Today’s collapses are already underway, the difference with the historical past being that inequities in water access and consequent crises are widespread. Water scarcity is a driver for population displacement – contributing ten percent of forced migratory flows, which topped 100 million last year. Ethiopia’s massive Renaissance Dam has stoked tensions with Sudan and Egypt, and terrorism and insecurity accompany a drying Lake Chad. Predictions of water conflicts are also current. These collapses were not sudden but unfolded over centuries with progressive declines punctuated by dramatic disasters and wars. The greatest ones arose around the rivers Nile, Indus, Euphrates and Tigris, or unravelled when water ran out, as happened with the 12th century BCE Turkish Hittite, 9th century Maya, 15th century Khmer, or 17th century Ming. We have been there before, as civilisations have always prospered or perished around water. As water is also crucial to the other 16 SDGs, the broader development impacts are profound. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, which promises safe and affordable drinking water for all, is increasingly out of reach. By 2025, half the world’s population will live in water-stressed areas and by the decade’s end, freshwater demand will outstrip supply. On prevailing trends, a water crunch is inevitable. Simultaneously, our growing population, now 8 billion, is digging deeper into underground aquifers at rates faster than their replenishment. Environmental destruction, which has caused the loss of a third of our forests and 85 percent of wetlands, is disrupting the water cycle at an alarming rate. We rely on that via a finely-tuned hydrological cycle of evaporation, condensation, precipitation, interception, infiltration, percolation, and transpiration to supply the 1 percent of total earthly water accessible for daily living.īut temperature rises from climate change is depleting glaciers. And 96 percent of this is saline oceans, covering 71 percent of the Earth’s surface.Ħ8 percent of the remaining water is locked into glaciers and 30 percent is deep underground. All the water that we were originally endowed with is all that we will ever have. Although this is an unimaginably large quantity, water is a finite resource. Thus accumulated a planetary stock of around 1.3 million cubic kilometres of water, with each cubic km containing one trillion litres. Gravity kept the water from being sucked away into space. The rest probably came up from the Earth’s core. Major faiths consider water a purifier in blessing ceremonies and in the ritual washing of the dead.Īncient beliefs that water is a gift of the gods are reflected in geological insight that the Earth acquired most of its water some four billion years ago from meteoroids bombarding our planet. The symbolism goes back millennia, with Greek philosophers considering water as basic bodily humour, the imbalance of which causes disease. That is how I learnt that water is a sacred substance. On her passing, it was but natural to establish a public drinking point in her memory. I was also roped into my beloved grandmother’s scheme for hydrating the labourers toiling on neighbourhood roads and buildings under the burning sun. Growing up as a child in India, my job was to fetch water for any visitor and for anyone who rang the doorbell demanding a drink. Water availability, access and affordability are acute problems for poor and crisis-vulnerable people, while billions of dollars in profits are extracted from the sector.
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