The water has already run out but the governments are pretending nothing happened. Guardian Reports
A 2017 paper estimated that to match crop production with projected demand, irrigation water use would need to increase by 146% by the middle of this century. However, all this water does not exist and governments rely on technology alone, but without political and economic measures it cannot work. The Guardian article
There's a flaw in the plan. And it's not small: it's an Earth-sized hole in our calculations. To keep pace with global food demand, agricultural production must grow by at least 50% by 2050. In principle, if nothing changes, this is doable, thanks largely to improvements in crop breeding and techniques agricultural. But everything else will change, writes the Guardian .
Even if we put aside all the other problems – the impacts of heat, the degradation of soil, the epidemic plant diseases accelerated by the loss of genetic diversity – there is one that, without the help of any other cause, could prevent us from feeding the world's population. The water.
A paper published in 2017 estimated that to match crop production with projected demand, irrigation water use would need to increase by 146% by the middle of this century. A little problem. The water has already run out.
In general, the world's arid areas are becoming drier, partly due to reduced precipitation, partly due to decreasing river flows due to retreating mountain ice and snow, and partly due to rising temperatures which causes greater evaporation and greater transpiration by the plants. Many of the world's major growing regions are now threatened by “flash droughts,” in which hot, dry weather sucks moisture from the soil with frightening speed. Some places, like the U.S. Southwest, now in its 24th year of drought, may have permanently transitioned to a drier state. Rivers are failing to reach the sea, lakes and aquifers are shrinking, freshwater species are becoming extinct at a rate about five times faster than land-dwelling species, and large cities are under threat from extreme water stress.
Agriculture is already responsible for 90% of the world's freshwater use. We have pumped so much water out of the ground that we have changed the Earth's rotation. The water needed to meet growing food demand simply does not exist.
This 2017 document should have alerted everyone. But, as usual, he was ignored by politicians and the media. Only when the problem reaches Europe is it recognized that there is a crisis. But if on the one hand there is an understandable panic about the drought in Catalonia and Andalusia, on the other there is an almost total inability on the part of powerful interests to recognize that this is just one case of a global problem, a problem which should be at the top of the political agenda.
While drought measures have sparked protests in Spain, this is far from the most dangerous flashpoint. The Indus River drainage basin is shared by three nuclear powers – India, Pakistan and China – and several highly unstable and divided regions, already plagued by hunger and extreme poverty. Today 95% of the river's dry season flow is extracted, mostly for irrigation. But the demand for water in Pakistan and India is growing rapidly. The supply – temporarily increased by the melting of the glaciers of the Himalayas and Hindu Kush – will soon reach a peak and then a decline.
Even under the most optimistic climate scenario, runoff from Asian glaciers is expected to peak before mid-century and glacier mass will shrink by about 46% by 2100. Some analysts see water competition between India and Pakistan as one of the causes main causes of the repeated conflicts in Kashmir. But unless a new Indus waters treaty is made that takes into account the dwindling supplies, these clashes could be the prelude to something much worse.
It is widely believed that these problems can be solved simply by improving the efficiency of irrigation: enormous quantities of water are wasted in agriculture. So let me introduce you to the paradox of irrigation efficiency. When improved techniques ensure that less water is needed to grow a given volume of crops, irrigation becomes more economical. As a result, it attracts more investment, encourages farmers to grow thirstier and more profitable plants, and expands over a larger area. This is what happened, for example, in the Guadiana river basin in Spain, where a 600 million euro investment to reduce water use by improving irrigation efficiency instead increased it.
The paradox can be overcome through regulation: laws that limit both total and individual water consumption. But governments prefer to rely on technology alone. Without political and economic measures, it doesn't work.
Nor are other technological remedies capable of solving the problem. Governments are planning huge engineering works to convey water from one place to another. But the deterioration of the climate and the increase in demand mean that many of the donor regions are also destined to remain dry. Water from desalination plants typically costs five or ten times more than water from the ground or sky, while the process requires large amounts of energy and generates large volumes of toxic brine.
Above all, we need to change our diet. Those who have the ability to choose their diet (in other words, the richest half of the world's population) should try to minimize the water footprint of their food. Apologies for insisting, this is another reason to switch to an animal-free diet, which reduces both total crop demand and, in most cases, water use. The water requirements of certain plant-based products, particularly almonds and pistachios in California, have become a major issue in the culture wars, as right-wing influencers attack plant-based diets. However, as excessive as these crops are irrigated, California uses more than double the amount of irrigation water to grow forage plants to feed livestock, especially dairy cows. Milk has a much higher water requirement than even the worst alternative (almond milk), and is astronomically higher than the best alternatives, such as oat or soy milk.
This is not to say that all plant products are exempt from liability: horticulture can require large amounts of water. Even as part of a plant-based diet, we should switch from some grains, vegetables and fruits to others. Governments and retailers should help us through a combination of stricter rules and informative labelling.
Instead, they do the opposite. Last month, at the behest of the European Commissioner for Agriculture, Janusz Wojciechowski, the European Commission eliminated from its new climate plan the call to encourage “diversified” (animal-free) protein sources. The regulatory grip is never as strong as in the agri-food sector.
I don't want to say more, but some of us must try to counteract the endless prejudice against relevance in politics and most media. This is another of those huge overlooked questions, any of which could be fatal to peace and prosperity on a habitable planet. Somehow, we need to get our attention back.
(Excerpt from the foreign press review edited by eprcomunicazione )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/lacqua-e-gia-esaurita-ma-i-governi-fanno-finta-di-nulla/ on Sat, 09 Mar 2024 06:28:58 +0000.