Back to the Well

The main question is the degree to which water’s problems are a factor of natural constraints — in which case, the limits are real and fixable only with substantial effort and cost — and how much is due to poor management — in which case, the remedy is obvious, if elusive. Good management, as we can plainly see from the state of the political world, is something of a hard premium in our times. Both paths will be explored in subsequent chapters.

The American water guru Peter Gleick, who runs his own water think tank called the Pacific Institute, has suggested that we contemplate the notion of peak water, a concept that mimics the much-debated and much-contested notion of peak oil, in which production peaks and subsequently declines, thereafter falling short of total consumption. With water, Gleick goes further, suggesting three peaks, not one: peak renewable water (“where flow constraints limit total water availability over time”), peak non-renewable water (similar to peak oil, “in which water consumption rates substantially exceed natural recharge rates and where over-pumping or contamination leads to a peak of production followed by a decline”), and peak ecological water (defined as the point beyond which the total costs of ecological disruptions and damages exceed the total value provided by human use of that water).

In his measured fashion, Gleick says that “despite uncertainties in quantifying many of these costs and benefits in consistent ways, more and more watersheds appear to have already passed the point of peak water.”4

Looked at another way, there are two dismal metrics, two overlapping water crises: the first is dirty water, the contamination of water supplies, even in areas where water itself is relatively abundant; the second is where water, dirty or clean, is in short (sometimes critically short) supply. They overlap because some areas that are water stressed are similarly bedevilled by pollution, making solutions incrementally more complicated. Both are further complicated by local, regional, national, and sometimes transnational tensions, sometimes arising from water directly, in other cases where water is a surrogate for greater conflicts.

Water quality is poor everywhere — hardly any rivers are now fit to drink in their “wild” state — but in the rich countries this can be, and is being, overcome. True, attitudes to water quality need some adjustment (the “new normal” of boil-water advisories, no-swimming advisories, and so on), and the water itself too often needs expensive infrastructure to purify supply, but these are now pretty much universal. In poor countries, there is clear evidence that where population increases and economies do not prosper, matters are getting worse, not better, despite decades of work by the aid agencies. A decade ago, Peter Gleick suggested that if water and sanitation services did not radically improve, as many as 135 million people would die from water-related diseases over the next twenty years, about the same number as those killed in all the wars in all of human history. That prediction sounds extravagant, but it actually came true — that many people did die of preventable water-borne diseases, a decade ahead of “schedule.” Matters have improved since then, but there are still a quarter billion new cases of water-borne diseases every year, killing the population equivalent of Canada every three years or so. Somewhere in the world, a child still dies every six to eight seconds from drinking contaminated water — that adds up to three to five million a year. Malaria, despite the existence of cheap and effective prophylactics, kills more than a million people a year. Bilharzia and dengue fever are spreading, not retreating. New tropical diseases such as chikungunya have made their way from Africa to the Caribbean just in the last few years. Cholera and dysentery risk becoming endemic. Even in Europe, somewhere around forty children die each day from drinking unsafe water.

As noted at the start of this book, the population of our little planet has tripled in the last century but water use has sextupled, about three-quarters of it used just to grow the food to feed the world. Some of the consequences are obvious: dozens of rivers no longer reach the sea. China’s Yellow River, or Huang He, now makes it to the ocean only in flood times; America’s Colorado is a mere drainage ditch by the time it gets to Mexico; you can often walk dry-footed across the Rio Grande; the Jordan River has become a pathetic trickle, and so on. Dismal news indeed. At least half the world’s wetlands, once nature’s flood-control mechanism, have disappeared in the last century. Forests, “nature’s sponges,” are disappearing everywhere. The Florida Everglades, usually counted as a conservation success story, are less than half their original size. Water supplies in the Nile Valley are in peril. A fifth of the planet’s freshwater fish that existed a century ago are already extinct. Groundwater tables, the aquifers on which so much of irrigation depends, are becoming seriously overdrafted in many parts of the world. Water use will likely increase by 50 percent in the next thirty years — if the water can be found. Somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the world’s food supply is being irrigated by over-mined aquifers.

The US national security apparatus, alarmed by the potential for water conflicts and for floods of ecological refugees, has calculated that in the next thirty years around four billion people — somewhere between a third and half of the global population — will live under conditions of severe water stress, which means living without the water to meet basic needs. Shortages will be particularly severe in Africa, the Middle East and Arabia, and South Asia, though many parts of the Americas will be similarly afflicted. As always, the poorest countries and their poorest people will be most directly damaged.

As the authors of the World Bank’s 2003 Water Sector Strategy paper put it, this gloomy arithmetic of supply is mirrored by an equally gloomy arithmetic of costs. The easy and cheap “hard” options for increasing the water supply have already been tapped. Most of the easy rivers have been dammed. A decade ago, the World Bank declared that necessary water infrastructure investments would have to increase from around $50 billion a year to more than $180 billion, just to keep from falling behind. The number is now far higher.

To manage the water world properly, you first need to know how much water there is, and where it is to be found, and then, having calculated that, it is necessary to know how much of that water is available — usable on an ongoing, sustainable basis. None of this is easy, even after decades of meticulous accumulation of data. Monitors mostly exist where they are less needed — in Europe and North America — and are spotty and unreliable in the rest of the world. Also, it is still not known how much fresh water is stored in permafrost and glaciers. There are some guesses, but even the guessers themselves admit the computations on which they are based are crude.

Water is no more than 0.2 percent of planetary matter, but despite this, most of the earth’s surface is water, albeit mostly salty or locked into ice caps. The notion that we would ever “run out” of water is ludicrous. There is more than we could ever use. But usable water is another thing. That we can run out of.

The renewability factor is critical. As an example, calculate how much water the North American Great Lakes “really” hold for human use. Lake Superior is not the largest of earth’s lakes (Baikal in Russia and Tanganyika in Africa contain more water), but the Great Lakes system does contain somewhere around 27 percent of the easily reachable surface fresh water on the planet. These lakes replenish slowly — if we were to take out a percentage point or so more water than that which goes in, the water levels would drop — and keep on dropping. That’s why there is no conflict between the statements “The Great Lakes contain a quarter of the world’s fresh water” and “Canada has only 6 percent of the world’s renewable water.” Canada has, in fact, almost identical renewable resources as China, in more or less the same scale landmass. Except China, of course, has thirty times the population, so the per capita availability of water in China and Canada are utterly different — one place is stressed, the other is not.

Thus, it is the flow of water, not the total amount, that gives us our livable quotient. And this flow is highly variable, affected by weather, climate, and a host of other factors. So here are some necessary numbers:

If there are almost 1.5 billion cubic kilometres of water on the planet, as is plausible, a mere 35 million of those are fresh water and most of that relatively trivial amount is not accessible to us — about 24 million cubic kilometres are locked into the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers and permafro st. The rivers, lakes, wetlands, and aquifers from which we derive usable water amount to somewhere around eleven million cubic kilometres. A Science paper by Taikan Oki and Shinjiro Kanae put the global total of available (that is, sustainably usable by humans) water at 45,500 cubic kilometres.5 Igor Shiklomanov, of the State Hydrological Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, calculated the figure at 42,000 cubic kilometres. My earlier book on water, a decade and a half ago, suggested a more conservative 34,000 cubic kilometres, a number based on plausible data sets from multiple national agencies. I’d stay with Shiklomanov on this: his institute is constantly updating the data as they are developed, and he brings a properly skeptical mind to the computations. We’re actually withdrawing about half of this amount each year. So there is a lot left over.

Is it (will it be) enough?

To begin to assess this, we must look first to the obvious fact that the geographical distribution of sustainable water is unequal — a climatic truism. To a degree, this is our fault: humans have colonized places where there is not enough water to support them (Los Angeles comes to mind). Thus, there are places on earth that have too much water, and places that haven’t nearly enough — that water is often in the wrong places at the wrong times and in the wrong amounts has long been a hydrological cliché. Further, climate change suggests that droughts (and floods) are increasing, which in turn means that stress is appearing in places that had never imagined it before. At the same time, it is also obvious that water is heavy and not easily transported. The Amazon basin accounts for almost 20 percent of the world’s runoff, but you can’t feasibly shift that to countries that are short — hell, you can’t even shift it to São Paulo, in the same country. There is no practical way of solving one region’s shortages with another’s surplus. In this sense, a suggestion by the International Rivers network that “just one percent of current [global] withdrawals” would give everyone who needed it forty litres a day is disingenuous: How are you going to get the water where it is needed?6

A second point is the equally obvious fact that the easiest aquifers have been tapped, the easiest rivers dammed, and all the easiest sources already discovered, and that we have contaminated more water than is ecologically sensible. This means that solutions become more difficult. Not impossible, just more difficult.

And finally, we look at the per capita use of water around the world. It has been increasing steadily, for a variety of reasons. Population growth increases total usage, not per capita usage — more people means more water use, even if the users are poor. But if they cease to be poor, they use even more — they use more water for sanitation, and for growing food (especially if they switch to eating more meat), and for multiple other purposes, including more manufacturing. The numbers illustrate the point: on a global scale, per capita water availability has decreased from 12,000 to 7,600 cubic metres per person, that is, by more than a third. Africa has seen the greatest change — per capita available water decreased there by 2.8 times. But the numbers are not trivial elsewhere either: Asia was next, with per capita availability decreasing 2.0 times; South America, 1.7 times; and Europe, 1.26.7 Total usage has gone up, sometimes dramatically: if consumption is expressed in cubic kilometres per year, usage went up in the twentieth century from 37 to 463 in Europe, 69 to 705 in North America, 40 to 235 in Africa, and 414 to 2,357 in Asia.

This doesn’t mean that the situation is beyond control, or salvation. So far, only North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula are in overall water deficit, extracting more water from their reservoirs than nature is replenishing (both regions are using around 130 percent of available supply), though the use in parts of Asia is approaching 80 percent of available supply. Of course, these national and regional figures mask local and river basin critical areas — the fact that the United States is in reasonable shape doesn’t mean the Ogallala aquifer isn’t being depleted.

To some degree, “virtual water,” sometimes known as embodied water, can alleviate stress in parched regions. Half a kilo of coffee beans, for example, has a “water footprint” of more than eight litres — that is, it takes eight litres of water to produce those beans, yet the beans are much lighter than water and can be easily transported — much more easily than the water that produced them. So Israel, say, can “conserve” water (that is, not have to use it up by irrigating coffee plantations) by buying coffee grown in places that are relatively water-rich. If managed right, both sides benefit.

Despite appearances, the unequal distribution of water, the fact that the remaining supplies will be harder to get than heretofore, and the increase in per capita consumption are amenable to solution. The solutions won’t always be easy, and will often be expensive, but they are achievable.