It is frequently reported that human society, capitalism, developmentalism, the polluter elite, etc are destroying the planets capacity to regenerate the resources we are taking from it. At the moment, it is estimated we have used up everything by August 2. The rest of the year involves plunder and destruction and lowers the date for the consumption of regenerable resources, next year and so on.
This is a problem when we come to basic survival supplies, like water….
Ground water loss
the amounts of fresh water and their rate of adequacy, is hard to estimate, rains etc vary, but the UN has just reported the following. And I quote directly.
(Groundwater depletion).
Groundwater is an essential freshwater resource stored in underground reservoirs called “aquifers”. These aquifers supply drinking water to over 2 billion people, and around 70 per cent of withdrawals are used for agriculture. However, more than half of the world’s major aquifers are being depleted faster than they can be naturally replenished. As groundwater accumulates over thousands of years, it is essentially a non-renewable resource. The tipping point in this case is reached when the water table falls below a level that existing wells can access. Once crossed, farmers will no longer have access to groundwater to irrigate their crops. This not only puts farmers at risk of losing their livelihoods, but can also lead to food insecurity and put entire food production systems at risk of failure.
emphasis added
This is likely to generate a ‘risk tipping point’ which increases the likelihood of cascading failure involving other dangers, see below.
Losses of ground water have already affected some countries
In the mid-1990s, Saudi Arabia was the world’s sixth- largest wheat exporter, based on the large-scale extraction of groundwater for irrigation. But once the wells ran dry, Saudi Arabian wheat production dropped and they had to rely on wheat imported from elsewhere. Other countries, like India, are not far from approaching this risk tipping point, too.
Another source of problems for ground water includes mining operations, especially fracking which cracks rocks and mixes substances from different layers. While this can be protected against for some years, if all the cracks are sealed off, there will come a time when the sealants break, and pollutants start permeating aquifers. So that water that remains in the aquifers may no longer be drinkable. Carbon Capture and Storage also risks contaminating water supplies.
Other Water Loss
Loss of fresh water supply is also threatened by the decline in Mountain glaciers through increased heat. These glaciers source most of the world’s great rivers, and water shortages are expected to trigger wars. This diminishment of water supply, so it will never be as great as it was, can be called ‘peak water’.
Peak water has already passed or is expected to occur within the next 10 years for many of the small glaciers in Central Europe, western Canada or South America. In the Andes, where peak water has already passed for many glaciers, communities are now grappling with the impacts of unreliable water sources for drinking water and irrigation.
There are also issues of water storage in dams because of increased evaporation levels due to the increased heat.
In Australia we have been watching our rivers die for years, as irrigation appears to strip so much water from them, they can no longer function. This could lead to the collapse of inland agriculture and, of course, country towns.
Tipping points
The idea of a risk tipping point is fairly simple.
There are different kinds of tipping points. For example, “climate tipping points” are tipping points after after which unstoppable changes occur which influence global climate and stop it reverting back to what has been historically normal. Examples of such tipping points include the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the release of methane from unfreezing tundra, the shifting of ocean currents, the rise in water vapour in the air. Some of these tipping points may have even occured even without rising temperatures, such as the human clearing of the Amazon and other large rainforests which will likely change rainfall patterns, as well as producing species extinction. Overfishing the oceans which could leave them dying.
A risk tipping point occurs when a “given socioecological system is no longer able to buffer risks and provide its expected functions” or when we have killed resilience, slack and redundancy in the social system and harmed its ability to bounce back to normal equilibria. If this happens “the risk of catastrophic impacts to these systems increases substantially”.
In an interconnected world the impacts of risk tipping points such as this are felt globally, as they cause ripple effects through food systems, the economy and the environment. They affect the very structure of our society and the well-being of future generations, and they also affect our ability to manage future risks. Groundwater, for instance, is relied upon to mitigate half of the agricultural losses caused by drought, a scenario we can expect to occur more often at many places in the future, due to climate change. If the groundwater has been depleted, this is an option we will no longer have.
So starvation, death, rampant inflation of food prices, food riots and so on can be expected to result from loss of water.
Given the world’s largely neoliberal regimes and their belief in markets, we can expect that the rich, and corporations, will try to purchase the water they need and take it away from others.
Privatization can be a problem
People will have heard of the UKs water problems. Given the country’s fame for rain, this is almost unbelievable, but water cleanliness is being destroyed by privatisation and the urge for profit.
UK rivers are full of sewage. the number of people admitted to hospital with waterborne diseases has risen by 60% since 2010. Data suggests that raw sewage was discharged into rivers and hence into the Seas, for 3.6m hours in 2023, doubling over the previous year.
The government has given water companies until 2035 to reduce the amount of sewage flowing into bathing water and ecologically important areas, but other discharges could continue until until 2050.
Perhaps not surprisingly Water companies increased profits from this bad performance. In 2022-23, they made £1.7bn in pre-tax profits, up 82% since 2018-19, when they made £955m. They also plan to increase water bills by up to 40%, to pay for cleaning up and debt payments. Over the last 30 or so years Thames Water has paid £7.2bn in dividends, and taken out £14.7bn in debt – some of which is likely to have gone on dividends. Between 1990 and 2023, English water companies have paid out a total of £53bn in dividends, meaning that they have given almost the same amount to shareholders as they currently have in debt.
Guardian 28 Feb 2024
In the US testing by the Environmental Protection agency has found that about 70 million people are exposed to toxic “forever chemicals” in their drinking water. However, the testing only covers one-third of the USA’s public water systems, so the total figures could be much higher. Independent estimates put the total at around 200 million people having tainted water. Likewise, parts of the water supply in the USA are heavily contaminated with cattle waste from huge feedlots. According to the Minnesota pollution control agency, nearly 70% of the state’s water pollution comes from crop and livestock production, and the pollution also affects groundwater wells.
Both shortage of fresh water and unpolluted fresh water will increase the problems of population increase. To feed the extra 2 billion or so people being, we may need to double the water supplies for irrigation.
Conclusion
As many as 4 billion people are already exposed to water stress conditions for at least one month a year. The natural ecosystems that provide clean water and alleviate floods and other risks — such as forests, mangroves and wetlands — are degrading and disappearing at alarming rates. Demand for water is projected to increase by up to 30% by 2050, while water-related conflicts and political instability are on the rise. And climate change is worsening the problem, intensifying floods and droughts, shifting precipitation patterns and fueling sea level rise.
World Resources Institute Securing Freshwater for All
This essentially human-based weakening of survival systems, is the real mark of the Anthropocene.
The more parts of the global system become precarious the more likely a system cascade will eventuate, in which a failure of one system generates failures in other systems which then reinforce the original failure and so on.
Increased rain, in some places, may be captured rather than simply flood and destroy towns, but that would require vast engineering works. A large building program for filtration and desalination plants may be necessary, although it seems improbable nowadays.
We have to stop destroying natural systems, and possibly risk building new kludge systems to deal with the destruction we have generated.
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 