In August 2019, the World Resources Institute put a number on a quiet emergency. Its Aqueduct analysis, built on a new hydrological model and peer-reviewed data, ranked water stress across 189 countries and their states and provinces, and found 17 of them living with “extremely high” baseline water stress: places where farms, factories and cities together draw 80 percent of the water available in an average year. Nearly one-quarter of humanity, around 1.7 billion people, lives in those 17 countries. The careful wording matters; the finding is not that the taps are dry everywhere today, but that supply and demand are so close that a single dry spell can tip a region into crisis.
The trend behind the ranking had been building for decades. Over the previous hundred years, the institute noted, water use had grown at more than twice the rate of human population, and global withdrawals had more than doubled since 1960. Below the 17 worst cases, another 44 countries were rated “high” on the same scale, roughly a third of the planet, with available supplies depleted by an average of 40 percent a year. The maps also made plain that stress does not respect borders: the United States as a whole ranked fairly well, while New Mexico’s pressure on supply matched the United Arab Emirates and Eritrea.
Geographically, the center of the problem was unambiguous. Twelve of the 17 most-stressed countries sat in the Middle East and North Africa, with Qatar, Israel and Lebanon at the top of the table; at the sub-national level, the Afghan province of Badghis and the Botswana centres of Gaborone and Jwaneng scored worst. India, ranked 13th, was the outlier that made the numbers global: with 1.3 billion people, it outweighed the other sixteen countries combined more than threefold, and that July the southern city of Chennai had watched its taps run dry, satellite images of an empty reservoir circulating worldwide.
The institute’s leadership did not soften the message. “Water stress is the biggest crisis no one is talking about,” said Andrew Steer, WRI’s president and chief executive, calling the consequences visible in “food insecurity, conflict and migration, and financial instability”. Solutions, he added, were arriving but too slowly: “A new generation of solutions is emerging, but nowhere near fast enough,” and “Failure to act will be massively expensive in human lives and livelihoods.” A World Bank line quoted at the time made the same point more quietly, describing drought’s damage as “misery in slow motion”.
What the 2019 report stressed, though, and what its authors repeated in every interview, is that the arithmetic is not fate. “The recent water crisis in Chennai gained global attention, but various areas in India are experiencing chronic water stress as well,” said Shashi Shekhar, a former secretary of India’s water ministry and a WRI fellow, adding that India could manage its risk with “reliable and robust data” on rainfall, surface water and groundwater. In the Middle East and North Africa, more than 80 percent of water was not being reused, an obvious gap; Australia, as it approached a Day Zero of its own during the millennium drought, had nearly halved domestic use. Betsy Otto, WRI’s global director for water, put it in one sentence: “water stress is not destiny”, because pretending “the situation will resolve itself” was the one thing the world could no longer afford.
The projections the report leaned on ran decades ahead. An American study published that year foresaw significant shortages within five decades across the Great Plains, the Southwest, the central Rockies, California and parts of the South and Midwest “as population and economic growth plus the changing climate alter water yield and demand”, across many of the 14 futures its researchers modeled. Researchers at MIT estimated that by 2050 roughly half of a projected 9.7 billion people would live in water-stressed regions. The encouraging part of the 2019 assessment, such as it was, lay in its own logic: every outcome it described depended on management, measurement and reuse, which is to say on decisions still available to be made. Otto’s closing image has aged rather than dated: hydrology becoming “more erratic, more unpredictable”, delivering “Either too much or too little, often in the same places”.
Sources
- Nearly 25% of The World's Population Faces a Water Crisis, And We Can't Ignore It : ScienceAlert
- Extreme water stress affects a quarter of the world's population, say experts | Access to water | The Guardian
