How Water Scarcity Around World Is Accelerated By Global Warming

From Yemen to India, and parts of Central America to the African Sahel, about a quarter of the world's people face extreme water shortages that are fueling conflict, social unrest and migration, water experts said on Wednesday.

With the world's population rising and climate change bringing more erratic rainfall, including severe droughts, competition for scarcer water is growing, they said, with serious consequences.

"If there is no water, people will start to move. If there is no water, politicians are going to try and get their hands on it and they might start to fight over it," warned Kitty van der Heijden, head of international cooperation at the Netherlands' foreign ministry.

"It's threats like these that keep me up at night," the diplomat told a webinar hosted by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a U.S.-based research group.

One in four children worldwide will be living in areas of extremely high water stress by 2040, researchers estimated.

In terms of water availability, "at some point we are going to hit the wall, and that wall might be different in different places", Heijden said.

Climate change is compounding the challenge, she said, with cities such as India's Chennai and South Africa's Cape Town battling severe water shortages in recent years related in part to erratic rainfall.

Disputes over water have for millenia served as a flashpoint, driving political instability and conflict, the water experts said.

And "the risks of water-related disputes are growing .. in part because of growing scarcity over water", said Peter Gleick, co-founder of the California-based Pacific Institute, which jointly published the report with WRI and The Water, Peace and Security Partnership.

But as water scarcity grows, water systems are also increasingly becoming targets in other types of conflicts, said Gleick, whose institute has compiled a chronology of water conflicts that dates back 5,000 years.

In Yemen, years of fighting has destroyed water infrastructure, leaving millions without safe water to drink or grow crops. Wells and other water facilities also have been targets in Somalia, Iraq, Syria and other countries, he said.

The World Resources Institute (WRI) updated its Global Water Risk Atlas revealing that 17 countries–home of a quarter of the world’s population–will face “extremely high” water stress within 20 years. Water stress is defined as the ratio between water withdrawals (i.e., domestic, agricultural, and industrial water uses) and available renewable water supplies. Risk categories of ‘high’ and ‘extremely high’ water stress are reached when yearly withdrawals exceed 40 percent and 80 percent of available renewable water supplies, respectively.

Some readers may remember last year when Cape Town was approaching ‘day zero’, the day when municipal water supplies were going dry. Depending on where you live, some might have wondered “how long until that happens to us?”

Water crisis and climate

Water crisis usually means the demand for drinking water outstrips supply. But I believe a water crisis can go beyond lack of water. A water crisis can mean being flooded by too much water, or having enough water without the minimum quality needed to use it. A water crisis may also be the lack of water management or even transboundary cooperation. According to the World Health Organization, about three in 10 people in the world lack access to clean water at home when needed.

While tremendous work has been done to reduce this number over the past decades, this means that 2 billion people still lack access to clean water at home. These water crises have resulted in a lack of sanitation and water-borne diseases, food insecurity, conflict, financial instabilities, infrastructure damage, and biodiversity loss. Most of these consequences are getting worse due to climate change.

Climate change is significantly transforming the water cycle. Higher temperatures are increasing evapotranspiration from vegetation, land, surface water, and oceans. A warmer atmosphere is holding more water. As air holds more water, more precipitation is leading to increased flooding. A warmer climate also translates to having more precipitation in the form of rain and less as snow. Snow represents natural water storage, valuable for later irrigation seasons. At the same time, areas like the Southwest of the United States will experience less precipitation because of climate change, leading to longer and more severe drought periods.

In addition, rain seasons will become shorter, creating more days when irrigation is needed and therefore increasing water demands. Warmer water in streams and rivers has an impact on metabolism, life cycle, and behavior of aquatic species. These cumulative impacts on water resources make water availability harder to predict and manage. This is intensifying problems for areas that are already experiencing such impacts and extending water stress into new places that will need to learn and adapt.

What can we do about it?

While not every element of a water crisis is related to climate, some of them are, and others have been exacerbated by it. Therefore, one way to reduce future water impacts is to reduce climate change impacts.

The leading cause of climate change is heat-trapping gases that mainly result from the burning of fossil fuels from our energy and transportation sectors. Emissions are also an animal agriculture, waste management, and industry by-product. Systemic actions to reduce heat-trapping gas emissions are our best chance to reduce climate change impacts, including the increasingly serious water crisis.

Our energy supply and transportation systems must come from renewable energy sources; we need to reduce food waste, switch towards a more plant-based diet and protect our forests. And we also need to increase education and promote reproductive health and reproductive rights. These actions must consider the needs of the most vulnerable communities, as the effects of climate change disproportionately affect them.

Even with bold actions to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases, many of the effects will still be present, so adaptation strategies are necessary to mitigate impacts.

At a high level, adaptation strategies must include planning responses to water demands increases, overhauling some of the current water policies, and investing in research and modeling of climate risk. Also important is providing water education and training to farmers and the general public, and increasing financial instruments that allow for maintenance and re-operation of infrastructure and adoption of new technologies. Considering these strategies to develop specific actions at local, regional, and state levels would ultimately improve adaptive capacity.

Recurring droughts in parts of Central America and the African Sahel in recent years have triggered migration as subsistence farmers, whose harvests have been decimated by low rainfall, seek refuge and jobs in other countries.

One key to tackling water scarcity is boosting investment in more sparing use of water in agriculture, an industry that absorbs more than two-thirds of the water used by people each year, the experts said.

Farmers in some drought-hit areas are switching to more efficient sprinkler or drip irrigation, and are using remote monitoring tools to make sure they apply just the right amount of moisture at the right time and in the right place, they said.

Conserving forests, wetlands and watersheds, including those around cities, can help absorb rainfall, helping stem crop losses from flooding and drought.

"Where possible such green infrastructure should be used with or instead of traditional physical infrastructure like dams, levies (or) reservoirs," said Charles Iceland, head of global and national water initiatives at WRI.

That's both because it can cost less and because it encourages preservation of ecosystems, he said.

The good news is that we know what it takes for communities to adapt to the impacts of climate change on their water resources. At a local level, a community with high adaptive capacity would be a community that understands how their future volume and timing of water availability may evolve. Such information may, for example, inform the type of crop most suited to the climate. 

The community would also be able to take strategic actions to deal with wet years (e.g., groundwater recharge), and dry years (e.g., right ratio of perennial and seasonal crops) and to make sure their infrastructure and operations are appropriate for such flexibility. Water conservation would be part of the education system and the culture of the community. Financial mechanisms would incentivize the adoption of water-efficient technologies, and fund water-related monitoring and research. Disadvantaged populations would be at the decision-making table and their interest would be equitably considered and addressed.

Reaching such adaptive capacity may take some time and won’t be easy, but ultimately will reduce the vulnerability of communities and increase their resilience as climate change puts water resources under increasing pressure.

Follow us on Twitter. Feel free to comment on the blog and give us your valuable feedback.