Problem Identification

Saturday, April 18, 2009 7:51 PM

Over the past decades, Singapore has been relying on Malaysia for her supply of water. However, the two water agreements where Malaysia imports her water supply to Singapore since 1965 are due to expire by 2011 and 2061 respectively. Further more, this two countries are too engaged in a dispute on the price of water. Thus, without a current resolution, and too, to ensure that the future generation has a sufficient water supply, the government of Singapore had decided to increase independence and self-sufficiency in its water supply.

Now, the problem is, if we do not import water from the other countries, where and how do we get our water supply from?

Issues that will arise from the problem

The people will feel unsatisfied that their government will not be able to provide for them and they would desire for a new form of government one that would be able to provide for all their needs. This will lead to unhappiness in the people and the country will be in crisis.
There would be a limited amount of water and this would result in the prices of drinks and the cost of water soaring.
Thus, the cost of food will also indirectly rise

The government will finally resort to desalination from our waste water and that means there will be more taxes to build the plants.

In this economic downturn now, many of the people espeacially the ones from the lower hierarchy or are of lower rank in society will lose out as they will not have the money to buy water all due to the increase in the prices.

The industries would suffer as we know many industries require water for cooling of the plants, and clean pure water is required for that to happen. The lack of water will result in the company not being able to continue the process as no water means no heating can be done and that means that the industries will shut down. People as a result will get fired and lose their job. This will result in the economy suffering, and at the same time country suffering

The countries will be in chaos, the government will not know what to do and thus, everything will be very messy and chaotic.

Solutions to problem

1. The government will result in using desalination to obtain drinkable water. In the past the people were very negative on the thought of drinking reused water but desalination is actually cleaner then the current water we are drinking and they will have to drink it as they will only have one source. However, due to the presence of high salt contents in seawater, it is more costly to desalinate seawater because desalination plants use more energy. However, the cost of desalination has been coming down as technology improves. So PUB has decided to diversify our water resources including supplying desalinated water. As NEWater is more cost competitive in the foreseeable future, PUB intends to maximise the use of NEWater. Thus, it would be a wiser choice to choose to use NEWater as a major water supply instead of desalination.

2. Singapore could reclaim more land and on those lands we can build reservoirs, to store rain water and those rainwater can be used for drinking and other portable uses.

3. The government can organize campaigns to educate the people on the importance of water and do water rationing

4. An interesting facet of the waterworks is the seawater supply systems with their separate networks of distribution mains, pumping stations and service reservoirs. Seawater is used to flush toilets and accounts for about 15% of total water use. Nearly all housing estates in Hong Kong Island and other densely populated districts receive sea water for flushing.

disclaimers