IPCC Warns Of Greater Risk To Food & Water Security

AsianScientist (Apr. 11, 2014) – By T V Padma – The climate change-related risks from extreme events such as floods and heat waves will rise further with global warming, according to the second installment of the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. This will aggravate food and water insecurity, especially for some of the poorest communities.

The report of the second working group of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), dealing with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, and offering new insights into key risks due to climate change, was released in Yokohama, Japan.

“Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri warned.

Christopher Field, the co-chair of the second working group, added: “We are not in an era where climate change is some kind of a future hypothetical. We live in a world where the impacts of climate change that have already occurred are widespread and consequential. There is no question that we live in a world that is already altered by climate change.”

The report highlighted many global shifts that climate change has already caused. It said that changing rainfall and melting snow and ice have affected water resources in many regions. Glaciers have shrunk, affecting run-off and water resources downstream. Permafrost is thawing, and wheat and maize yields have fallen in many regions.

The report also repeated warnings about shifts in species’ migratory ranges and the threats this may pose to food security. It also raised concerns about increased human displacement and resulting conflicts.

Impacts in Asia

Asia will be particularly hard-hit by water scarcity, food insecurity, the redistribution of land species and an increased risk to coastal and marine ecosystems, the report said. It predicts that South Asia will be the region most impacted by global warming, due to more extreme weather events such as floods and droughts.

It has “rung warning bells for Asia” and has “very serious implications” for South Asia in particular, said Chandra Bhushan, deputy director at the Centre for Science and Environment, a Delhi-based NGO.

A major reason for the greater impact in the region is its large population of impoverished people, said Bhushan. Bangladesh, India and Pakistan together account for almost half the world’s poor people, he said.

Purnamita Dasgupta, coordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on rural areas, and professor at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi, said that the impacts of climate change “will add to the existing vulnerabilities of people in rural areas, such as lack of access to water and infrastructure”.

“We could have more poverty shocks because the poor are already disadvantaged,” she said, adding that climate change acts as a “threat multiplier”.

With 70 percent of people in developing countries living in rural areas, the “rural poor would be impacted through reduced access to water” and “stand to lose whatever assets they have” with a rise in extreme events such as floods and drought, she said.

The report provides scientific evidence on how adaptation could reduce the risks that climate change will pose and how to manage those risks. “We now have enough evidence to show that adaptation is important,” Dasgupta said.

However, it is difficult at this stage to work out the costs of adaptation measures, as few countries are yet to practice it. Nonetheless, Pachauri agreed that the report highlights the urgent need for adaptation and “hopefully restores the balance between the need for both mitigation and adaptation measures” by countries.

He added that there is a huge dearth of local knowledge on the kinds of adaptation needed in particular locations, and on which local institutions could be fully engaged in adaptation policies, practices and corresponding cost estimates. “That is a real gap” in knowledge that experts need to work on, Pachauri said.

Some positive messages

Yet the report said that “adaptation is already occurring” to an extent, as some governments are beginning to embed it in some planning processes.

“One thing that we have come up with is the importance of adaptation and mitigation choices because this is the only way we might be able to reduce the risks of climate change,” Pachauri said at a press briefing.

Camilla Toulmin, director of UK-based research organization the International Institute for Environment and Development, said in a statement: “Some of the world’s least developed countries are already forging ahead. Ethiopia has committed to carbon-neutral development. Bangladesh has invested US$10 billion of its own money to adapt to extreme climatic events. Nepal is the first country to develop adaptation plans at the community level.” More

 

© 2014

We Still Need To Deal With Drought

This is the time of year when drought drops from the headlines in all but the warmest parts of North America. Crops aren't withering in the sun; few homeowners worry about lawn-watering restrictions. Until the weather heats up in the spring, the weather headlines will be mostly about winter storms. But that doesn't mean moisture deficits have been resolved. National drought maps reveal that persistent drought is plaguing California, the central Plains states, and, to a lesser extent, the East Coast.

Water Harvesting

Looking more widely, the past eighteen months have seen a global outbreak of emergency water rationing in the face of sudden, extraordinary scarcity. In a diverse group of countries, including the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Australia, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa, India, Pakistan, China, Taiwan, Malaysia and the Philippines, a wide variety of rationing plans have had to be put into practice. Rationing has even become necessary in normally moist, green places, most prominently the United Kingdom, Ireland and New Zealand. In many situations, the causes of water shortages have been much more complex than routine drought or high population density. Thanks to greenhouse emissions, local climates are becoming increasingly fickle.

A whopping 86 percent of the world's total fresh water consumption is accounted for by production of food, fiber and other agricultural products, and 9 percent is attributable to industrial production. Farms dominate water use in the United States as well. But even though a scant 5 percent of the global footprint is residential water use, it is in the domestic supply where shortages are felt most immediately and most intensely by the majority of people.

When municipal or county water supplies are tightened, lucky residents with wells are able to supply themselves (at least until the well also goes dry). And increasingly, people in drought-prone areas are planning ahead and capturing rain for future use. A dozen states and the US Virgin Islands now have laws regulating, and for the most part encouraging, rainwater harvesting. In this, Texas leads the nation. In 2009, Colorado partially lifted a longstanding law that had banned homeownersfrom collecting rainwater off their own roofs. Utah repealed a similar ban in 2010. The state of Oregon publishes a guide to rainwater rainwater collection (PDF). (Hysteria a couple of years ago over the conviction of an Oregon man for water harvesting was unwarranted; he had built a vast system of reservoirs with a capacity of 13 million gallons—a bit more than is needed for personal use.)

Meanwhile, most of us are still stuck with paying for our residential water supply. And any economist can show you how the most efficient method of allocating water is "marginal cost pricing", under which the first gallon per week or month is the most valuable and expensive, with the cost falling as consumption rises. That, however, penalizes low-income households and rewards heavy consumption. Therefore, many municipalities across North America and the world have turned marginal cost pricing on its head. Under what are called increasing block tariff systems, each household has a monthly right to an initial "block" of that is free or very cheap, with the price escalating sharply for subsequent blocks.

But there will always be a wide gap between what it costs to provide municipal water and what many residents can afford to pay for it. Treating water as a market commodity almost inevitably leads to conflict, and water-privatization schemes have repeatedly failed.

Talk of looming worldwide conflict over water resources has been going on for years. But it is often conflict itself - state versus state, class versus class, neighbor versus neighbor and, increasingly, humanity versus nature - that triggers water scarcity in the first place. The only long-term solution is to resolve such conflicts, to ensure that every community has an adequate water supply. But even then, resources may not be bountiful, and rationing by some means other than willingness (and ability) to pay will be necessary.

If we cannot manage to conserve and share water fairly, there is little chance that we will manage share other resources fairly. Enforcing the right to water is, or at least should be, less complex and contentious than ensuring rights to, say, energy, food, or medical care. As Maude Barlow concluded in her 2007 book Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, "If ever there was a time for a plan of conservation and water justice to deal with the twin water crises of scarcity and inequity, now is that time. The world does not lack the knowledge about how to build a water-secure future; it lacks the political will."

Meanwhile, you might as well get a couple of rain barrels going. More

Photo by Wikimedia Commons/Sustainable Sanitation Alliance

Stan Cox is a senior scientist at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and author most recently of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing(The New Press, 2013).

 

Global majority faces water shortages 'within two generations'

The majority of the 9 billion people on Earth will live with severe pressure on fresh water within the space of two generations as climate change,pollution and over-use of resources take their toll, 500 scientists have warned.

The world's water systems would soon reach a tipping point that "could trigger irreversible change with potentially catastrophic consequences", more than 500 water experts warned on Friday as they called on governments to start conserving the vital resource. They said it was wrong to see fresh water as an endlessly renewable resource because, in many cases, people are pumping out water from underground sources at such a rate that it will not be restored within several lifetimes.

"These are self-inflicted wounds," said Charles Vörösmarty, a professor at the Cooperative Remote Sensing Science and Technology Centre. "We have discovered tipping points in the system. Already, there are 1 billion people relying on ground water supplies that are simply not there as renewable water supplies."

A majority of the population – about 4.5 billion people globally – already live within 50km of an "impaired" water resource – one that is running dry, or polluted. If these trends continue, millions more will see the water on which they depend running out or so filthy that it no longer supports life.

The threats are numerous. Climate change is likely to cause an increase in the frequency and severity of droughts, floods, heatwaves and storms. The run-off from agricultural fertilisers containing nitrogen has already created more than 200 large "dead zones" in seas, near to rivermouths, where fish can no longer live. Cheap technology to pump water from underground and rivers, and few restrictions on its use, has led to the over-use of scarce resources for irrigation or industrial purposes, with much of the water wasted because of poor techniques. And a rapidly rising population has increased demand beyond the capability of some water resources.

In some areas, so much water has been pumped out from underground that salt water has rushed in to fill the gap, forcing farmers to move to other areas because the salination makes their former water sources unusable.

Most of the areas where water will be scarcest soonest are in poor countries, which have little resilience to cope. Many are also in areas where there is already political instability, tension or outright conflict, and the competition for water resources will heighten these problems.

Water in the Anthropocene from WelcomeAnthropocene on Vimeo.

But the scientists warned that the developed world would also suffer. For instance, there are now 210 million citizens of the US living within 10 miles of an "impaired" water source, and that number is likely to rise as the effects of global warming take hold. In Europe, some water sources are running dry because of over-extraction for irrigation, much of which is carried on in an unsustainable fashion.

Pollutants are also causing severe problems in the rich world – the scientists highlighted the role of endocrine disruptors, which can cause fish to change gender, and the long-term effects of which on human populations are as yet barely known.

"There is no citizen of the world who can be complacent about this," said Janos Bogardy, director of the UN University's Institute for Environment and Human Security.

On Wednesday, UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, added his voice to concerns about water security: "We live in an increasingly water insecure world where demand often outstrips supply and where water quality often fails to meet minimum standards. Under current trends, future demands for water will not be met," he said.

Water Crisis Hitting Food, Energy – And Everything Else

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Mar 22 2013 (IPS) - How much water does it take to turn on a light? It took 10,000 litres to make your jeans. Another three big bathtubs of water was needed for your two-eggs-toast-coffee breakfast this morning.

We are surrounded by an unseen world of water: furniture, houses, cars, roads, buildings – practically everything we use and make needs water.

“There is no way to generate energy without water,” said Zafar Adeel, co-chair of the UN-Water Task Force on Water Security and director of the Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Canada.

Even solar panels need regular washing to perform well. Wind energy might be an exception, Adeel told IPS from a water conference in Beijing being held during World Water Week.

There is growing recognition that peak oil is nowhere near as important as peak water because there is no substitute for water. The growing shortage of water — 1.2 to 1.7 billion people face scarcity — has alarmed many. Water has been identified as an “urgent security issue”, by a group that last year included both former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the InterAction Council, an association of 37 former heads of state and government.

It’s important that “water security” be recognised by the U.N. Security Council as either as a trigger, a potential target, or a contributing factor to insecurity and potential conflict in many parts of the world, said Adeel.

Defining exactly what the term “water security” means has been challenging, but UN-Water, the United Nations’ inter-agency coordination mechanism for all water-related issues, now has a working definition.

They have defined water security as: “The capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of and acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being, and socio-economic development, for ensuring protection against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters, and for preserving ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability.”

The definition was released Friday on World Water Day along with an analytical brief “Water Security and the Global Water Agenda“.

“Water fits within this broader definition of security — embracing political, health, economic, personal, food, energy, environmental and other concerns — and acts as a central link between them,”says Michel Jarraud, Chair of UN-Water and secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

It is important to note that conflicts over water are rare. “Historically there hasn’t been a war between nations over water,” said Harriet Bigas, a co-author of the brief and colleague of Adeel at the Institute for Water, Environment and Health.

Driven largely by water and food shortages linked to drought in the Horn of Africa, almost 185,000 Somalis fled to neighbouring countries in 2011. In Sudan, violence broke out in March 2012 in the Jamam refugee camp where large numbers of people faced serious water scarcity. And in South Sudan, entire communities were forced to leave due to scarce water resources as a result of conflict in 2012.

Water insecurity can lead to cascading political, social, economic and environmental consequences, she said.

However, the norm is for nations and regional partners to work out water-sharing agreements, offering important opportunities for dialogue amongst traditional enemies.

“Water is a greater pathway to peace than conflict,” writes noted international water expert Aaron Wolf of Oregon State University. More

 

The Coming Global Water Crisis

What happens when demand for this essential resource starts exceeding supply in many parts of the world?

The recent UN alert that drought in the Sahel threatens 15 million lives is a harbinger of things to come.

In the next twenty years, global demand for fresh water will vastly outstrip reliable supply in many parts of the world. Thanks to population growth and agricultural intensification, humanity is drawing more heavily than ever on shared river basins and underground aquifers. Meanwhile, global warming is projected to exacerbate shortages in already water-stressed regions, even as it accelerates the rapid melting of glaciers and snow cover upon which a billion people depend for their ultimate source of water.

This sobering message emerges from the first U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment of Global Water Security. The document predicts that by 2030 humanity's "annual global water requirements" will exceed "current sustainable water supplies" by forty percent. Absent major policy interventions, water insecurity will generate widespread social and political instability and could even contribute to state failure in regions important to U.S. national security. (Look here for a webcast from the Woodrow Wilson Center of experts and U.S. government officials discussing the findings.)

The simultaneous ubiquity and scarcity of water is one of Earth's little ironies. Globally, 97.5 percent of H2O is contained in world's oceans. Of the planet's "fresh" water (the residual 2.5%), more than two-thirds is encased in ice packs and glaciers, particularly in Antarctica and Greenland, another thirty percent in groundwater, and almost one percent in high latitude permafrost. That leaves us with about 0.4 percent of global fresh water to account for: about two-thirds of that is contained in freshwater lakes, with the rest distributed among soil moisture (12 percent), the atmosphere (9.5 percent), wetlands (8.5 percent), rivers (1.5 percent) and vegetation (1 percent).

The need for reliable sources of fresh water is as old as our species, of course. What is new today is the combustible combination of surging global demand for increasingly scarce fresh water in certain volatile regions of poor governance. Several factors are driving this trend.

• Demographic pressure: By 2025, the world's population will swell from seven to nearly eight billion. The vast majority of this increase will occur in the developing world, particularly Africa. In rapidly expanding urban centers, demand for fresh water will rise for personal consumption, sanitation, industry, and hydroelectric use.
• Declining Fresh H2O supplies: According to Global Water Security, "one third of the world's population will live near water basins where the water deficit will be larger than 50 percent by 2030." Many regions that are already experiencing water stress will become "extremely more stressed" or even "exceptionally more stressed." In some areas, rapid depletion of underground aquifers will be the culprit. In others it will be reductions in meltwater as glaciers recede. In the Andes, hundreds of glaciers will simply disappear in coming decades, eliminating dry season water supplies. Similar, though more gradual, dynamics will be at play in the Himalayas, sometimes referred to as the world's "third pole".
• Changing dietary preferences: Meanwhile, the global middle class will surge from 1.8 to 4.9 billion by 2030. Wealthier populations will consume more meat, requiring a shift to more energy and water-intensive agriculture focusing on the raising of livestock and feed grain. Already today, some 93 percent of fresh water consumed is devoted to agriculture (from a combination of riverine, lake, and groundwater sources). Without massive behavioral changes, changing land use and food consumption patterns will place even greater pressures on fresh water resources.
• Poor Water Management: Adapting to a new era of water scarcity will require enormous investments in integrated water management, particularly in the developing world. This would include improving agricultural efficiency through new irrigation systems and drought-resistant crops; renovating infrastructure to reduce urban "water leakage" (which averages 30-50 percent in many cities); clarifying rights to the use of subterranean, riverine, and lacustrine water resources; and introducing pricing mechanisms that reflect the true economic value of water--admittedly a politically volatile step in societies where free (or cheap) access to water is viewed as an inherent, longstanding right.

Significantly, the intelligence community does not predict that increased competition for water resources will, by itself, be a source of violent conflict--a finding borne out by a rich body of research. And yet the same document warns that water stress may well "contribute to the risk of instability and state failure," particularly "when combined with poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions." The accompanying map makes clear that many of the countries likely to be hardest hit are fragile and/or authoritarian states located within the broad arc of instability encompassing North Africa, the Horn, the Arabian Peninsula, and southwest, central, and south Asia. In other words, states least able to cope.

Regional tensions over shared river basins will also rise. States will use diplomatic and other leverage to preserve their water interests, and "upstream" states will be tempted to use water as a diplomatic weapon, including by threatening to impede flow. Nonstate actors, notably terrorists and other extremists, may also seek to sabotage dams and other infrastructure.

Regional stability and peace, therefore, increasingly depend on effective management of the world's 263 shared international water basins. "Today, water basin agreements often do not exist or are inadequate." Analyzing the current capacity to manage seven major water basins, Global Water Security assesses mechanisms to govern the Brahmaputra and Amu Darya to be "inadequate," and those governing the Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile, and the Mekong as "limited." (The Indus and the Jordan rivers earn a higher, "moderate" score.) More

World Water Day 2012 official video

World Water Day 2012 official video, focusing on the theme of the campaign "Water and Food Security".

Produced by kf@kantfish.com and featuring a soundtrack by DDG Project. Animations by antiestatico.com
Download your animation on: http://www.unwater.org/worldwaterday

Nile dam project a hydropower hope, but regional sore point

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AlertNet) – Ethiopia has begun construction of a 6,000 megawatt (MW) hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile river, a move that has been greeted enthusiastically by many Ethiopians but that is causing concern in the downstream nations of Sudan and Egypt.

The project, which is scheduled to take six and a half years to complete, is being managed by the state-owned power utility company, Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo). The dam is being built about 900 km (560 miles) north-east of the capital, Addis Ababa, and just 40 km (25 miles) from the Sudanese border.

Ethiopia’s government hopes to capitalize on the energy potential of a river that is revered by the Ethiopian population but that until now has not been significantly exploited to feed the country’s growing need for electric power.

Ethiopia is the source of the Blue Nile, and its territory contributes up to 86 percent of the river’s water. The Blue Nile in turn is responsible for more than half of the water in the Nile, the world’s longest river system. The other main source, the White Nile, originates on the Ugandan side of Lake Victoria.

The new project is not the first dam to be constructed on tributaries of the Nile in Ethiopia. Three smaller projects with a combined capacity of about 760 MW have already been completed, and EEPCo is seeking financing for a 278 MW dam on another tributary, the Chemoga-Yeda River. But the planned Grand Renaissance Dam (GRD) dwarfs these projects in scale and cost.

The 6,000 MW dam will be built by Italian construction company Salini Costruttori, which received the construction contract in late 2010, while electromechanical work is being done by a local company, Metal and Engineering Corporation.

Ethiopia has been dubbed “the water tower of east Africa” because of its numerous river and lake systems. The Nile is an emblematic part of the country, immortalized in poems and songs and even on coins and bank notes. But its potential for hydroelectric power has until now gone largely unused.

For many Ethiopians, the new planned dam is not only about lighting their houses and providing power for businesses and to export, but it also holds a symbolic significance, a way of looking forward from memories of famine and conflict.

WORRIED NEIGHBOURS

Despite its popularity among Ethiopia’s population, the dam project has caused consternation in neighbouring Sudan as well as in Egypt, both downstream countries that rely upon the Nile for almost all their water and fear the dam will cause a reduction in water available to them.

The new dam will eventually create a lake containing more than 60 billion cubic metres of water, twice as much as Lake Tana, Ethiopia’s largest body of water.

There are also concerns about the potential environmental impact of the dam, although the scale of opposition has been smaller than that provoked by the Gibe III dam. Gibe III has provoked opposition from groups concerned about the drying up of Kenya’s Turkana Lake, the world’s largest desert lake, which is fed by the Gibe river, and the possible displacement of tribal people in Ethiopia and Kenya.

Gossaye Mengiste, an official of the ministry of water and energy, which oversees EEPCo, said he believed the environmental impact of the project would be minimal and that because the area around the dam is sparsely inhabited, no mass relocation of people would be necessary. More