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The Nations That Will Be Hardest Hit By Water Shortages By 2040
merbs writes: Water access is going to be one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century. As climate change dries out the already dry areas and makes the wet ones wetter, we're poised to see some radical civilizational shifts. For one, a number of densely populated areas will come under serious water stress—which analysts fear will lead to strife, thirst, and even violent conflict. With that in mind, the World Resource Institute has assembled a new report projecting which nations are most likely to be hardest hit by water stress in coming decades—nations like Bahrain, Israel, Palestine, and Spain lead the pack.
I was expecting a listicle.
I love how Alaska gets included with the rest of the nation even though we have nothing close to a water shortage with all the glaciers up here. We should have been grouped with Canada.
If ye donâ(TM)t have water then bathe in wine
Oh well, I suppose people with very stable and safe lives need to find something to fear.
By 2040 we should have all that crap sorted out. If there are any shortages, it's because some corrupt bastard is mucking up the works. There is absolutely no longer any technical reason to suffer shortages of any kind anywhere.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
So...water shortage might cause Israel and Palestine to have issues, then?
Except, of course that's a flat out lie, there was a magazine article, nothing else. The AGW deniers have been so thoroughly discredited they are reduced to making stuff up.
Increase middle-east migration to Europe.
Christ will this lying meme ever fucking die?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Spain is covered in greenhouses, if they run out of water, Europe runs out of food, so you can pretty much expect desalination plants to be built in large scale.
I know they already are getting into solar in a big way.
Obviously, it will be the ones with inadequate desalination plants.
Australia's population is growing faster than Bangladesh's in % (some 1.89%/yr vs ~1.2%/yr:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-29/kohler-infrastructure-emergency/5224586
Most of the growth is through immigration of people that are well off from Europe and the US.
For this reason major Australian cities needed to build expensive water desalination plants. Water costs raised 20%/yr for many years to
pay for it.
Electricity network had to be upgraded for the same reason and electricity went up 20%/yr for many years because of that.
Of course the populace didn't even notice until the carbon tax was introduced that caused a much smaller increase, then all hell
broke loose.
Because of the crazy population growth, house prices have passed from 3-4x average wage ~20 yrs ago to ~7x and, recently, ~11x.
Again , people are angry about this but have no clue of the reason : they blame investors, particularly Chinese, but never even
grasp the reason why investors would be so keen in buying houses. It's almost hilarious how they fight over the real reason while
missing the obvious. Of course, if one raises the issue of population, you are automatically branded a xenophobe and a racist.
The issue is so off the RADAR that a party dedicated to stable population only got 0.2% at the last election.
Ah, you should see what this population growth is doing to traffic and infrastructure.
Anyway, more people => less for everyone and water is just a small corollary to this
You'd think by then, countries will have invested in desalinization plants to make ocean water drinkable.
I'm from Mongolia, you insensitive clod.
Uh-huh. Here in Australia, we had one of these guys screeching about the perpetual drought Australia was going to be enduring. The government poured billions into building the biggest desalination plant in the country. Then the drought ended, the dams filled, and the desal plant is idling along, producing nothing, but costing half a million a day.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The problem is not water shortage, it's human surplus.
Israel will probably be OK. In the recent years, It invested heavily in reclaimed water and desalination facilities. It can already provide more then 50% of it's water from desalination and dirty water processing. The countries around Israel though, are not in such a great shape. Jordan buys water from Israel today, and would probably need to buy more in the future. Saudi Arabia might have some issues as well. Syria and Iraq are losing their infrastructures fast. It doesn't help that you have water on the other side of the country, if you don't have the infrastructure to move it... or the political stability to do that.
The most blatant corruption here are the so-called "free" trade agreements rammed down the throats of African nations (EU, I'm looking at you). They are killing local industries (just one example: they are swamped by cheap, disgusting leftovers from EU chicken industry because the "developed" nation's citizens can only stand breast and drumstick).
Water? The same: The likes of Nestlé and Veolia steal the water to re-sell it to the locals.
Now that's not to say that the local chiefs aren't corrupt -- but pointing at them from our "first world" couch totally misses the point.
Now excuse me, I'm going to barf.
Water stress in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland? You've got to be kidding! Where I live if you put a water butt outside with an open top it will fill up over winter. That's not with a pipe coming from the roof or anything like that, its just with the rain going directly through the hole in the top.
not while there are ignorant fools alive
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
But me and my family will be fine. That's all that matters to me.
"... as they forge a path to peace ..."
you must be talking about some other Israel I've never heard about, because the Israeli government hasn't genuinely sought "peace" from the day it was bandied about in the Balfour Declaration - the project was long ago high-jacked by Zionist racists. ... ...
The Golan Heights were "secured" by Israel specifically because of the water rights.
Israel have since built the desalination plants you speak of, but before that, they "resolved their water shortage problems" by simply taking it from others
Since then, we're all living on borrowed time
And technology won't solve this? I mean we have an ocean full of water and it's becoming cheaper and cheaper every day to turn it into drinking water, i think this is just a lot of doom calling (and i don't believe the statistic about the Netherlands, it's like the one in Al Gore's movie which proved to be wrong where the Netherlands will be drowned by 2040, for which we have built the delta works)
I think water won't even be a problem anymore in 20 years, but this is just to manipulate the politics to do something which will result in very little other than wasting money... (which they're totally kick-ass at thanks to these kind of reports)
For water desalination using nuclear means. Sure it won't support industry, but it will support local drinking water supplies. One problem at a time. Overall I don't really care and such a calamity will spur nuclear research that should have been done years ago.
Israel is on track to have its entire water consumption come from desalination in the next few years. They're already over half, and re-use over 90% of their wastewater. Water is not going to be a pressing issue at all.
Israel currently or will shortly desalinate 100% of its water needs and is actually refilling its aquifers. So I'm not sure what the basis of the claim is. However, the desalination is using natural gas, not solar, so it is not long-term sustainable. Not all the damage has been undone yet. The dead sea has been falling by 1 meter per year for the last 30+ years because all the water coming into it was used for irrigation by Israel and Jordan. While I believe they have arrested or perhaps stopped the drop, they have not yet refilled it. There has been an interesting proposal to develop hydroelectric power with a canal from the meditteranean, and an interesting twist proposed by professor Dan Zaslavsky to generate all power needed by Israel AND Palestine with a single downdraft tower. Here is an article on this interesting concept in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Zaslavsky's claim was that such a tower would reduce the amount of water going into the dead sea by 90% due to evaporation, therefore they could increase the flow into the dead sea by a factor of 10, generating 20GWatts of power. The concept has never been tested at scale so no one knows if it would work.
Obviously all the middle east is not going to cool down any time soon, and needs a desalination solution, or the current wave of immigration will look like a trickle. Ignoring for the moment the population boom which will destroy everything if they don't control it, the technical solution is nuclear power. A nuclear plant does not contribute to global warming, and the waste heat, applied to water, desalinates a lot of water. It's a productive use of all the energy from the plant instead of just 45%. Unfortunately, no one wants Arab countries to have nuclear plants given the current political environment. The risk of terrorism, or proliferation is huge. I think the article neglects Iran, which should be higher on the list. They are using 90+% of their surface water and are imminently in danger of running out. The minister in charge was predicting that 70% of the country could have to evacuate in just a few years. http://www.danielpipes.org/158...
With all due respect, this article indicated two factors leading to national water stress, the first is the currently recognized changes in rainfall patterns. The second is the political/population aspect to those nations. In many cases, it is not a total lack of water resources that will affect the population, but its distribution within the country and the lack of infrastructure or political will/means to match the distribution of water to the distribution of usage.
While many might focus on the "man-made" side of the issue regarding the changes in water distribution, the far far greater calamity is the 100% man-made factors that make up the political problems.
The US has unmatched monetary resources to easily manage the water distribution changes caused by changes to the climate, regardless of their cause. However, the political environment makes usage of those monetary resources to change the water usage distribution to match the future water resource distribution impossible. And sadly, there is next to zero chance of any change in the collective political will to alter US use of water to match future water distribution.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
Lets build a city around a place that has always had poor water supply. Then lets make artificial dams or other water holding areas. Let the people do what every they want with the water and years later we'll think of what might happen.
You chose to live there, learn to use the water wisely or move.
The Golan Heights were "secured" by Israel specifically because of the water rights.
And here I thought it was annexed after Israel captured it in that same 6-day war back in the 60's.
When Egypt kicked UN forces out of Sinai and deliberately went to block Tiran Straits DESPITE being warned about that being seen as a cause for war?
Then Egypt started amassing forces on the Israeli border.
Then Egypt got its ass handed to it, Israel taking the entire Sinai Peninsula, so Egypt dragged Jordan and Syria into the war.
So then THEY TOO got their asses handed to them, with Israel TAKING BACK the area which Jordan had annexed two decades prior.
You know, back in 1948 when they ganged up with their buddies from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and "volunteers" (or INSURGENTS as we call them today) from Pakistan, Arab Liberation Army, Muslim Brotherhood etc. etc. to "drive Jews into the sea" in a "war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades" as it was referred to by Arab League's Secretary-General Azzam Pasha.
Seems to me like Israel took ALL that ground specifically because they were invaded by those countries, with intent of extermination.
I.e. In order to have a better strategic position for defense from future invasions.
Which they didn't have to wait for too long.
But it is nice to see that even you can't run from the facts that THAT was THEN and that NOW they have resolved their water shortages.
That's a funny name for a cow.
That is assuming the temp is going up at the time, or the temp is going down. No one can predict when the heat cycle will end and we start the cooling cycle.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The amount of water on the planet won't change, and all those nations but Palestine have the money and engineering ability to get water. If the people of Palestine ever started using their brains en mass and stopped crippling their own chances at success they do amazing things too. No shortage of water for desalinization next to Palestine. Whole article is bullshit alarmist nonsense.
Note the birth rate of middle class or wealthy people is much below the 2.1 children per couple it takes to have "break even" population. The poor and ignorant are the problem
The Duggars are not poor.
PlanetVulkan.com
The Earth has been continually losing water since it was formed (aside from the off-chance that asteroids carried more water here - Great Lakes perhaps?).
Solar winds will continue to carry water vapors away from this planet. Changes in solar cycles will affect weather patterns on Earth, further exacerbating the problem.
Not to mention, as populations of people and animals increase, being composed of mostly water, this will also decrease environmental water levels.
Places like Egypt used to see rainfall much greater in the past than they do now - they may have even been semi-tropic.
This isn't a new change, but people are apparently becoming more aware of it. On a grand scale, unfortunately, there is little that can be done. On a micro scale, we can conserve and recycle as best we can.
Hearing reports such as these do make me glad I live near the Great Lakes, though.
They have Lancashire Uk as medium to high water shortage- well we aint London we only have 2 weather patterns here - grey over cast and grey over cast rainning.
do you also have opinion about where on scale of "ignorant 1 - 10" they might fall? I'd say about 12 myself
Do us a favor MightyMartian: Don't try to think you no mind. It's no strong suit for losers like you hiding behind fake online names and are giant zeros in life.
Why can't a no mind loser zero in life hiding behind fake online names like you MightyMartian die instead? Do the world a favor, die.
Dont try 'play smart'. You're an undereducated moron hiding behind fake names online as you're a loser in life.
Question: What's it like hiding behind fake names in your 20 yr. online done zero fantasy as you're a loser in life?
Agreed. The last time Jane Q. Public regurgitated this lie, I linked papers showing that mainstream science predicted anthropogenic CO2-driven warming, even in the 1970s.
By 2040, it will be solved.
1. California is building multiple desalinization plants to be ready by 2016. How many will the world have by 2040?
2. Recycling water is improving.
3. What if we put a pipe between the ocean and Death Valley. It is hot. The water would evaporate fast and a previous desert could become a giant inland see.
4. Pump water from ocean to Great Salt Lake in North America and Dead Sea. Keep them full and they will provide natural desalination by evaporation and rain.
5. Evaporation aids. Technology to cause more evaporation and thus more rain.
Man, give the stalking of Jane Q a break, it makes you look like a psycho, and instantly loses any respect for your words.
If debunking Jane's public statements is "stalking" then what is Jane's ~7 year campaign of harassing scientists using illegally obtained private emails? And given that the fate of civilization is at stake, it's worth noting that every minute Jane spends responding to my debunkings is another minute he can't spend telling another scientist to commit suicide.
And by the way, Jane's only a foot soldier. I'm also currently debunking Rep. Rohrabacher's accusations of fraud on Twitter- he's one of the most powerful Congressman in the USA and is on the House "Science" committee. Ironically, Jane/Lonny has been running interference for him on Twitter. So when I debunk Rohrabacher's claims in a little bit, I'll address Jane's at the same time. What Jane and Rohrabacher are doing is just wrong, and I'm going to keep opposing it even if some think that makes me look like a psycho and causes them to instantly lose any respect for my words.
The point is it's not just them, your stalking means in I rarely read you posts thru, it too over the top man.
You keep using this word "stalking" to describe the same kind of debunking that The Daily Show regularly does: showing that someone's public statements are internally inconsistent and/or inconsistent with reality.
Oh, and next time you think you see a splinter of "over the top" in someone else's comments, remember the log made up of the time you told someone "kill yourself" and all the times you've hurled insults like "denialist half wit" "dumnfuck" (sic) "idiots" "morons" without brains.