, with Malta being an EU member we are now obliged to adhere to the Water Directive, which stipulates that the WSC must operate on a full cost recovery basis.

Finally, the government has decided to act and the Malta Resources Authority has recently published a draft National Water Policy.

In my opinion, any water policy has to be based on the integrated management of water resources. We have four types of water sources, namely water provided from the aquifer, RO water, rainwater and treated sewage effluent. Any policy would need to evaluate financial and environmental costs for the use of different types of water and propose which source of water can be used most efficiently in different circumstances.

Consumers have to be made more aware of the cost of water. The WSC charges between €1.47 for low consumption to €5.41 for high consumption for each cubic metre of water. Water carriers sell water at about €2 per cubic metre. Local bottled water is sold at circa €250 per cubic metre. Hence, the supply of good quality drinking water by the WSC would mean a huge savings to the consumers who use bottled water.

The policies proposed need to be doable. Hence, while the document stresses the need for all developments to have a reservoir, as is required by law, on the other hand when one considers the volume of water that can be collected from the roof of an apartment block, this volume is relatively small to cater for all the residential units within that block. Furthermore, there are legal and technical complications for the collection and use of such water from communal roofs.

Therefore, in such circumstances one may propose that, rather than digging a reservoir under each block, a communal reservoir is excavated under the road and the rainwater system of all apartment blocks connected to it. Such reservoirs can be financed by the imposition of a contribution as part of a building levy by the Malta Environment and Planning Authority for development applications. Such a contribution would not be an extra burden on developers as it would relieve them from the cost of building individual reservoirs. Developers who build their own reservoirs would be exempted from the contribution. The water so collected can then be made use of by the central government or local councils.

One other issue that needs to be tackled is that of “ownership” for the implementation of the water policy. At present there are various stakeholders in this sector, including the WSC, the Roads Department responsible for the construction of rain water culverts, the Public Works Department responsible for the cleaning of valleys and maintenance of reservoirs, local councils responsible for the maintenance of culverts in local streets, the Department of Agriculture. In my opinion, the MRA should not only have a regulatory role but it must also be responsible for the coordination of the various stakeholders.

There are various other proposals that can be made to address the water problem. However, any policy document is only relevant if there is the political will to implement it. I sincerely hope we start addressing this problem in earnest because we may already be too late.

The author is the Labour opposition’s main spokesman on infrastructure and capital projects.