JEDDAH: The country consumed about 4 trillion cubic meters of thousands-of-years-old groundwater during the last three decades, mostly through irrigating wheat farms, while agricultural uses consume about 19 billion cubic meters a year, according to experts. The water sector is facing difficulties compensating for the consumption, even with 30 desalination plants along the Red Sea coast, they added. Experts say there is no clear short-term plan to manage water and no plan at all for its long-term management. Prof. Nasir Bin Sulaiman Al-Amri, head of Water Resources Management at Jeddah's King Abdulaziz University, said there is no comprehensive management of the water sector, as per the internationally approved model called for at the Earth Summit 2002, which recommended “integrated water resources development and management.” Some organizations have carried out initiatives and projects, parts of which focused on developing water resources, wastewater treatment, and management tools such as educating people about careful use of water, but those efforts are not enough, Al-Amri said. All those efforts are not sufficiently implementing the principles of integrated management and not concentrating on agriculture, which consumes 85 percent of water resources, he said. Al-Amri said water management in the country would have been better if the Ministry of Agriculture and Water's national plan, which was prepared 20 years ago, was implemented. The plan, which includes legislation for water management, was based on an integrated study that assessed water resources and demand. “To implement the principles of integrated water management in Saudi Arabia, there must be clear goals in policy that identifies priorities of water development,” he said. Muhammad Habeeb Bukhari, a water expert, said it is important to determine the main resource of drinking water – desalinated saline, groundwater or both – before applying resource management in the sector. He said it would take 100 desalination plants to provide all the drinking water that's needed. It is very difficult to find a “water balance,” given the lost amount of groundwater during the last 30 years, he added. To compensate for that loss, sand dams should be built in the country's valleys to keep water and let it saturate the ground naturally, which has been done successfully in South Africa, he said.
