What future for water

Around the world, fresh water is fast becoming a dangerously scarce resource, driving a surge in fights to secure supplies and fears over rising numbers of deaths in water conflicts. Growing populations, more farming and economic growth, climate change and a rush of people to cities all are increasing pressure on the world's limited water supplies, researchers say. U.N. data shows 2 billion people - a quarter of the world's population - now are using water much faster than natural sources, such as groundwater, can be replenished. In increasingly parched southern Africa, worsening water shortages in 2017 led South Africa's Cape Town to launch a public countdown to "Day Zero" when it feared the city's taps would run dry.

About 70% of freshwater used each year around the world goes to agriculture, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). As the world's population continues to expand, finding ways to reduce farming's share of the world's water, while still growing more food, will be crucial to prevent worsening hunger, including in fast-growing cities, food experts say. Global trade in food - which is effectively trade in the water used to produce it - may also need reconsideration.

In Chile's Petorca province, a three-hour drive north of Santiago, expansive avocado fields make Chile the world's third largest exporter of the wildly popular fruit, dubbed "green gold". But as big corporate avocado farms have stepped up production, climate change has brought more unreliable rainfall to the region, driving more severe droughts. That combination has led to increasingly problematic water shortages in Petorca, forcing some residents to rely on trucked-in drinking water - and raising questions about whether avocados for export should remain the region's priority.

"There are people here who water their avocado plants every day, and we have to drink water from trucks that we don't even know is safe," said Cataline Espinoza, who lives on the edge of thousands of hectares of avocado plantations.

Bangalore's groundwater is running dry. A government think tank last year predicted the city - like others in India, including New Delhi - could run out of usable groundwater as early as 2020 as aquifers deplete. India's 'Silicon Valley' tech hub of Bangalore, where gleaming office complexes and apartment blocks have sprouted faster than the plumbing to serve them, only 60% of the water the city needs each day arrives through its water pipes. Much of the rest is pumped from groundwater wells and delivered to homes and offices by a fleet of private and government tanker trucks that growl through the streets of the city of 12 million. By 2030, half of India's population - now about 1.4 billion people - may lack enough drinking water, the report predicted.

In places from Africa to the Middle East, "big rivers are drying out, the population is increasing, demand is piling up and we can't supply (people) with water and food", warned General Tom Middendorp, a former Dutch defence chief.

Globally, the number of conflicts related to water scarcity has risen from roughly 16 in the 1990s to about 73 in the past five years, according to a chronology maintained by the Pacific Institute, which tracks freshwater security issues. In the 1990s, conflicts driven by water scarcity led to about 350 deaths, in places from Yemen to Nigeria, according to the chronology based on news reports and other sources. But in the last five years, at least 3,000 people - and perhaps more than 10 times that many, if estimates of refugee deaths by Medicins Sans Frontieres are included - have died in clashes related to water in a huge range of countries, it noted.

"We see conflicts over water, unfortunately, almost everywhere around the world now as competition grows over the scarce resource," said Peter Gleick, co-founder of the California-based Pacific Institute. "If you look at the number of conflicts over water in the past few decades, it's going up exponentially." He goes on to say. "The tools of international agreements do not apply in these kinds of conflicts," Gleick said. "We have far fewer tools to address violent conflicts between neighbours, between ethnic groups, between farmers or pastoralists."

Water conflicts between countries may grow as well, with only about 60% of transboundary water sources covered by international agreements as of 2017, according to a 2018 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) report that looked at 62 of 153 countries that share water sources.

Water shortages are likely to lead to a growing death toll in coming decades, as farmers struggle to access enough water to grow crops and families turn to riskier water sources to slake their thirst, researchers say.

So far, "with very rare exceptions, no one dies of literal thirst", Gleick said. "But more and more people die from contaminated water or conflicts over access to water."

Talent Zuma, a resident of Nxamalala, a village in KwaZulu-Natal province sums it all up, "People say the next war will be over water, but here it feels like it has already begun."
http://news.trust.org/item/20190603094814-xa45o/