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

Since construction of the High Aswan Dam almost all flow in the Nile River is now either diverted for irrigation or evaporates away behind reservoirs. ²¹³ Dams along Africa’s Volta River system can hold back or release more than four years’ worth of its total river flow. Water passage through the Euphrates-Tigris in the Middle East, the Mae Khlong in Thailand, the Rio Negro in Argentina, and the Colorado in North America is similarly controlled. But hydrologic data are seldom released. Many countries even classify them, so their downstream neighbors can’t tell if they are complying with international water-sharing agreements.²¹⁴

These are the reasons why our group of scientists and engineers were in that Washington, D.C., hotel room, and in other meeting rooms like it in Rome, San Francisco, Barcelona, Paris, Orlando, San Diego, Columbus, and Lisbon. There are now over five hundred of us in thirty-two countries, working on a bold new idea to globalize information about water resources, by measuring it everywhere and all the time, from space. The technology to do it is a satellite called a wide-swath altimeter. It uses a remarkable radar technology that Ernesto Rodriguez invented, called a “Ka-band radar interferometer” or KaRIn (named adorably after Ernesto’s wife). We’re going to put KaRIn into space, mounted on a satellite called SWOT.²¹⁵

SWOT will point not one but two radars—tethered to each other by a thirty-foot boom—toward the Earth. Like two giant police radar guns they will stare down at the planet, zapping millions of rivers, lakes, coastlines, and other wet spots on its rotating face while hurtling through orbit at over fifteen thousand miles per hour. Even one SWOT satellite will stream three-dimensional water-level maps of the entire world, day and night. This technology will constantly scan the pulse of the planet’s plumbing. It will unveil its throbs and ebbs of circulating water in all their complexity for the first time. Then, we will post the data online for free.

Billions care about the fate and availability of their water. Especially where it is scarce, little information is available, and lives depend on it. Our satellite is currently wending its way through the political labyrinth of being approved, built, and launched. We are hoping it can be up and orbiting by 2018. But regardless of SWOT’s particular fate, I am confident that by 2050, its successors will have made globalized water resource information transparently available for everyone and everywhere on Earth, as has now been done very successfully with other kinds of satellite data.²¹⁶ No more water secrets or scientific question marks. It will completely transform the way we study and manage our most vital natural resource.

Wars over Water?

It has become fashionable to declare water the “next oil,” over which the world is bracing to go to war in the twenty-first century. Googling “water wars” yields over three hundred thousand hits; the phrase is showing up in scholarly articles as well as newspaper headlines.²¹⁷ “Fierce competition for freshwater,” said U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan in 2001, “may well become a source of conflict and wars in the future.” His successor, Ban Ki-Moon, in a 2007 debate of the U.N. Security Council, warned of water scarcity “transforming peaceful competition into violence,” and floods and droughts sparking “massive human migrations, polarizing societies and weakening the ability of countries to resolve conflicts peacefully.”²¹⁸

International relations professor and journalist Michael Klare gets more specific. He expects four rivers in particular—the Nile, Jordan, Tigris-Euphrates, and Indus—to provoke “high levels of tension along with periodic outbreaks of violent conflict.”²¹⁹ Those four are good picks. They are already oversubscribed, and shared between sworn enemies. The Jordan River’s water is divided among Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the occupied Palestinian territories. Tigris-Euphrates water is used by Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians, Turks, and Kurds. The Indus is shared by Afghanistan, China, India, Pakistan, and Kashmir. The Nile and its tributaries are controlled by eight other countries besides Egypt.

Virtually all of the water flowing down these four river systems is in use today. By 2050, depending on the basin, their dependent human populations will jump anywhere from 70% to 150%. This means that for a vast area, from North Africa to the Near East and South Asia, human demand for water is rapidly overtaking available supply. “Now at the dawn of the twenty-first century,” Klare warns, “conflict over critical water supplies is an ever-present danger.”²²⁰

Scary stuff. But will the world really go to war over water? Here is a pleasant surprise: History tells us that while international conflicts over water are very common, nearly all of them—at least so far—are peacefully settled. A close reading of history reveals that while water and violence are often associated, countries rarely resort to armed violence over water.²²¹

Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute and Aaron Wolf at Oregon State University maintain historical databases of past conflicts and their causes.²²² These reveal a rich soap opera of tensions, conflicting interests, and contentious relations, but not outright war—at least not between sovereign countries or specifically over water resources. Most commonly, the violence they document identifies water as a tool, a target, or a victim of warfare —but not its cause.²²³

Remarkably, successful water-sharing agreements are common even between hydrologically stressed countries that go to war over other things. Wendy Barnaby, editor of Britain’s People & Science magazine, points out that India and Pakistan have fought three wars, yet always have managed to work out their water disputes through the 1960 Indus Water Treaty.²²⁴ The reason is purely rational: By cooperating, both countries are able to safeguard their core water supply. Water is too important to risk losing in a war. Israel’s water independence ran out in the 1950s, Jordan’s in the 1960s, and Egypt’s since the 1970s. But their wars have never been fought over water. It’s amazing, because these countries no longer have enough even to grow their food.

Instead, they all import someone else’s water . . . in the form of grain.

The Virtual Water Trade

The most skilled diplomats in the world couldn’t stop a water war if people were starving. What enables sworn enemies to coexist, with large and growing populations, along a dwindling dribble like the Jordan River? Ten million people living between it and the Mediterranean Sea, with barely enough water to grow a fifth of their food? The answer is global trade flows of food.

The single biggest users of water are not cities but farms. Fully 70% of all human water withdrawal from rivers, lakes, and aquifers is for agriculture.²²⁵ Because agricultural products require water to grow, they essentially have water resources “embedded” within them. The export and import of food and animals, therefore, amounts to the export and import of water.

This “virtual water trade” is the globalized-world solution to the ancient problem of having abundant water in some places and not enough in others.²²⁶ From the global perspective, it is also less wasteful. It takes far more water to grow an orange in the baking dry heat of Saudi Arabia than to grow the same orange in humid Florida. Hidden inside Mexico’s imports of wheat, corn, and sorghum from the United States is the import of seven billion cubic meters of virtual water a year. Not only does this help Mexico—now in its fifteenth year of drought—it also requires less water overall. To produce that same amount of grain domestically, Mexico would need nearly sixteen billion cubic meters of freshwater per year, almost nine billion more. That single trade relationship saves enough water to flood the entire United Kingdom under an inch and a half of standing water.

The virtual water trade is a little-discussed secret not publicized by political leaders. Most people don’t enjoy hearing that their country is food-dependent, or that it uses its water to support others. North America is the world’s biggest exporter of virtual water. Many countries—including much of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Japan, and Mexico—are net importers. Unbelievably, about 40% of all human water consumption is moved around in this way, embedded in global trade flows of agricultural and industrial products.²²⁷ Without these flows the world would look very different than it does today. Dry places would support far fewer people. Lacking distant markets, large areas of terrific farmland would either surge in population or become abandoned. Global trade may be bad for local economies, bad for energy consumption, bad for resource exploitation, bad for other things . . . but it’s also spreading the wealth—of water—around.