The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future (13 page)

Our Most Necessary Resource

It’s hard to imagine anything humans need more than freshwater. If it were to all somehow vanish, the human race would be extinct in a matter of days. If it stopped flowing to our animals and fields, we would starve. If it became unclean, we would become sick or even die. Our societies need water in proper quantity, quality, and timing to preserve civilization as we know it. Too little, or at the wrong time of year, and our food dies off and industries fail. Too much, and our fields dissolve and people drown. For the past ten thousand years the very existence of permanent human settlements has depended upon having a consistent, dependable supply of usable water.

What does the future hold? Are we running low on water, as we must ultimately run low on oil? In the past fifty years we’ve doubled our irrigated cropland and tripled our water consumption to meet global food demand. In the next fifty, we must double food production again.
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Is there really enough water to pull that off?

In his book
When the Rivers Run Dry
environmental journalist Fred Pearce describes in vivid, firsthand detail the stark reality of impending water crises in more than thirty countries around the globe. We now withdraw so much water that many of our mightiest and most historic rivers—like the Nile, the Colorado, the Yellow, the Indus—have barely a trickle left to meet the sea.

The good news is that, unlike oil, which is ultimately finite, water is endlessly returned to us by the hydrologic cycle. Except for fossil groundwater, there is no such thing as “Peak Water” in the same sense as “Peak Oil.” It always comes back—somewhere—as rain or snow. It may be too much, or too little, or come at the wrong time, but it does come back. The bad news is that in addition to the aforementioned problems of too much, too little, or bad timing, our water sources can also become polluted. Finally, while it’s true that there is plenty of water circulating out there someplace, nearly all of it is useless to us.

The Russian hydrologist Igor Alexander Shiklomanov estimates that almost 97% of the world’s water is salty ocean, unfit for drinking or irrigation; 1% is salty groundwater, again useless. Of the 2.5% or so that is fresh, most
would
be salty if not for the glaciers of Antarctica, Greenland, and mountains that hold it up on land in the form of ice, rather than letting it run off into the ocean. Fresh groundwater holds about three-quarters of 1%. The minuscule remainder—about eight one-thousandths of 1%—is held in all the world’s lakes, wetlands, and rivers combined. Our atmosphere’s clouds, vapor, and rain hold even less, just one ten-thousandth of 1% of all water on Earth.
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There are three points to be taken from Shiklomanov’s numbers. The first is that the most important sources of water for people and terrestrial ecosystems—rivers, lakes, and rain—are actually fleetingly rare forms of H
₂
O. If all the water in the world was a thousand-dollar bill, these sources would amount to about eight cents. The second point is that relative to rivers, lakes, and rain, far larger volumes of freshwater are frozen up inside glaciers, or stored underground in aquifers. These, too, are critically important to humanity and will be discussed shortly.

The third point—and frankly one that is all too often neglected by policy makers and scientists alike—is that these numbers alone do not tell the whole story when it comes to human water supply. Recall that water, unlike oil, is a circulating resource. It recycles constantly through the hydrologic cycle, in infinite loops of rain, runoff, evaporation, and various storage compartments, like ice. From a practical standpoint the
throughput
of freshwater (or “flux”) is just as important as the absolute size of its various containers. The total volume of water held in rivers at any given instant is tiny, but it is replaced quickly, unlike, say, an ancient glacier or slowly oozing aquifer. A water droplet moves down a natural river in a few days, whereas the same droplet moving through glaciers, groundwater, and deep ocean currents could be stuck there for centuries to hundreds of thousands of years. This explains the seeming paradox that despite the world’s rivers’ instantaneous storage capacity of just two thousand cubic kilometers of water, we pull almost twice that amount from them every year.
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This is why rainfall and surface water, despite their diminutive holdings, are so critically important to land-based ecosystems and people. Their fast throughput is what makes them so valuable. But because their storage capacities are so tiny, we are vulnerable to the smallest of variations in that throughput. Unlike an ocean or glacier, the atmosphere and rivers have no meaningful storage capacity from which to draw water in dry times or hoard it in wet times. Therefore, terrestrial life is highly sensitive to floods and droughts, whereas marine life is generally not. Tuna have plenty of worries, but droughts are not one of them. Battling this vulnerability is a prime reason why we have built millions of dams, reservoirs, lakes, and ponds throughout the world. Yet even after all this massive engineering, we still have only enough of these artificial impoundments to store slightly less than two years’ water supply.
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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.
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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.
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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 canal
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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this globally averaged number masks some wild geographic discrepancies. Some countries, like Canada, Japan, and Estonia, provide clean water to all of their citizens. Others, 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.
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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.
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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
.
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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”
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—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.
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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.