The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

ten people and forcing almost a million more to evacuate. Thousands of homes were destroyed. ¹⁸⁵ By May 2008, northern California was also suffering. In many areas its rainfall, too, fell 80% below normal. Flows in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers were critically low. Reservoir levels were down across the state, and Lake Oroville, a key supplier to California’s massive State Water Project, was half gone. More than a hundred thousand acres in California’s sprawling Central Valley—the very heart of the state’s gigantic agricultural engine—went unplanted.

Schwarzenegger issued an executive order setting into motion water-transfers, conservation programs, and other measures to combat the crisis,¹⁸⁶ but the drought deepened. Water levels fell further and more fires burned. Eight months later, in February 2009, he proclaimed a state of emergency. Citing “conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property” and “widespread harm to people, businesses, property, communities, wildlife, and recreation,”¹⁸⁷ he ordered even more draconian measures to be taken. Experts were predicting that field fallowing would rise from one hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand acres—meaning that nearly 20% of the Central Valley’s farmland would go unplanted.¹⁸⁸ Suddenly, on top of a historic economic crisis from collapsed housing and global credit markets, California was bracing to lose another eighty thousand jobs and $3 billion in agricultural revenue from drought.

Iowa and California were not alone in their water-related crises. As Schwarzenegger mobilized California, the southeastern United States, which is usually moist, was also in historic drought, triggering a wave of outdoor-watering bans, withered crops, and unheard-of water battles between states like Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas.¹⁸⁹ Mexico had been in severe drought, with only limited relief, for fifteen years.¹⁹⁰ Exceptional droughts were under way in Brazil, Argentina, western Africa, Australia, the Middle East, Turkey, and Ukraine.¹⁹¹ Drought emergencies were triggering food aid in Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mauritania, and Moldova.¹⁹² By February 2009, precipitation was 70%-90% below normal in northern and western China, threatening 10% of the country’s entire cereal production. ¹⁹³ That same month, extreme dryness primed “Black Saturday,” when six hundred blazes killed two hundred people in the worst Australian wildfires in history. By April, crop failures in Chattisgarh state drove fifteen hundred Indian farmers—unable to repay their debts without water—to commit suicide.¹⁹⁴

Within days of the Iowa floods, heavy rains also struck eastern India and China, killing sixty-five people and displacing five hundred thousand in India. In China, floods in Guangdong and Guangxi Zhuang, Sansui City, and the Pearl River delta killed 176 and displaced 1.6 million. While America’s eyes were fixed on Sarah Palin, hydrologist Bob Brakenridge at Dartmouth was watching floods from space, using satellites to track them all over the world.¹⁹⁵ In the ten months between Barack Obama’s winning the Iowa caucuses on January 3, and the general election on November 4, Brakenridge documented 145 major floods carving destruction around the planet. As Barack Obama took down first Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, those rivers took down lives and property from Taiwan to Togo. They killed almost five thousand people and washed seventeen million more from their homes.

Our Most Necessary Resource

It’s hard to imagine anything humans need more than freshwater. If it were to all somehow vanish, the human race would be extinct in a matter of days. If it stopped flowing to our animals and fields, we would starve. If it became unclean, we would become sick or even die. Our societies need water in proper quantity, quality, and timing to preserve civilization as we know it. Too little, or at the wrong time of year, and our food dies off and industries fail. Too much, and our fields dissolve and people drown. For the past ten thousand years the very existence of permanent human settlements has depended upon having a consistent, dependable supply of usable water.

What does the future hold? Are we running low on water, as we must ultimately run low on oil? In the past fifty years we’ve doubled our irrigated cropland and tripled our water consumption to meet global food demand. In the next fifty, we must double food production again.¹⁹⁶ Is there really enough water to pull that off?

In his book When the Rivers Run Dry environmental journalist Fred Pearce describes in vivid, firsthand detail the stark reality of impending water crises in more than thirty countries around the globe. We now withdraw so much water that many of our mightiest and most historic rivers—like the Nile, the Colorado, the Yellow, the Indus—have barely a trickle left to meet the sea.

The good news is that, unlike oil, which is ultimately finite, water is endlessly returned to us by the hydrologic cycle. Except for fossil groundwater, there is no such thing as “Peak Water” in the same sense as “Peak Oil.” It always comes back—somewhere—as rain or snow. It may be too much, or too little, or come at the wrong time, but it does come back. The bad news is that in addition to the aforementioned problems of too much, too little, or bad timing, our water sources can also become polluted. Finally, while it’s true that there is plenty of water circulating out there someplace, nearly all of it is useless to us.

The Russian hydrologist Igor Alexander Shiklomanov estimates that almost 97% of the world’s water is salty ocean, unfit for drinking or irrigation; 1% is salty groundwater, again useless. Of the 2.5% or so that is fresh, most would be salty if not for the glaciers of Antarctica, Greenland, and mountains that hold it up on land in the form of ice, rather than letting it run off into the ocean. Fresh groundwater holds about three-quarters of 1%. The minuscule remainder—about eight one-thousandths of 1%—is held in all the world’s lakes, wetlands, and rivers combined. Our atmosphere’s clouds, vapor, and rain hold even less, just one ten- thousandth of 1% of all water on Earth. ¹⁹⁷

There are three points to be taken from Shiklomanov’s numbers. The first is that the most important sources of water for people and terrestrial ecosystems—rivers, lakes, and rain—are actually fleetingly rare forms of H₂O. If all the water in the world was a thousand-dollar bill, these sources would amount to about eight cents. The second point is that relative to rivers, lakes, and rain, far larger volumes of freshwater are frozen up inside glaciers, or stored underground in aquifers. These, too, are critically important to humanity and will be discussed shortly.

The third point—and frankly one that is all too often neglected by policy makers and scientists alike—is that these numbers alone do not tell the whole story when it comes to human water supply. Recall that water, unlike oil, is a circulating resource. It recycles constantly through the hydrologic cycle, in infinite loops of rain, runoff, evaporation, and various storage compartments, like ice. From a practical standpoint the throughput of freshwater (or “flux”) is just as important as the absolute size of its various containers. The total volume of water held in rivers at any given instant is tiny, but it is replaced quickly, unlike, say, an ancient glacier or slowly oozing aquifer. A water droplet moves down a natural river in a few days, whereas the same droplet moving through glaciers, groundwater, and deep ocean currents could be stuck there for centuries to hundreds of thousands of years. This explains the seeming paradox that despite the world’s rivers’ instantaneous storage capacity of just two thousand cubic kilometers of water, we pull almost twice that amount from them every year.¹⁹⁸

This is why rainfall and surface water, despite their diminutive holdings, are so critically important to land- based ecosystems and people. Their fast throughput is what makes them so valuable. But because their storage capacities are so tiny, we are vulnerable to the smallest of variations in that throughput. Unlike an ocean or glacier, the atmosphere and rivers have no meaningful storage capacity from which to draw water in dry times or hoard it in wet times. Therefore, terrestrial life is highly sensitive to floods and droughts, whereas marine life is generally not. Tuna have plenty of worries, but droughts are not one of them. Battling this vulnerability is a prime reason why we have built millions of dams, reservoirs, lakes, and ponds throughout the world. Yet even after all this massive engineering, we still have only enough of these artificial impoundments to store slightly less than two years’ water supply.¹⁹⁹

The other big problem for humans, of course, is that this small bucket of fast-recycling river water is spread very unfairly around the planet. Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, and Russia are veined with so many permanent streams, rivers, and lakes that most have never been named, whereas Saudi Arabia has no natural ones at all. Water-rich Norway has 82,000 cubic meters of renewable freshwater per person while Kenya has just 830.²⁰⁰ And to a very large degree, this unfair distribution of surface water is created by the pattern