We’ll reserve judgement on the issue of cloud seeding, given that three water management and climatology experts — Mr Basil Fernandez, managing director of the Water Resources Authority; Dr Michael Taylor, head of the Physics Department at the University of the West Indies; and Professor Anthony Chen, Nobel prize-winning physicist — have agreed that it’s expensive and offers limited guarantee of its intended purpose.

We, however, endorse fully the view of these experts that rainwater harvesting is critical to Jamaica’s water management.

It is a point we have raised in these columns before. In fact, just two months ago we put forward the suggestion that the Jamaica Social Investment Fund, given its record of accessing social assistance money, could help in the construction of tanks for schools and communities. We also posited the view that the Government could provide a boost for private tank building through tax incentives and other measures.

We reiterate our position that it should be compulsory for housing developments to be supported by rainwater harvesting capacity, as that would contribute significantly to the simple conservation measures that the National Water Commission says can save up to 30 per cent of water used in a household.

Mr Fernandez, we notice, shares our view, as he was quoted in our monthly Environment Watch publication last Wednesday as saying: “Just like how we could say every house must be guttered and the rainwater stored in an underground cistern — such as in the United States or the British Virgin Islands — we can store rainwater and use that water for things like flushing toilets, watering your lawn so we are not using treated city water for doing the things that untreated water can be used for.”

It’s a perfectly logical argument, for as Professor Chen pointed out in that same article, Jamaica’s water problem is not rooted in a lack of rainfall, it resides in our failure to store rainwater.

Professor Chen went even further to propose that we set about storing rainwater in aquifers underground.

These are credible suggestions that we hope the Government will accept and implement. For even with the most intense of public education campaigns, appealing to the people’s sense of duty to conserve will not result in a wholesale solution to the water shortage problem we experience during times of drought, as there are many people who will ignore the messages and continue to do as they please.

This water crisis, though, has offered us an opportunity to put in place the systems necessary to avoid a recurrence of the problem in the future. And while we acknowledge that in the current economic climate funds are hard to come by — especially with the Government being unable to pay in full outstanding increases to public sector workers this year — we believe the cost of not implementing the sound suggestions will far outweigh the price the country will pay to correct the effects of inaction.

We have a tendency to act during a crisis, such as the water crisis we are currently having, only to resort to our usual complacency as soon as the crisis is over.

When the rains return, as they will, let’s get busy storing the water.