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Freshwater Drain

Seventy-one percent of the planet is covered in water. Barely more than 2 percent of that water is fresh, and only 1 percent of that water, at most, is accessible, with the rest trapped mostly in glaciers. Which means, in essence, as National Geographic has calculated, only 0.007 percent of the planet’s water is available to fuel and feed its seven billion people.

Think of freshwater shortages and you probably feel an itch in your throat, but in fact hydration is just a sliver of what we need water for. Globally, between 70 and 80 percent of freshwater is used for food production and agriculture, with an additional 10 to 20 percent set aside for industry. And the crisis is not principally driven by climate change—that 0.007 percent should be, believe it or not, plenty, not just for the seven billion of us here but for as many as nine billion, perhaps even a bit more. Of course, we are likely heading north of nine billion this century, to a global population of at least ten and possibly twelve billion. As with food scarcity, much of the growth is expected in parts of the world already most strained by water shortage—in this case, urban Africa. In many African countries already, you are expected to get by on as little as twenty liters of water each day—less than half of what water organizations say is necessary for public health. As soon as 2030, global water demand is expected to outstrip supply by 40 percent.

Today, the crisis is political—which is to say, not inevitable or necessary or beyond our capacity to fix—and, therefore, functionally elective. That is one reason it is nevertheless harrowing as a climate parable: an abundant resource made scarce through governmental neglect and indifference, bad infrastructure and contamination, careless urbanization and development. There is no need for a water crisis, in other words, but we have one anyway, and aren’t doing much to address it. Some cities lose more water to leaks than they deliver to homes: even in the United States, leaks and theft account for an estimated loss of 16 percent of freshwater; in Brazil, the estimate is 40 percent. In both cases, as everywhere, scarcity plays out so nakedly on a stage defined by have-and-have-not inequities that the resulting drama of resource competition can hardly be called, truly, a competition; the deck is so stacked that water shortage looks more like a tool of inequality. The global result is that as many as 2.1 billion people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water, and 4.5 billion don’t have safely managed water for sanitation.

Like global warming, the water crisis is soluble, at present. But that 0.007 percent leaves an awfully thin margin, and climate change will cut into it. Half of the world’s population depends on seasonal melt from high-elevation snow and ice, deposits that are dramatically threatened by warming. Even if we hit the Paris targets, the glaciers of the Himalayas will lose 40 percent of their ice by 2100, or possibly more, and there could be widespread water shortages in Peru and California, the result of glacier melt. At four degrees, the snow-capped Alps could look more like Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, with 70 percent less snow by the end of the century. As soon as 2020, as many as 250 million Africans could face water shortages due to climate change; by the 2050s, the number could hit a billion people in Asia alone. By the same year, the World Bank found, freshwater availability in cities around the world could decline by as much as two-thirds. Overall, according to the United Nations, five billion people could have poor access to freshwater by 2050.

The United States won’t be spared—boomtown Phoenix is, for instance, already in emergency planning mode, which should not surprise, given that even London is beginning to worry over water shortages. But given the reassurances of wealth—which can buy stopgap solutions and additional short-term supply—the United States will not be the worst hit. In India, already, 600 million face “high to extreme water stress,” according to a 2018 government report, and 200,000 people die each year from lacking or contaminated water. By 2030, according to the same report, India will have only half the water it needs. In 1947, when the country was formed, per capita water availability in Pakistan stood at 5,000 cubic meters; today, thanks mostly to population growth, it is at 1,000; and soon continued growth and climate change will bring it down to 400.

In the last hundred years, many of the planet’s largest lakes have begun drying up, from the Aral Sea in central Asia, which was once the world’s fourth largest and which has lost more than 90 percent of its volume in recent decades, to Lake Mead, which supplies much of Las Vegas’s water and has lost as much as 400 billion gallons in a single year. Lake Poopó, once Bolivia’s second biggest, has completely disappeared; Iran’s Lake Urmia has shrunk more than 80 percent in thirty years. Lake Chad has more or less evaporated entirely. Climate change is only one factor in this story, but its impact is not going to shrink over time.

What goes on within those lakes that survive is perhaps just as distressing. In China’s Lake Tai, for instance, the blooming of warmwater-friendly bacteria in 2007 threatened the drinking water of two million people; the heating-up of East Africa’s Lake Tanganyika has imperiled the fish stock harvested and eaten by millions in four adjacent, hungry nations. Freshwater lakes, by the way, account for up to 16 percent of the world’s natural methane emissions, and scientists estimate that climate-fueled aquatic plant growth could double those emissions over the next fifty years.

We’re already racing, as a short-term fix for the world’s drought boom, to drain underground water deposits known as aquifers, but those deposits took millions of years to accumulate and aren’t coming back anytime soon. In the United States, aquifers already supply a fifth of our water needs; as Brian Clark Howard has noted, wells that used to draw water at 500 feet now require pumps at least twice as deep. The Colorado River Basin, which serves water to seven states, lost twelve cubic miles of groundwater between 2004 and 2013; the Ogallala Aquifer in part of the Texas Panhandle lost 15 feet in a decade, and is expected to drain by 70 percent over the next fifty years in Kansas. In the meantime, they’re fracking in that drinking water. In India, in just the next two years, twenty-one cities could exhaust their groundwater supply.

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The first Day Zero in Cape Town was in March 2018, the day when the city, a few months earlier and enduring its worst drought in decades, had predicted its taps would run proverbially dry.

Sitting in a living room in a modern apartment in an advanced metropolis somewhere in the developed world, this threat may seem hard to credit—so many cities looking nowadays like fantasies of endless and on-demand abundance for the world’s wealthy. But of all urban entitlements, the casual expectation of never-ending drinking water is perhaps the most deeply delusional. It takes quite a lot to bring that water to your sink, your shower, and your toilet.

As climate crises so often do, in Cape Town the drought aggravated existing conflicts. In a memorable first-person account written at the time, Capetonian Adam Welz described the episode, which did end before the city went completely dry, as an operatic enactment of familiar local problems: mostly wealthy whites complaining that mostly poor blacks, many of whom receive a small allocation free, were draining the water supply; social media aflame with accusations of idle or indifferent black South Africans leaving water pipes running unattended and shantytown businesses running off stolen water. Black South Africans pointed the finger at suburban whites with pools and lawns, making hay over “orgies of flushing in the toilet stalls of upscale shopping malls.” Conspiracy theories circulated involving federal indifference and withheld Israeli technology, and accusations of bad faith bounced from local authorities to national ones to meteorologists—altogether serving, as is almost always the case when communities must respond collectively to climate threats, as a buffet of excuses to not act. At the peak of the crisis, the mayor announced that nearly two-thirds of the city, 64 percent, were failing to abide by the city’s new water restrictions, which aimed to limit water use to 23 gallons per person each day. The average American goes through four to five times that much; in arid Utah, founded on a Mormon prophecy predicting the arrival of an Eden in the desert, the average citizen goes through, each day, 248 gallons. In February, Cape Town halved the individual allotment to 13 gallons, and the army prepared to secure the city’s water facilities.

But accusations of individual irresponsibility were a kind of weaponized red herring, as they often are in communities reckoning with the onset of climate pain. We frequently choose to obsess over personal consumption, in part because it is within our control and in part as a very contemporary form of virtue signaling. But ultimately those choices are, in almost all cases, trivial contributors, ones that blind us to the more important forces. When it comes to freshwater, the bigger picture is this: personal consumption amounts to such a thin sliver that only in the most extreme droughts can it even make a difference. Even before the drought, one estimate found that South Africa had nine million people without any access to water for personal consumption at all; the amount of water required to satisfy the needs of those millions is only about one-third the amount of water used, each year, to produce the nation’s wine crop. In California, where droughts are punctuated by outrage over pools and ever-green lawns, total urban consumption accounts for only 10 percent.

In South Africa, eventually, the crisis passed—a combination of aggressive water rationing and the end of the dry season. But you could be forgiven, considering the news coverage of Cape Town, for thinking that the South African city was the first to stare down a Day Zero. In fact, São Paulo did it in 2015, after a two-year drought, limiting water use to twelve hours a day for some residents in an aggressive rationing system that shuttered businesses and forced mass layoffs. In 2008, Barcelona, facing the worst drought the city had seen since Catalonians began keeping records, had to barge in drinking water from France. In southern Australia, the “millennium drought” began with low rainfall in 1996 and continued, through a Death Valley–like trough that lasted eight years, beginning in 2001 and ending only when La Niña rainfall finally relieved the area in 2010. Rice and cotton production in the region fell 99 and 84 percent, respectively. Rivers and lakes shriveled up and wetlands turned acidic. In 2018, in the Indian city of Shimla, once the summertime home of the British Raj, the taps ran dry for weeks in May and June.

And while agriculture is often hit the hardest by shortages, water issues are not exclusively rural. Fourteen of the world’s twenty biggest cities are currently experiencing water scarcity or drought. Four billion people, it is estimated, already live in regions facing water shortages at least one month each year—that’s about two-thirds of the planet’s population. Half a billion are in places where the shortages never end. Today, at just one degree of warming, those regions with at least a month of water shortages each year include just about all of the United States west of Texas, where lakes and aquifers are being drained to meet demand, and stretching up into western Canada and down to Mexico City; almost all of North Africa and the Middle East; a large chunk of India; almost all of Australia; significant parts of Argentina and Chile; and everything in Africa south of Zambia.

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As long as it has had advocates, climate change has been sold under a saltwater banner—melting Arctic, rising seas, shrinking coastlines. A freshwater crisis is more alarming, since we depend on it far more acutely. It is also closer at hand. But while the planet commands the necessary resources today to provide water for drinking and sanitation to all the world’s people, there is not the necessary political will—or even the inclination—to do so.

Over the next three decades, water demand from the global food system is expected to increase by about 50 percent, from cities and industry by 50 to 70 percent, and from energy by 85 percent. And climate change, with its coming megadroughts, promises to tighten supply considerably. In fact, the World Bank, in its landmark study of water and climate change “High and Dry,” found that “the impacts of climate change will be channeled primarily through the water cycle.” The bank’s foreboding warning: that when it comes to the cruelly cascading effects of climate change, water efficiency is as pressing a problem, and as important a puzzle to solve, as energy efficiency. Without any meaningful adaptation in the distribution of water resources, the World Bank estimates, regional GDP could decline, simply due to water insecurity, by as much as 14 percent in the Middle East, 12 percent in Africa’s Sahel, 11 percent in central Asia, and 7 percent in east Asia.

But of course GDP is at best a crude measure of environmental cost. A more eye-opening ledger is kept by Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute: a simple list of all armed conflicts tied up with water issues, beginning in 3,000 BC with the ancient Sumerian legend of Ea. Gleick lists nearly five hundred water-related conflicts since 1900; almost half of the entire list is since just 2010. Part of that, Gleick acknowledges, is a reflection of the relative abundance of recent data, and part of it is the changing nature of war—conflicts that used to unfold almost exclusively between states are now, in an era where state authority has weakened in many places, likely to spark within states and between groups. The five-year Syrian drought that stretched from 2006 to 2011, producing crop failures that created political instability and helped usher in the civil war that produced a global refugee crisis, is one vivid example. Gleick is personally more focused on the strange war unfolding in Yemen since 2015—technically a civil war, but practically a proxy regional war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and conceptually a sort of world war in miniature, with American and Russian involvement as well. There, the humanitarian cost has been carried as much by water as by blood; in part because of targeted attacks on water infrastructure, the number of cholera cases grew to one million in 2017, which means in a single year roughly 4 percent of the country contracted the disease.

“There’s a saying in the water community,” Gleick tells me. “If climate change is a shark, the water resources are the teeth.”