Is the UN turning its back on the human right to water?

One of the biggest threats to economic and social development is that the world's freshwater supplies are rapidly becoming scarce and polluted. A new set of actors are now engaging in the global development arena to define and write the rules ofaccess to water to ensure people's needs are protected.

It is alarming to see that the human right to water and sanitation continues to be marginalised in UN policy discussions. The exclusion of this right to water in the most recent draft of the sustainable development goals reveals policy more conducive to promoting water security for economic growth than ensuring the preservation of watersheds and the equitable distribution of scarce water supplies.

When the UN general assembly passed a resolution in 2010 affirming water and sanitation as a human right, it was celebrated as a victory for communities dealing with the health impacts of polluted water, the indignity of not having access to clean drinking water and sanitation or the inability to produce food owing to water shortages. Social movements saw the human right to water and sanitation as a tool in the fight against a global water crisis produced by inequality, social exclusion and abuse of the water commons.

The global water crisis is also a big concern for industries seeking secure access to water supplies to sustain and expand operations in a never-ending quest for economic growth. The extractive industries, large drinks companies, big banks investing in water stocks, and companies involved in providing water and sanitation services have positioned themselves as stakeholders within global water policy discussions and as being able to provide solutions to the crisis.

The latest trend in global and national water policy is for corporations to participate in decision-making bodies and promote corporate-driven solutions through public-private partnerships. Over the past decade or so, the efforts of corporations such as Nestlé and Unilever to engage in global water policy discussions has shifted the debate from one of injustice and inequality to a depoliticised discussion of scarcity solved by technological fixes. These are offered by multinational corporations and market mechanisms that further deregulate water resource allocation.

When global policymakers – including the working group on sustainable development goals (SDGs) – focus simply on improving "water efficiency" for these ever-expanding industries without anchoring discussions of access to water as a right, they are ignoring communities that are challenging the very presence of the industries that are destroying watersheds.

The human right to water and sanitation holds promise for these communities. It has been invoked in Plachimada, in south India, to challenge Coca Cola's accessto aquifers; by anti-mining activists throughout Latin America; and, more recently, by the Kalahari Bushmen in a struggle to access traditional water sources on land coveted by industries such as tourism, diamond mining and fracking.

It has also been used to democratise water and sanitation services. In Uruguay, recognition of the human right to water led to the ban of private water services. When a recent ruling by a top Greek court blocked the privatisation of the country's largest water utility, in Athens, it was a victory for activists across Europe who had condemned forced privatisation through loan conditions in bailout packages for Greece, Portugal and Italy.

So it is deeply troubling that the human right to water continues to be contested at the UN. For those living without access to adequate drinking water and sanitation, the SDG on water focuses on universal access. As special rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque arguesthat an emphasis on universality alone fails to eliminate inequality.

At the very minimum, the human right to water calls for the elimination of discrimination and the adoption of special measures for marginalised communities. Social movements pursuing public control over water supplies, and democratic and participatory governance models, are also drawn to the elements of public participation in decision-making, accountability and access to justice underscored by the human right to water.

While this right is hardly the silver bullet for all global water woes, it goes a long way towards balancing unequal power relationships. More

 

© 2014

Japan's 25-year plan to have space solar power

Solar energy experts have long known that the best place to collect the sun's rays is in space. A solar farm in orbit could collect energy all the time, whereas ground-based arrays sit idle during the night.

And huge chunks of real estate are easier to come by in space, where solar collectors can be as enormous as they need to be. But the problems with turning solar energy in space into useable energy on Earth have kept space solar stuck in the land of science fiction since the 1960s.

Yet Japan's version of NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, is optimistic. JAXA recently unveiled a technology roadmap that says it can make solar arrays in orbit a reality by the 2030s, and that plant could supply 1 gigawatt of energy, the equivalent of one of the country's nuclear plants. Susumu Sasaki reports for IEEE Spectrum.

Microwaves are key to JAXA's plans. Some space solar concepts have proposed using lasers to beam the energy in orbit down to collectors on the surface, but the water molecules in the clouds can scatter laser light. That means you'd lose some of the energy on anything less than a perfectly clear day. Microwaves don't have that problem. So JAXA has designed multiple concepts in which the DC (direct current) power generated in orbit would be transformed into microwaves and then beamed to Earth's surface, where a farm of antennas would collect the microwaves and transform them back into DC electricity. JAXA says it can now perform these transformations with at least 80 percent efficiency on each end.

Another major hurdle for space solar is keeping the collectors pointed at the sun at all times so they can collect energy continuously. JAXA released one design that features a square panel measuring 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) on each side. But the panel's orientation is fixed, meaning the amount of energy it can produce varies. Another JAXA design solves this problem by incorporating two enormous mirrors that reflect sunlight onto photovoltaic panels positioned between them.

More hurdles: If a space solar array had to burn fuel to adjust its position, for example, that would add millions of dollars to the cost. So Japan is trying to design its components in such a way that they naturally counterbalance Earth's gravity and stay in position without adjustment. In the case of the two-mirror design, all those pieces would need to fly in careful, precise formation, something that has not been tried on so grand a scale.

In the transmission phase, more than a billion tiny antennas affixed to moveable panels would be required to receive the microwave energy coming from space. Those panels must constantly adjust their orientation to maximize how much energy they receive. JAXA plans to help them by sending a pilot signal from the ground to the satellite that would tell the satellite how to adjust the beam.

Despite these and more challenges, JAXA has rolled out an ambitious timeline: It plans to unveil a ground-based demonstration this year, then reveal progressively larger experimental satellites in 2017, 2021, and 2024. The major goal would come to fruition in the following decade: A 1-GW power station in 2031, and then one power station launched per year by the late 2030s.

Within a quarter-century, then, perhaps Japan's energy will come not from nuclear plants -- which are vulnerable to earthquakes, tsunamis, and planetary outbursts -- but from solar arrays that aren't even on the planet. More

 

© 2014