Water We Talking About

As the global population continues to grow, developing nations expand their consumption patterns with economic success and global warming continues to dry out increasing availability of drinking and agricultural water, is the next set of resource wars/conflicts likely to center on this most precious of all life-giving values? A February 2^nd Intelligence Community Assessment (a declassified version was released to the public on March 22^nd), ordered by the Department of State and entitled Global Water Security, suggests that this indeed may be the case. The report adopts the conclusion on climate change embodied in a 2007 United Nations study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCG), which concluded that “Many … areas (e.g., Mediterranean Basin, the western United States, southern Africa, northeast Brazil, southern and eastern Australia) almost certainly will suffer a decrease in water resources due to climate change…”

Perhaps in the near-term, we may fall short of war, but water issues will exacerbate tensions and place political as well as economic pressures on regions of the world already hard-pressed with social issues: “[P]roblems with water could destabilize countries in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia over the next decade… While the report concluded that wars over water are unlikely in the coming decade, it said that countries could use water as political and economic leverage over neighbors and that major facilities like dams and desalination plants could become targets of terrorist attacks. Coupled with poverty and other social factors, problems with water could even contribute to the political failure of weaker nations.

“The public report, unlike the classified version, did not specify countries at greatest risk for water-related disruption but analyzed conditions on major river basins in regions with high potential for conflict — from the Jordan to the Tigris and Euphrates to the Brahmaputra in South Asia.” New York Times, March 22^nd.

Even here, the future could rewrite the future of major sections of our own country. Everyone focuses on the obvious problems and battles among California (north and south battling each other), Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, etc., but our vulnerability extends way beyond these areas. Entire regions of the United States could find their value propositions severely altered, the viability of lifestyles severely curtailed with entire industries facing virtual extinction as a result. Take one of the greatest water resources that is the mainstay of our grain-producing mid-western heartland – the Ogallala Aquifer (pictured above) – once literally the size of Lake Huron. When wind-driven pumps gently extracted water for irrigation purposes, the aquifer was able to replenish itself with relative ease. In the late 1920s and following years, however, the increased use of diesel-powered water pumps began what may now be an irreversible move towards eventual depletion, which some believe can happen within the next several decades. And without that precious resource, the potential of a massive dustbowl become more than a mere possibility.

Will our internal battle for access to water be a factor which pulls us apart or provides a common goal that might draw us together to seek solutions?The need to preserve, recycle and conserve our water supplies, the capacity to pull moisture out of the air, even in the driest climates, and our pursuit of desalination technologies will soften some of the realities of struggles over water resources… but some of those struggles, I suspect, will not be so gentle.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the world seems to be facing liquidity crises at every level.