Sunday, September 7, 2014

World Wide Droughts Will Lead to Water Wars Someday

Good Day World!

We can’t live without drinking water.

It’s the most precious resource on the planet, but you wouldn’t know it by the way it’s wasted.

We need to price water accordingly. When you turn on the tap and water flows, there's little recognition it's a finite resource.

We’re facing a worldwide weather phenomenon that threatens the future of water and food supplies, according to experts.

Colombia, Pakistan, Somalia, Australia, Guatemala, China and Kenya are just a few of the other countries currently suffering from severe drought conditions.

Droughts have plagued the earth for centuries. In fact, there's some debate over whether the recent spate of drought is different from the past.

What is clear to some analysts is that more severe weather episodes like drought are on the way. It’s only going to get worse.

"We'll see more droughts and floods in the decades to come," said LaDawn Haglund, a professor of justice and social inquiry at Arizona State University and an urban water expert.

"Warming temperatures are changing when and where how much water falls from the sky," she said in a recent NBC interview.

In California, the well-documented drought will cost the state $2.2 billion and put some 17,000 agricultural workers out of a job this year, according to a study from the University of California, Davis. California is easily the biggest agriculture-producing state in the United States.

It's the use of groundwater supplies after surface wells have dried up that has helped keep food prices low for now. That’s changing.

With drought almost guaranteed, the issue, say experts, is how the world deals with dwindling surface and groundwater supplies.

What's missing in all the drought talk is advanced planning by political leaders. Partisan politics prevent any unified response to an issue.

A lot of the blame goes on governments around the globe for failing to think beyond the last drought. That failure could bring on national security issues and heighten conflicts over water and food in the future.

It does not seem likely that we can realistically slow down population growth or the demands of economic growth that comes with it.

The demand for water will increase with time. The resources won’t.

For centuries, wars have been fought over precious commodities from all over the world—though, so far, water hasn't been one of them.

But according to Blue Gold: World Water Wars, that's all about to change as political, economic, and social movements make water a limited resource in more and more international regions.

(Book Photo via PBS)

The film takes viewers through the causes of the water crisis—mining, pollution, wetland destruction—and blocks out the potential effects of a water shortage.

If you're not even sure that fighting to own water is possible, then Flow is a good film to start with; the award-winning documentary asks that exact question, and then sets about answering it through interviews with scientists and activists, and in-depth discussions of, as the film refers to it, "the growing privatization of the world's dwindling freshwater supply."

But it's not all gloom and doom: filmmaker Irena Salina also looks at the solutions, individuals, and companies that are developing ways to stem the tide of water damage.

Time for me to walk on down the road…

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