The Other Liquid Gold: Water

Most of the Developed World has happily taken water for granted since at least the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when poor water management wrecked the American prairie and scattered the region’s population to every corner of the United States. Sadly, we are about to relive that unhappy period on a global scale.

Much of the world’s present water woes are due not so much to climate change as to poor water policies.  Agricultural Economist Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute noted in a November 9, 2009 presentation to the World Affairs Council that water tables are falling in nations that contain half the world’s population. These countries include, China, India and the United States.

One of the causes is over-pumping of water from underground aquifers, in which more water is extracted than is replenished. This practice is especially acute in nations in the Middle East, but also among some nuclear powers. In India, for example, 175 million people (15% of the population) depend on over-pumping. In China, another 130 million people depend on over-pumping. In Saudi Arabia, over-pumping has now decimated that nations’ fossil aquifers so much that it has been forced into winding down its domestic wheat production. By 2016, no grain will be produced in Saudi Arabia and it will be dependent on imports.

This linkage of water to food is important and I will return to it in next week’s post. But as Lester Brown informs us, each of us drinks only 4 liters of water per day, but the food we eat requires 2,000 liters per day. As he puts it: “We eat a lot of water.”

But how does climate change fit into this picture? The good news is that as the atmosphere warms, the moisture content it holds will increase, leading to more rain (Flannery. 2005). Unfortunately, according to the IPCC, this precipitation will fall unevenly and in places that our current farming infrastructure cannot take advantage of, for example in Siberia, Antarctica and northern Canada. This shift in rainfall, will also mean flooding in those areas that do get rain and permanent droughts in areas that do not.

One place expected to see a dramatic loss of rainfall is Brazil, which could mean not only a catastrophic release of the Amazon’s carbon into the atmosphere as the rain forest dies, but also intense pressure on the Brazilian population. In fact, some scientists, like British climatologist Richard Betts, predict that the Amazon will begin to turn to desert beginning in 2050.

But changes in rain patterns are only a part of the 21st Century water story. It is the loss of glacial runoff where the more immediate danger lies. Across the world, glaciers are melting and many will disappear in just a few decades. One of the largest collections of glaciers is in the Himalayan and Hindu-Kush mountains, in Central Asia. This system of glaciers constitutes the largest mass of frozen water on the planet after that of the poles and it has played a historic role in nurturing human civilization. Indeed, it can be argued that the runoff from these glaciers were responsible for at least two of humanity’s longest-lived cultures: those of China and India. And yet, within as little as thirty years, these glaciers will be all but gone.

The number of people that depend directly on the waters that flow from the Himalayan and Hindu-Kush glaciers has been estimated at over 1 billion people. But economically, the loss of this reliable and very ancient water supply will be extremely destabilizing for the global economy since it will force billions of Indians and Chinese to import food they once grew themselves, driving up food costs for everyone. This topic will be covered in more detail in next week’s post, but it warrants focus here since the whole issue originates with water.

Similar, albeit less dramatic, changes to water supply are already underway in many places in the world. Since the late 1990s, the American Southwest and Australia have been experiencing what many believe is the beginning of a long-term and permanent drought caused by climate change. (For more on Nevada, see Katrina of the Mojave: A Family’s Story).  In both these cases, the economic perils of such water loss for the people living there will likely be making headlines over the next twenty years as populations and farms struggle and eventually have to move elsewhere. Already, in 2009, the world witnessed the spectacle of Australian cityscapes turned orange by the soils lifted from parched farms.

No matter if it is flooding or drought, though, there will be costs to the world economy. In places all over the world, centuries of investments based on historic water patterns will become obsolete, with entire cities, farming regions and irrigation systems being abandoned and new ones needing to be built.

But, of course, just as the hydrology of 2010 will be irrevocably changed by 2050, so will that of 2110, and 2150. And those changes will keep coming for centuries, even if we stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today. The lesson here is that any adaptations to the water conditions of the future will only be temporary, meaning that the costs to keep populations supplied with water will become a long-term challenge for generations to come.

We must, therefore, recall the warning of Lester Brown, who reminds us of the linkage between water resources and food, a subject this blog will examine in next week’s post.