-
Linden Ellis, ChinaDialogue
China’s Biggest Environmental Stories of 2010/11
›January 21, 2011 // By Wilson Center Staff
The original version of this post first appeared on ChinaDialogue’s The Daily Planet blog, December 23, 2010.
Last month I spent a few days in Washington, DC meeting mostly with people working on U.S.-China environmental relations. Among others, I met with Jennifer Turner, director of the China Environment Forum at the Wilson Center (and my former boss), and we had an exciting conversation about the biggest China environmental stories covered in the United States in 2010, and what we hope to see in 2011. I was inspired to write this post based on our conversation. This is of course neither definitive nor exhaustive, but merely my perspective on how things look from Washington.China Is Winning the Clean Energy Race. Energy was the big story in 2010. Studies show that the United States will need to renovate or retire virtually all of its power plants by 2050, and China must build a modern energy sector to serve a growing population. Both countries emphasized their intentions to build a clean energy economy in 2010 and almost immediately competition was dubbed a “race.” Soon after it was declared a two-party race, it became evident that China was winning.
China’s clean energy investment is two times greater than that of the United States, according to a Pew Charitable Trust report published last year. The news has centered upon China’s ability to make sweeping changes to domestic energy markets, in stark contrast to the United States’ inability to pass climate legislation. Most notably in 2010, China passed a regulation requiring that a percentage of all electric company profits be used for energy efficiency every year.
Energy “Co-op-etion.” Perhaps as a response to fears of “losing” the energy race, public opinion in the United States focused on new and existing energy cooperation and on market fairness. The U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center, signed in 2009, was officially launched in 2010 and is likely to formalize a great deal of on-going cooperation on energy between the United States and China. In December, Jonathan Silver, Executive Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Guarantee Program, spoke at a conference in San Francisco and described the developing energy relationship between China and the United States as “co-op-etition” – the two countries have complementary markets and a lot to learn from each other but will compete in U.S., Chinese, and international markets to sell clean technologies.
Concerns about the fairness of the market – initially because of changes in China’s government procurement laws discriminating against foreign clean technology companies – peaked with the U.S. Steel Workers’ petition in October. Americans are concerned that their technologies will suffer in the international market because of Chinese clean technology subsidies.
China “Ruined” Copenhagen. Perception that China ruined Copenhagen dominated the U.S. news early in the year but was softened by a more positive outlook following Cancun. Anxiety in Washington, DC regarding the accuracy of China’s CO2 data colored many debates on American participation in international climate negotiations all year.
Oil and Rare Earths. The oil spill in Dalian in July made big news in the United States as it came in the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Many comparisons were made, despite the enormous difference in scale between the two incidents. Rare earth elements (the spine of the clean technology industry) were another major concern that arose in 2010 in Washington. Many of America’s rare earth mines were shuttered decades ago when Chinese mines were able to produce more affordably. This year, China began restricting rare earth exports, at least partially for environmental reasons, forcing the United States to consider reopening many of its mines and how to deal domestically with the environmental effects of those mines.
In 2011 I hope that interest in China’s environment will continue in the United States, but I expect that we will see less on renewables, as stimulus money runs thin, and rising concern for more traditional pollutants and basic environmental governance in China (especially regarding water and air pollutants).
The 12th Five-Year Plan. Set to be released early 2011, the 12 Five-Year Plan will initially dominate energy stories as it outlines how China will meet its ambitious energy intensity targets. I expect nuclear energy will replace wind and solar as the big stories in 2011. Nuclear liability should be addressed in China in 2011, as it was in India in 2010. Because of the close energy business ties between China and the United States, liability laws in China are likely to be more sympathetic to the needs of American companies than India’s recent law, which exposes nuclear components suppliers to unlimited liability.
Soil Pollution Prevention and Remediation. China’s soil pollution survey was completed in 2009 and the draft Provisional Rules on Environmental Management of the Soil of Contaminated Sites was released by the Ministry of Environmental Protection for comment in December 2009. The problem is huge and significant in China’s development and construction boom, and little data has been publicly released from the survey. I expect that in 2011, we will start to see active management and enforcement, at least in major cities.
Water Quality and Quantity. Water has and will likely continue to be, the greatest environmental concern in China and abroad, given its transboundary nature. Turner suggests we will see more on control of and attention to nitrogen pollution in China’s waterways in 2011.
To chime in with your comments on what you feel were the biggest stories of 2010 and what you predict will dominate 2011, be sure to let us know below or on ChinaDialogue.
Linden Ellis is the U.S. project director of ChinaDialogue and a former project assistant for the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum.
Sources: Asia Society, ChinaDialogue, The New York Times, Pew Charitable Trust.
Photo Credit: “Factory in Inner Mongolia,” courtesy of flickr user Bert van Dijk. -
Elizabeth Malone on Climate Change and Glacial Melt in High Asia
›
“There’s nothing more iconic, I think, about the climate change issue than glaciers,” says Elizabeth Malone, senior research scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Malone served as the technical lead on “Changing Glaciers and Hydrology in Asia: Addressing Vulnerability to Glacier Melt Impacts,” a USAID report released in late 2010 that explores the linkages between climate change, demographic change, and glacier melt in the Himalayas and other nearby mountain systems.
Describing glaciers as “transboundary in the largest sense,” Malone points out that meltwater from High Asian glaciers feeds many of the region’s largest rivers, including the Indus, Ganges, Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, and Mekong. While glacial melt does not necessarily constitute a large percentage of those rivers’ downstream flow volume, concern persists that continued rapid glacial melt induced by climate change could eventually impact water availability and food security in densely populated areas of South and East Asia.
Rapid demographic change has potentially factored into accelerated glacial melt, even though the connection may not be a direct one, Malone adds.
Atmospheric pollution generated by growing populations contributes to global warming, while black carbon emissions from cooking and home heating can eventually settle on glacial ice fields, accelerating melt rates. Given such cause-and-effect relationships, Malone says that rapid population growth and the continued retreat of High Asian glaciers are “two problems that seem distant,” yet “are indeed very related.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
Watch: Amy Webb Girard on Integrated Development Strategies for Improved Women’s Nutrition
›“When women become pregnant…their nutrient needs shoot through the roof,” said Amy Webb Girard of Emory University’s School of Public Health in this interview with ECSP and the Global Health Initiative. Girard explains that under-nutrition is a major problem for women – especially pregnant women – in resource-poor settings.
“For example, iron requirements almost double during the course of pregnancy, but iron is one of those nutrients that are really difficult to get,” Girard explained. Meat is not readily available in many developing countries and the iron in non-meat foods is not absorbed as completely. As a result, “women by and large are unable to meet those nutrient needs,” she said.
Fortunately, there is “an arsenal of nutritional interventions available,” noted Girard, including micro-nutrient supplements, behavior change strategies, and integrated facility- and community-based delivery methods.
“Additionally I think it’s very important that we also look at food production. This is a key, key thing,” said Girard. “Women who are able to produce their own foods [and] households that can produce their own foods have greater food security.”
“A lot of these agricultural strategies serve double purposes,” Girard said. “They not only increase the available food and the quality of that food, they improve women’s livelihoods, they give them a source of income, they give them – as some studies have shown – greater ability to negotiate within their own households for how money should be spent [and] whether they should access care or not. So they actually empower women in ways beyond nutrition.” -
National Geographic’s Population Seven Billion
›The short feature above and accompanying cover article in the January 2011 issue launch National Geographic’s seven-part year-long series examining global population. The world is set to hit seven billion this year, according to current UN projections, and may reach nine billion by 2045.
The authors point out that today, 13 percent of people don’t have access to clean water globally and 38 percent lack adequate sanitation. Nearly one billion people have inadequate nutrition. Natural resources are strained. Is reducing population growth the key to addressing these problems?
Not according to Robert Kuznig, author of National Geographic’s lead article, who writes that “fixating on population numbers is not the best way to confront the future…the problem that needs solving is poverty and lack of infrastructure, not overpopulation.”
“The most aggressive population control program imaginable will not save Bangladesh from sea-level rise, Rwanda from another genocide, or all of us from our enormous environmental problems,” writes Kuznig. Speaking on NPR’s Talk of the Nation last week, he reiterated this message, saying global problems “have to be tackled whether we’re eight billion people on Earth, or seven, or nine, and the scale for them is large in any case.”
Instead, the challenge is simultaneously addressing poverty, health, and education while reducing our environmental impact, says Kuznig.
“You don’t have to impose prescriptive policies for population growth, but basically if you can help people develop a nice, comfortable lifestyle and give them the access to medical care and so on, they can do it themselves,” said Richard Harris, a science correspondent for NPR, speaking with Kuznig on Talk of the Nation.
Kuznig’s article highlights the Indian state of Kerala, where thanks to state investments in health and education, 90 percent of women in the state can read (the highest rate in India) and the fertility rate has dropped to 1.7 births per woman. One reason for this is that educated girls have children later and are more open to and aware of contraceptive options.
Whither Family Planning?
In a post on Kuznig’s piece, Andrew Revkin, of The New York Times’ Dot Earth blog, points to The New Security Beat’s recent interview with Joel E. Cohen about the crucial role of education in reducing the impact of population growth. Cohen asks: “Is it too many people or is it too few people? The truth is, both are real problems, and the fortunate thing is that we have enough information to do much better in addressing both of those problems than we are doing – we may not have silver bullets, but we’re not using the knowledge we have.”
Although the National Geographic article and video emphasize the connections between poverty reduction, health, education, and population growth, both give short shrift to family planning. It’s true that fertility is shrinking in many places, and global average fertility will likely reach replacement levels by 2030, but parts of the world – like essentially all of sub-Saharan Africa for example – still have very high rates of fertility (over five) and a high unmet demand for family planning. Globally, it is estimated that 215 million women in developing countries want to avoid pregnancy but are not using effective contraception.
Development should help reduce these levels in time, but without continued funding for reproductive health services and family planning supplies, the declining trends that Kurznig cites, which are based on some potentially problematic assumptions, are unlikely to continue.
As Kuznig told NPR, “you need birth-control methods to be available, and you need the people to have the mindset that allows them to want to use them.”
At ECSP’s “Dialogue on Managing the Planet” session yesterday at the Wilson Center, National Geographic Executive Editor Dennis Dimick urged the audience to “stay tuned – you can’t comprehensively address an issue as global and as huge as this in one article, and within this series later in the year we will talk about [family planning] very specifically.” Needless to say, I look forward to seeing it, as addressing the unmet need for family planning is a crucial part of any comprehensive effort to reduce population growth and improve environmental, social, and health outcomes.
Sources: Center for Global Development, Dot Earth, NPR, Population Reference Bureau, World Bank.
Video Credit: “7 Billion, National Geographic Magazine,” courtesy of National Geographic. -
In FOCUS: To Get HELP, Add Livelihoods to Population, Health, and Environment
›January 20, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffProponents of integrated development have always faced significant barriers, but with a new focus on international aid from the Obama administration, the tide may be turning. To fully harness this momentum, Gib Clarke argues in a new ECSP brief that the population-health-environment (PHE) community must solidify its research base, reach out to new partners, and push for flexible funding and programming.
In “Helping Hands: A Livelihood Approach to Population, Health, and Environment Programs,” he writes that PHE programs should also add livelihoods (i.e., ways to make a living) as a critical element. He suggests such programs adopt a new moniker: “HELP” – Health, Environment, Livelihoods, and Population.
“Helping Hands” comes at a time when the integrated approach is being touted at the highest levels:“We cannot simply confront individual preventable illnesses in isolation. The world is interconnected, and that demands an integrated approach to global health,” said President Barack Obama in May 2009, echoing what population-health-environment (PHE) practitioners have long argued: Integrated lives with integrated problems require integrated solutions. Proponents of integration face significant barriers: lack of funding, programmatic silos, and policy disinterest.
While the Administration’s newest development efforts (see, e.g., Feed the Future Initiative, Global Health Initiative, and release of the QDDR) all recognize the power of integration, the degree to which these initiatives will operate across sectors remains to be seen. Drawing on interviews with leading experts, Clarke outlines the continuing challenges to implementing more integrated PHE programs and offers four recommendations for overcoming them:
“Given the strong base of existing and recent PHE programs, the PHE community is well-positioned to work with lead partners in Obama’s Global Health Initiative, climate change adaptation efforts, food security programs, and other upcoming crosscutting work,” concludes Clarke, who is currently director of planning and development at Interfaith Community Health Center in Bellingham, Washington. For example, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah stated that the Feed the Future program would be closely integrating its objectives with the Global Health Initiative – a potential opportunity for PHE programs that offer both health benefits and food security.- The PHE community should adopt a new name that highlights the all-important livelihood component, such as “HELP Plus.”
- PHE programs need to gather data and conduct operational research to justify the claims of the PHE field.
- The PHE community needs to “agree to disagree” on the issue of scaling up integrated programs.
- PHE programs should seek funding from a diverse array of donors.
“This increased interest in integration may also be the best opportunity for finding new funding, fostering replication, and scaling up. It is a promising moment for integrated approaches, whether we call them PHE, HELP Plus, or some other acronym,” writes Clarke.
“Helping Hands: A Livelihood Approach to Population, Health, and Environment Programs” along with previous FOCUS issues are available on ECSP’s publications page.
Image Credit: From the cover of “Helping Hands: A Livelihood Approach to Population, Health, and Environment Programs,” courtesy of the Wilson Center. -
Apply Now for the Compton Foundation/PRB International Fellowship
Doing Research on Reproductive Health, Environment, and Security?
›January 19, 2011 // By Hannah MarquseeThe Population Reference Bureau and Compton Foundation’s International Fellows Program deadline is rapidly approaching on January 24. The fellowship is for students from sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America seeking to affect policy and/or improve the effectiveness of population, family planning, and reproductive health programs in the developing world. Master’s students may be awarded up to $10,000 and PhD students up to $20,000 to perform capstone/internship work or dissertation research on the intersection between reproductive health, the environment, and security.
2010 Compton/PRB Fellow Kennedy Maring, a Ugandan student at UNC Chapel Hill, spent a year researching the feasibility of integrating family planning services into HIV/AIDS programs in Masindi, Uganda, in order to address high rates of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Maring interviewed 182 pregnant women and 11 health providers in Masindi, and found that while more women in the area understood that HIV could be passed from mother to child than the national average, few were using available services such as HIV counseling or family planning. Her research resulted in many recommendations to improve prevention of HIV transmission and use of family planning, including: integrate family planning into HIV prevention; train more health providers; involve men in reproductive health care; encourage hospital delivery; bring services to the people; and provide free breast milk supplements.
Patrick Kipalu, an American University student from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), traveled deep into his country’s forests to interview indigenous people about their perspective on and awareness of climate change, deforestation, and mitigation programs such as the UN Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program (REDD). Kipalu’s research showed that weak forestry governance, widespread ignorance of forestry laws, corruption, and lack of indigenous community participation, among other challenges, will make successful implementation of REDD difficult. If the current style of forestry management in the DRC continues, REDD will only provide incentives for more corruption and deforestation, he found. In this highly centralized government process, the government, logging companies, and other powerful stakeholders will reap all the benefits without any revenue going back to benefit indigenous forest communities.
How to Apply
2011 fellowship applications are being accepted until January 24, 2011. To apply, send a completed application form, curriculum vitae, cover letter, transcript, abstract of proposed research, budget, and two letters of recommendation to Dr. Ashley Frost at afrost@prb.org. Master’s students must also provide a letter from the organization where their capstone/internship will take place, and Ph.D. students must provide proof of an approved research proposal.
For full instructions, visit the fellowship site on PRB.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “photoshot,” courtesy of flickr user hippolyte. -
How Population Growth Is Straining the World’s Most Vital Resource
Turning Up the Water Pressure [Part Two]
›January 19, 2011 // By Russell SticklorThis article by Russell Sticklor appeared originally in the Fall 2010 issue of the Izaak Walton League’s Outdoor America magazine. Read part one here.
As concerns over water resources have grown around the globe, so too have proposed solutions, which range from common sense to absurd. Towing icebergs into the Persian Gulf or floating giant bags of fresh water across oceans to water-scarce countries are among the non-starters. But more moderate versions of those ideas are already being put into practice. These solutions showcase the power of human ingenuity — and reveal just how desperate some nations have become to secure water.
For example, India is doing business with a company out of tiny Sitka, Alaska, laying the framework for a water-export deal that could see huge volumes of water shipped via supertankers from the water-rich state of Alaska to a depot south of Mumbai. Depending on the success of this arrangement, moving bulk water via ship could theoretically become as commonplace as transoceanic oil shipments are today.
There is far greater potential, however, in harnessing the water supply of the world’s oceans. Perhaps more than any other technological breakthrough, desalination offers the best chance to ease our population-driven water crunch, because it can bolster supply. Although current desalination technology is not perfect, Eric Hoke, an associate professor of environmental engineering at the University of California-Los Angeles, told me via email, it is already capable of converting practically any water source into water that is acceptable for use in households, agriculture, or industrial production. Distances between supply and demand would be relatively short, considering that 40 percent of the world’s population — some 2.7 billion people — live within 60 miles of a coastline.
The Lure of Desalination
Although desalination plants are already up and running from Florida to Australia, the jury is still out on the role desalination can play in mitigating the world’s fresh water crisis. Concerns persist over the environmental impact seawater-intake pipes have on marine life and delicate coastal ecosystems. Another question is cost: Desalination plants consume enormous amounts of electricity, which makes them prohibitively expensive in most parts of the world. Desalination technology may not be able to produce water in sufficient scale — or cheaply enough — to accommodate the growing need for agricultural water. “Desalination is more and more effective [in producing] large quantities of water,” notes Laval University Professor Frédéric Lasserre in an interview. “But the capital needed is huge, and the water cost, now about 75 cents per cubic meter, is far too expensive for agriculture.” Although desalination might be “a good solution for cities and industries that can afford such water,” Lasserre predicts it “will never be a solution for agricultural uses.”
Nevertheless, desalination’s promise of easing future water crunches in populous coastal regions gives the technology game-changing potential at the global level. “Desalination technology,” Columbia University’s Upmanu Lall told said in an email, “will improve to the point that [water scarcity] will not be an issue for coastal areas.”
A Glass Half Full
With world population projected to grow by at least 2 billion during the next 40 years, water will likely remain a chief source of global anxiety deep into the 21st century. Because water plays such a fundamental role in everyday life across every society on earth, its shared stewardship may become an absolute necessity.
Take India and Pakistan’s landmark Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, which is still in effect today. The agreement — signed by two countries that otherwise can’t stand each other — shows that when crafted appropriately and with enough patience, international water-sharing pacts can help defuse tensions over water access before those tensions escalate into violence. Similar collaboration on managing shared waters in other areas of the world — a process that can be a bit bumpy at times — has proven successful to date.
Meanwhile, more widespread distribution of reliable family planning tools and services across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia will also be needed if the international community hopes to meaningfully address water scarcity concerns. Better access to healthcare and family planning tools would empower women to take greater control over their reproductive health and potentially elevate living standards in crowded parts of the developing world. Smaller family sizes would help decelerate population growth over time, easing the burden on water and soil resources in many areas. The key is ensuring such efforts have adequate funding. The United States recently pledged $63 billion over the next six years through its Global Health Initiative to help partner countries improve health outcomes through strengthened health systems, with a particular focus on improving the health of women and children.
Putting a dent in the global population growth rate will be important, but it must be accompanied by a sustained push for conservation — nowhere more so than in agriculture. Investing in the repair of a leaky irrigation infrastructure could help save water that might otherwise literally slip through the cracks. Attention to maintaining healthy soil quality — by practicing regular crop rotation, for example — could also help boost the efficiency of irrigation water.
Setting a Fair Price
The most enduring changes to current water-use practices may have to come in the form of pricing. In most parts of the world, including parts of the United States, groundwater removal is conducted with virtually zero oversight, allowing farmers to withdraw water as if sitting atop a bottomless resource. But as groundwater tables approach exhaustion, the equation changes; as Ben Franklin famously pointed out, “when the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.”
The key, then, is to establish the worth of water before this comes to pass. Smart pricing could encourage conservation by making it less economical to grow water-intensive crops, particularly those ill-suited to a particular climate. “Some crops being grown should not be grown . . . once the true cost of water is factored in,” Nirvikar Singh, a University of California-Santa Cruz economics professor who focuses on water issues, told me via email. Pricing would also provide a revenue stream for modernizing irrigation infrastructures and maintaining sewage systems and water treatment centers, further bolstering water efficiency and quality both in the United States and around the globe.
To be sure, implementing a pricing scheme for water resources — which have been essentially free throughout history — will be unpopular in many parts of the world. It’s natural to expect some pushback from the public as water managers and governments take steps to address the 21st century water crunch. But given the resource’s undeniable and universal value on an ever-more crowded planet, few options exist aside from using the power of the purse to push for more efficient water use.
In the end, however, water pricing must be combined with greater public value on water conservation — we must not flush water down our drains before using it to its full potential. Whether that involves improving the water transportation infrastructure, recycling wastewater, taking shorter showers, or turning to less water-intensive plants and crops, steps big and small need to be taken to better conserve and more equitably divide the world’s water to irrigate our farms, grow our economies, and sustain future generations.
Sources: Columbia Water Center, National Geographic, Population Reference Bureau, White House.
Photo Credits: “Juhu Beach Crowded,” courtesy of flickr user la_imagen, and “Irrigation (China),” courtesy of flickr user spavaai. -
How Population Growth Is Straining the World’s Most Vital Resource
Turning Up the Water Pressure [Part One]
›January 18, 2011 // By Russell SticklorThis article by Russell Sticklor appeared originally in the Fall 2010 issue of the Izaak Walton League’s Outdoor America magazine.
For many Americans, India — home to more than 1.1 billion people — seems like a world away. Its staggering population growth in recent years might earn an occasional newspaper headline, but otherwise, the massive demographic shift taking place on our planet is out of sight, out of mind. Yet within 20 years, India is expected to eclipse China as the world’s most populous nation; by mid-century, it may be home to 1.6 billion people.
So what?
In a world that is increasingly connected by the forces of cultural, economic, and environmental globalization, the future of the United States is intertwined with that of India. Much of this shared fate stems from global resource scarcity. New population-driven demands for food and energy production will increase pressure on the world’s power-generating and agricultural capabilities. But for a crowded India, domestic scarcity of one key resource could destabilize the country in the decades to come: clean, fresh water.
Stepping Into a Water-Stressed Future
From Africa’s Nile Basin and the deserts of the Middle East to the arid reaches of northern China, water resources are being burdened as never before in human history. There may be more or less the same amount of water held in the earth’s atmosphere, oceans, surface waters, soils, and ice caps as there was 50 — or even 50 million — years ago, but demand on that finite supply is soaring.
Consider that since 1900, the world population has skyrocketed from one billion to the cusp of seven billion today, with mid-range projections placing the global total at roughly 9.5 billion by mid-century. And it only took 12 years to add the last billion.
Unlike the United States — which is a water-abundant country by global standards — India is growing weaker with each passing year in its ability to withstand drought or other water-related climate shocks. India’s water outlook is cause for alarm not just because of population growth but also because of climate change-induced shifts in the region’s water supply. Depletion of groundwater stocks in the country’s key agricultural breadbaskets has raised water worries even further. Water scarcity is not some abstract threat in India. As Ashok Jaitly, director of the water resources division at New Delhi’s Energy and Resources Institute, told me this past spring, “we are already in a crisis.”
How the country manages its water scarcity challenges over the coming decades will have repercussions on food prices, energy supplies, and security the world over — impacts that will be felt here in the United States. And India is not the only country wrestling with the intertwined challenges of population growth and water scarcity.
Transboundary Tensions
Several of the world’s most strategically important aquifers and river systems cross one or more major international boundaries. Disputes over dwindling surface- and groundwater supplies have remained local and have rarely boiled over into physical conflict thus far. But given the challenges faced by countries like India, small-scale water disputes may move beyond national borders before the end of this century.
Looming global water shortages, warns a recent World Economic Forum report, will “tear into various parts of the global economic system” and “start to emerge as a headline geopolitical issue” in the coming decades.
This has become a national security issue for the United States. Any country that cannot meet population-linked water demands runs the risk of becoming a failed state and potentially providing fertile ground for international terrorist networks. For that reason, the United States is keeping close track of how water relations evolve in countries like Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. It is also one of the reasons water security is a key goal of U.S. development initiatives overseas. For instance, between 2007 and 2008, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) invested nearly $500 million across more than 70 countries to boost water efficiency, improve water treatment, and promote more sustainable water management.
More Mouths to Feed, Limited Land to Farm
Water is a critical component of industrial processes the world over — from manufacturing and mining to generating energy — and shapes the everyday lives of the people who rely on it for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. But the aspect of modern society most affected by decreasing water availability is food production. According to the United Nations, agriculture accounts for roughly 70 percent of total worldwide water usage.Global population growth translates into tens of millions of new mouths to feed with each passing year, straining the world’s ability to meet basic food needs. Given the finite amount of land on which crops can be productively and reliably grown and the constant pressure on farms to meet the needs of a growing population, the 20th and early 21st centuries have been marked by periodic regional food crises that were often induced by drought, poor stewardship of soil resources, or a combination of the two. As demographic change continues to rapidly unfold throughout much of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the ability of farmers and agribusinesses to keep pace with surging food demands will be continually challenged. Food shortages could very well emerge as a staple of 21st century life, particularly in the developing world.
Mirroring the growing burden on farmland will be a growing demand for water resources for agricultural use — and the outlook is not promising. According to a report from the International Water Management Institute in Sri Lanka, “Current estimates indicate that we will not have enough water to feed ourselves in 25 years’ time.”
As one of the world’s largest agricultural producers, the United States will be affected by this food crisis in multiple ways. Decreased food security abroad will increase demand for food products originating from American breadbaskets in California and the Midwest, possibly resulting in more intensive (and less sustainable) use of U.S. farmland. It may also drive up prices at the grocery store. Booming populations in east and south Asia could affect patterns of global food production, particularly if severe droughts spark downturns in food production in key Chinese or Indian agricultural centers. Such an outcome would push those countries to import huge quantities of grain and other food staples to avert widespread hunger — a move that would drive up food prices on the global market, possibly with little advance warning. Running out of arable land in the developing world could produce a similar outcome, Upmanu Lall, director of the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University, said via email.
Changing Tastes of the Developing World
Economic modernization and population growth in the developing world could affect global food production in other ways. In many developing countries, rising living standards are prompting changes in dietary preferences: More people are moving from traditional rice- and wheat-based diets to diets heavier in meat. Accommodating this shift at the global level results in greater demand on “virtual water” — the amount of water required to bring an agricultural or livestock product to market. According to the World Water Council, 264 gallons of water are needed to produce 2.2 pounds of wheat (370 gallons for 2.2 pounds rice), while producing an equivalent amount of beef requires a whopping 3,434 gallons of water.
In that way, the growing appeal of Western-style, meat-intensive diets for the developing world’s emerging middle classes may further strain global water resources. Frédéric Lasserre, a professor at Quebec’s Laval University who specializes in water issues, said in an interview about his book Eaux et Territories, that at the end of the day, it simply takes far more water to produce the food an average Westerner eats than it does to produce the traditional food staples of much of Africa or Asia.
Continue reading part two of “Turning Up the Water Pressure” here.
Sources: Columbia Water Center, ExploringGeopolitics.org, International Water Management Institute (Sri Lanka), Population Reference Bureau, The Energy and Resources Institute (India), United Nations, USAID, World Economic Forum, World Water Council.
Photo Credits: “Ganges By Nightfall,” courtesy of flickr user brianholsclaw, and “Traditional Harvest,” courtesy of flickr user psychogeographer.
Subscribe:
