Earlier this month, officials in the South Pacific island nation
of Tuvalu had to confront a pretty dire problem: they were running
out of water. Due to a severe and lasting drought, water reserves
in this country of 11,000 people had dwindled to just a few days'
worth. Climate change plays a role here: as sea levels rose,
Tuvalu's groundwater became increasingly saline and undrinkable,
leaving the island dependent on rainwater. But now a La
Niña-influenced drought has severely curtailed rainfall, leaving
Tuvalu dry as a bone. "This situation is bad," Pusinelli Laafai,
Tuvalu's permanent secretary of home affairs, told the Associated
Press earlier this month. "It's really bad."
So far Tuvalu has been bailed out by its neighbors Australia and
New Zealand, which have donated rehydration packets and
desalination equipment. But the archipelago's water woes are just
beginning - and it's far from the only part of the world facing a
big dry. Other island nations like the Maldives and Kiribati will
see their groundwater spoil as sea levels rise. Texas, along with
much of the American Southwest, is in the grip of a truly
record-breaking drought - even after days of storms in the past
month, Houston's total 2011 rainfall is still short of its yearly
average by a whopping 2 ft., or 60 cm. Australia has experienced
severely dry weather for so long, it's not even clear whether the
country is in a state of drought, or more worryingly, a new and
permanent dry climate that could forever alter life Down Under.
"Climate-change impacts on water resources continue to appear in
the form of growing influence on the severity and intensity of
extreme events," says Peter Gleick, one of the foremost water
experts in the U.S. and head of the Pacific Institute, an NGO based
in Oakland, Calif., that focuses on global water issues.
"Australia's recent extraordinary extreme drought should be an
eye-opener for the rest of us."
Volume 7 of the Pacific Institute's regular report on global
water usage,The World's Water, comes out today, just in time to
address the squeeze of droughts, the increasingly apparent impact
of climate change and the threats facing our relatively scarce
supplies of freshwater. The sweeping report is a reminder that
clean water is vital to life - as Gleick points out, more than 2
million people die each year from preventable water-related
diseases - and that on the whole, we're not doing a very good job
of husbanding that resource. There's even a risk here that parts of
the U.S., especially the arid West, may have passed "peak water" -
the point at which it becomes essentially impossible to increase
supply.
Potential water shortages are one more reason to try to reduce
carbon emissions and blunt the worst impacts of climate change - a
warmer world is likely to further dry out already arid regions,
even as extreme rainfall intensifies in already wet areas. But
however severe the effects of climate change become, we're going to
need to use water much more efficiently than we do now: the world's
population is expected to pass the 7 billion mark by the end of
this month, and more people will need more water. "New thinking
about solutions and sustainable water planning and management,
better data, case studies and efforts to raise awareness, are all
needed," Gleick writes in The World's Water.
Smarter water policy might mean rethinking other fields of
resource use. Take, for example, natural gas drilling. Hydraulic
fracturing has vastly increased American supplies of natural gas,
which is good for gas companies and, because natural gas generally
has a greener footprint, potentially good for the environment as
well. But fracking requires a significant amount of water - up to 5
million gal. (19 million L) per well. That might not be a major
problem in a relatively wet state like Pennsylvania, but in
bone-dry states like Texas, water-intensive fracking has sparked a
backlash. There's also the uncertain risk of water contamination
from fracking and drilling, and the problem of water waste. "The
rapid expansion of the use of hydraulic fracturing to increase
natural gas production has serious potential consequences for local
water resources," says Gleick. It's important that "more effort be
put into both understanding the real risks and protecting water
resources before pushing for accelerated programs of natural gas
production."
What we need most of all is a rethink of how we deal with water
and a recognition of just how valuable it is - especially in a
warming world. That means focusing on modulating demand as much as
increasing supply. Through most of the 20th century, governments
dealt with water problems through massive construction projects
designed to expand and regulate supply - think the Hoover Dam near
Las Vegas or the Three Gorges Dam in China.
But the era of those big projects may be ending, largely because
we've begun to recognize the environmental problems that come with
major dams, including the loss of aquatic wildlife and the
displacement of local populations. Last month Burma's military
government - not ordinarily responsive to public opinion - canceled
a planned $3.6 billion Chinese-backed hydroelectric dam that would
have displaced thousands of villagers. Just as we've recognized
that energy efficiency is often the fastest and cheapest way to
address carbon emissions, there's much that can be done to curb
water waste. We need to "adopt 21st century strategies of new forms
of sustainable water supply, rethink water demand and efficiency of
use, and [embrace] smart use of pricing and economics," says
Gleick. The alternative could mean ending up like poor Tuvalu -
high and dry.
