NEWS Malaysia

Year 2020 is known as the COVID-19 pandemic year. However, in Klang Valley, Malaysia, the year 2020 has also been a year with many incidents of unscheduled water supply disruption. Such disruptions occurred almost once a month due to pollution of raw water resources. We are surrounded by water, yet water is scarce. Many may not realize that for every country, water is the central element to achieving a larger sense of security, sustainability, development and human well-being. Indeed, United Nation Security Council has supported the inclusion of water security into their agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals. It is of debate, whether we have the capacity to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being and socio-economic development.

The forum was aimed to discuss on how to ensure sufficient protection against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters, and to identify the critical agenda that warrant immediate attention from the academics, researchers, industries and government agencies. Three water experts from Malaysia and Taiwan were invited to deliver their thoughts and knowledge on these water security issues – Prof. Dr. Zulkifli Yusop from the Centre for Environmental Sustainability and Water Security (IPASA), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Ir. Dr. Salmah Zakaria from the Academy of Sciences Malaysia (ASM) Water Committee and Dr. Yu-Shiu Chen from the Disaster Prevention Research Center, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU). The one-hour forum was moderated by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ivy Chung, Vice Director of NCKU Overseas Hub in Malaysia, and streamed live from NCKU Overseas Hub in Malaysia Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/NCKUOHinMalaysia).

Prof. Dr. Zulkifli Yusop who is a Senior Fellow at IPASA, UTM started the forum by expressing his views on the sustainability of water ecosystem in Malaysia. “To discuss the topic to relate water management in terms of water security, we must first make sure the water supply management is sufficient at all times including during dry and wet seasons. Secondly, we need to manage the water when it is in excess to reduce the risk of flood and thirdly, we need to manage the water for environmental protection (in conserving the habitat of flora and fauna)” said Prof. Dr. Zulkifli. He also mentioned that 99% of water supply comes from surface water, hence Malaysia depends too much on surface water. Malaysia needs to explore other water resources such as ground water and rain water harvesting. Due to the dependance on surface water and the possibility that these surface water may be more polluted due to increasing industrialization, he expects that Malaysia will have more difficulty in getting plain water. Despite of the increasing demand of water supply, the country has low efficiency problems in term of water consumption. Prof. Dr. Zulkifli shared that the non-revenue water lost is very high, which averages about 35% for the whole country. In the agriculture sector, more than half of the water transported from the dam to the field is lost through the aqueduct, and the water lost is due to old technology (E.g.: asbestos pipe leakage).

“The capita use per person/day is still high in Malaysia, which is greater than the standard provided by the World Health Organization (WHO)” said Prof. Dr. Zulkifli. He emphasized that Malaysia needs a lot of effort, not only by the government but also the community in improving the water use efficiency. He also pointed out that the water pollution from factories and land usage activities are also another sets of problems we face today. There is also another form of emerging pollution. The detection method for this new pollutant is complicated and difficult. The pollutant may appear in tap water in low concentrations, but when exposed in the long term, it may cause cancer in human. Prof. Dr. Zulkifli highlighted that the solutions for all water issues lie in water supply enhancement and water demand management. For the latter, he introduced the implementation of 5 Rs which are: 1) ‘reduce non-revenue water and water use per capita/day; 2) reuse the water for other purposes which is not using high quality water; 3) recycling of water in industry sectors; 4) restore the polluted water by through treatment process; and 5) recover used water for certain use’. Lastly, community and stakeholders’ participation on projects related to water is critical for their success.

“Water security as defined by the United Nation Water (2013) is the capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being, and socio-economic development, for ensuring protection against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters, and for preserving ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability” explained by Dr. Salmah Zakaria, who is the chairperson of the ASM Water Committee. She further added that water security aspects include drinking water and human well-being, economic activities and development, water-related hazards and climate change, and ecosystems. She emphasized the importance for awareness creation, advocacy and capacity building, besides the enforcement side. Among her suggestions to solve the water security issues are the needs of players from other than the technical areas (E.g.: people from the governance and the political side), as well as to have an allocated budget to do what is needed. Dr. Salmah also mentioned “We can come up with the best policies, unless we can touch base with whom who implement those policies, then only it can be implemented”. She urged Malaysian researchers to look on how to identify gaps, how do to merge it and how to narrow the gaps between the State’s and Federal’s water policies and management.

As the Division Leader of Disaster Prevention Research Center at NCKU, Dr. Yu-Shiu Chen described the water resource management under sediment related problems in Taiwan. He shared on the Typhoon Morakot incident in 2009 which brought a catastrophic damage to Taiwan. “After the typhoon, the Taiwanese government started the renovation plan for the sediment-related disasters so that we have landslide dam monitoring, river dredging, and sabo dam for debris flow”, said Dr. Chen. He shared that in Taiwan, they started to do research on the sediment management at the river basin scale to solve sediment problems. Monitoring (sediment movement) provides sufficient information for the current situation. However, to predict the future or any unexpected incidents, the researchers provided the government suggestions not to only just focus on monitoring but to think more on the other basins. Dr. Chen described that “Firstly, a field survey must be done to understand the situation or the characteristic of our basins, and to get the parameters for the basins. Then, we have to apply all these parameters, and apply some scenarios (E.g.: climate change, super typhoon), and use all these parameters into numerical models to do some experiment in the basin. These processes allowed us to evaluate the effectiveness of our strategy, then finally proceed with the monitoring works”. He also shared that “After Typhoon Morakot, we try to predict the disposition in our reservoirs in 5 years, and we compare the measurement with our simulation. We give our government a new strategy on how to keep the capacity of our reservoir”. Dr. Chen emphasized that more advanced work is need in water resource management to control disasters (prevention and mitigation measures) and in reservoir management. He also added that the trust by Taiwanese government to consult the academics in the universities when faced with water crisis, has put them towards a path to translate their expertise to real-world problems.

The forum was held on November 20th, 2020 in conjunction of the NCKU Overseas Week 2020. If you have missed out on the forum, you may still view the recorded session here: https://fb.watch/1VTwufDsiG/