The issue of national identity is taken seriously by Balkan people – including the least serious among them.
Macedonia Over Exploits Water Resources
Skopje | 18 March 2009 |
A new report by the European Environment Agency, EEA, titled "Water resources across Europe - confronting water scarcity and draught", released Tuesday at the world water forum in Istanbul showed Cyprus and Bulgaria on top of a “water exploitation index” ranking in the report, which compares countries’ water supplies with their water use.
Macedonia, Italy, Spain and Malta were also found to be exploiting a worryingly high proportion of their water resources. The EEA report says that in many parts of Europe the level of water use is unsustainable and provides recommendations for a new approach to managing water resources.
The report highlights that while southern Europe continues to experience the greatest water scarcity problems, water shortages are growing in parts of the north too. Moreover, climate change will cause the severity and frequency of droughts to increase in the future, exacerbating water stress, especially during the summer months.
Excluding illegal water use, Europe abstracts around 285 km3 of freshwater annually, representing on average 5 300 m3 per capita, roughly equivalent to two Olympic swimming pools.
In Europe as a whole, 44 per cent of abstraction is used for energy production, 24 per cent for agriculture, 21 per cent for public water supply and 11 per cent for industry.
Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the European Union’s environmental watchdog, said: “The short-term solution to water scarcity has been to extract ever greater amounts of water from our surface and groundwater assets,” the Financial Times reported.
She warned that the ill effects are beginning to be felt. “Overexploitation is not sustainable. It has a heavy impact on the quality and quantity of the remaining water as well as the ecosystems which depend on it,” she said.
The report found that at least 11 per cent of Europe’s population and 17 per cent of its territory has been affected by water scarcity in recent years, and put the cost of droughts in Europe over the past 30 years at €100 billion.
