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Water Shortages Could Affect 5 Billion People By 2050, UNESCO Warns (theguardian.com)
About 3.6 billion people are estimated to be living in areas with a potential for water scarcity for at least one month per year, and this number could rise to as many as 5.7 billion people by 2050, according to a report published by UNESCO [PDF]. From a report: The comprehensive annual study warns of conflict and civilisational threats unless actions are taken to reduce the stress on rivers, lakes, aquifers, wetlands and reservoirs. The World Water Development Report -- released in drought-hit BrasÃlia -- says positive change is possible, particularly in the key agricultural sector, but only if there is a move towards nature-based solutions that rely more on soil and trees than steel and concrete.
"For too long, the world has turned first to human-built, or 'grey', infrastructure to improve water management. In doing so, it has often brushed aside traditional and indigenous knowledge that embraces greener approaches," says Gilbert Houngbo, the chair of UN Water, in the preface of the 100-page assessment. "In the face of accelerated consumption, increasing environmental degradation and the multi-faceted impacts of climate change, we clearly need new ways of manage competing demands on our freshwater resources."
"For too long, the world has turned first to human-built, or 'grey', infrastructure to improve water management. In doing so, it has often brushed aside traditional and indigenous knowledge that embraces greener approaches," says Gilbert Houngbo, the chair of UN Water, in the preface of the 100-page assessment. "In the face of accelerated consumption, increasing environmental degradation and the multi-faceted impacts of climate change, we clearly need new ways of manage competing demands on our freshwater resources."
...Everyone gets to enjoy "Raw Water".
I look forward to the part where we all move back into caves.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We get more than enough water for all world falling from the sky here. Finally the shite weather proves to be good for something ;)
When the oceans rise due to global warming everyone will have enough water.
What indigenous knowledge is there for managing water? Typically they would just move to another water source if their main one disappeared. Is there some magic tree and soil combination that creates water? My guess is Gilbert Houngbo is one of those African "leaders" who also believes in many crazy things.
As will Global warming, Over Population, Hunger, Pollution ...
Get the idea?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Dismissed as bullshit alarmist crap
May be alarmist, but certainly the cracks in the water infrastructure of large cities are showing...
Melbourne, Australia
Mexico City, Mexico
Cape Town, South Africa
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Jakarta, Indonesia
Certainly, we aren't running out of fresh water as a species. However, the fresh water isn't where the people are, and the infrastructure planning to adjust for fluctuations in historical rainfall patterns is lagging greatly.
The problems are likely technically solvable, but may be so expensive that they will serve displace populations (negative growth in mega cities). I don't think 5B people will die of thirst by 2050, but I can certainly imagine that 5B people wouldn't live where they might have been if it weren't for water issues.
Every single one of those can be traced back to overpopulation. The impact of population growth on per capita recoverable rainfall is far greater than global warming. There's three likely ways forward. Mass migration (globalist preferred option). Asia and Africa needs stop shitting out so many children (least likely). Mass die offs (most likely). Regardless of global warming.
There are ways to go about this that doesn't involve a lot of suffering and death. If we do nothing, the route is death by starvation, dehydration or disease. If we plan carefully and did something like a 1 child policy, then nobody has to die, we simply have a new generation that is smaller than the previous. Of course the religious nutjobs that run the world aren't going to allow such a thing, so either way it's going to be a war.
A lot of commenters seem to not get that, unless you have a handy solar, wind or tidal powered desalination plant lying around and the capital to build one, living on the coast won't help, as the water is not drinkable. Diseases are spread in marshlands too, so being too near the coast can impact your fresh water supply.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The problem with water shortage is that it is expensive to transport water to places where the shortage is. Combine it with the fact that people in most of those places are poor and you get a problem.
It's funny to me when somebody tells me to conserve water because of the water shortage in other countries. It's not like the water I save is going to be shipped to Africa, so, the only reason to conserve water is to save my money.
Once Tech solves the problem, the price will come down substantially.
Heck there are some very well known places that have fairly good DeSal plants supplying water already. There isn't a huge need (yet) therefore it is still expensive.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The Earth is constantly changing which means the old "nature based" ways will also become a nonviable answer. Thanks to climate change, we have vastly accelerated many changes which includes the location of available water resources. Our best bet is to work toward reversing the damage done and desalinate water using a water vapor distillation system (aka slingshot). Yes, these systems require energy but Sol provides us with more than enough energy for such systems.
We absolutely could stretch our water supply further but thanks to a tragedy of the commons coupled with capitalism, it simply won't happen without extreme enforcement measures. We already know that our politicians are spineless, so it's better that we assume the worst case scenario and create out own supply of fresh water.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
desalination
Once Tech solves the problem, the price will come down substantially.
Heck there are some very well known places that have fairly good DeSal plants supplying water already. There isn't a huge need (yet) therefore it is still expensive.
De-sal plants currently have two big flaws, you need to be near the ocean and you need to dump the brine somewhere. Okay, brine isn't high-level nuclear waste, but there's a lot more of it than high-level nuclear waste...
There's some folks working on making commercial chemical product like sodium bicarbonate calcium chloride from the brine which can finance the processing of the brine. However, right now, people are mostly just dumping the brine (back into the ocean making it locally saltier or into evaporation pools that contaminate the land).
That is the thing Slashdotters don't understand: things don't happen by magic. There isn't some sudden "breakthrough" where you can make desalinated water without a relatively expensive process. No one is going to suddenly create something to save the planet. That only happens in movies.
I am an engineer, but this is not my area of expertise. However, someone should try to honestly answer your questions. The problem that you are getting at is "entropy." It is much easier to burn fuel, emit CO2, and allow it to mix into the atmosphere, than it is to separate it back out and capture it.
Entropy is a thermodynamics term that relates to the amount of "disorder." It is the scrambled egg problem. It is far easier to break the egg and scramble it (add disorder) than to unscramble it and reassemble it (decrease disorder).
Even if one can solve the problem of separating out CO2, "reverse-combust[ing]" it requires energy (and almost certainly more than was put in originally).
There is a similar answer related to desalination (easier to add salt to water than to separate the two). There are people working on making desalination better, but it is still an energy intensive process.
However, you could do your part and support caring about the environment, making it clear to your elected representatives that you do, and voting for the more environmentally friendly candidate.
Could the brine be transported out say a mile or two and be offloaded there, where the deeper water and stronger currents will disapate it more, and could the evap pools be build from non water permeable material, so it can be treated like nuclear waste or something?
I am sure someone has asked these questions before, I am not saying I am smarter then all the people who work on this stuff.
New Zealand has been maneuvered by treasonous governments into being a debtor nation while running a trade surplus (should be impossible, but that's where treason comes in). Your land has been sold to foreigners for baubles and thanks to international trade treaties it's almost impossible to take back.
Don't worry about it. By that time, Nestle will be selling water to your kids. Just get filthy rich and everything will be fine.
Actually, Climate Change has been linked to increased rainfall in many areas. ...
FTFY
Hasn't it been shown that a lot of the increased rainfall is usually in all the wrong places; where it can't be easily used.
Off hand I can think of a few places where they don't seem to be getting that wonderful increase in rainfall. Southern India. Sub-Saharan Africa, California for the ten years preceding this year and last year. Etc.
I wouldn't want to bet my ability to survive on a throw of the "some places get more" dice.
It's funny to me when somebody tells me to conserve water because of the water shortage in other countries. It's not like the water I save is going to be shipped to Africa, so, the only reason to conserve water is to save my money.
Of course water isn't going to be shipped to Africa, but potable water has a pretty high carbon footprint. Also if much of your local water comes from natural aquifers, reducing the amount of water pumped out by a community reduces the general risk of local subsidence/sinkholes/etc...
There are other reasons to use less water than to simply save money.
To extract fresh water from sea-water, you have to separate the H2O molecules from whatever other crap has been dissolved. That includes virus particles and metal elements; salts, sodium, calcium, chloride, mercury, etc... First way is through porous membranes or micorpore clay filters. Then you have to force the water through these at pressure. That takes energy. You can try evaporating the water. That too requires energy to make the water reach 100C. Even if you tried to force the water into a vacuuum to lower the boiling point that will still take energy - either from pumping air out or from propellor cavitation. Some systems use solar power, others use tidal wave power. Nuclear is the most attractive.
They are working on generating bio-fuels from captured CO2.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
This must be totally coincidental! Also, are you sure these are not fake news?
In other news, many people are too stupid to see a looming catastrophe when it stares them in the face.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
New Zealand had a succession of Finance Ministers who saw what your Mr. Reagan and his wealthy friends were selling and went all in.
What we were sold was trickle down economics, and "all boats lift in a rising tide" and "user pays" all of which have been absolute disasters for working people and a huge cash grab for the wealthy, (also as you point out, wealthy foreigners).
When we "negotiate" international trade treaties, we have nothing to offer, as we gave everything away 20 years ago, which is one of the reason we can't sell milk to the Canadians (for example).
In the credits or annotations at the end of "The Big Short" (or here), it is noted that one of the players, Michael Burry or Ben Hockett, is focusing on water futures. At the time I was thinking, here's a guy who manages to see things that only become obvious in retrospect.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
As of this year, in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand a Chinese company is now extracting approx. 4 billion liters of water per year from our reservoir. Christchurch citizens had no say in the matter.
And shipping this water to China?
There is no real "brine problem" with desalination. All of the salt in the brine was there originally. Desalination just temporarily separates the salt and the water, without changing the amount of either.
Dismissed as bullshit alarmist crap
May be alarmist, but certainly the cracks in the water infrastructure of large cities are showing...
Melbourne, Australia
Mexico City, Mexico
Cape Town, South Africa
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Jakarta, Indonesia
Of that list, Melbourne has essentially solved it's problem with technology, money and good rainfall :-)
8 x (2000/600) x 1000 ~ 25,000 gallons/2,000 sqft typical house ~70 gallons/day. Most places have more rain than Phoenix.
In Civ, you have to wait until you build up to a Roman level of technology.
I apologize that someone modded this as flamebait, when it's the absolute truth. It's not just Asia and Africa, but the entire planet is becoming over-populated, with new settlements in places that can't sustain the population growth. It's a problem everywhere. Sadly, your citation of Asia and Africa makes you sound racist.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
A nuclear powered aircraft carrier can supply something like 50,000 people with daily clean water. I wonder how much a dedicated nuclear power plant could provide?
Maybe nuclear war, but it is very difficult to tell where wars have occurred if you look at a population graph from the last 5000 years.
I don't really care if you run out of water, if you are stupid enough to live in a desert and complain you have no water.
There is no real "brine problem" with desalination. All of the salt in the brine was there originally. Desalination just temporarily separates the salt and the water, without changing the amount of either.
The "brine" problem is if you dump it back into the ocean, it takes more and more energy to desalinate. Eventually you can reach the point of "peak-salt". Usually it doesn't get to that, but it is a problem you often need to think about...
A problem is the concentration of salt in the discharge is higher than in the ambient environment, causing local stresses to wildlife.
This is why you dump the brine somewhere that has an actual current, i.e. not right at the coast, and not in an inlet. That way, it gets dissipated over a large swath of ocean.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
certain areas are over populated but there is plenty of space out there. if they could move the water from floods in monsoon areas and find ways to pipe that water out to areas that need it (they can pipe oil around when necessary) or large man made reservoirs or to nearby deserts to return them to being fertile. It would need a grand global plan and a lot of jobs could be created. The monsoon areas in Asia could then sell fresh-ish water to Arabia and make some money back
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
If they can afford oil pipelines, they can afford water pipelines - depends on your motivation
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Dismissed as bullshit alarmist crap
[Snip]
Certainly, we aren't running out of fresh water as a species. However, the fresh water isn't where the people are, and the infrastructure planning to adjust for fluctuations in historical rainfall patterns is lagging greatly.
The problems are likely technically solvable, but may be so expensive that they will serve displace populations (negative growth in mega cities). I don't think 5B people will die of thirst by 2050, but I can certainly imagine that 5B people wouldn't live where they might have been if it weren't for water issues.
I don't think it's that simple. There is basically the same amount of water in the ecosystem, but the human population is growing dramatically and our water usage (per head) has been growing steadily over the last 50 years, especially in the developed world. Fifty years ago most of the domestic water uses we take for granted now - e.g. dish washers, central heating systems, power showers - either didn't exist or weren't available to most of the population. And the use of water in industrial processes has increased hugely as well.
As the population increase doesn't look like slowing (or reversing) any time soon, we are going to have to look critically at the ways we use water.
Ultimately, the resources are finite. Space itself isn't useful. For each human, there's a need for water, and food, and where to put their waste and poo. We've already caused the climate to change, what new disaster do you want next?
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
+1 Funny
+1 Informative
(Out of mod points)
The contents of this message have been doubly encrypted by ROT13
Recycle more, use more biodegradable packaging etc, turn poo into power or fertiliser, make industry and people waste less water, grow more food on newly reclaimed land, farm and manufacture more efficiently, lots more renewable power generation - there are lots of things that can be done to make people on this planet less wasteful but that takes a mindset change for a lot of the idiots out there that deny climate change.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The Guardian got Brasília right, so the 237th 8-bit ASCII character (Latin small letter i with acute) got lost in the copy-pasting.
How quaint. Care to elaborate?
Since I currently live in the Great Lakes water basin, where population is stagnant (or declining as it is in upstate New York), and where last year Lake Ontario were at record high levels (my dock being inundated for several weeks -- a once in decades event). Access to "lots" of fresh water is not necessarily a large concern. There are also treaties in place between the U.S. and Canada which makes it nearly impossible for ANY water to be shipped out of the basin -- so that over abundance of clean fresh water is very unlikely to change. The U.S. side of the basin does not have many economic advantages (note the population growth (or lack thereof)) as proof of this, but water -- no problem. We would really be happy for more "legal" immigration to occur, as we are really not overcrowded in any meaningful way -- those who immigrate will just have to accept the tax and regulatory environment :-)...
That works, perhaps short term. You still haven't addressed the near geometric growth of the population. This earth is finite in size. Years ago, I was able to take a trip around the entire planet in a series of flights. I started in the states, went to Singapore, then to London, then back. Much of the planet is mountains, deserts, and ocean.
I saw huge globs of plastics in the ocean. Lots of people living in arid climates.
It's babies, a basic biological drive. There are too many of them. It's not sustainable, given the near exponential growth. People aren't fastidious by nature. Portions of them have slowly woken up to sustainability, but many have not. Think about the huge deadzone in the Gulf of Mexico, the damaged Great Barrier Reef, and all of the other places that have become signs that we're no where near close to sustainability, yet babies keep coming faster than before. Without thought, it's eventually doom.
A colleague of mine deals with the millions of people in camps in Africa, victims of incessant war and strife. For some, life is living in a camp with no real chance of having a life of their own.
The climate deniers are one problem, but babies are still a problem that we're ignoring, and it's at the root of the pestilence of greed.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Significant portions of the planet have birth rates below replacement levels. In some places, this is masked by immigration, and in some it will be a while before the population levels actually decline from it. This happens pretty much everywhere women get education, opportunities for employment, access to birth control, and where the society is sufficiently stable that a 1-year-old is very likely to mature. Lack of this is most common in parts of Africa and Asia, which is why the population increases tend to be there.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
And I suppose we don't educate women in the USA, where the birthrate is very steadily climbing, and has been for 200years+, since the invasion.
And also why the global birthrate is up, not down, save for just a few countries (Japan as an example, acknowledged). You can't blame it on Asia and Africa. Yes, the numbers are high there, but they're largely high across the planet, and the geometry continues with the up arrow, not the down arrow.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Alternately, you could type "us birth rate by year" into Google, and look at the chart that pops up at the top. In that case, you'd see that the US birth rate went significantly down from 1960, hit the present rate about 1975, and has stayed pretty steady since. That would save you from publicly claiming that the US birth rate has been climbing for 200+ years.
Given that you're wrong on your first claim, I don't feel the need to dig into the others.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
My objection is to the liberal usage of the year 2050.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.