Review: November 2020
Challenges of Sustainable Infrastructure and Domestic Wastewater Management and Impacts on Local Environmental Health in Bocas Del Toro, Panama
Ashley Meara
Wastewater treatment continues to be a high-priority sustainability challenge in developing nations. Wastewater refers to water that has been used for domestic, manufacturing, industrial, agricultural, or commercial purposes. Domestic wastewater comes from houses, public facilities, and businesses, divided between greywater and blackwater. Blackwater refers to wastewater derived from sewage, while greywater is wastewater captured from sinks, showers, laundry machines, and dishwashers.1 Untreated domestic wastewater contains a variety of pollutants, including nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, fecal matter, pathogens, organic particles, toxins such as pesticides and herbicides, pharmaceuticals, solids, fats, oil, and grease. Despite technological and scientific advances, 95% of global wastewater is released into the environment, void of any treatment.2 The majority of populations, particularly in low-income countries, are therefore exposed to extremely poor water quality throughout their communities, in addition to ecosystem degradation of their local environment. There is a global need for increased awareness and policy regarding the lack of sustainability of current wastewater management strategies, and particularly in developing countries, in order to reach the 2030 United Nations water quality, wastewater treatment, and safe reuse development goal of halving the proportion of untreated wastewater, and substantially increasing recycling and safe reuse globally.3 Throughout this paper, I will evaluate domestic wastewater management and the challenges of sustainable infrastructure, given the social injustices and environmental consequences perpetuated by the treadmill of production.
The preliminary step to resolving this wastewater issue is allocating more resources toward wastewater treatment infrastructure in developing countries, where the most basic sanitation systems are not present due to limited public finance for treatment infrastructure. This should be a top priority in order to protect public health and prevent environmental degradation. In developing countries, each person produces, on average, six liters of toilet wastewater each day. Based on the number of people who don't have access to safe sanitation, that equates to nearly 14 billion liters of untreated faecally contaminated wastewater created each day.2 The discharge of untreated domestic sewage and wastewater from industrial and commercial establishments into surface water has caused extreme water scarcity. As a result, 1.2 billion people globally can barely get clean drinking water, and millions of people die annually from drinking unhealthy water.4 While the entirety of wastewater is increasing exponentially with population growth and industrialization, domestic sewage from individual households continues to be a large component of the contamination in water systems. The makeup of wastewater origin is dependent on location, and therefore efficient management of wastewater involves specificity to the country, while also acknowledging the unique cultural, economic, and environment of the area.
Panama is a leading country in municipal water withdrawals, as 67% of total water withdrawals are from domestic sources. This is significantly higher than the global average of 11% being used for municipal purposes.3 Though there is high rainfall in this region, 67% is much higher than its’ neighboring country, Costa rica, which has shown to have 21% of its total freshwater withdrawal from domestic sources.3 This gives insight into future mitigation strategies, indicating particularly high domestic output in Panama, with agriculture being largely rainfed and industrial output being relatively low. With this, domestic wastewater infrastructure is important to investigate in Panama, and particularly in island communities in the Bocas Del Toro Province, where social and environmental inequity is extremely present. The majority of the indigenous population often does not receive fair water sanitation and resources, as is the case in many developing countries globally. The high amount of domestic water being turned to harmful wastewater containing abundant contaminants, impacts this island community drastically and disproportionately in a multitude of ways. Therefore, this case study aims to evaluate the challenges of sustainable infrastructure and the impacts on local environmental health in Bocas Del Toro, Panama.
Wastewater treatment, along with coastal and fresh water quality standards are established by governments to limit the release of untreated domestic wastewater to oceans, and to ensure that pollutants do not exceed a certain level that is deemed dangerous to ecosystem and human health. Some countries also establish bathing water quality standards for coastal bodies of water. Wastewater management in the Wider Caribbean Region is historically challenging due to the previous factors discussed. The lack of resources and infrastructure to properly treat wastewater has led to water pollution, resulting in negative impacts to important coastal and freshwater ecosystems and to human health. Across the region, 80% of domestic wastewater entering the Caribbean Sea remains untreated; 51.5 % of households lack sewer connections; and only 17% of households are connected to acceptable collection and treatment systems.1 In 1999, Governments of the Wider Caribbean Region recognized the importance of wastewater pollution issues by signaling their commitment to reduce marine pollution from untreated wastewater and agreeing to the Protocol on the Control of Land Based Sources of Marine Pollution (LBS Protocol).1 However, treatment centers are still extremely poorly maintained and there is not enforcement of the regulations surrounding this legislation due to the lack of economic investment and necessary infrastructure.
In addition to the poor maintenance and enforcement, declines in water quality are only being amplified with increasing ocean temperatures, sea level rise, and ocean acidification due to climate change. The resulting water pollution has detrimental impacts on the main tropical coastal ecosystems in this area, such as coral reefs and mangroves being a primary component of the nearshore waters surrounding the island communities. These environments provide key ecosystem services, such as aiding in biodiversity, shoreline protection, and carbon sequestration, which help mitigate the anthropogenic impacts driving climate change. In turn, degradation of these ecosystems further accelerates global warming at an exponential rate. Mangroves serve as the only blue carbon forest in the world, with the ability to pull remarkable amounts of greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, storing up to four times as much carbon as other tropical forests. In addition, mangroves and coral reefs operate in symbiosis, enhancing tropical environments and providing protection against natural disasters by forming a combined wave-resistant structure to aid in creating a buffer zone from waves and erosion.6 The health of coral reefs is dependent on mangrove forests, which are highly productive and dynamic environments. Mangroves also provide a nursery habitat and maintain fisheries, with their lower threat of predation, the protection they provide, higher oxygen concentrations, and high food availability. These factors therefore provide ideal grounds for breeding and spawning of fish and in turn, increase biodiversity of coral reef fishes.5 Unfortunately, over 80% of coral reefs have been lost in the Caribbean in the past two decades and this has largely been attributed to wastewater pollution.1 Coral reefs also happen to be a main component of ecotourism throughout the Caribbean, attracting divers and fisherman year round. Loss of these environments will make these island communities more vulnerable to natural disasters, cause economic losses in fisheries, and their tropical tourism industry, which is largely dependent on these habitats and acts as a primary source of GDP in Panama. Therefore, examining this issue from an ecological perspective is important in understanding long-term economic impacts, and should then play a large role in influencing conservation efforts in terms of wastewater pollution.
The social consequences for indigenous people of these regions are numerous due to historically remaining governmental priorities and allocation of resources. Over 500 indigenous families that currently live near the WWTP do not currently have any wastewater treatment, leading to their sewage being disposed of directly in the coastal mangroves.1 Houses in this community are positioned directly on the shoreline of these mangrove ecosystems and therefore are innately tied to their historical culture and entire livelihood, in daily activities such as bathing, washing their clothes, and fishing.9 However, these historical aspects are blatantly threatened in a disproportionate manner, with greatly increased water quality health risks for the indigenous and poorer populations. These communities are thought to have a higher infant mortality rate that may be associated with exposure to untreated domestic wastewater in mangroves.1 Some of the most common illnesses connected to exposure to these waters include acute respiratory disease (ARD), and eye, ear, and skin infections, cholera, typhoid, and hepatitis.2 Additionally, exposure to the toxins associated with algal blooms, which comes from this large influx of nutrients, poses significant human health risks. These algal bloom events also influence anoxic zones in ecosystems, decreasing dissolved oxygen concentrations and therefore accelerating ocean acidification, as discussed previously. The lack of investment in sustainable wastewater infrastructure is largely attributed to poor knowledge of the impacts that poor management practices are having on human and environmental health, and in turn, how this will lead to economic costs for these island communities. In 2003, studies estimated that polluted coastal waters generate 120 million excess cases of gastroenteritis and 50 million excess cases of ARD annually, resulting in a global cost of $12 billion per year in public health expenses.1 Awareness of the connectivity between wastewater treatment and human and ecosystem health is important in order to shape policy and management to improve domestic wastewater practices.
In order to formulate solutions to these issues, examining institutional causation is crucial. Following discussion of the vast environmental degradation occurring in response to sewage waste, it is evident that there is a clear disconnect between human decision and nature. There has been a loss of connection between humans and the natural world, and commonly no longer able to be informed when Earth needs care, attention, and preventative measures for conservation.7 Tropical ecosystems are being deconstructed at the expense of blatant pollution. If nature was at the forefront of decision-making and not seen as something to be so easily dismissed, these habitats would not be depleting at such extreme rates. Though mangroves are resilient environments, they will not persevere indefinitely and this major carbon sink will come to an end, as the atmosphere feels the impacts of greenhouse gas emission and global warming at alarming rates. With this, every human action should be so engrained to the effects on nature, given that the natural world essentially allows for human survival. There is a need for understanding that there is an ultimate limit to human consumption and disregard of nature.
Indigenous people have played a critical role in protecting biodiversity, natural resources, and the climate in the lands that they have inhabited for millennia. Panamanian governments struggle to recognize the rights and respect for these populations that are so intertwined with climate change mitigation and resource allocation. Industry and capitalistic ideals have disrupted this harmonious historical tie that ropes nature and people as one. Over-extraction and lack of consideration is possibly not embedded in human nature, but has come to drive human action based on societal views and the system in which the capitalistic society operates.8 Though the financial framework is a difficult barrier in developing countries, funds can be better allocated. Long-term damage to the environment and human health needs to be addressed prior to satisfaction of short-term monetary fulfillment. Industry is often prioritized before ecology, as there is often being a dominance of economic growth over resource preservation.11 In recognizing this downfall through utilizing ecological research, it is apparent that tropical ecosystems are diminishing exponentially and this impacts the Panamanian economy that is nearly 15% dependent on ecotourism operating in these environments.1 In the interests of economics, stakeholders come to weigh that the benefits of improving wastewater management systems and connecting more people to centralized wastewater treatment plants would likely outweigh the costs associated with human health, ecotourism loss, and ecosystem degradation. Environmental injustices are very present, such as vast procedural justice instances, as previously discussed, given the lack of transparency and that indigenous people are not a part of the decision-making process regarding the infrastructure placement and management strategies. Resources and infrastructure are not implemented fairly or equally distributed, as poor communities are particularly vulnerable to the wastewater pollution, given their lack of connection to the treatment plants, and dependence on the mangroves for their entire livelihood.9 This peak realization is necessary to address the climate crisis and abundant health issues, and the rising history of intersectional and injustices being faced are due to capitalism.
The link between culture and the environment among Indigenous people is evident and it is apparent that they share a spiritual, cultural, social, and economic relationship with their traditional lands. Some ecologists attribute sheer population growth as being the source of ecological consumption.10 However, local people have preserved this historical tie to nature for hundreds of years of living on these islands without an issue. Consumption of resources at this rate is not inevitable given population size. There are possibilities for natural treatment methods, as well as sustainable infrastructure to have increased connectivity to sources of waste, which would in turn, decrease the influx of harmful toxins into the waters. There are management strategies to deal with human growth that could be maintained and deconstruct the overconsumption of ecological resources. Improvement of wastewater infrastructure, with the purpose to treat and return this water back to the surrounding environment is gaining more traction, but a paradigm shift is vital to influence technology and management practices, from treatment and disposal of wastewater to water resource recovery, recycling, and utilizing wastewater as part of the solution. Consideration of wastewater as a water resource is necessary, instead of hazardous waste to dispose of, which inevitably leads to vast amounts of contaminants into the environment. There is a need for incentives to redefine how wastewater is managed toward a more sustainable way and increased monitoring of water quality across ecosystems in coastal areas, especially where there are communities living on the water. Governments need to be driven to support the development of services, which can collect and transport sanitation waste for safe treatment, and raise awareness of the issue among residents, to stimulate customer demand. As demonstrated throughout this review, it is seen that the origin of these problems are embedded in a lagging sociological and environmentalist perspective and in utilizing both of these lenses, it aids in formulating powerful solutions, in therefore creating a more sustainable system.
References
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Goal 6: Clean water and sanitation - SDG tracker. Our World in Data. (n.d.). Retrieved December 9, 2021, from https://sdg-tracker.org/water-and-sanitation.
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Mumby et al. 2004. Mangroves enhance the biomass of coral reef fish communities in the Caribbean. Nature. 427, pages 533–536.
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Flora, Gloria. “Remapping Relationships: Humans in Nature.” Pp. 184-193.
Raymond, Robert. “Humans Aren’t Inherently Destroying the Planet- Capitalism is.” Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/humans-arent-inherently-destroying-the-planet-capitalism-is
Bullard, Robert D. “Environmental Justice in the 21st Century.” Pp. 19-42.
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Schnaiberg, Allan and Kenneth Alan Gould. “Treadmill Predispositions and Social Responses.” Pp. 51-60.