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

form of improved water whereas just one in ten rural Ethiopians do.

As we saw in Chapter 3, cities empower efficient channeling of natural resources to people. It is far more economical to lay water pipes and sewerage in a densely populated area than to spread them across the countryside. For much of the world, even sewers are a luxury. Unbelievably, four in ten of us don’t even have a simple pit latrine. Small wonder that waterborne diseases kill even more people than our raging epidemic of HIV/AIDS. As Jamie Bartram of the United Nations World Health Organization writes:

Far more people endure the largely preventable effects of poor sanitation and water supply than are affected by war, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction combined. Yet those other issues capture the public and political imagination—and public resources—in a way that water and sanitation issues do not. Why? Perhaps in part because most people who read articles such as this find it hard to imagine defecating daily in plastic bags, buckets, open pits, agricultural fields, and public areas for want of a private hygienic alternative, as do some 2.6 billion people. Or perhaps they cannot relate to the everyday life of the 1.1 billion people without access to even a protected well or spring within reasonable walking distance of their homes.²⁰⁹

Most experts agree that getting clean water to the world’s poorest people is largely a matter of money. According to the United Nations, the price tag for everyone to have safe, clean drinking water would be about $30 billion per year. But in the poorest countries, building water treatment plants and a network of pipes to move it is still prohibitively expensive, especially for rural areas. Well-intentioned foreign aid often fails to leave the cities of ruling elites. And while small, inexpensive water treatment technologies like ultraviolet purification hold promise, microprojects have failed to attract much interest from the big lenders. Water expert Peter Gleick, cofounder and president of the Pacific Institute, likes to point out that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund know how to spend a billion dollars in one place (on a big dam project, for example) but not how to spend a thousand dollars in a million places. But all too often, a thousand-dollar solution is what’s needed most. Getting clean water to people living in our most impoverished places remains an enormous challenge, with no clear solution on the horizon.

Another trend is further clouding the picture. Multinational corporations are increasingly moving to privatize and consolidate water supplies. Over the past decade, at least three—Suez, Veolia Environmental Services (formerly Vivendi), and Thames Water—have expanded into for-profit water delivery ventures all over the developing world. In early 2009 Germany’s industrial giant Siemens paid nearly $1 billion for U.S. Filter, the leading supplier of water treatment products and services in North America. Multinational giants like General Electric and Dow Chemical are also jumping into the water business, alongside other companies you’ve never heard of, like Nalco, ITT, and Danaher Corporation.

The benefit of this water-privatization frenzy is the expansion of modern water treatment and distribution facilities into impoverished places that desperately need them. However, these are for-profit companies, not public municipalities. In return for the new infrastructure, they must charge fees for the water in order to recoup building costs and generate profits for their shareholders. This is a familiar transaction in the developed world, where people are accustomed to paying for water, but is a radical shift in poor countries where municipal water supply—to the extent that it is available—is often free.

Control of life’s most essential natural resource by overseas multinational corporations is an abomination to people like Maude Barlow, author of Blue Gold and Blue Covenant.²¹⁰ These books point out that to the poorest of the poor, even a few cents for water is unaffordable, forcing them to drink from polluted streams and ditches, fall sick, and die. Extrapolating the current globalization trend into the future, Barlow imagines the following in Blue Covenant:

A powerful corporate water cartel has emerged to seize control of every aspect of water for its own profit. Corporations deliver drinking water and take away wastewater; corporations put massive amounts of water in plastic bottles and sell it to us at exorbitant prices; corporations are building sophisticated new technologies to recycle our dirty water and sell it back to us; corporations extract and move water by huge pipelines from watersheds and aquifers to sell to big cities and industries; corporations buy, store, and trade water on the open market, like running shoes. Most importantly, corporations want governments to deregulate the water sector and allow the market to set water policy. Every day, they get closer to that goal.

Opponents of multinational companies are a passionate group, and especially when it comes to water. They protest that water privatization has become a key objective of the World Bank, and even of regional lenders like the African Development Bank and Asian Development Bank, with full buy-in from the United Nations and World Trade Organization. They accuse the World Water Council—purportedly an ideologically neutral platform to promote “conservation, protection, development, planning, management, and use of water in all its dimensions on an environmentally sustainable basis for the benefit of all life on Earth”²¹¹—as in fact being a subversive global champion of water privatization and business corporations. They organize resistance movements and sit-ins, losing a fight with Nestle over a Poland Spring bottling plant in Michigan, winning another against Coca-Cola at Plachimada, India; and even street riots to force Bechtel out of Bolivia.²¹²

Surveying the debate coolly from arm’s length, one can appreciate the benefits of the private-sector model. If countries cannot or will not deliver clean water to their citizens who desperately need it, and neither will the World Bank, then why not let private capital have a go? On the other hand, something does feel creepy about transferring control of life’s most basic requirement—clean drinking water—from local to overseas control, to corporations whose fiduciary responsibility lies first and foremost with their shareholders. Paying for water works fine in the developed world, but where people earn a dollar per day? Is water property, or human right? This battle continues on fronts all over the world, with no clear best path forward.

World population will grow by 50% in the next forty years, nearly all of it in the developing world and mostly in places that are already water-stressed now. This new population will also be wealthier and eat more meat, thus requiring higher per capita food production than today. To meet this projected demand for food and feed, we must double our crop production by 2050. Finding enough freshwater to support this, plus more industry, plus billions of new apartments, all while keeping the water clean as it cycles endlessly between our kidneys and the environment, is very likely the greatest challenge of our century.

The Information Revolution

Breakfasts at high-powered NASA meetings in Washington, D.C., were much less glamorous than I’d hoped. Rather than sampling astronaut food in a gleaming high-tech boardroom, I was hunched in a bland carpeted hallway at the Marriott, poking a half-empty platter of stale bagels. But I didn’t mind. I grabbed the last poppyseed and a cup of coffee and ducked into the cramped meeting room. My old grad-school roommate Doug Alsdorf, now a professor at Ohio State, was bellowing at us to take our seats. I found one and sat quickly. One of the smartest men I have ever known, radar engineer Ernesto Rodriguez from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was preparing to give us another update on our half-billion-dollar idea.

The water crisis is about more than failing crops and unsanitary conditions. It is also about information—or more precisely, the lack of it—for effective water management. Water is constantly on the move, but unbelievably, we have hardly any idea of where, when, or how much we have at any given moment. Our knowledge of Earth’s hydrology is extraordinarily data-poor. Other than large rivers, few streams are measured. Outside the United States and Europe, the vast majority of water bodies receive no hydrologic monitoring whatsoever. We have basically zero information for small lakes, cattle ponds, and wetlands. Even the water levels behind dams, while monitored by their operators, are seldom released to the broader public in many countries.

Because of this information gap, millions of people have no idea whether next week will bring lower water levels in their river or lake, or a raging flood. Emergency workers don’t know when a flood has peaked or how high it will go. Along many rivers even the weather isn’t a reliable predictor because upstream reservoirs release water at the command of dam operators, not rainstorms. In a complete reversal of their preexisting natural state, many of today’s rivers shrink, not swell, as they move downstream. In fits and starts, a gauntlet of diversions and dams sips them to death.