Whether it is because of the impoverished bean harvest or the amount of dust accumulating everywhere, few have failed to notice the effects of Malta’s worst winter drought in 93 years.
After an exceptionally dry winter, scattered showers last week added a few grudging millimetres to our well-below-average rainfall count. The eagerly expected rain was sparse, and in many areas the ground remained dry.
With Malta already squarely in the semi-arid zone, this season’s rainfall pattern is pushing us closer toward a desert climate. Measured since the end of last summer, the rainfall till now has been barely half the annual average as we approach the dry season. Agricultural areas, which mostly lie on the western side of Malta, received even less rain.
We are already suffering from a man-made type of drought caused by continued over-extraction from the aquifer and a growing population with ever higher water demands. Seawater intrudes into the main aquifer and salinity of groundwater increases due to uncontrolled pumping from hundreds of private boreholes, mostly unmetered. If the winter drought continues it will make Malta’s existing water crisis even more severe.
Lack of rainwater to replenish increasingly depleted aquifers is a serious problem for Malta, yet there has long been reluctance on the part of the authorities to tackle politically sensitive water issues head on. Rather than focusing on our future, public attention is captivated by financial scandals and political intrigue as the fate of the national water supply is left to the priests and imams – a truly medieval approach to water management.
Farmers have been forced to use precious reserves to water their crops at a time when the land should have been coming alive with rain-soaked soil and plants bursting out of the ground.
A good portion of this year’s less-than-usual rainwater supply, which would normally have been held in store for crop irrigation in the hot summer months, has already been consumed by early irrigation after the wet season simply dried up.
The water we have seen being used to irrigate fields this winter should have stayed in the ground where it belonged, at least until later in the year.
One local newspaper has tagged the winter dryness as a possible “first sign” that Maltese agriculture is being affected by climate change, although farmers have noticed increasingly unusual weather patterns beyond normal cycles for some years now. Dry periods from time to time are often part of a natural swing, but if these become more frequent it could well be that climate change is amplifying the effects of drought.
Public attention is captivated by financial scandals and political intrigue as the fate of the national water supply is left to the priests and imams – a truly medieval approach to water management
The culture of water saving, which one would expect to find widespread on a Mediterranean island with such a highly challenged water resource, is all but absent. Yet, surprisingly to visitors to Malta, the bright green roundabouts on our roads are hardly evidence of a community aware of its responsibility not to waste precious water. Rather than cracking down on the hosepipe-happy populace, saving water is merely something tourists are asked to practise voluntarily in their hotel rooms.
As homes with gardens and empty wells are already bringing in bowsers – further depleting the water table – politicians keep postponing the publication of the national water plan.
Despite every good effort by the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology’s Water Research and Training Centre to foster research and innovation in water and agriculture, robust policies to guide water governance across the board are still missing.
In a review of Malta’s water resources intended to give life to a much-needed water policy for the islands, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation had called for “immediate action”. Ten years have gone by since then. The 94-page FAO document, which raised issues that politicians chose to ignore, was quietly shelved.
The landmark document described Malta’s various water challenges in detail and came to the conclusion that the biggest problem of all was lack of water governance. Since then, despite being given a clear direction, various administrations have waded in the shallows, postponing change in favour of a precarious status quo.
The FAO review was critical of the practice of extracting water for free by drilling boreholes, which have created an accumulating deficit in the water table each year as more is taken than can ever be replaced by rainfall. The review also presented scenarios which screamed for some tough decision-making by our politicians, such as curbing the amount of water consumed by agriculture – an annual 28 million cubic metres according to the National Statistics Office back in 2009, and probably much more today.
It is unforgiveable that one administration after another has slipped into a coma on something as basic to life, health and the economy as our water policy. Successive governments failed to take the necessary steps to ensure a sustainable supply of groundwater for the benefit of the Maltese community as a whole.
Ahead of the last general election, the Malta Water Association had turned up the pressure with its recommendations to political parties, indicating the pressing need for a national water management plan.
Last June, Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi finally announced the government’s intention to launch “within a year” a national water management plan after public consultation, after talks with consultants. Shortly after, the Today Public Policy Institute secured a meeting with the Prime Minister to discuss its latest report on why Malta’s national water plan requires an analytical policy framework.
At this meeting, it was agreed that the lead authors of the TPPI report should meet with the ministry’s water policy experts, view the draft national water plan and submit their comments.
Regrettably the promise was not kept, although the report authors – a hydrologist, a geologist and a World Bank policy analyst – who provide their expertise freely, did not give up. At a meeting with the Standing Committee on Health in Parliament earlier this month, they again presented their case to the ministry.
The TPPI report does not hold back on the type of piecemeal consultation being carried out so far on such a crucial national issue as water: “Consultation in the absence of a sound policy framework runs the risk of a plan based largely on vested interests and electioneering imperatives, without the analytical framework to select from the options based on measurable economic and social outcomes. The risk is one-off initiatives unrelated to a sound understanding of the overall economic context.”
Tagging the most urgent areas where analysis needs to be sharpened, the report says that Malta needs to establish a fully operational model of what is happening to its sea-level and perched aquifers.
We need to know how rapidly the volume and purity of aquifers are deteriorating and to gauge the projected useful life of the aquifers under different scenarios of extraction, recharging, and nitrate run-off. What targets can be set for reducing extraction and how much remedy is required to bring the aquifers back to sustainability?
As the report states, a task of this importance and magnitude cannot be properly carried out by the limited staff currently working on water issues in the responsible ministry.