OXFORD, United Kingdom (AlertNet) – Water is increasingly becoming a scarce resource and shortages could drive conflict, hit food and energy production and threaten growth in renewable energy technology, experts warned at a water security conference on Monday.
And climate change – which appears to be bringing more extreme weather events such as droughts and floods – is likely to make the situation even more difficult, they said.
“Climate change will hit more people through water than in any other way,” said David Grey, a University of Oxford water expert, pointing to record floods in Thailand, Pakistan and Australia and record droughts in Somalia, Russia and the U.S. state of Texas in just the past two years.
But cutting waste in water use, particularly in irrigation, as well as making good use of mobile phone technology, gathering better data and putting in place better water use policies all could help stem conflict, improve safety and ensure better water security, particularly for the world’s poorest people, the experts said.
“The scale of the challenge, and therefore the scale of the opportunity it presents, is unprecedented,” said Ian Walmsley, pro-vice chancellor for research at the University of Oxford.
Worldwide, farming accounts for 70 percent of the world’s freshwater use each year. But in agricultural breadbaskets like central India, the northern China plains, and the central western region of the United States, much of the water is drawn not just from rain but from deep aquifers that are quickly being depleted.
Peter Gleick, a leading water expert and head of the U.S.-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, likened the issue to drawing down a bank account. The situation could present huge problems in the future as the world tries to increase food production by at least 70 percent by 2050 to meet growing demand, experts said.
“A substantial amount of our food production worldwide comes from non-renewable groundwater resources, and in the long run that is not sustainable,” Gleick said.
Renewable energy production also is threatened by water shortages, he said. Huge solar energy arrays are planned in the western United States, but many of the best places to locate them also suffer severe shortages of the water needed to cool them.
Conflicts over access to water are as old as recorded history, Gleick said – his institute has created a map of 225 water conflicts dating back 5,000 years – but today “the risks of water-related conflicts are growing,” as shortages loom in many parts of the world. More
