GLAND, SWITZERLAND — Making drinking water from seawater not only is a potential threat to the environment, says environmental group WWF in a newly released global review of desalination plants, but also potentially exacerbates climate change.

The group, formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund, also cites in its report, “Making Water: Desalination — Option or Distraction for a Thirsty World?, applications in which reverse osmosis (RO) membrane technologies have successfully treated contaminated water for both potable and reuse purposes.

The report reviews desalination plants and practices in such areas as Australia, the Middle East, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, and includes details on the growth of desalination in India and China.

According to the report, “Seawater desalination is rapidly emerging as one of the major new sources of freshwater for the developed and some areas of the developing world, raising significantly the overall energy intensity, potential climate impact and cost of water supplies. This dramatic upscaling of the industry is occurring against a backdrop of unresolved questions on the potential environmental impacts of large-scale processing of seawater habitat and the discharge of increasing volumes of concentrated brine wastes.”

However, the report says RO membrane technologies, used increasingly in desalination, “have been used successfully in a limited way in parts of India to remove dangerous contaminants from rural drinking water — there are clear humanitarian reasons to deploy the technology much more widely.”

According to the report, “Reverse osmosis membrane technologies have great potential for increasing water use efficiency through recycling, for decontaminating water and for environmental repair through purifying or providing water for such purposes as rejuvenating wetlands, augmenting streamflows and recharging aquifers.”

Director of WWF’s Global Freshwater Programme Jamie Pittock said in a WWF press release, “Large desalination plants might rapidly become ‘the new dams’ and obscure the importance of real conservation of rivers and wetlands. As with any relatively new engineering, such as large dams that grew up in the ’50s, the negatives become known when it is too late or too expensive to fix. What we need most is a new attitude to water, not unchecked expansion of water engineering.”

To read the full press release, click here.

To read the full WWF 53-page report, click here.

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