There is as much water now as when time began, you can’t make more of it and you can’t throw it away – water just ‘is’. It is one of the few substances on earth that is endlessly recycled. Indeed the drop of water in your morning coffee could have been in the heart of a whale or the sweat of a slave.
When the industrial revolution kicked off there were one billion people depending on that water – today there are seven billion. Just as we have mined the earth for ancient sunlight in the form of coal and oil so we have drained our aquifers for water to drive manufacturing and our industrial farms.
One hundred cities in northern China already ration water – Beijing’s future as China’s capital has been under review as its growth has outstripped its water resources. Twentyfour countries in Africa will not have enough water to meet their needs by 2025 as their populations continue to grow.
Our modern corporations are defined by and use unimaginable amounts of water. I would argue that Coca Cola Corporation is not in the business of manufacturing soft drinks but rather the business procuring more clean water than almost any other enterprise on earth. Intel Corporation has a water recycling programme that claims to have saved 10 billion litres of water per annum – imagine what their usage is if that is the saving!
However we continue to waste water on a monumental scale both in open canal agriculture in the developing world, wasteful manufacturing processes as well as for pleasure. In the US there are now 17,000 golf courses up from 4,000 in the 1950’s. It is estimated that there are 32 million acres of irrigated lawn in the US – more than three times the amount of irrigated corn fields. China is following the same development trend. Our children may well question our sanity in using our precious water to irrigate our lawns – then drilling for oil so that we can spend our weekends mowing them.
The first modern war over water has already taken place. The seven-day war between Israel and Jordan to take the Golan Heights was as much about controlling the headwaters of the Jordan River as anything else.
We need to get busy making some hard choices. We need to move to a water wise agriculture which will require a transfer of technology and funding to developing nations. We need to reduce our waste of water for pleasure and move to waterwise gardening and civic spaces. Our leading companies are already understanding that water is no longer free and managing this increasingly scarce and expensive resource like any other – those companies that ignore their water footprint will fail their shareholders and employees as the sustainability revolution takes hold. The real issue is what we decide to do with the poor – many of whom have limited access to water. During the industrial revolution the rich became overweight whilst the poor went hungry. In this sustainability revolution will we continue to water our lawns whilst the poor die of thirst as we take their water to make our consumer goods and food?
If we do not make better choices in the 21st century than we have in our past, we risk nothing less than the collapse of civilisation as the environmental migrations we will see will dwarf the economic migrations of the past. As we have seen in Yemen – people can put up with hunger and political repression– but not with a lack of water.
Let’s get busy repairing the future.
By Jason J Drew