Water management is a national priority

The next global conflict will take place in a very different way. The Warm Wars, the conflicts that are going to pin race against race, nation against nation, even person against person for the resources that the human race has taken for granted for decades but are now becoming scarce due to global warming and other side-effects of over- industrialization, will be fought on earth. People's attention will be earthbound when they search and struggle for water, food and habitable land.

According to the Oakland, California-based Pacific Institute, in 2009 alone there are five water-related conflicts in Asia. Inone case, a family in India's Madhya Pradesh was killed by a mob who were drawing water illegally from a municipal pipe. Other people ran to collect water from the pipe after the killing before the water ran out.

In the coming decades, when extreme climate brought by global warming further disrupts global water sources, the essential element for humankind will become ever more valuable as a commodity. Water conservation will be as important as gold reserves to the stability of a nation.

It is in this context that the significance of the recent dispute

between the southern counties of Tainan and Kaohsiung over the construction of a reservoir in Kaohsiung's Meinung Township should be understood.

Tainan County is currently home to 20 reservoirs, supplying water to nearby regions such as Tainan City, Kaohsiung City and Kaohsiung County. However, as Tainan is under a drought spell itself recently, the Nan-hua Reservoir in the region is no longer pumping enough water to Kaohsiung.

The Water Resources Agency (WRA) under the Ministry of Economic Affairs is therefore actively planning the construction of water diversion tunnels to link Nan-hua Reservoir to Tseng-Wen Reservoir, Taiwan's largest reservoir also located in Tainan, to boost the water volume of the former and thereby restarting supply to Kaohsiung.

Tainan Magistrate Su Huan-chih was strongly against the construction, citing the tragic mudslide that killed over 400 people in Siaolin Village when Typhoon Morakot pummeled southern Taiwan last August as an example. Many believed the mudslide is partly caused by similar water diversion construction, yet nearly NT$10 billion are still allocated for such construction in the NT$38-billion water control budget, Su complained.

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