Why is the world in danger of facing a serve and shorting of water in coming future?
Give reason
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Answers
The next time you open a can of soft drink, consider where the water inside it came from. The H20 in an Indian can of Coca-Cola includes treated rainwater, while the contents in the Maldives may once have been seawater. The water needs to come from such different sources for a reason – it’s because there is a global freshwater crisis.
Given that 70% of the Earth’s surface is water, and that volume remains constant (at 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometres), how is a water shortage even possible? Well, 97.5% is seawater unfit for human consumption. And both populations and temperatures are ever-rising, meaning that the freshwater we do have is under severe pressure.
Water demand globally is projected to increase by 55% between 2000 and 2050. Much of the demand is driven by agriculture, which accounts for 70% of global freshwater use, and food production will need to grow by 69% by 2035 to feed the growing population. Water withdrawal for energy, used for cooling power stations, is also expected to increase by over 20%. In other words, the near future presents one big freshwater drain after the next.
What’s more? Right now, according to a Nasa-led study, many of the world’s freshwater sources are being drained faster than they are being replenished.Of the world’s major aquifers (gravel and sand-filled underground reservoirs), 21 out of 37 are receding, from India and China to the United States and France. The Ganges Basin in India is depleting, due to population and irrigation demands, by an estimated 6.31 centimetres every year. Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at Nasa, has warned that “the water table is dropping all over the world. There’s not an infinite supply of water.”
Meanwhile, Mexico City, built on ancient lake beds, is now sinking in some areas at a rate of nine inches a year. As the city draws on the aquifer below, the effect is like drinking a milkshake through a straw. Once horizontal streets now undulate like BMX tracks. The city imports 40% of its water, and Ramón Aguirre Díaz, director of the Water System of Mexico City, has blamed “heavier, more intense rains, which mean more floods, but also more and longer droughts.”
Much of the same is happening in California. From 2011 to 2016, the state suffered its worst drought in 1,200 years. Its major aquifers receded at a combined rate of 16 million acre-feet per year, and roughly 1,900 wells ran dry. Then, in the first three months of 2017, rain fell at 228% more than its normal level, thanks to climate change, scientists say. Lake Oroville in the northern part of the state swung from being at 41% of capacity to 101% in just two months, causing dams to be overwhelmed and 188,000 local residents to be evacuated.
Yet even when a drought ends as spectacularly as California’s, the aquifers below aren’t suddenly refilled. According to Nasa’s Famiglietti, it would take four years of above-average rainfall in California for that to happen. And even then, “California will still be losing water [because the] state simply does not have enough water to do all the things that it wants to do.”
But what else could all this mean, beyond the fact that our freshwater supply could soon be very strapped?
Some hypothesise that increased water shortages around the world will lead to wars. The current Syrian civil war has been cited by many, including Dr Peter Engelke, senior Fellow at Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council, as a recent example. “Between 2007 and 2010, Syria experienced one of the worst droughts in recorded history, the effect of which was to decimate rural communities and drive hundreds of thousands off the land and into Syria’s cities, where they were marginalised," he says.
Anders Berntell, executive director of 2030 Water Resources Group, a multi-sector water resources body, also suggests a link to Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab, whereby young people “realise that, as a result of the lack of natural resources, degraded land and lack of water there are no livelihood opportunities… There is no future for them. They become easily targeted.” They are more easily radicalised.
All of which would predict a bleak future – but some nations have worked out solutions. And they’re impressive ones that the rest of the world can learn from.For example, Australia survived its “Millennium Drought” from 1997 to 2009 by rapidly implementing measures that halved business and residential water use.
“Australia is the gold standard," says Richard Damania, global lead economist in the World Bank's Water Practice, and formerly of the University of Adelaide. The key was putting a price on water and making it a tradable commodity.
“[Suppose] I had water, but I'm only growing wheat. Whereas you’re growing grapes or something of higher value [than wheat, but don't have water]" he explains. "Then I can sell you that water instead of irrigating my lower value crop. This way… Australia survived the Millennium
Because we are westing water recklessly. so we should think about future generations