The age of water scarcity consequently heralds the potential start of a momentous transition in the trajectory of water and world history: from the traditional paradigm based on centralized, mass-scale infrastructure that extracted, treated, and delivered ever greater, absolute supplies from nature to a new efficiency paradigm built upon more decentralized, scaled-to-task, and environmentally harmonious solutions that make more productive use of existing supplies. This transition is fomenting a new politics in the old equations between population sizes and available water resources in societies all over the world. New population-resource equilibriums eventually will be achieved within each society, water-poor and water-rich alike, through breakthroughs in efficiency and organization on the one hand, or stagnation in personal living standards and overall population levels on the other—and very likely some mixture of both. History suggests that it will be a tumultuous process, recasting social orders, domestic economic hierarchies, international balances of power, and everyday lives. Some regions are better placed than others to face the transition. With water demand continuing to outstrip soaring population growth and many planetary ecosystems being taxed beyond sustainable levels, more and more water-fragile nations were already being driven to the brink.
Most prominent, water scarcity is cleaving an explosive fault line between freshwater Haves and Have-Nots across the political, economic, and social global landscapes of the twenty-first century: internationally, among relatively well-watered industrial world citizens and those of water-famished, developing countries; among those upriver who control river flows and their neighbors downstream whose survival depends upon receiving a sufficient amount; and among those nations with enough agricultural water to be self-sufficient in food and those dependent upon foreign imports to feed their teeming populations. Within nations the new freshwater fault line is fomenting a more divisive competition among interest groups and regions for a greater allocation of limited domestic water resources: between heavily subsidized farmers on the one side and industrial and urban users without government assistance on the other; between the well-heeled situated within close proximity of freshwater sources and the rural and urban poor, who, by dint of occupying secondary locations more remote from water sources, endure the added insult of having less piped connectivity and regressively greater expense in obtaining water. The water fault line cut across humanity, between those able to pay the top price for abundant, wholesome drinking water and the water destitute who glean the dregs; between those who dwell in locations with effective pollution regulations, modern wastewater treatment, and sanitation facilities and those on the other side of the sanitary divide, whose daily lives are contaminated by exposure to impure, disease-plagued water. Across geographical habitats, water’s fault line contrasts the privileged minority who live in the planet’s relatively well-watered and forested temperate zones and the largest part of the human race that live on water-fragile dry lands, oversaturated tropics, or were exposed to the costly unpredictability of extreme precipitation events that cause out of season floods, mudslides, and droughts. Increasingly, the fault line between water Haves and water Have-Nots is being played out on the plane of international policy between traditional economic nationalists trying to manage affairs within the blinkers of domestic boundaries and the growing coalition of enlightened self-interests worried about destabilizing spillovers from the interdependencies of global society and from planetary environmental crises triggered by the regional degradation of water ecosystems.
Every day across the planet, armies of water poor, mainly women and children compelled by thirst to forgo school and productive work, march barefoot two or three hours per day transporting just enough water in heavy plastic containers from the nearest clean source for their barest household survival needs—some 200 pounds per day for a four-person household. The alarming dark side of this humanitarian divide includes over 1.1 billion people—almost one-fifth of all humanity—who lack access to at least a gallon per day of safe water to drink. Some 2.6 billion—two out of every five people on Earth—are sanitary Have-Nots lacking the additional five gallons needed daily for rudimentary sanitation and hygiene. Far fewer still achieve the minimum threshold of 13 gallons per day for basic domestic health and well-being, including water for bathing and cooking. The lives of the most abject of Water Have-Nots, moreover, are chronically afflicted and shortened by diarrhea, dysentery, malaria, dengue fever, schistosomiasis, cholera, and the myriad other illnesses that make waterborne diseases mankind’s most prevalent scourge. Half the people in the developing world of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean are estimated to suffer from diseases associated with inadequate freshwater and sanitation. This side of the humanitarian divide includes the 2 billion human beings whose lives are uprooted catastrophically every decade from inadequate public infrastructural protection from water shocks. By contrast, on the Water Have side of the humanitarian divide, industrialized-world citizens use 10 to 30 times more water than their poorest, developing nation counterparts. In the water-wealthy United States, each person uses an average of 150 gallons per day for domestic and municipal purposes, including such extravagances as multiple toilet flushes and lawn watering.
Water rationing is increasingly commonplace in Water Have-Not societies. So, too, are internecine conflicts and violent protests over scarce supplies and high prices. Inadequate water supply commonly manifests itself in the form of insufficient food output, stunted industrial development as critical water inputs are sacrificed to the priority of agriculture, and shortages in energy, whose modern production infrastructure is closely interlinked with copious volumes of water used for cooling, power generation, and other purposes. Chronic water scarcity undercuts the political legitimacy of governments, fomenting social instability, and failed states. Water riots, bombings, many deaths, and other violent warning signs occurred from 1999 to 2005, for example, in various conflicts over water in Karachi, Pakistan, in Gujarat, India, in provinces of arid north China, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, between Kenyan tribes, among Somalia villages, and in the Darfur, Sudan, genocide. In the oddest report of water violence, eight monkeys were killed and 10 Kenyan villagers wounded when the desperate primates descended upon water tankers brought to relieve the drought-stricken village. Cross-border tensions and military threats between nation-states are palpable perils in a growing number of international watersheds in some of the world’s most combustible regions. Today, it is a commonplace for statesmen to paraphrase the much publicized 1995 prediction of a former chairman of the World Commission for Water in the 21st Century and senior World Bank official, Egyptian Ismail Serageldin: “Many of the wars this century were about oil, but those of the next century will be over water.”
From the early 1990s, a decade marked by the global environmental awakening symbolized by the first Earth Summit in 1992 at Rio de Janeiro, a consensus began to coalesce among attentive world leaders that on existing trajectories and technologies, usable freshwater resources were falling short of what was needed for long-term global economic growth. The consensus helped galvanize in 2001 the first comprehensive, planet-wide assessment of the health of all of Earth’s major ecosystems and its effects on human well-being. The headline findings of the landmark Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, launched under U.N. auspices and completed in 2005 with input from over a thousand experts worldwide, was that 15 of the 24 studied Earth ecosystems were being degraded or used unsustainably. Freshwater ecosystems and capture fisheries, in particular, were singled out as “now well beyond levels that can be sustained even at current demands, much less future ones.” Up to half the world’s wetlands disappeared or were severely damaged in the twentieth century’s drive to obtain more arable land and freshwater for agriculture. Worldwide expansion of irrigable farmland is peaking out for the first time in history.
Under demographic and developmental duress, mankind’s withdrawal of usable, renewable freshwater from the surface of the planet is expected to rise from half to 7
0 percent by 2025. Due to heavy overdrafts on slowly replenishing reserves in some water distressed regions, MEA experts estimated that possibly as much as one-quarter of global freshwater use might already be exceeding the accessible, sustainable supply.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of nations were so critically water stressed that they can no longer grow all the crops they need to feed and clothe their own populations. Growing crops is an astonishingly water intensive enterprise—about three-quarters of mankind’s water use worldwide is for farm irrigation. Indeed, food itself is mainly water. To produce a single pound of wheat requires half a ton, or nearly 250 gallons of water; a pound of rice needs between 250 and 650 gallons. Moving up the food chain to livestock for meat and milk multiplies the water intensity since the animals have to be nourished with huge quantities of grain; up to 800 gallons, or over three tons of water, for instance, are needed for the feed that produces a single portion of hamburger and some 200 gallons for a glass of cow’s milk. In all, a well-nourished person consumes some 800 to 1,000 gallons of water each day in the food he eats. The ordinary cotton T-shirt on his back requires as much as 700 gallons to produce.
As water poor countries fall short of self-sufficiency in producing their daily bread, they are growing increasingly dependent upon importing grain and other foods from water-wealthier farming nations. By 2025 up to 3.6 billion people in some of the driest, most densely populated and poorest parts of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia are projected to live in countries that cannot feed themselves. Due to water scarcity a growing trade in virtual water—food and other finished products imported in substitution for scarce domestic water resources—is redefining the terms of international trade and emerging as a distinctive feature of the changing global order. The growing bifurcation between water-poor food importers and water-rich exporters is often further exacerbated by man-made ruination of cropland from soil erosion and polluting runoff. The prospect of upward spiraling international food prices as the era of cheap water and cheap food comes to an end is already causing experts to warn of grave consequences if there is not a new Green Revolution, perhaps including the development of genetically modified plant hybrids that grow with less water.
The same, finite net, 4/1,000ths of 1 percent of Earth’s total water that recycled endlessly and fell over land in the process of evaporation-transpiration and precipitation has sustained every civilization from the start of history to the present. Man’s practical access to this renewable freshwater supply remains limited to a maximum of one-third, since about two-thirds quickly disappears in floods and into the ground, recharging surface and ground water ecosystems and ultimately returning to the sea. Even so, that one-third totals enough available renewable water to more than suffice for the planet’s 6 billion—if it were all distributed evenly. But it is not. A large share runs off unused in lightly inhabited jungle rivers like the Amazon, the Congo, and the Orinoco and across Russia’s remote Siberian expanses toward the Arctic in the giant Yenisei and Lena rivers. So the actual total amount of readily available, renewable freshwater per person often averages less—often far less—in some regions than the threshold annual 2,000-cubic-meter measure of water sufficiency. And it is declining sharply in inverse relationship to the escalation of world population.
Yet even that does not convey the full measure of the deepening water crisis challenge because the remainder of renewable freshwater that precipitates within the reach of large human society falls in disparate intensities, seasonal patterns and degrees of difficulty in being captured for human use. Hot climates, for instance, suffer much higher losses from evaporation than cool, temperate ones—in Africa only one-fifth of all rainfall transforms into potentially utilizable runoff. The most difficult hydrological environment is not one of extreme aridity, or extreme wetness, however, but where water availability varies widely between seasons and is prone to unpredictable water shocks, such as floods, landslides, droughts and sudden, extreme deviations from usual patterns. Seasonality raises the complexity and the cost of water engineering, while unpredictability defeats even sound waterworks planning, often striking demoralizing setbacks against development. It is not a coincidence that history’s poorest societies often have had the most difficult hydrological environments.
As a result, each region’s actual water challenges vary enormously by environment, availability, and the population it has to support. Australia is by far the driest continent, with only 5 percent of world runoff. But it has to support by far the smallest human population, a mere 20 million, or less than one-half of 1 percent of world population. Asia, the largest continent, receives the most renewable water, about one-third of the total. Nonetheless, it is the most water-stressed continent because it has to meet the needs of three-fifths of humanity, contains some of the world’s most arid expanses, and over three-quarters of its precipitation falls in the form of hard-to-capture, highly variable, concentrated seasonal monsoons. The water richest continent is South America, with 28 percent of the world’s renewable water and only 6 percent of its population. On a per person basis, it receives ten times as much freshwater each year as Asia and five times as much as Africa. Yet most of it flows away unused through jungle watersheds, while some high desert regions remain bone dry. North America is water wealthy with 18 percent of the world’s runoff and 8 percent of its population. Europe has only about 7 percent of the world’s water for its 12 percent share of population, but is comparatively advantaged in its wet, northern and central half because much of it falls year-round, evaporates slowly, and runs off in easily accessible and navigable small rivers.
The continental volumes, of course, mask the all-important disparities among localities and nations that are animating the new water politics. One eye-popping headline of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was that the planet’s dry lands, encompassing one-third of humanity or over 2 billion people, had only 8 percent of the world’s renewable supply of water in its surface streams and fast-recharging groundwater tables. More than 90 percent of the dry-land inhabitants live in developing nations, making water famine one of the key, vexing challenges of international economic development. It is hardly surprising that the vast dry-land belt stretching from North Africa and the Middle East to the Indus valley is also one of the world’s most politically volatile regions. At the other end of the spectrum are super Water Have countries such as Brazil, Russia, Canada, Panama, and Nicaragua with far more water than their populations can ever use. The United States and China have large hydrological imbalances with shortages in their far western and northern regions, respectively; while the modestly populated American Far West felt constraints on its rapid growth, the fertile, overpopulated northern plain of China is one of the most severely water-scarce, environmentally challenged regions on Earth. Likewise, India’s growing, huge population is outstripping the highly inefficient management of its freshwater resources, forcing farmers, industry, and households to pump groundwater faster and deeper in a proverbial race to the bottom. Western European nations managed successfully because they use their limited water resources more productively, abetted by their higher proportions used for industry and cities, and less for agriculture.
Because water is so heavy and is needed in such vast quantities, chronic shortages cannot be permanently relieved by transporting it over long distances. The challenge of water scarcity, therefore, has to be confronted watershed by watershed, according to local physical and political conditions, and further constrained by the needs of foreign neighbors within the 261 transnational river basins that are home to 40 percent of the world’s inhabitants. One of the most reliable indicators of water wealth is the amount of water storage capacity each nation has installed per person to buffer it against natural shocks and to manage its economic needs; almost universally, the storage leaders are the world’s wealthiest nations, while the poorest remain most exposed to the natural caprices of water.
Despite its growing scarcity and pr
eciousness to life, ironically, water is also man’s most misgoverned, inefficiently allocated and profligately wasted natural resource. Societies’ own poor management of water, in other words, is a key component of their water scarcity crises. In market democracies and authoritarian states alike, modern governments still routinely maintain monopolistic control over their nation’s supply, pricing, and allocation; commonly, it is distributed as a social good, as political largesse to favored interest groups, and in overweeningly ambitious public projects. Almost universally, governments still treat water as if it were a limitless gift of nature to be freely dispensed by any authority with the power to exploit it. In contrast to oil and nearly every other natural commodity, water is largely exempted from market discipline. Rarely is any inherent value ascribed to the water itself. Only the cost of capturing and distributing it is routinely accounted. Nor is any cost ascribed to the degradation of the water ecosystem from whence it comes and to which, often in a polluted condition, it ultimately returns. By belonging to everyone and being the private responsibility of no one, water for most of history has been consumed greedily and polluted recklessly in a classic case of a “tragedy of the commons.”
Steven Solomon Page 42
