12 ms·

Water 'Bankruptcy' Era Has Begun for Billions, Scientists Say

95 points by ciconia 9mo ago

ciconia 9mo ago
https://archive.ph/XpRIS https://archive.ph/XpRIS
carschno 9mo ago
Here is the paper on which the article is based: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11269-025-04484-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11269-025-04484-0
ceejayoz 9mo ago
Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600
digitalsushi 9mo ago
I know there's no single answer to this. But, if we wanted to mitigate this, do we have the geoengineering ability to execute on it? I know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work. What would it look like? I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down. Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california? would it destroy the great lakes? i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me
- betaby 9mo ago
  Los Angeles already gets its water from 500km away. No need to exacerbate the situation.
  - digitalsushi 9mo ago
    it's hypothetical remember, its just a fantasy solution
- sanex 9mo ago
  The Great Lakes states have an agreement surrounding how much water you can remove from the lakes. That would be your first regulatory hurdle. In addition I suspect the loss associated with an aqueduct of that scale would make desalinization more efficient, which is generally cost prohibitive at current water levels.
  - kevinmchugh 9mo ago
    We also have a treaty with Canada about the usage of water from the Great Lakes.
    - gramie 9mo ago
      We Canadians have seen how much value the US administration places on treaties.
  - trenning 9mo ago
    The water pact is even more specific in that at least WI I believe you have to be East of the subcontinental divide to pull water from Lake Michigan. Another poster mentioned real estate peaking in a zip code of AZ for having limited access to fresh water. I wonder how long until real estate along the great lakes starts becoming a long term hedge.
- dragontamer 9mo ago
  Is it cheaper to reroute a lake to a desert and build a new underground river? Or is it cheaper to just move the city itself to a closer source of good clean water?
  - buckle8017 9mo ago
    Unfortunate probably cheaper to reroute the lake.
    - dragontamer 9mo ago
      On the contrary. We've been moving cities and municipalities since the dawn of civilization. That's just how life worked. Yes water works continue to improve but the age old solution is simply to stop city growth at its sustainable level and start moving people to other, newer, better areas to live. ------- Alternatively, you can boom bust with feast and famine economics and have tons of people die due to poor planning. That's also part of the age old deal and it's evidence is written in the many mismanaged cities across history.
- brk 9mo ago
  Not an expert, but a more-than-casual-observer as someone who has lived on the water (literally and figuratively). A core part of the problem is things like the farming in California that uses excessive amounts of water, which is already brought in from very distant regions. I don't think there is a way to distribute the fresh water supply equitably if you have various regions and industries that insist on being highly inefficient and wasteful. California is certainly not the only example, there are lots of places trying to grow crops in illogical places, water supplies being polluted by industries, etc.
  - rayiner 9mo ago
    The problem isn’t just farming in the desert. The problem is all those people living in the desert in the first place. There is a reason the Spanish then the Mexicans did almost nothing to settle and develop California. It was massive water projects by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that made modern California possible.
    - estearum 9mo ago
      I'm no fan of cities in deserts, but farming is by far the much, much, much larger problem.
    - jimnotgym 9mo ago
      How much has the infrastructure improved since then? I see on TV that some of California has snow and flash flooding. Are there attempts being made to capture that, or soak it into the ground? Or is it cheaper to keep using the old projects? I see on YouTube that there are parts of Texas you can buy for peanuts because ranching doesn't work there any more. I gather that the cows eat so much of the ancient grassland away that the soil washed away and now we have flash flooding? Then I see terrible flooding in the main rivers. I wonder if it is because governments are (or were) good at big centralised water projects, but spending for thousands upon thousands of swales and check dams to be built is harder, and less sexy?
    - bilbo0s 9mo ago
      California isn't even the problem. They're rich enough and big enough, (and fortuitously situated enough), that they just crank up desal plants and go happily on their way. What about the rest of the west? Arizona? New Mexico? Nevada? etc etc Water needs to be brought in from somewhere? Who's going to pay for that? How do you do it safely, sustainably. And on and on. I know people forget the rest of the west a lot. (Or maybe they just don't care about us as much?) But it's actually more of an issue in those places than it is in California. A personal illustrative story. I used to live in Scottsdale. The water issue is such common knowledge out there that people started trying to get into the magic zip code. (Phoenix sits on like a gazillion years worth of water that they squirreled away.) I had moved into the magic zip code just about 1 year before everything went crazy. As it happened, about 18 months after we moved to that zip, we decided to move back to the Great Lakes region. Fully expecting to lose money on the house. But the word had got out on that zip code, and the final offer was over 60% more than we'd paid just 18 months prior. That gives an indication of how even individuals are thinking. It just kind of felt like a lot of people, governments and organizations know there will be an issue, but money is gating everyone's ability to do anything about it. Whereas of course, money's not as much of an issue in California. I think large parts of the west will need help in the future. Or people will need to pay significantly more in taxes to live in those places. It can't go on forever the way it has been. That much is certain.
- rayiner 9mo ago
  > Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california? Why would the midwestern states consent to that? The southwest is structurally unsustainable. If we can’t develop sufficient renewable energy to power desalination, we’ll probably have to abandon much of California. My prediction is that if we ever have another civil war, it will be states going to war over access to water.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
    > The southwest is structurally unsustainable Nope. Agriculture in the southwest is structurally unsustainable, that's all. Of course, for California, that has enormous consequences, but then say California, not "the southwest".
    - rayiner 9mo ago
      None of it is sustainable without diverting Colorado River water. Human habitation alone might be below what you can currently get out of the river, but who knows what climate change will do to that.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
        I don't believe that this is true. Colorado diversions might be currently used for residential purposes, but only because so much other water is used by agriculture. I'm fairly certain (though not completely certain) that AZ, NM in particular could support their residential populations with no Colorado diversions at all.
- shoxidizer 9mo ago
  Perhaps it isn't possible because of economics. If you build an aquaduct to a somewhere sunny so that water is plentiful there, then farms, cities, parks, and so on will grow as long as the water is cheap, reaching the capacity of your infrastructure, and the causing a crisis whenever there's a droubt.
- everdrive 9mo ago
  People don't know how to be efficient at scale. Large complex problems could in principle be understood by a few experts, but they always become political problems. (ie, people must be socially, politically, or religiously attached to the right ideas rather than strictly convinced by detailed facts) Worse, people don't know how to maintain excess. People are a gas, and expand to fill the space they're in. If we had an abundance of water, all people would do is expand their water usage until that abundance is gone.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
    > People don't know how to be efficient at scale. Do you understand how much more food we produce on roughly the same amount of land (globally) than we did 60 years ago? Claiming that we don't know how to be efficient at scale is absurd. Now, it is true that these production levels are very dependent on a bunch of practices that are likely not sustainable, and that's a serious and pressing issue. But the problem is not efficiency. Further, as others have noted here (and so have I), it is animal-based food production that uses so much of the water that we use, and that's a choice we've made (particularly in the USA). We could make different choices (and some of us have tried to).
- bell-cot 9mo ago
  > aqueduct from the great lakes to california? Talk to a civil engineer about the lead times, length, flow rate, and elevation changes you'd need - nope, zero chance of any project that expensive and long-duration ever becoming operational. Talk to a political scientist about the voters and leaders at the water intake end - nope, "over our dead bodies".
- mikestew 9mo ago
  Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california? Good luck with that: “we mismanaged our water supply, and now we are coming for yours.” That, and the number of agreements and treaties with Canada concerning the Great Lakes. And that’s before we figure out how to efficiently pump water over two mountain ranges.
- dyauspitr 9mo ago
  Desalination plants with extensive water transportation pipe systems like we have for natural gas. We would need to solve the salt water dumping problem but that could just be accepting loss of natural diversity in the area around desalination plants or dumping further out in the open sea.
- jerf 9mo ago
  The Great Lakes have a management principle that is basically "You can use the water of the Great Lakes by permission as long as the water remains in the watershed." And permission is not automatic either. The reason for that to a large degree is that the Great Lakes area looked over at the Southwest, which wasn't even as bad at the time as it is now, did some math, and worked out that if the Great Lakes tried to supply the Southwest that it would cause noticeable dropping of the water level. I'm sure it would be even more dropping now. The problem is, the Great Lakes aren't just some big lakes with juicy fresh water that can be spent as desired. They are also international shipping lanes. They make it so that de facto Detroit, Chicago, and a whole bunch of other cities and places are ocean ports. Ocean ports are very, very valuable. There are also numerous other port facilities all along the great lakes, often relatively in the middle of nowhere but doing something economically significant. This is maintained by very, very large and continual dredging operations to keep these lanes open. Dropping the water levels would destroy these ports and make the dredging operations go from expensive to impossible. So, getting large quantities of water out of the Great Lakes to go somewhere isn't just a matter of "the people who control it don't want to do that", which is still true, and a big obstacle on its own. The Southwest when asking for that water is also asking multiple major international ports to just stop being major international ports. That's not going to happen.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
    There's an even bigger problem if you're talking about the soutwhest in general: huge parts of it are thousands of feet above the Great Lakes. The energy costs of moving water horizontally are probably doable; pumping millions of acre-feet 5k feet vertically are almost certainly not (no matter what energy source you suggest using for this).
- thinkcontext 9mo ago
  The largest such effort is China's South - North Water Transfer Project, look into that if you are interested in the subject. Its unbelievably gigantic in scale, yet the amount of water moved is relatively modest compared to the amount of consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Transfer_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran... California is also an enormous plumbing project, much has been written on it.
- AngryData 9mo ago
  The Great Lakes Compact prevents water from being pumped out of the Great Lakes water basin. And as someone in that basin the people here would go to war before they allowed water to be pumped across the country to water arid farmland. Doubly so when the region already has trouble competing in agricultural markets against those arid farms due to their irresponcible farming practises.
betaby 9mo ago
Governments are not ready to admit the fact of the Earth's overpopulation.
- Sharlin 9mo ago
  Water scarcity is mostly caused by factors other than overpopulation.
  - betaby 9mo ago
    Let's concentrate on couple of countries to simplify the discussion: Iran, Egypt, Algeria. Water scarcity there is dominated by explosive population growth there in the last 70 years. Water is not scarce in general, just yet. It scarce where population is exploding.
    - mring33621 9mo ago
      High birth rates in low-resource localities seems like a poor survival strategy. Unless the new people are used as an army to take the needed resources from others...
  - Gareth321 9mo ago
    I think it's both. Local populations adapt to whatever the local reservoirs can sustain but as soon as an unexpected climate event occurs (such as unusually low rainfall in a given season), the water reserves can no longer sustain the population. See Cape Town (2015-2018), Chennai (2019), São Paulo (2014-2015), California (2012–2016 & 2020–2022), etc. If the local reservoirs were not already at capacity, or had much more redundancy, these events would have been much easier to manage. Fewer people in high risk areas would in fact reduce the risks of water scarcity.
- onion2k 9mo ago
  The world has more than enough water, food, and energy to sustain a much, much higher population. The issue is that people in the areas with a lot of resources don't want to share - that's more of an observation than a criticism. People don't have to share.
comrade1234 9mo ago
Not n Switzerland... water is practically free. they don't even bother with putting water meters on individual apartments and instead just split the bill up by all of the apartments at the end of the year. Hot water is metered though. I've lived all over the USA and I remember wondering why I was stuck with a shitty shower with California-standard shower head even though water was cheap and plentiful where I lived.
- Sharlin 9mo ago
  In Finland even the hot water bill is split, per-apartment water meters are only now getting common in new buildings.
- whiterock 9mo ago
  same in Austria. The mountains giveth
- csense 9mo ago
  > Hot water is metered though This is weird to me, in the places I've lived in the US each apartment has its own hot water heater. You don't get hot water delivered, you get cold water and heat it yourself (you pay for it indirectly via the gas / electric bill.)
  - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
    A lot of countries have city wide hot water plants, especially in Northern Europe and Asia, I think you will find them in northern Canada as well . Some places have building wide hot water, not in the USA though.
  - comrade1234 9mo ago
    We have a hot-water-on-demand heater for the entire building. It's about the height of a hot water heater but the radius is maybe 4x and the whole thing looks like it was designed by apple.
comrade1234 9mo ago
There are abandoned ancient cities all over India and SE Asia because the city ran out of water. Tehran is not a new phenomenon.
- dyauspitr 9mo ago
  India has it good in a way. The monsoons are reliable and India just needs to have sufficient rainwater collection for ground water replenishment structures built. As an example, in an area of southern India, most homes are built by digging a big pit on the property and bricks are directly cut out of the semi porous stones available a few feet under the surface. This ends up in every house having an open pit on the property. When the monsoons come around, these pits fill up with water every year and then replenishes the ground water every year. Compared to surrounding areas, this region always has full wells even during harsh droughts.
jimnotgym 9mo ago
> Chronic overuse of groundwater, forest destruction, land degradation, and pollution have caused irreversible freshwater loss in many parts of the world I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories. In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months. Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost. I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.
- fullstop 9mo ago
  > I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories. The water supply in a town near me is permanently contaminated by PFAS after the foam that the fire department used for training ran into the well: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/investigations/how-officials-are-handling-forever-chemicals-in-water-across-the-region/3952402/ https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/investigations/how-officials...
alecco 9mo ago
Previous discussion 21hs ago 124 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600 My comment then: UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
code51 9mo ago
Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue. Yet, economic downturn creates a vicious circle: governments avoid infra spend because of low funds, then agriculture and other economic output gets hit because of water shortage. Lower resource lower will for infra spend. Until you hit the very low: stopping the grid because day zero. At that point, both the grid and city hygiene becomes a mess anyway. Costs build up so much that most governments cannot cope up with it properly. and this is why you need sane people at the top earliest
- sbacic 9mo ago
  > Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue. Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't that mean the water is returned back to the environment? It's not made unusable, nor does it disappear permanently.
  - citrin_ru 9mo ago
    In many places water is pumped from deep underground aquifers but leaks go to surface ground waters and could quickly end-up in the Ocean so aquifers are still depleted.
  - jezzamon 9mo ago
    We're talking about accessible fresh water. If it evaporates and then rains over the ocean then it's lost, or as the article mentions, if it becomes contaminated then it's not longer usable as fresh water
  - alphawhisky 9mo ago
    Groundwater recharge from surface to an aquifer where it "rests" can take up to 1000 years.
ChrisArchitect 9mo ago
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600
Faelon 9mo ago
We have a tremendous opportunity to use our food choices to push towards a more water-abundant world. 70% of all freshwater withdrawals go to agriculture, and 80% of agricultural land on Earth is used to feed animals. Animal-based foods are ENORMOUSLY less water efficient than plant foods, accounting for equivalent nutrition. 3oz of cheese is like leaving your shower on full blast for 30 minutes. Nearly half (46%) of all water diverted from the Colorado River is used to feed cows and the food they eat. We could cut down dramatically by eating plants directly. https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stress https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stress https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks https://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-water-climate-change-beef https://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-...
- chickensong 9mo ago
  You're not wrong, but I have no faith it will come to pass. Most humans want to eat meat, and will likely continue to do so until forced to stop. Continuing to spread the message is still helpful however, change comes in all forms. What I'd like to see, is more agricultural reform, both on water management, and export taxes. We have a lot of agricultural production based on legacy design that doesn't account for current water supply issues, and much of the end product is shipped and sold overseas for profit. Depleting a critical local resource to profit a few is the type of issue that feels like it has a chance to gain public support for legislative change, once the situation is dire enough. I think we're still the frog boiling stage, but at some point it'll be too hot for the masses to ignore.
  - Faelon 9mo ago
    This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You, me, and everybody else can stop consuming animal products right now, at this minute. Water use is only a small part of the argument- these animals emit tons of carbon, and more than anything else, they use just as much land as there are forests remaining on the planet. I wish we could focus on visualizing the amount of habitat destruction wrought by animal agriculture. 80% of all agricultural land is for animals and the food they eat. "Marginal" land for agriculture used to be America's Serengeti and now it's a vast, dead monoculture. And let's not forget- these animals feel, and they have a perspective with which they relate to and understand the world, just like we do. If we have a choice, we should choose to not consume products of cruelty which destroy our planet. It's easy.
jimnotgym 9mo ago
In my bit of the UK there is a fairly common bit of geography, which is hilly peat bog ground. This is natures sponge, it absorbed rain to reduce flooding, and then kept the rivers higher in times of drought. In WW2 and the decade or so after, the owners were forced to 'improve' the land or have it confiscated by WARAG. The solution was to drain it, so sheep could graze, turn flatter bits into field etc. This was a justifyiable response to the U-boat menace that tried to starve Britain out of the war. The sponge was destroyed There is now a greater understanding that the sponge is good. There have been small projects to block drains and reflood bits, that then start to sponge again. But greater roll out meets innevitable resistance. The hill may have a nominal landowner, but it may also have many smaller surrounding properties that have grazing rights on the hill. Now some environmentalists turn up offering to flood their grazing, on a farm that is already marginally profitable... and so we each an impasse. Downstream are millions of people who want drinking water but don't want flooding. The solution of them paying the 'commoners' to use their grazing as sponge never comes up. In the lowlands are small rivers that were 'canalised' in the same era. A little stream was dug 6 feet deeper and straightened. This dried the fields for grazing and cultivation. Now people want to restore these streams for both habitat and flood control reasons. Often this is simply by inaction from the people meant to maintain the canal. There is zero talk of ongoing payments to the people who lose fields through this! They are supposed to just put up with it! I suspect this story has analogues in many other places.
- no_wizard 9mo ago
  I think societies should and will need to get used to either forcibly doing these environmental restoration projects despite other objections and/or paying people out to remove land owner interests. Climate change doesn’t care about whether you own the land or not, it will inevitably lead to more problems for everyone. Anything that helps mitigate this needs to be actively considered
  - jimnotgym 9mo ago
    Totally agree. But if we believe in property protection, we shouldn't steal those rights though. Any temporary payment will not be trusted, since future governments can undo it. The government should buy the land, and the rights, at full market value, discounted by the value of a new perpetual right to graze what is left after the flooding. Peat bogs are also the best carbon sinks we have, aren't they? One interesting part of this, is that there are plans to reforest some of these areas (which were deforested perhaps 1000 years ago), and the main opposition to that is from the general public, who like to look at the hills as they are! People are complex...
Kon5ole 9mo ago
We need water and we need to save energy from renewable sources. Surplus electricity can be used to make hydrogen from salt water, and when hydrogen is burned to generate energy it releases desalinated water. It is inefficient yes, but solar is so cheap I think there is an opportunity for a twofer here. Private enterprises and individuals will deploy solar panels equivalent to several new nuclear plants every year. IMO governments should invest massively in hydrogen infrastructure. Plants, distribution and storage.
Dig1t 9mo ago
Israel has a massive desalination operation. It produces so much extra water that they can actually pump the extra water back into natural sources. Any water shortage problem in the first world is simply one of mismanagement and a failure to plan.
burnt-resistor 9mo ago
Because of climate change, there will be droughts, floods, mass famines, and extreme migration of billions of climate refugees across continents. It will be terrible. These are the Tragedy of the Commons consequences of mostly the Global North using the sky as an invisible sewer without doing enough to address the destabilization except invite fossil fuel peddlers to COPs.

95 points by ciconia 9mo ago

https://archive.ph/XpRIS https://archive.ph/XpRIS

Here is the paper on which the article is based: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11269-025-04484-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11269-025-04484-0

ceejayoz 9mo ago

Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600

digitalsushi 9mo ago

I know there's no single answer to this. But, if we wanted to mitigate this, do we have the geoengineering ability to execute on it? I know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work. What would it look like? I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down. Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california? would it destroy the great lakes? i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me

betaby 9mo ago
Los Angeles already gets its water from 500km away. No need to exacerbate the situation.
- digitalsushi 9mo ago
  it's hypothetical remember, its just a fantasy solution
sanex 9mo ago
The Great Lakes states have an agreement surrounding how much water you can remove from the lakes. That would be your first regulatory hurdle. In addition I suspect the loss associated with an aqueduct of that scale would make desalinization more efficient, which is generally cost prohibitive at current water levels.
- kevinmchugh 9mo ago
  We also have a treaty with Canada about the usage of water from the Great Lakes.
  - gramie 9mo ago
    We Canadians have seen how much value the US administration places on treaties.
- trenning 9mo ago
  The water pact is even more specific in that at least WI I believe you have to be East of the subcontinental divide to pull water from Lake Michigan. Another poster mentioned real estate peaking in a zip code of AZ for having limited access to fresh water. I wonder how long until real estate along the great lakes starts becoming a long term hedge.
dragontamer 9mo ago
Is it cheaper to reroute a lake to a desert and build a new underground river? Or is it cheaper to just move the city itself to a closer source of good clean water?
- buckle8017 9mo ago
  Unfortunate probably cheaper to reroute the lake.
  - dragontamer 9mo ago
    On the contrary. We've been moving cities and municipalities since the dawn of civilization. That's just how life worked. Yes water works continue to improve but the age old solution is simply to stop city growth at its sustainable level and start moving people to other, newer, better areas to live. ------- Alternatively, you can boom bust with feast and famine economics and have tons of people die due to poor planning. That's also part of the age old deal and it's evidence is written in the many mismanaged cities across history.
brk 9mo ago
Not an expert, but a more-than-casual-observer as someone who has lived on the water (literally and figuratively). A core part of the problem is things like the farming in California that uses excessive amounts of water, which is already brought in from very distant regions. I don't think there is a way to distribute the fresh water supply equitably if you have various regions and industries that insist on being highly inefficient and wasteful. California is certainly not the only example, there are lots of places trying to grow crops in illogical places, water supplies being polluted by industries, etc.
- rayiner 9mo ago
  The problem isn’t just farming in the desert. The problem is all those people living in the desert in the first place. There is a reason the Spanish then the Mexicans did almost nothing to settle and develop California. It was massive water projects by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that made modern California possible.
  - estearum 9mo ago
    I'm no fan of cities in deserts, but farming is by far the much, much, much larger problem.
  - jimnotgym 9mo ago
    How much has the infrastructure improved since then? I see on TV that some of California has snow and flash flooding. Are there attempts being made to capture that, or soak it into the ground? Or is it cheaper to keep using the old projects? I see on YouTube that there are parts of Texas you can buy for peanuts because ranching doesn't work there any more. I gather that the cows eat so much of the ancient grassland away that the soil washed away and now we have flash flooding? Then I see terrible flooding in the main rivers. I wonder if it is because governments are (or were) good at big centralised water projects, but spending for thousands upon thousands of swales and check dams to be built is harder, and less sexy?
  - bilbo0s 9mo ago
    California isn't even the problem. They're rich enough and big enough, (and fortuitously situated enough), that they just crank up desal plants and go happily on their way. What about the rest of the west? Arizona? New Mexico? Nevada? etc etc Water needs to be brought in from somewhere? Who's going to pay for that? How do you do it safely, sustainably. And on and on. I know people forget the rest of the west a lot. (Or maybe they just don't care about us as much?) But it's actually more of an issue in those places than it is in California. A personal illustrative story. I used to live in Scottsdale. The water issue is such common knowledge out there that people started trying to get into the magic zip code. (Phoenix sits on like a gazillion years worth of water that they squirreled away.) I had moved into the magic zip code just about 1 year before everything went crazy. As it happened, about 18 months after we moved to that zip, we decided to move back to the Great Lakes region. Fully expecting to lose money on the house. But the word had got out on that zip code, and the final offer was over 60% more than we'd paid just 18 months prior. That gives an indication of how even individuals are thinking. It just kind of felt like a lot of people, governments and organizations know there will be an issue, but money is gating everyone's ability to do anything about it. Whereas of course, money's not as much of an issue in California. I think large parts of the west will need help in the future. Or people will need to pay significantly more in taxes to live in those places. It can't go on forever the way it has been. That much is certain.
rayiner 9mo ago
> Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california? Why would the midwestern states consent to that? The southwest is structurally unsustainable. If we can’t develop sufficient renewable energy to power desalination, we’ll probably have to abandon much of California. My prediction is that if we ever have another civil war, it will be states going to war over access to water.
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  > The southwest is structurally unsustainable Nope. Agriculture in the southwest is structurally unsustainable, that's all. Of course, for California, that has enormous consequences, but then say California, not "the southwest".
  - rayiner 9mo ago
    None of it is sustainable without diverting Colorado River water. Human habitation alone might be below what you can currently get out of the river, but who knows what climate change will do to that.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
      I don't believe that this is true. Colorado diversions might be currently used for residential purposes, but only because so much other water is used by agriculture. I'm fairly certain (though not completely certain) that AZ, NM in particular could support their residential populations with no Colorado diversions at all.
shoxidizer 9mo ago
Perhaps it isn't possible because of economics. If you build an aquaduct to a somewhere sunny so that water is plentiful there, then farms, cities, parks, and so on will grow as long as the water is cheap, reaching the capacity of your infrastructure, and the causing a crisis whenever there's a droubt.
everdrive 9mo ago
People don't know how to be efficient at scale. Large complex problems could in principle be understood by a few experts, but they always become political problems. (ie, people must be socially, politically, or religiously attached to the right ideas rather than strictly convinced by detailed facts) Worse, people don't know how to maintain excess. People are a gas, and expand to fill the space they're in. If we had an abundance of water, all people would do is expand their water usage until that abundance is gone.
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  > People don't know how to be efficient at scale. Do you understand how much more food we produce on roughly the same amount of land (globally) than we did 60 years ago? Claiming that we don't know how to be efficient at scale is absurd. Now, it is true that these production levels are very dependent on a bunch of practices that are likely not sustainable, and that's a serious and pressing issue. But the problem is not efficiency. Further, as others have noted here (and so have I), it is animal-based food production that uses so much of the water that we use, and that's a choice we've made (particularly in the USA). We could make different choices (and some of us have tried to).
bell-cot 9mo ago
> aqueduct from the great lakes to california? Talk to a civil engineer about the lead times, length, flow rate, and elevation changes you'd need - nope, zero chance of any project that expensive and long-duration ever becoming operational. Talk to a political scientist about the voters and leaders at the water intake end - nope, "over our dead bodies".
mikestew 9mo ago
Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california? Good luck with that: “we mismanaged our water supply, and now we are coming for yours.” That, and the number of agreements and treaties with Canada concerning the Great Lakes. And that’s before we figure out how to efficiently pump water over two mountain ranges.
dyauspitr 9mo ago
Desalination plants with extensive water transportation pipe systems like we have for natural gas. We would need to solve the salt water dumping problem but that could just be accepting loss of natural diversity in the area around desalination plants or dumping further out in the open sea.
jerf 9mo ago
The Great Lakes have a management principle that is basically "You can use the water of the Great Lakes by permission as long as the water remains in the watershed." And permission is not automatic either. The reason for that to a large degree is that the Great Lakes area looked over at the Southwest, which wasn't even as bad at the time as it is now, did some math, and worked out that if the Great Lakes tried to supply the Southwest that it would cause noticeable dropping of the water level. I'm sure it would be even more dropping now. The problem is, the Great Lakes aren't just some big lakes with juicy fresh water that can be spent as desired. They are also international shipping lanes. They make it so that de facto Detroit, Chicago, and a whole bunch of other cities and places are ocean ports. Ocean ports are very, very valuable. There are also numerous other port facilities all along the great lakes, often relatively in the middle of nowhere but doing something economically significant. This is maintained by very, very large and continual dredging operations to keep these lanes open. Dropping the water levels would destroy these ports and make the dredging operations go from expensive to impossible. So, getting large quantities of water out of the Great Lakes to go somewhere isn't just a matter of "the people who control it don't want to do that", which is still true, and a big obstacle on its own. The Southwest when asking for that water is also asking multiple major international ports to just stop being major international ports. That's not going to happen.
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  There's an even bigger problem if you're talking about the soutwhest in general: huge parts of it are thousands of feet above the Great Lakes. The energy costs of moving water horizontally are probably doable; pumping millions of acre-feet 5k feet vertically are almost certainly not (no matter what energy source you suggest using for this).
thinkcontext 9mo ago
The largest such effort is China's South - North Water Transfer Project, look into that if you are interested in the subject. Its unbelievably gigantic in scale, yet the amount of water moved is relatively modest compared to the amount of consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Transfer_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran... California is also an enormous plumbing project, much has been written on it.
AngryData 9mo ago
The Great Lakes Compact prevents water from being pumped out of the Great Lakes water basin. And as someone in that basin the people here would go to war before they allowed water to be pumped across the country to water arid farmland. Doubly so when the region already has trouble competing in agricultural markets against those arid farms due to their irresponcible farming practises.

betaby 9mo ago

Governments are not ready to admit the fact of the Earth's overpopulation.

Sharlin 9mo ago
Water scarcity is mostly caused by factors other than overpopulation.
- betaby 9mo ago
  Let's concentrate on couple of countries to simplify the discussion: Iran, Egypt, Algeria. Water scarcity there is dominated by explosive population growth there in the last 70 years. Water is not scarce in general, just yet. It scarce where population is exploding.
  - mring33621 9mo ago
    High birth rates in low-resource localities seems like a poor survival strategy. Unless the new people are used as an army to take the needed resources from others...
- Gareth321 9mo ago
  I think it's both. Local populations adapt to whatever the local reservoirs can sustain but as soon as an unexpected climate event occurs (such as unusually low rainfall in a given season), the water reserves can no longer sustain the population. See Cape Town (2015-2018), Chennai (2019), São Paulo (2014-2015), California (2012–2016 & 2020–2022), etc. If the local reservoirs were not already at capacity, or had much more redundancy, these events would have been much easier to manage. Fewer people in high risk areas would in fact reduce the risks of water scarcity.
onion2k 9mo ago
The world has more than enough water, food, and energy to sustain a much, much higher population. The issue is that people in the areas with a lot of resources don't want to share - that's more of an observation than a criticism. People don't have to share.

comrade1234 9mo ago

Not n Switzerland... water is practically free. they don't even bother with putting water meters on individual apartments and instead just split the bill up by all of the apartments at the end of the year. Hot water is metered though. I've lived all over the USA and I remember wondering why I was stuck with a shitty shower with California-standard shower head even though water was cheap and plentiful where I lived.

Sharlin 9mo ago
In Finland even the hot water bill is split, per-apartment water meters are only now getting common in new buildings.
whiterock 9mo ago
same in Austria. The mountains giveth
csense 9mo ago
> Hot water is metered though This is weird to me, in the places I've lived in the US each apartment has its own hot water heater. You don't get hot water delivered, you get cold water and heat it yourself (you pay for it indirectly via the gas / electric bill.)
- seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
  A lot of countries have city wide hot water plants, especially in Northern Europe and Asia, I think you will find them in northern Canada as well . Some places have building wide hot water, not in the USA though.
- comrade1234 9mo ago
  We have a hot-water-on-demand heater for the entire building. It's about the height of a hot water heater but the radius is maybe 4x and the whole thing looks like it was designed by apple.

comrade1234 9mo ago

There are abandoned ancient cities all over India and SE Asia because the city ran out of water. Tehran is not a new phenomenon.

dyauspitr 9mo ago
India has it good in a way. The monsoons are reliable and India just needs to have sufficient rainwater collection for ground water replenishment structures built. As an example, in an area of southern India, most homes are built by digging a big pit on the property and bricks are directly cut out of the semi porous stones available a few feet under the surface. This ends up in every house having an open pit on the property. When the monsoons come around, these pits fill up with water every year and then replenishes the ground water every year. Compared to surrounding areas, this region always has full wells even during harsh droughts.

jimnotgym 9mo ago

> Chronic overuse of groundwater, forest destruction, land degradation, and pollution have caused irreversible freshwater loss in many parts of the world I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories. In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months. Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost. I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.

fullstop 9mo ago
> I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories. The water supply in a town near me is permanently contaminated by PFAS after the foam that the fire department used for training ran into the well: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/investigations/how-officials-are-handling-forever-chemicals-in-water-across-the-region/3952402/ https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/investigations/how-officials...

alecco 9mo ago

Previous discussion 21hs ago 124 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600 My comment then: UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.

code51 9mo ago

Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue. Yet, economic downturn creates a vicious circle: governments avoid infra spend because of low funds, then agriculture and other economic output gets hit because of water shortage. Lower resource lower will for infra spend. Until you hit the very low: stopping the grid because day zero. At that point, both the grid and city hygiene becomes a mess anyway. Costs build up so much that most governments cannot cope up with it properly. and this is why you need sane people at the top earliest

sbacic 9mo ago
> Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue. Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't that mean the water is returned back to the environment? It's not made unusable, nor does it disappear permanently.
- citrin_ru 9mo ago
  In many places water is pumped from deep underground aquifers but leaks go to surface ground waters and could quickly end-up in the Ocean so aquifers are still depleted.
- jezzamon 9mo ago
  We're talking about accessible fresh water. If it evaporates and then rains over the ocean then it's lost, or as the article mentions, if it becomes contaminated then it's not longer usable as fresh water
- alphawhisky 9mo ago
  Groundwater recharge from surface to an aquifer where it "rests" can take up to 1000 years.

ChrisArchitect 9mo ago

[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600

Faelon 9mo ago

We have a tremendous opportunity to use our food choices to push towards a more water-abundant world. 70% of all freshwater withdrawals go to agriculture, and 80% of agricultural land on Earth is used to feed animals. Animal-based foods are ENORMOUSLY less water efficient than plant foods, accounting for equivalent nutrition. 3oz of cheese is like leaving your shower on full blast for 30 minutes. Nearly half (46%) of all water diverted from the Colorado River is used to feed cows and the food they eat. We could cut down dramatically by eating plants directly. https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stress https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stress https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks https://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-water-climate-change-beef https://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-...

chickensong 9mo ago
You're not wrong, but I have no faith it will come to pass. Most humans want to eat meat, and will likely continue to do so until forced to stop. Continuing to spread the message is still helpful however, change comes in all forms. What I'd like to see, is more agricultural reform, both on water management, and export taxes. We have a lot of agricultural production based on legacy design that doesn't account for current water supply issues, and much of the end product is shipped and sold overseas for profit. Depleting a critical local resource to profit a few is the type of issue that feels like it has a chance to gain public support for legislative change, once the situation is dire enough. I think we're still the frog boiling stage, but at some point it'll be too hot for the masses to ignore.
- Faelon 9mo ago
  This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You, me, and everybody else can stop consuming animal products right now, at this minute. Water use is only a small part of the argument- these animals emit tons of carbon, and more than anything else, they use just as much land as there are forests remaining on the planet. I wish we could focus on visualizing the amount of habitat destruction wrought by animal agriculture. 80% of all agricultural land is for animals and the food they eat. "Marginal" land for agriculture used to be America's Serengeti and now it's a vast, dead monoculture. And let's not forget- these animals feel, and they have a perspective with which they relate to and understand the world, just like we do. If we have a choice, we should choose to not consume products of cruelty which destroy our planet. It's easy.

jimnotgym 9mo ago

In my bit of the UK there is a fairly common bit of geography, which is hilly peat bog ground. This is natures sponge, it absorbed rain to reduce flooding, and then kept the rivers higher in times of drought. In WW2 and the decade or so after, the owners were forced to 'improve' the land or have it confiscated by WARAG. The solution was to drain it, so sheep could graze, turn flatter bits into field etc. This was a justifyiable response to the U-boat menace that tried to starve Britain out of the war. The sponge was destroyed There is now a greater understanding that the sponge is good. There have been small projects to block drains and reflood bits, that then start to sponge again. But greater roll out meets innevitable resistance. The hill may have a nominal landowner, but it may also have many smaller surrounding properties that have grazing rights on the hill. Now some environmentalists turn up offering to flood their grazing, on a farm that is already marginally profitable... and so we each an impasse. Downstream are millions of people who want drinking water but don't want flooding. The solution of them paying the 'commoners' to use their grazing as sponge never comes up. In the lowlands are small rivers that were 'canalised' in the same era. A little stream was dug 6 feet deeper and straightened. This dried the fields for grazing and cultivation. Now people want to restore these streams for both habitat and flood control reasons. Often this is simply by inaction from the people meant to maintain the canal. There is zero talk of ongoing payments to the people who lose fields through this! They are supposed to just put up with it! I suspect this story has analogues in many other places.

no_wizard 9mo ago
I think societies should and will need to get used to either forcibly doing these environmental restoration projects despite other objections and/or paying people out to remove land owner interests. Climate change doesn’t care about whether you own the land or not, it will inevitably lead to more problems for everyone. Anything that helps mitigate this needs to be actively considered
- jimnotgym 9mo ago
  Totally agree. But if we believe in property protection, we shouldn't steal those rights though. Any temporary payment will not be trusted, since future governments can undo it. The government should buy the land, and the rights, at full market value, discounted by the value of a new perpetual right to graze what is left after the flooding. Peat bogs are also the best carbon sinks we have, aren't they? One interesting part of this, is that there are plans to reforest some of these areas (which were deforested perhaps 1000 years ago), and the main opposition to that is from the general public, who like to look at the hills as they are! People are complex...

Kon5ole 9mo ago

We need water and we need to save energy from renewable sources. Surplus electricity can be used to make hydrogen from salt water, and when hydrogen is burned to generate energy it releases desalinated water. It is inefficient yes, but solar is so cheap I think there is an opportunity for a twofer here. Private enterprises and individuals will deploy solar panels equivalent to several new nuclear plants every year. IMO governments should invest massively in hydrogen infrastructure. Plants, distribution and storage.

Dig1t 9mo ago

Israel has a massive desalination operation. It produces so much extra water that they can actually pump the extra water back into natural sources. Any water shortage problem in the first world is simply one of mismanagement and a failure to plan.

burnt-resistor 9mo ago

Because of climate change, there will be droughts, floods, mass famines, and extreme migration of billions of climate refugees across continents. It will be terrible. These are the Tragedy of the Commons consequences of mostly the Global North using the sky as an invisible sewer without doing enough to address the destabilization except invite fossil fuel peddlers to COPs.