The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

by Laurence C. Smith

  The other big problem for humans, of course, is that this small bucket of fast-recycling river water is spread very unfairly around the planet. Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, and Russia are veined with so many permanent streams, rivers, and lakes that most have never been named, whereas Saudi Arabia has no natural ones at all. Water-rich Norway has 82,000 cubic meters of renewable freshwater per person while Kenya has just 830.200 And to a very large degree, this unfair distribution of surface water is created by the pattern of the global atmospheric circulation itself.

  Rainmaker, Land Baker

  Just a hundred steps into the rain forest my head was thudding, my shirt drenched, and I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t claustrophobia—although I couldn’t see well through the green gloom of filtered canopy light—but the wet, steaming heat. It was like inhaling vapors over a teakettle. Something went soft under my foot—I had unwittingly crushed an exotic caterpillar the length of my hand. I excused myself from the group and walked gasping back toward the boat, but was intercepted by an aboriginal man. He was selling tiny clay couples with enormous genitalia, eternally frozen in joyous copulation. Back on the boat, a hot breeze blew down the Amazon River but my skin dripped even faster. The air was totally saturated. I couldn’t wait to get back to my air-conditioned hotel room in Manaus.

  I must have caught the Amazon on a bad day. Most living things love tropical rain forests. Their wide green sash—plain on any world map, roughly encircling the equator—is bursting with life and contains the vast majority of species, known and as yet undiscovered, on Earth. Rain forests grow there thanks to the condensate downpours dumped by the moist, rising air masses of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). This band of clouds and rain follows the Sun, circling nearly directly overhead, as it sizzles the equatorial oceans and landmasses to evaporate huge quantities of water vapor. The vapor rises, cools, and condenses, deluging the tropics with rain and triggering the Asian and African monsoons as the ITCZ drifts back and forth across the equator each year, endlessly chasing the seasonal march of the Sun. Billions of living things hang on the strength and reliability of these annual rainfall patterns, including us.

  To the north and south, straddling the lush equatorial belt and monsoonal areas like the dried-out bun halves of a veggie sandwich, are two huge drought-stricken bands of drylands and deserts. The Sahara, Arabian, Australian, Kalahari, and Sonoran are all found here, huddled at roughly 30º N and S latitude. While not lifeless, these zones are decidedly stark compared with their green equatorial neighbor. They mark the killing fields of the moist ITCZ air masses. Emptied of their rain holdings, the air masses drift north or south before tumbling earthward again, baking the land with crushing dry heat, pressed downward by the weight of still more air falling from above. Like the perpetual circuit of rising and falling wax in a Lava lamp, this sinking air closes the convection loop, flowing from both hemispheres back toward the equator in the form of trade winds. From there, the Sun’s rays will moisten and lift the air once again, repeating the cycle. This overall pattern of atmospheric circulation, called the Hadley Cell, is one of the most powerful shapers of climate and ecosystems on Earth.

  Despite the harsh aridity, billions of people live in or around those twin subtropical blast zones of sinking dry air, which contain some of our fastest-growing human populations. Pressing hard into the Sahara’s southern flank are nearly eighty million people of Africa’s Sahel, a population projected to reach two hundred million by 2050.201 North of the Sahara are the large populations of northern Africa and Mediterranean Europe. Australian cities cling to the coastline of their dusty continent, leaving the continent’s vast desert interior mostly uninhabited. But the parched Middle East, southern Africa, and western Pakistan are heavily populated and have some of the youngest, fastest-growing populations in the world.

  Phoenix and Las Vegas—two briskly growing cities in the arid southwestern United States—lie in the middle of a Hadley Cell desert. Nineteen million people can survive in Southern California only because there are a thousand miles of pipelines, tunnels, and canals bringing water to them from someplace else. It comes from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and Owens Valley to the north, and from the Colorado River to the east, far across the Mojave Desert. They enjoy green lawns, burbling fountains, and swimming pools in a place where rainfall averages less than fifteen inches per year. A second canal202 from the Colorado pumps water up nearly three thousand feet in elevation and 330 miles east to Phoenix and Tucson, prompting Robert Glennon, author of Water Follies, to observe that we literally move water “uphill to wealth and power.”203 Without this infrastructure and the energy to run it, Arizonans’ water supply would more closely resemble that of Palestinians: fifteen dubious gallons a day haggled from the back of a water trafficker’s truck.

  Which Is Worse?

  Even if there were no climate change, the world would still be facing declining per capita water supply because of our growing economy and population. In general, more people means more water demand. Even if we could freeze population growth, advancing modernization means more meat, finished goods, and energy, all of which raise per capita water consumption.204 Contrary to common perception, population growth and industrialization thus represent an even bigger challenge to the global water supply than does climate change.

  Policy wonks and water managers have long sensed this. But hydrologist Charlie Vörösmarty blew it wide open in 2000 when he and his colleagues Pamela Green, Joe Salisbury, and Richard Lammers at the University of New Hampshire compared climate and hydrologic models with long-term population and water-consumption trends.205 As part of the study, they published three brightly colored maps of projected water demand for 2025. I make my students stare at these maps at least once in my introductory course lectures at UCLA.

  One of the maps is quite scary-looking and captures the combined effects of both climate and population trends on human water-supply stress. Most of the world is colored red (indicating less water availability than today) with a few places colored blue (more water availability, mostly in Russia and Canada) and even fewer in green (meaning little or no change). This fearsome red map suggests that by the year 2025 much of humanity’s water supply will be worse off, either from population growth, or climate change, or both.

  The other two maps separate out the effects of population and climate change. The population-only map is even scarier than the combined map. Nearly all the world is bathed in red, with blue colors even rarer than before. Compared to it, the climate-only map seems almost benign, with roughly equal proportions of blue and red tones and even more in green. In other words, climate changes are expected to both harm and help water availability in different parts of the world, whereas population and economic growth harm it nearly everywhere.206 So even if our climate-change problems could somehow disappear tomorrow (and they won’t), we would still face enormous challenges to water supply in some of the hottest, most crowded places on Earth.

  Drinking Sh**

  It’s hard to imagine the world behind those red maps. To most people—especially living in cities—clean water is like oil and electricity: one of those things upon which they depend mightily yet give barely a passing thought. In my own city of Los Angeles, everyone will gladly pay a hundred dollars a month for cable television, yet would roar in protest if forced to pay that much for life’s elixir piped directly into their homes. When Governor Schwarzenegger declared a state of drought emergency, I studied my water bill closely for the first time in my life. For two months of clean drinking water, snared from faraway sources and delivered to my house by one of the world’s most expensive and elaborate engineering schemes, I was charged $20.67. I spend more on postage stamps.

  If only everyone could indulge such ignorant bliss. While eight in ten people have access to some sort of improved water source,207 this globally averaged number masks some wild geographic discrepancies. Some countries, like Canada, Japan, and Estonia, provide clean water to all of their citizens. Oth
ers, especially in Africa, do so for under half. The worst water poverty is suffered by Ethiopians, Somalis, Afghanis, Papua New Guineans, Cambodians, Chadians, Equatorial Guineans, and Mozambicans.208 Even their statistics hide the most glaring divide—between cities and rural areas. Eight in ten urban Ethiopians have some form of improved water whereas just one in ten rural Ethiopians do.

  As we saw in Chapter 3, cities empower efficient channeling of natural resources to people. It is far more economical to lay water pipes and sewerage in a densely populated area than to spread them across the countryside. For much of the world, even sewers are a luxury. Unbelievably, four in ten of us don’t even have a simple pit latrine. Small wonder that waterborne diseases kill even more people than our raging epidemic of HIV/AIDS. As Jamie Bartram of the United Nations World Health Organization writes:

  Far more people endure the largely preventable effects of poor sanitation and water supply than are affected by war, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction combined. Yet those other issues capture the public and political imagination—and public resources—in a way that water and sanitation issues do not. Why? Perhaps in part because most people who read articles such as this find it hard to imagine defecating daily in plastic bags, buckets, open pits, agricultural fields, and public areas for want of a private hygienic alternative, as do some 2.6 billion people. Or perhaps they cannot relate to the everyday life of the 1.1 billion people without access to even a protected well or spring within reasonable walking distance of their homes.209

  Most experts agree that getting clean water to the world’s poorest people is largely a matter of money. According to the United Nations, the price tag for everyone to have safe, clean drinking water would be about $30 billion per year. But in the poorest countries, building water treatment plants and a network of pipes to move it is still prohibitively expensive, especially for rural areas. Well-intentioned foreign aid often fails to leave the cities of ruling elites. And while small, inexpensive water treatment technologies like ultraviolet purification hold promise, microprojects have failed to attract much interest from the big lenders. Water expert Peter Gleick, cofounder and president of the Pacific Institute, likes to point out that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund know how to spend a billion dollars in one place (on a big dam project, for example) but not how to spend a thousand dollars in a million places. But all too often, a thousand-dollar solution is what’s needed most. Getting clean water to people living in our most impoverished places remains an enormous challenge, with no clear solution on the horizon.

  Another trend is further clouding the picture. Multinational corporations are increasingly moving to privatize and consolidate water supplies. Over the past decade, at least three—Suez, Veolia Environmental Services (formerly Vivendi), and Thames Water—have expanded into for-profit water delivery ventures all over the developing world. In early 2009 Germany’s industrial giant Siemens paid nearly $1 billion for U.S. Filter, the leading supplier of water treatment products and services in North America. Multinational giants like General Electric and Dow Chemical are also jumping into the water business, alongside other companies you’ve never heard of, like Nalco, ITT, and Danaher Corporation.

  The benefit of this water-privatization frenzy is the expansion of modern water treatment and distribution facilities into impoverished places that desperately need them. However, these are for-profit companies, not public municipalities. In return for the new infrastructure, they must charge fees for the water in order to recoup building costs and generate profits for their shareholders. This is a familiar transaction in the developed world, where people are accustomed to paying for water, but is a radical shift in poor countries where municipal water supply—to the extent that it is available—is often free.

  Control of life’s most essential natural resource by overseas multinational corporations is an abomination to people like Maude Barlow, author of Blue Gold and Blue Covenant.210 These books point out that to the poorest of the poor, even a few cents for water is unaffordable, forcing them to drink from polluted streams and ditches, fall sick, and die. Extrapolating the current globalization trend into the future, Barlow imagines the following in Blue Covenant:

  A powerful corporate water cartel has emerged to seize control of every aspect of water for its own profit. Corporations deliver drinking water and take away wastewater; corporations put massive amounts of water in plastic bottles and sell it to us at exorbitant prices; corporations are building sophisticated new technologies to recycle our dirty water and sell it back to us; corporations extract and move water by huge pipelines from watersheds and aquifers to sell to big cities and industries; corporations buy, store, and trade water on the open market, like running shoes. Most importantly, corporations want governments to deregulate the water sector and allow the market to set water policy. Every day, they get closer to that goal.

  Opponents of multinational companies are a passionate group, and especially when it comes to water. They protest that water privatization has become a key objective of the World Bank, and even of regional lenders like the African Development Bank and Asian Development Bank, with full buy-in from the United Nations and World Trade Organization. They accuse the World Water Council—purportedly an ideologically neutral platform to promote “conservation, protection, development, planning, management, and use of water in all its dimensions on an environmentally sustainable basis for the benefit of all life on Earth”211—as in fact being a subversive global champion of water privatization and business corporations. They organize resistance movements and sit-ins, losing a fight with Nestlé over a Poland Spring bottling plant in Michigan, winning another against Coca-Cola at Plachimada, India; and even street riots to force Bechtel out of Bolivia.212

  Surveying the debate coolly from arm’s length, one can appreciate the benefits of the private-sector model. If countries cannot or will not deliver clean water to their citizens who desperately need it, and neither will the World Bank, then why not let private capital have a go? On the other hand, something does feel creepy about transferring control of life’s most basic requirement—clean drinking water—from local to overseas control, to corporations whose fiduciary responsibility lies first and foremost with their shareholders. Paying for water works fine in the developed world, but where people earn a dollar per day? Is water property, or human right? This battle continues on fronts all over the world, with no clear best path forward.

  World population will grow by 50% in the next forty years, nearly all of it in the developing world and mostly in places that are already water-stressed now. This new population will also be wealthier and eat more meat, thus requiring higher per capita food production than today. To meet this projected demand for food and feed, we must double our crop production by 2050. Finding enough freshwater to support this, plus more industry, plus billions of new apartments, all while keeping the water clean as it cycles endlessly between our kidneys and the environment, is very likely the greatest challenge of our century.

  The Information Revolution

  Breakfasts at high-powered NASA meetings in Washington, D.C., were much less glamorous than I’d hoped. Rather than sampling astronaut food in a gleaming high-tech boardroom, I was hunched in a bland carpeted hallway at the Marriott, poking a half-empty platter of stale bagels. But I didn’t mind. I grabbed the last poppyseed and a cup of coffee and ducked into the cramped meeting room. My old grad-school roommate Doug Alsdorf, now a professor at Ohio State, was bellowing at us to take our seats. I found one and sat quickly. One of the smartest men I have ever known, radar engineer Ernesto Rodriguez from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was preparing to give us another update on our half-billion-dollar idea.

  The water crisis is about more than failing crops and unsanitary conditions. It is also about information—or more precisely, the lack of it—for effective water management. Water is constantly on the move, but unbelievably, we have hardly any idea of where, when, or how much we have at any given mome
nt. Our knowledge of Earth’s hydrology is extraordinarily data-poor. Other than large rivers, few streams are measured. Outside the United States and Europe, the vast majority of water bodies receive no hydrologic monitoring whatsoever. We have basically zero information for small lakes, cattle ponds, and wetlands. Even the water levels behind dams, while monitored by their operators, are seldom released to the broader public in many countries.

  Because of this information gap, millions of people have no idea whether next week will bring lower water levels in their river or lake, or a raging flood. Emergency workers don’t know when a flood has peaked or how high it will go. Along many rivers even the weather isn’t a reliable predictor because upstream reservoirs release water at the command of dam operators, not rainstorms. In a complete reversal of their preexisting natural state, many of today’s rivers shrink, not swell, as they move downstream. In fits and starts, a gauntlet of diversions and dams sips them to death.

  Since construction of the High Aswan Dam almost all flow in the Nile River is now either diverted for irrigation or evaporates away behind reservoirs. 213 Dams along Africa’s Volta River system can hold back or release more than four years’ worth of its total river flow. Water passage through the Euphrates-Tigris in the Middle East, the Mae Khlong in Thailand, the Río Negro in Argentina, and the Colorado in North America is similarly controlled. But hydrologic data are seldom released. Many countries even classify them, so their downstream neighbors can’t tell if they are complying with international water-sharing agreements.214

  These are the reasons why our group of scientists and engineers were in that Washington, D.C., hotel room, and in other meeting rooms like it in Rome, San Francisco, Barcelona, Paris, Orlando, San Diego, Columbus, and Lisbon. There are now over five hundred of us in thirty-two countries, working on a bold new idea to globalize information about water resources, by measuring it everywhere and all the time, from space. The technology to do it is a satellite called a wide-swath altimeter. It uses a remarkable radar technology that Ernesto Rodriguez invented, called a “Ka-band radar interferometer” or KaRIn (named adorably after Ernesto’s wife). We’re going to put KaRIn into space, mounted on a satellite called SWOT.215