Water. Without it there is no life. To put it simply the amount of water in the world is finite as the number of earthlings is growing rapidly and our water use is growing even much faster. The alarming extent of water scarcity across the world does not seem to worry too many politicians as yet, and yesterday's graph of the Pew Research Center (see below) lends credence to the fact that most people do not take Global Warming seriously particularly in the context of the current cold front in the Northern hemisphere; (IMHO, there ought to be a movement to use a different terminology, like Climate Change, which conveys just that, or Climate Crisis as Al Gore rightly calls it).
The poor and the vulnerable are the ones who will suffer most. Water shortages mean long walks to procure water, high prices to purchase it when not available, food insecurity and diseases from drinking contaminated water.
It's a catch 22: we need water to grow food, as globally, the sheer amount of soil we need to produce our food is making an enormous impact on deforestation and desertification. According to FAO we have taken over about 26% of the planet's land area (roughly 3.3 billion hectares) for cropland and pasture, replacing over a third of temperate and tropical forests and a quarter of natural grasslands.
Agriculture accounts for about 70 percent of all freshwater withdrawn from lakes, waterways and aquifers around the world. The figure is closer to 95 percent in several developing countries, where roughly three-quarters of the world’s irrigated farmlands are located.
Learning to wisely use and manage water & soil is the only option for sustaining our planet's population. President Obama acknowledged in part some of the problems facing us, in his Time interview:
I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs.
There are no easy solutions (certainly not within the confines of this diary), but one of the most obvious and glaring issue is that we should turn to eating less meat as 1 kilo of grain-fed beef needs at least 15 cubic meters of water, and then there's the soil, the land, and the grain itself (34% of world grain supplies are fed to livestock reared for meat). Yet we seem to ignore this as worldwide, the richer we grow the more we turn to meat.
Food security comes at a high price. In 1 out of 5, it is a security many can only envy. New technology can help: cleaning up pollution and so making more water potable, and in agriculture, where water use can be made far more efficient; drip irrigation, whenever implemented, can drastically cut the amount of water needed; reverse osmosis has greatly improved; desalination makes sea water available, but takes huge quantities of energy and leaves vast amounts of brine; and of course the elephant in the room, bio drought-resistant plants could also help if it were 100% safe for future generations.
For those interested in water news read UNESCO Water Portal Bi-monthly Newsletter No. 212: Water Footprints and Virtual Water here.
The Good and the Bad:
BAD - Cyprus runs risk of desertification from climate change, drought, scientist warns:
The Mediterranean island of Cyprus runs the risk of desertification by the end of this century as studies project a rise in summer temperatures of between 2-4 degrees Celsius, warned Professor Manfred Lange, director of the Energy, Environment and Water Research Center at the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia. Source
Good - The fight against desertification:
Tunisia's arid Governate of Sousse made inroads on soil erosion and the encroachment of the desert between 1990 and 2001, thanks to the government's first national plan to preserve water and soils, and the second plan (2002-2011) appears to be equally successful. Source (in French)
BAD - Drought hits Argentina's economy hard:
The skeletons of dead cattle litter Buenos Aires Province in Argentina as the worst drought since 1971 turns much of the nation's breadbasket into dust. The Secretariat of Agriculture predicted that the wheat harvest would drop by 44% and the maize harvest by 27%. Source
Really BAD - More Climate Change is Coming to the US Southwest:
A conference of climate change experts, co-sponsored by the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law, was held in Tucson, Pima County, Arizona and focused upon climate changes in the southwestern states. Professor Jonathan Overpeck, director of the UA's Institute for Environment and Society, told around 300 delegates that global warming plus natural climate variability could result in a "megadrought" that could persist for decades. Source
GOOD - New Mexico Environment Department Prevails in Precedent-Setting Case Affirming State's Authority to Protect All Groundwater in New Mexico:
In Santa Fe, the New Mexico Environment Department won a major case against Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold (formerly the Phelps Dodge Mining Corporation) heard by the Water Quality Control Commission. Source
BAD - Tehran drinking water has highest nitrate level in Iran:
Director Mohammad-Baqer Saduq of Tehran's Department of Environment in Iran reported that the capital's drinking water has the highest level of nitrate in the country. Water in the cities of Mashad and Arak ranks second and third worst in nitrate concentrations. Source
BAD - Australian Report Identifies High Risk Areas as Sea Levels Rise:
A report on the impact of climate change upon Australia's coastal areas identified high-risk areas in Clarence and other parts of southern Tasmania. Co-author Clive Attwater warned that hundreds of properties in low-lying coastal areas faced the threat of erosion, flooding, and storm surges as sea levels rose. Source
GOOD - Japan Launches Climate Change Satellite:
Japan launched the first satellite dedicated to monitoring greenhouse gas emissions across the globe: its instruments will measure the quantities being released and pinpoint where they're coming from. Source
GOOD - 26 January 2009, Madrid: Chiefs of key international agencies pledged today to step up commitments against hunger and malnutrition, at the opening of a Madrid meeting on Food Security for All. Participating are UN officials and representatives of international agencies belonging to the Secretary-General's High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis, along with leaders of think tanks, non-governmental organizations and the private sector. The objectives of the meeting are to raise the political profile of hunger and food security, develop new partnerships and increase resources.
"With an expected increase of 40 million in 2008, the world today has reached 963 million people who are malnourished," said Jacques Diouf, Task Force vice-chairman and FAO Director-General, at the opening session. "This signifies that right now there are almost one billion who are hungry, out of the 6.5 billion who make up the world population."
Source
And finally a simple message from Water Day 09:
"Whether we live upstream or downstream, we are all in the same boat."