Part 8 – Water

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BBC Learning English
Talk about English
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Part 8 – Water


Gary: Water … Do we have enough of it? Will this precious resource be the cause of
future wars?
Turn the pages of your newspaper, tune in to the radio news: these topics
appear over and over again. Water is a subject that affects us all; it touches our
lives in different ways.

Clip
VOX POPS Comments from people in the field

Gary: The facts and figures that lie behind these human stories are dramatic. In this
series, we consider the themes that feature in BBC World Service news
programmes. Today's “big story” is water. Well focus on some of the issues
and, of course, the language behind the topic, and well look at how water is
reported in the news.
As science journalist Helen Sewell explains, “water” is a very broad subject.

Clip Helen Sewell, BBC Science Radio Unit
There are issues like sanitation, the availability of clean water, of water for you to wash your
hands in after you've been to the toilet, for example; to make sure that there are sewage
systems in place – and some of the poorer countries don't have those sewage systems. And


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then, of course, if the water from peoples toilets gets mixed up with drinking water, then
you've got all sorts of problems and that can lead to many, many thousands of deaths. More
than a billion people worldwide already lack enough safe water to meet the minimum health
levels. And the UN Environment programme says that the water shortage is the second most
worrying problem this millennium – after global warming.


Gary: Helen Sewell of the BBC Science Radio Unit.
Huge numbers of people around the world do not have enough safe water to
drink. Many more do not have access to proper sanitation.
But what's the reason for this water shortage? Scientists tell us that the amount
of available water isn't changing – so are we just using more of it?

Clip Helen Sewell, BBC Science Radio Unit
We are using more of it. The world population is growing rapidly. So, of course, more
people use more water. And also more people need more food. So as more crops are planted,
more water is needed to make sure that those crops grow so that we can be fed as well as
watered. And one of the other reasons that were using more water for agriculture is that, in
places, where there was a lot of drought and the crops were naturally, I suppose, drought-
resistant, they've been replaced with these high-yield “miracle seeds”, which basically provide
much more food from the same crop as you would have from the drought-resistant crop, but of
course they need much more water to water them. And in addition, some people don't water
their crops in the most efficient way, so through poor irrigation methods a lot of water is lost
as well.


Gary: Water shortages are made worse through poor management of water resources


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and inefficient watering of the land. In addition, safe water can become
contaminated as a result of poor sanitation or the chemical fertilisers used in
agriculture. So, how is it possible to ensure that people everywhere have access
to the water they need? Well, one answer is to build dams. But, of course,
dams don't provide a straightforward solution. They may supply energy and
fresh water to those who live nearby, but there's often a price to pay. In some
cases, millions of people are forced to leave their homes before the area is
flooded. In other cases, the people who live downstream may suddenly find
themselves without the water they once enjoyed.
When we bear in mind factors like these, we begin to understand how water
issues can lead to political disagreement and other tensions.

Clip Helen Sewell, BBC Science Radio Unit
At the moment Bangladesh is suffering because India has diverted and dammed so many of its
water sources. And Bangladesh depends very heavily on rivers that originate in India. In
Israel … Israel takes water wherever it can, which means that Syria and Jordan and the
Palestinian townships in Israel don't get as much water as they want. And that can make for
political rows as well. And in an unstable region that could be dangerous, as the water
shortage becomes more and more severe. Relations between Botswana and Namibia have
been severely strained by Namibia's plans to construct a pipeline to divert water from a shared
river … and Ethiopia plans to take more water from the Nile – even though Egypt is heavily
dependent on those waters for irrigation and power. So, it could cause problems. And, in fact
in 1995, the Vice President of the World Bank made a much-quoted prediction for the next
millennium. He said if the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next
century will be fought over water.




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Gary: Who owns the scarce commodity that runs through our rivers, or which lies
deep below the ground? Water is a highly political issue. And that explains
partly why it so often becomes a story in the news. But what is the BBC's role
in reporting stories like these – and how do they do it? I put those questions to
Helen Sewell, who helps to provide the BBC's news coverage.

Clip Helen Sewell, BBC Science Radio Unit
Well, were here to educate people and to inform people. So really we should be highlighting
the issues as they arise and telling them in a very factual way without bias to one side or
another if there's a conflict. And we do tend to look at crises because that's what people are
interested in. So, if there's a major flood or a drought, we tend to focus on how many people
are without water; how many people could die. And that's rather morbid, but in order to be
part of news programming we have to have a story – a “new story” that our listeners haven't
heard before, and that they're going to be interested in hearing.

Gary: When, as a journalist, you're reporting stories about crises around the world, to do with
water issues, is it difficult to find the sort of language that's appropriate for the news story?

Helen: It's not a difficult thing to do. What we tend to do is avoid using all the adjectives that
fiction writers would use. So we wouldn't say, for example, “it's a most terrible, awful,
appalling drought” … we would just say “there's a drought”. We might say “the drought is the
worst to hit which ever country it is for the past 30 years and X million people are affected by
it”. Now, everybody knows that if so many million people are affected and it's such a bad
drought, then it is going to be terrible, appalling and awful. So we don't need to use the
emotive language there.

Gary; WaterAid is a charity whose offices are based in London next to the River


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Thames. I decided to get their view on news coverage about water.

Clip Sharon Brand-Self, Media Manager, WaterAid
Gary: I've come to see Sharon Brand-Self who's the media manager for Water Aid – that's the
UK Charity that helps the worlds poorest people gain access to water, sanitation and hygiene
education. And were sitting next to the River Thames, which runs through the centre of
London … in sight of the Houses of Parliament and the Palace of Westminster … and it's also
a historic site, I think, Sharon?

Sharon: Yes, I believe were actually over one of the main sewerage systems that runs through
the whole of London. And it probably dates back about 150 years when we first actually
started pioneering a sewerage system to clean up London.

Gary: If you look at the way that water issues are reported in the newspapers today, or the
kind of reports we hear in news programming, what's your view as part of a campaigning
organisation, a Water organisation, about the way that water is reported?

Sharon: I think that there has been a noticeable change in the Media as to how water and
sanitation is covered. The World Summit in Johannesburg last August really did help change
that agenda. It put development into the public domain, as something that would be of interest
to people. So we were getting a lot of attention. The UK's main newspapers and television
and radio news were all wanting to know about that very human side: how are the poorest
people affected by the lack of most basic needs like water and sanitation? And that's
something that had been difficult to sell to the Media in the past. The Media were wanting to
know more about water wars and that kind of thing, rather than that very human need.

Gary: That's been my experience, just talking to journalists at the BBC World Service, that
they tend to react to crises or to specific events happening. Is that something that you've


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noticed as well?

Sharon: Definitely. I think that's the nature of news, it kind of ticks off one of the
requirements, doesn't it, for a journalist: this is something happening now. It also ticks off
another one: it's bad news, and that always seems to sell very well in the UK. But I do think
that behind the news there are always these more deep-rooted issues. Before any disaster,
emergency – especially in the Developing World – happens, there are development issues that
could have solved the problem before it even started, or prevented the problem. And I think
that has certainly come to the Publics attention more in the past year or maybe two years;
where people are thinking: no it's poverty at the root of these problems, and lets look at how
we can change those and get some practical solutions going.

Gary: What, as a water charity and as a Media manager for a water charity would you ideally
like to see reported in news bulletins?

Sharon: It's incredibly important to keep reminding people of the fact that were looking at 1.1
billion people without any safe water to drink; 2.4 billion people without any sanitation, and
that problem is getting worse rather than better. Id also like to see much more attention paid
to the targets that were set at the World Summit last year, which was a piece of hope really for
Africa especially, setting the target that by 2015 wed be halving the amount of people who are
having to live without water and sanitation. And I don't want that to be a forgotten issue now.
We really think it's the Medias role to help keep it in the public eye, to keep saying: OK we
know you set these targets to the worlds governments, but now what are you doing about it?

Gary: I was talking to Sharon Brand-Self, Media Manager for the UK Water Charity,
WaterAid.