New plan to tackle Persian Gulf water shortages

Rebecca Torr in the Gulf Daily News (Bahrain): Bahrain is exploring the possibility of creating underground reservoirs as a way of tackling water shortages. If given the go-ahead they would hold surplus treated waste water to be used for irrigation.

Environmental experts have already conducted a small scale study to assess the health risks of storing treated waste water and are now proposing to hold a pilot study in the field. The proposal will be put forward in the Second National Communication on Climate Change that will be submitted to the United Nations next month.

The report covers all aspects related to climate change, including its impact on water, health, biodiversity, sea level rise and coastal management.

"Treated waste water is used for irrigation and surpluses can be injected into the underground reservoir, but first we need to assess the health risks," Arabian Gulf University academic affairs vice-president Professor Waleed Al Zubari told the GDN. "We recommend doing a pilot study where we store the water and modify the reservoir underground. We have already done a health risk assessment and we found very minimal health risks but we need to do a field study. The underground reservoir could work by gravity, there may be no need for injection."...

A Bahrain fountain, shot by Vladimir Arshinov, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license