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A Quarter of Humanity Faces Looming Water Crises

190 points by johnny313 7y ago

amitport 7y ago
And another quarter* faces the ramifications of that water crises: war + massive immigration *I don't really have an estimate but a lot IMO
- netsharc 7y ago
  Yeah.. Sudan, Syria.. a factor for Arab Spring was rising food prices because of Russian forest fires ruining the grain harvest. And then the residents of those areas dream of the land of gold and honey (or at least political stability and no bullets flying) and try to go to Europe, pissing off the people who don't want to share their "birthright" prosperity, leading to populist/Nazi parties...
- izzydata 7y ago
  Sounds like an endlessly cascading problem that will effect the whole world eventually. If we have more consumption than is sustainable then it is going to run out eventually.
xvilka 7y ago
Collecting rainwater on the building roofs is a right solution, also putting the trees on these roofs. And of course, desalinating - a lot of the cities from the red zone are nearby seas or oceans.
- fucking_tragedy 7y ago
  Water rights are going to be increasingly important as time goes on, and those rights might prevent certain areas from collecting rainwater and runoff.
  - imglorp 7y ago
    Already in some places. Roofcrime is a thing. http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resources/rainwater-harvesting.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resourc...
- jedberg 7y ago
  Many states ban the collection of rainwater. In California for example it was illegal until 2012. I don't about the rest of the world, but I suspect water rights can be complicated everywhere. It will be up to the states and national governments' to fix this with legislation.
- monocasa 7y ago
  And here in the states there's bans on collecting rainwater on state by state basis, despite the fact that there's good data that it doesn't matter to the macro hydro systems if people collect rainwater. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3948194/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3948194/ In South America it's even crazier. Bolivia was forced to privatize their water system as part of the neoliberal polices they needed to enact in order to get a world bank loan. That new company banned rainwater collection and has used heavily armed paramilitaries to enforce it.
  - mrec 7y ago
    > despite the fact that there's good data that it doesn't matter to the macro hydro systems if people collect rainwater There's an interesting comment below suggesting that bans may be more about preventing mosquito breeding grounds than capturing water supply.
    - monocasa 7y ago
      Here in CO at least it's 100% a water rights thing. They're afraid of downstream lack of water if everyone is collecting their runoff (and afraid that the smaller farmers won't need to buy as much if they're collecting their own).
      - davidw 7y ago
        > Here in CO Spelling out places might be helpful in a forum that is global. To me, CO means * Colombia, the country. I don't know much about water rights, usage and distribution there. * Colorado, the US state. Certainly a place where water rights are a hot topic. * Central Oregon, where I live, where it is also very dry and water makes or breaks farm and ranch operations. * Province of Como, abbreviated CO on license plates in Italy. Water isn't quite so contested there as far as I know.
        monocasa 7y ago
        Colorado
- mjmahone17 7y ago
  If a place gets less than 40cm of rain per year, adding water collection for the entire roof of a 100 sq meters building will only result in 40 cubic meters of water, or 40000 liters. At 100 liters per day usage (lower than a typical European), collecting rainwater gives you 40 days of usage, and in reality much less due to evaporation and other inefficiencies. What is needed most are laws preventing, or at least disincentivizing, taking more out than what is coming in. Of course this is really hard: water systems don’t follow neat political boundaries, so one entity drilling deeper or damming a river also drains the water of its neighbors.
  - leereeves 7y ago
    > If a place gets less than 40cm of rain per year, adding water collection for the entire roof of a 100 sq meters building will only result in 40 cubic meters of water, or 40000 liters. At 100 liters per day usage (lower than a typical European), collecting rainwater gives you 40 days of usage, 40000/100 = 400 days of usage.
    - mjmahone17 7y ago
      Woah bad math on my part. This is a good point, and changes my view on the viability of rainwater collection.
- fooblitzky 7y ago
  Desalination on a scale sufficient for a city requires an extraordinary amount of power. The plant in Queensland uses: "...around 3.58 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity for every cubic metre (kilolitre) of water it produces"[1] That's not going to be affordable for many poorer countries. It's expensive enough that Queensland only turns that plant on for emergencies. The CO2 emissions would also only intensify the problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Coast_Desalination_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Coast_Desalination_Plant
  - Retric 7y ago
    That sounds much worse than it is. Outside of farming a cubic meter is a lot of water. Desalination costs ~3$ per 1,000 gallons of which around 40% is electricity costs, that’s generally affordable for most areas based on consumption and local economic conditions. Though again, not for farming.
    - thaumaturgy 7y ago
      Which source are you using for that number?
      - dmurray 7y ago
        The numbers quoted for the Queensland plant referenced above would translate to about A$1.50, or US$1, for a thousand gallons. (10c/kWh for electricity according to [0]) There are running costs other than electricity, but it's always talked about as being power-intensive, so it seems fair to assume the cost of electricity dominates. $1 for a thousand gallons seems like a non issue for domestic use in developed countries. It's on par with the cheapest rates consumers currently pay in Europe, while some countries pay 8x more [1]. Even in most poor countries it should be attainable. [0]https://www.aemc.gov.au/energy-system/electricity/electricity-market/spot-and-contract-markets https://www.aemc.gov.au/energy-system/electricity/electricit... [1]https://www.thejournal.ie/water-charges-in-ireland-versus-europe-1789576-Nov2014/ https://www.thejournal.ie/water-charges-in-ireland-versus-eu...
      - Retric 7y ago
- maximente 7y ago
  rainwater on roofs is certainly a solution, but it also massively increases mosquito presence if not properly set up and cared for - like, weekly. it's an externality that can't be hand-waved away as trivial when considering massive adoption of rain barrels.
  - singularity2001 7y ago
    curious: what does properly setting up and caring for entail?
    - m4x 7y ago
      This link suggests you "just" need to make sure all openings in the tank are sealed and the inlet is protected with a fine mesh grille: https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/publications/publishing.nsf/Content/ohp-enhealth-raintank-cnt-l~ohp-enhealth-raintank-cnt-l-5~ohp-enhealth-raintank-cnt-l-5.5 https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/publications/publishing....
      - carapace 7y ago
        Or toss a few guppies or goldfish in there.
        prawn 7y ago
        That'd work in the tank (besides the fish excretions) but in a wet system, you have standing water in downpipes the diameter of a tennis ball that might get a little restrictive for fish.
    - prawn 7y ago
      You'd need all intakes (e.g., downpipes from gutters) to be protected with mesh, the tank itself to have likewise, but the most painful bit is handling those intakes/overflows getting blocked by leaves/debris. My pipes get blocked by leaves even without mesh. There are a variety of angled mesh systems you can use but adding them to each down-pipe gets expensive.
cracker_jacks 7y ago
Has one of the fundamental components (water) for farming changed at all in recent years? Perhaps there hasn't been enough of a market force for innovation after the advent of irrigation.
- nradov 7y ago
  Farmers in many areas have long been pumping out groundwater from wells at unsustainable rates. In recent years some of those wells have started running dry, or governments have imposed restrictions.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    A lot of farmers in the US pay heavily subsidized prices for water, this market inefficiency is just going to lead to sadness down the line - either farmers are getting a really good deal or residential customers are being heavily exploited (or, most likely, both).
- singularity2001 7y ago
  Didn't much of Spain switch to drip irrigation / greenhouse farming? That would be innovation, right?
  - AJ007 7y ago
    Drip irrigation is not foolproof. If there isn’t enough water the salinity of the soil increases until eventually it can’t support plants anymore and you end up with something that looks more like Iraq. I’m not sure what that means for greenhouses.
- GrayTextIsTruth 7y ago
  well just increased globalization in the last couple of decades. California produces lots of crops and most of it isn't even consumed by Californians. The California water crisis is basically just a product of a globalized economy. Non-Californians are getting their food using California's water. Having grown up in the California central valley (the Ag capital of the country), it's really sad to see the state flora and fauna suffer so that people who live on the other side of the planet can get almonds.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
irrational 7y ago
I live in Western Oregon where for much of the year we have an abundance of water falling from the sky. We already have tons of people moving to the area, but I wonder if the number of people moving to areas like ours is going to go up tremendously.
- gremlinsinc 7y ago
  Ironic if there's a mass Exodus to Oregon/Washington just before the next Cascadia earthquake/tsunami wipes off half the two states. Guess that would be nature's way of enforcing population control.
pimmen 7y ago
I’m from Sweden. We have massive fresh water sources and most projections of the future show us retaining our water advantage while the rest of the world suffers through more intense droughts. Why do I deserve all this water just because I was born here? Why doesn’t someone born in a water stressed environment deserve more water? Water is not a luxury, and we can’t easily make more of it, so I just don’t understand how we can knowingly transition into a more unfair world than ever and not feel bad about it.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  > Water is not a luxury, and we can’t easily make more of it, so I just don’t understand how we can knowingly transition into a more unfair world than ever I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. Water is logistically hard and expensive to transfer; sustaining a place like Las Vegas is quite possible, but it relies on massive infrastructure development and expenditure to move water around. Selfishness is certainly part of the problem, from allotment-preservation in Colorado to international politics in Turkey. But to a significant degree, the core problem is that people simply live and use water in different places than it falls. As far as an argument for allowing immigration, water fairness makes sense. But if we're talking about sharing water, I'm not sure if a lack of will is the central problem?
- noir_lord 7y ago
  > so I just don’t understand how we can knowingly transition into a more unfair world than ever and not feel bad about it. Some of us do, I'm also from a country that is small enough and wet enough (and likely to get wetter with climate change) that we can feasibly shift water from the wet north west to the drier south east. Beyond what I'm already doing I don't know what else I can do - honestly on an individual level no one person can make a significant difference, it has to come on a governmental level and that requires good politicians with the electorate pushing them and frankly in my country I can't see that happening without massive voting reform that would require the turkeys to vote for Christmas.
marmaduke 7y ago
It would be nice to be able to look more closely at the data here. What makes up this scalar 'water stress'? Maybe those areas using the available water are efficient? As other commenters point out, there's a 2nd order effect: if you live in a low stress area, near (in a transportation sense, not Euclidean distance) a high stress area, you're bound to have problems unless border control comes to rescue. I should have paid more attention in geopolitics class..
- theandrewbailey 7y ago
  I'm wondering why areas along the Mississippi River and near the Great Lakes are considered stressed.
  - Bartweiss 7y ago
    That's a good question, I had to go poke at the original publication and tool to get some idea. This looks like a very good database, but the NYT is being misleading when it cites "high stress" and then only gives examples that are actively running out of water. The actual definition of water stress used is: > Baseline water stress measures the ratio of total water withdrawals to available renewable water supplies... Available renewable water supplies include surface and groundwater supplies and considers the impact of upstream consumptive water users and large dams on downstream water availability. Higher values indicate more competition among users. So the first note is that this is measuring sustainability, not risk of water shortage; it doesn't factor in that Lake Superior has ~800x the current volume of Lake Powell. And it's meant to study competition for water rather than actual deficit, so 'high' stress is 40%-80% usage, and 'very high' stress is >80% usage. (In fairness, >80% is likely unsustainable because we don't capture water as it arrives. Drawing 100% doesn't mean a state-wide rainbarrel, so water will still reach surface plants as wells run dry.) Second is that it's not clear how rainfall onto the lakes is being assigned. Michigan is "high" in the middle and "low" around the edges, so maybe it's being assigned to the nearest land area without accounting for piping and the usage compacts that govern where it goes? That wouldn't matter in most places, but Lake Superior in particular would distort things hugely. Third, these are watershed-level colorations. If you zoom in on the dark red along the Mississippi, it turns out to be Jonesboro, Arkansas. That's a hilly/mountain region with flatter land on either side, and a bunch of manufacturing. As soon as it's streams hit the White River watershed, it drops back down to yellow. If they're drawing hard without pumping water uphill they might get into trouble, but things would still be ok downstream because no one on the Mississippi is relying on that area for water. https://www.wri.org/aqueduct/ https://www.wri.org/aqueduct/
munificent 7y ago
This is likely an unpopular opinion and one with many downsides we need to be very alarmed about but I think we are going to find that if there is any solution to this, the solution is going to involve a global government. Climate change and water are Earth-scale problems. If we don't have an Earth-scale organization that has real power working to solve those problems, we're going to end up with a bunch of nations feverishly wasting even more of our dwindling resources to try to push the suffering onto each other. Do you want countries building desalinization plants and planting forests, or do you want them accumulating missiles and building walls? Unless there is some organization with enough power to prevent countries from fighting each other, you're going to get the latter.
- analognoise 7y ago
  Holding hands and singing Kumbaya has never worked on even a country scale and rarely works on a city level, now you want to extrapolate that to the whole planet? Good luck. Signed, those of us who build missiles.
  - AWildC182 7y ago
    The one thing better than a good defense is not needing to use it. Signed, someone else in your industry.
    - analognoise 7y ago
      Hey, I don't want to use it either. But it's pretty obvious we need it.
    - chr1 7y ago
      Global government won't help with that. There are many countries with ongoing conflicts, that would continue between the people even if the governments were gone, and then planetary government would either have to send large number of troops into iraq/afganistan style conflicts, or let them fight and form their own governments.
  - inscionent 7y ago
johnohara 7y ago
This National Geographic piece about David Bamberger and the Selah Ranch Project in Texas bears watching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSPkcpGmflE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSPkcpGmflE Surface water from rivers, lakes, streams, and reservoirs garner attention because they are visible and make the effects of changes and shortages easier to understand. But a much more difficult crisis may already be upon us in the form of aquifer depletion and may require a complete paradigm shift in how we approach conservation and usage.
cushychicken 7y ago
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi is a great near-future sci-fi read on this subject.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
One of the more interesting (to me at least) aspects of the warming trend of both the atmosphere and the oceans is that for each degree C increase in the mean atmospheric temperature increases its water carrying capacity on the order of 4.2 quadrillion kilograms. Rising ocean temperatures, combined with rising air temperatures are increasing the rate of evaporation of sea water into the air. The effect of this is transporting more water in the air over longer distances. This "side effect" of global warming will likely make all of our past observations of precipitation rates in any given region completely moot. It also makes suspect any extrapolation of current precipitation trends into the future. My reading of the current literature suggests to me that we might have an opposite problem, which is massive flooding in areas on a regular basis where previously they considered such floods "100 year" or "1000 year" storms. What every climate scientist I have talked with agrees with, is that the current climate is being destabilized relative to historical records. Thus extrapolations become more and more uncertain (have larger error bars) as the initial conditions drift further and further away from anything on record.
- avip 7y ago
  It's not "an opposite problem", it's the same problem. Heavy rains in a shorter timeframe will not refill aquifers.
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    I don't disagree, but aquifer filling is in part a function of precipitation over time. And when an area is getting much more precipitation over time than it used to, it increases the aquifer fill rate. There is also the "new" opportunity to build reservoirs on the rain sheds. If it had been impractical before it can become practical given even a modest increase in the average yearly rainfall. I good example of that is the LA project[1] to recover rain runoff rather than sluice it out to the ocean. [1] https://la.curbed.com/2015/6/25/9946522/los-angeles-rainwater-capture https://la.curbed.com/2015/6/25/9946522/los-angeles-rainwate...
  - willhslade 7y ago
    Well, if you dig deep enough holes, they will. That's how over a million people live in the Rajasthan desert in India.
jaimex2 7y ago
It's more a reproduction/migration crisis really. These cities have all grown above what their local resources can provide, its time to cut back.
chr1 7y ago
Is there ongoing research on methods to control weather on local level? Most suggestions i have seen are things that are meant to change the temperature of earth as a whole like build sunshade in L2 point, randomly spray aerosols to make it colder everywhere. But there must be ways to change the local weather with smaller and smarter methods, (maybe aerostats, solar updraft towers, short lived aerosols?)
User23 7y ago
On the plus side, hydroengineering is one of the very first technologies human beings mastered. This is an engineering problem, and it's one we can solve.
thomasmarriott 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsbad_Desalination_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...
HighPlainsDrftr 7y ago
Around the rocky's - I've noticed that storm drain systems are always a huge piece of infrastructure. They seem to dump to the local river. Why don't the cities harvest that water and treat it instead of dumping it into the river? They may be able to build retention ponds and hold on to it for a while. Treat it later. No need to just toss it.
ddmma 7y ago
Nestles just launched worldwide delivery of plastic botles using drones https://www.nestle.com/aboutus/overview/businesses/nestle-waters https://www.nestle.com/aboutus/overview/businesses/nestle-wa...
- techrich 7y ago
  They are the worst for water issues.
- kiliantics 7y ago
  better tell /r/hydrohomies and get them on the case
GrryDucape 7y ago
So, based off the map, the Indian subcontinent is basically fucked right? Although I am surprised by places like Italy or Peru.
pressurefree 7y ago
arduino squeegee bluehouse.
kiliantics 7y ago
It would be great if nytimes really cared about these issues and used its power to convince people of the real changes that need to be made to society. Instead, they run pieces that side against those that are working hard to make these changes: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/opinion/climate-change-greta-thunberg.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/opinion/climate-change-gr...

190 points by johnny313 7y ago

And another quarter* faces the ramifications of that water crises: war + massive immigration *I don't really have an estimate but a lot IMO

netsharc 7y ago
Yeah.. Sudan, Syria.. a factor for Arab Spring was rising food prices because of Russian forest fires ruining the grain harvest. And then the residents of those areas dream of the land of gold and honey (or at least political stability and no bullets flying) and try to go to Europe, pissing off the people who don't want to share their "birthright" prosperity, leading to populist/Nazi parties...
izzydata 7y ago
Sounds like an endlessly cascading problem that will effect the whole world eventually. If we have more consumption than is sustainable then it is going to run out eventually.

xvilka 7y ago

Collecting rainwater on the building roofs is a right solution, also putting the trees on these roofs. And of course, desalinating - a lot of the cities from the red zone are nearby seas or oceans.

fucking_tragedy 7y ago
Water rights are going to be increasingly important as time goes on, and those rights might prevent certain areas from collecting rainwater and runoff.
- imglorp 7y ago
  Already in some places. Roofcrime is a thing. http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resources/rainwater-harvesting.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resourc...
jedberg 7y ago
Many states ban the collection of rainwater. In California for example it was illegal until 2012. I don't about the rest of the world, but I suspect water rights can be complicated everywhere. It will be up to the states and national governments' to fix this with legislation.
monocasa 7y ago
And here in the states there's bans on collecting rainwater on state by state basis, despite the fact that there's good data that it doesn't matter to the macro hydro systems if people collect rainwater. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3948194/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3948194/ In South America it's even crazier. Bolivia was forced to privatize their water system as part of the neoliberal polices they needed to enact in order to get a world bank loan. That new company banned rainwater collection and has used heavily armed paramilitaries to enforce it.
- mrec 7y ago
  > despite the fact that there's good data that it doesn't matter to the macro hydro systems if people collect rainwater There's an interesting comment below suggesting that bans may be more about preventing mosquito breeding grounds than capturing water supply.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    Here in CO at least it's 100% a water rights thing. They're afraid of downstream lack of water if everyone is collecting their runoff (and afraid that the smaller farmers won't need to buy as much if they're collecting their own).
    - davidw 7y ago
      > Here in CO Spelling out places might be helpful in a forum that is global. To me, CO means * Colombia, the country. I don't know much about water rights, usage and distribution there. * Colorado, the US state. Certainly a place where water rights are a hot topic. * Central Oregon, where I live, where it is also very dry and water makes or breaks farm and ranch operations. * Province of Como, abbreviated CO on license plates in Italy. Water isn't quite so contested there as far as I know.
      - monocasa 7y ago
        Colorado
mjmahone17 7y ago
If a place gets less than 40cm of rain per year, adding water collection for the entire roof of a 100 sq meters building will only result in 40 cubic meters of water, or 40000 liters. At 100 liters per day usage (lower than a typical European), collecting rainwater gives you 40 days of usage, and in reality much less due to evaporation and other inefficiencies. What is needed most are laws preventing, or at least disincentivizing, taking more out than what is coming in. Of course this is really hard: water systems don’t follow neat political boundaries, so one entity drilling deeper or damming a river also drains the water of its neighbors.
- leereeves 7y ago
  > If a place gets less than 40cm of rain per year, adding water collection for the entire roof of a 100 sq meters building will only result in 40 cubic meters of water, or 40000 liters. At 100 liters per day usage (lower than a typical European), collecting rainwater gives you 40 days of usage, 40000/100 = 400 days of usage.
  - mjmahone17 7y ago
    Woah bad math on my part. This is a good point, and changes my view on the viability of rainwater collection.
fooblitzky 7y ago
Desalination on a scale sufficient for a city requires an extraordinary amount of power. The plant in Queensland uses: "...around 3.58 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity for every cubic metre (kilolitre) of water it produces"[1] That's not going to be affordable for many poorer countries. It's expensive enough that Queensland only turns that plant on for emergencies. The CO2 emissions would also only intensify the problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Coast_Desalination_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Coast_Desalination_Plant
- Retric 7y ago
  That sounds much worse than it is. Outside of farming a cubic meter is a lot of water. Desalination costs ~3$ per 1,000 gallons of which around 40% is electricity costs, that’s generally affordable for most areas based on consumption and local economic conditions. Though again, not for farming.
  - thaumaturgy 7y ago
    Which source are you using for that number?
    - dmurray 7y ago
      The numbers quoted for the Queensland plant referenced above would translate to about A$1.50, or US$1, for a thousand gallons. (10c/kWh for electricity according to [0]) There are running costs other than electricity, but it's always talked about as being power-intensive, so it seems fair to assume the cost of electricity dominates. $1 for a thousand gallons seems like a non issue for domestic use in developed countries. It's on par with the cheapest rates consumers currently pay in Europe, while some countries pay 8x more [1]. Even in most poor countries it should be attainable. [0]https://www.aemc.gov.au/energy-system/electricity/electricity-market/spot-and-contract-markets https://www.aemc.gov.au/energy-system/electricity/electricit... [1]https://www.thejournal.ie/water-charges-in-ireland-versus-europe-1789576-Nov2014/ https://www.thejournal.ie/water-charges-in-ireland-versus-eu...
    - Retric 7y ago
maximente 7y ago
rainwater on roofs is certainly a solution, but it also massively increases mosquito presence if not properly set up and cared for - like, weekly. it's an externality that can't be hand-waved away as trivial when considering massive adoption of rain barrels.
- singularity2001 7y ago
  curious: what does properly setting up and caring for entail?
  - m4x 7y ago
    This link suggests you "just" need to make sure all openings in the tank are sealed and the inlet is protected with a fine mesh grille: https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/publications/publishing.nsf/Content/ohp-enhealth-raintank-cnt-l~ohp-enhealth-raintank-cnt-l-5~ohp-enhealth-raintank-cnt-l-5.5 https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/publications/publishing....
    - carapace 7y ago
      Or toss a few guppies or goldfish in there.
      - prawn 7y ago
        That'd work in the tank (besides the fish excretions) but in a wet system, you have standing water in downpipes the diameter of a tennis ball that might get a little restrictive for fish.
  - prawn 7y ago
    You'd need all intakes (e.g., downpipes from gutters) to be protected with mesh, the tank itself to have likewise, but the most painful bit is handling those intakes/overflows getting blocked by leaves/debris. My pipes get blocked by leaves even without mesh. There are a variety of angled mesh systems you can use but adding them to each down-pipe gets expensive.

cracker_jacks 7y ago

Has one of the fundamental components (water) for farming changed at all in recent years? Perhaps there hasn't been enough of a market force for innovation after the advent of irrigation.

nradov 7y ago
Farmers in many areas have long been pumping out groundwater from wells at unsustainable rates. In recent years some of those wells have started running dry, or governments have imposed restrictions.
- munk-a 7y ago
  A lot of farmers in the US pay heavily subsidized prices for water, this market inefficiency is just going to lead to sadness down the line - either farmers are getting a really good deal or residential customers are being heavily exploited (or, most likely, both).
singularity2001 7y ago
Didn't much of Spain switch to drip irrigation / greenhouse farming? That would be innovation, right?
- AJ007 7y ago
  Drip irrigation is not foolproof. If there isn’t enough water the salinity of the soil increases until eventually it can’t support plants anymore and you end up with something that looks more like Iraq. I’m not sure what that means for greenhouses.
GrayTextIsTruth 7y ago
well just increased globalization in the last couple of decades. California produces lots of crops and most of it isn't even consumed by Californians. The California water crisis is basically just a product of a globalized economy. Non-Californians are getting their food using California's water. Having grown up in the California central valley (the Ag capital of the country), it's really sad to see the state flora and fauna suffer so that people who live on the other side of the planet can get almonds.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

irrational 7y ago

I live in Western Oregon where for much of the year we have an abundance of water falling from the sky. We already have tons of people moving to the area, but I wonder if the number of people moving to areas like ours is going to go up tremendously.

gremlinsinc 7y ago
Ironic if there's a mass Exodus to Oregon/Washington just before the next Cascadia earthquake/tsunami wipes off half the two states. Guess that would be nature's way of enforcing population control.

pimmen 7y ago

I’m from Sweden. We have massive fresh water sources and most projections of the future show us retaining our water advantage while the rest of the world suffers through more intense droughts. Why do I deserve all this water just because I was born here? Why doesn’t someone born in a water stressed environment deserve more water? Water is not a luxury, and we can’t easily make more of it, so I just don’t understand how we can knowingly transition into a more unfair world than ever and not feel bad about it.

Bartweiss 7y ago
> Water is not a luxury, and we can’t easily make more of it, so I just don’t understand how we can knowingly transition into a more unfair world than ever I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. Water is logistically hard and expensive to transfer; sustaining a place like Las Vegas is quite possible, but it relies on massive infrastructure development and expenditure to move water around. Selfishness is certainly part of the problem, from allotment-preservation in Colorado to international politics in Turkey. But to a significant degree, the core problem is that people simply live and use water in different places than it falls. As far as an argument for allowing immigration, water fairness makes sense. But if we're talking about sharing water, I'm not sure if a lack of will is the central problem?
noir_lord 7y ago
> so I just don’t understand how we can knowingly transition into a more unfair world than ever and not feel bad about it. Some of us do, I'm also from a country that is small enough and wet enough (and likely to get wetter with climate change) that we can feasibly shift water from the wet north west to the drier south east. Beyond what I'm already doing I don't know what else I can do - honestly on an individual level no one person can make a significant difference, it has to come on a governmental level and that requires good politicians with the electorate pushing them and frankly in my country I can't see that happening without massive voting reform that would require the turkeys to vote for Christmas.

marmaduke 7y ago

It would be nice to be able to look more closely at the data here. What makes up this scalar 'water stress'? Maybe those areas using the available water are efficient? As other commenters point out, there's a 2nd order effect: if you live in a low stress area, near (in a transportation sense, not Euclidean distance) a high stress area, you're bound to have problems unless border control comes to rescue. I should have paid more attention in geopolitics class..

theandrewbailey 7y ago
I'm wondering why areas along the Mississippi River and near the Great Lakes are considered stressed.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  That's a good question, I had to go poke at the original publication and tool to get some idea. This looks like a very good database, but the NYT is being misleading when it cites "high stress" and then only gives examples that are actively running out of water. The actual definition of water stress used is: > Baseline water stress measures the ratio of total water withdrawals to available renewable water supplies... Available renewable water supplies include surface and groundwater supplies and considers the impact of upstream consumptive water users and large dams on downstream water availability. Higher values indicate more competition among users. So the first note is that this is measuring sustainability, not risk of water shortage; it doesn't factor in that Lake Superior has ~800x the current volume of Lake Powell. And it's meant to study competition for water rather than actual deficit, so 'high' stress is 40%-80% usage, and 'very high' stress is >80% usage. (In fairness, >80% is likely unsustainable because we don't capture water as it arrives. Drawing 100% doesn't mean a state-wide rainbarrel, so water will still reach surface plants as wells run dry.) Second is that it's not clear how rainfall onto the lakes is being assigned. Michigan is "high" in the middle and "low" around the edges, so maybe it's being assigned to the nearest land area without accounting for piping and the usage compacts that govern where it goes? That wouldn't matter in most places, but Lake Superior in particular would distort things hugely. Third, these are watershed-level colorations. If you zoom in on the dark red along the Mississippi, it turns out to be Jonesboro, Arkansas. That's a hilly/mountain region with flatter land on either side, and a bunch of manufacturing. As soon as it's streams hit the White River watershed, it drops back down to yellow. If they're drawing hard without pumping water uphill they might get into trouble, but things would still be ok downstream because no one on the Mississippi is relying on that area for water. https://www.wri.org/aqueduct/ https://www.wri.org/aqueduct/

munificent 7y ago

This is likely an unpopular opinion and one with many downsides we need to be very alarmed about but I think we are going to find that if there is any solution to this, the solution is going to involve a global government. Climate change and water are Earth-scale problems. If we don't have an Earth-scale organization that has real power working to solve those problems, we're going to end up with a bunch of nations feverishly wasting even more of our dwindling resources to try to push the suffering onto each other. Do you want countries building desalinization plants and planting forests, or do you want them accumulating missiles and building walls? Unless there is some organization with enough power to prevent countries from fighting each other, you're going to get the latter.

analognoise 7y ago
Holding hands and singing Kumbaya has never worked on even a country scale and rarely works on a city level, now you want to extrapolate that to the whole planet? Good luck. Signed, those of us who build missiles.
- AWildC182 7y ago
  The one thing better than a good defense is not needing to use it. Signed, someone else in your industry.
  - analognoise 7y ago
    Hey, I don't want to use it either. But it's pretty obvious we need it.
  - chr1 7y ago
    Global government won't help with that. There are many countries with ongoing conflicts, that would continue between the people even if the governments were gone, and then planetary government would either have to send large number of troops into iraq/afganistan style conflicts, or let them fight and form their own governments.
- inscionent 7y ago

johnohara 7y ago

This National Geographic piece about David Bamberger and the Selah Ranch Project in Texas bears watching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSPkcpGmflE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSPkcpGmflE Surface water from rivers, lakes, streams, and reservoirs garner attention because they are visible and make the effects of changes and shortages easier to understand. But a much more difficult crisis may already be upon us in the form of aquifer depletion and may require a complete paradigm shift in how we approach conservation and usage.

cushychicken 7y ago

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi is a great near-future sci-fi read on this subject.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

One of the more interesting (to me at least) aspects of the warming trend of both the atmosphere and the oceans is that for each degree C increase in the mean atmospheric temperature increases its water carrying capacity on the order of 4.2 quadrillion kilograms. Rising ocean temperatures, combined with rising air temperatures are increasing the rate of evaporation of sea water into the air. The effect of this is transporting more water in the air over longer distances. This "side effect" of global warming will likely make all of our past observations of precipitation rates in any given region completely moot. It also makes suspect any extrapolation of current precipitation trends into the future. My reading of the current literature suggests to me that we might have an opposite problem, which is massive flooding in areas on a regular basis where previously they considered such floods "100 year" or "1000 year" storms. What every climate scientist I have talked with agrees with, is that the current climate is being destabilized relative to historical records. Thus extrapolations become more and more uncertain (have larger error bars) as the initial conditions drift further and further away from anything on record.

avip 7y ago
It's not "an opposite problem", it's the same problem. Heavy rains in a shorter timeframe will not refill aquifers.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  I don't disagree, but aquifer filling is in part a function of precipitation over time. And when an area is getting much more precipitation over time than it used to, it increases the aquifer fill rate. There is also the "new" opportunity to build reservoirs on the rain sheds. If it had been impractical before it can become practical given even a modest increase in the average yearly rainfall. I good example of that is the LA project[1] to recover rain runoff rather than sluice it out to the ocean. [1] https://la.curbed.com/2015/6/25/9946522/los-angeles-rainwater-capture https://la.curbed.com/2015/6/25/9946522/los-angeles-rainwate...
- willhslade 7y ago
  Well, if you dig deep enough holes, they will. That's how over a million people live in the Rajasthan desert in India.

jaimex2 7y ago

It's more a reproduction/migration crisis really. These cities have all grown above what their local resources can provide, its time to cut back.

chr1 7y ago

Is there ongoing research on methods to control weather on local level? Most suggestions i have seen are things that are meant to change the temperature of earth as a whole like build sunshade in L2 point, randomly spray aerosols to make it colder everywhere. But there must be ways to change the local weather with smaller and smarter methods, (maybe aerostats, solar updraft towers, short lived aerosols?)

User23 7y ago

On the plus side, hydroengineering is one of the very first technologies human beings mastered. This is an engineering problem, and it's one we can solve.

thomasmarriott 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsbad_Desalination_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...

HighPlainsDrftr 7y ago

Around the rocky's - I've noticed that storm drain systems are always a huge piece of infrastructure. They seem to dump to the local river. Why don't the cities harvest that water and treat it instead of dumping it into the river? They may be able to build retention ponds and hold on to it for a while. Treat it later. No need to just toss it.

ddmma 7y ago

Nestles just launched worldwide delivery of plastic botles using drones https://www.nestle.com/aboutus/overview/businesses/nestle-waters https://www.nestle.com/aboutus/overview/businesses/nestle-wa...

techrich 7y ago
They are the worst for water issues.
kiliantics 7y ago
better tell /r/hydrohomies and get them on the case

GrryDucape 7y ago

So, based off the map, the Indian subcontinent is basically fucked right? Although I am surprised by places like Italy or Peru.

pressurefree 7y ago

arduino squeegee bluehouse.

kiliantics 7y ago

It would be great if nytimes really cared about these issues and used its power to convince people of the real changes that need to be made to society. Instead, they run pieces that side against those that are working hard to make these changes: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/opinion/climate-change-greta-thunberg.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/opinion/climate-change-gr...