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Europe is facing the most severe drought in the last 500 years, but it is not the only continent affected by this phenomenon. The global scale of drought is yet another consequence of climate change. Water – the element that is vital for survival and key to industry and agriculture – has become increasingly disputed globally, its shortage producing economic, humanitarian and security crises.
Drought, the first “shark bite” of climate change
The images are telling. Slide the pointer right to see what the river basin looked like twenty years ago, and slide left to see what it looks like today, in the scorching August of 2022. The difference is striking. Seen from above, the Colorado River in America used to be a long streak of green with serrated margins on the map. Today, the green streak has not only shrunk, but the green too has grown pale – a sign that the water surface didn’t shrink just in size, but also in depth. Surprisingly enough, from high above, seen from afar, the river itself seems to resemble the desert color-wise. Until last year, the Rhine in Germany was like a robust vein, beaming with life. Today, the vein seems to be sclerotic and withered when seen from a plane. The River Po in Italy used to leave narrow strips of sand here and there. Right now, those strips have broadened and multiplied, like parasites seen on x-ray. The Yangtze River is a different story, it’s harder to take pictures of it from a plane, but you can use satellite footage. And what do you see? The same image of multiplied stretches of sand as a result of water receding. The Danube River doesn’t even need high-altitude pictures. From the Serbian bank, you can notice the wreck of a German ship protruding from the sand, probably the first time it has seen the light of day since it sank back in 1944 during World War II. And you can reach it on foot, without even swimming, on cracked pathways that remind us what the earth would be like without water. And all these pictures converge towards one conclusion that many know it to be true: the northern hemisphere is this year is going through a bout of severe drought. The question is whether this time it is more than a simple drought. Has it become a chronic phenomenon? Could it all be linked to the unnatural phenomena we’ve witnessed in the last decades?
“If we look at climate change like a shark that is circling us, then drought would be its first bite”, some experts argue. But they take things even further, arguing that it’s not just climate change triggering a possible water crisis, but also demographic growth and increasing water consumption, caused by growing prosperity in more and more areas around the globe.
This year, the rainless summer season in Europe has provided numerous examples of what could happen in case of a water shortage. Norway, which can be considered Europe’s battery judging from the number of its hydroelectric power plants, has warned it might cut back on its electricity output due to decreasing water levels. In Germany, the Rhine has receded to dangerous levels, which, in addition to other malfunctions, has led to several barges running aground. The vessels were transporting export-bound vehicles manufactured in Germany’s car plants. In other European countries, crops were severely affected by the sweltering heat. In Romania, the Agriculture Ministry periodically issues press releases with farmlands “compromised” by the dry season. Most recently, by the time I wrote this article, nearly half a million of hectares, accounting for 5% of our country’s farmland, have been compromised. Water shortages create economic difficulties on other continents too. Just like Norway, the decreasing water levels have led China to reduce its electricity production capacity. This has, in turn, prompted branches of Toyota and Foxconn to suspend their activity. Additionally, in Chile – a country located in the southern hemisphere – the last ten years with little to no rain have caused a dramatic drop in the production of copper, the biggest industry of its kind in the world. A whole series of chain reactions follows with potential impacts on other industries worldwide.
Yet geostrategy experts say the most worrisome effect of the penury of water is the emergence of social strife. A recent such example can be found in Mexico, although the conflict here is still simmering: the drought has caused great difficulty at the Cuauhtémoc brewery, owned by the Heineken group, in a country that is the world’s number one beer exporter. Clashes have erupted between factory representatives and farmers, both sides seeking to secure the much-needed resource for their own activity. The factory has gone to great lengths to prove it is consuming 1% of local water resources, to little avail however. In a new populist outburst, president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has recommended businesses to relocate further south, where water resources are more abundant. In fact, as The Economist writes in its latest issue, the problem is not as much the shortage of water in itself, but rather its uneven distribution. Regions that are undergoing a wide-reaching process of development – such as India – have very limited water resources, making them the ideal festering grounds for widespread social unrest.
Drought – breeding ground for armed conflicts
Recent examples in this respect are plentiful. Researcher Francesca de Châtel has proved as early as six years ago that the more profound reasons behind the war in Syria must be identified in the decades of excessive exploitation of the country’s water sources, more specifically used by oversized irrigation systems for wheat and cotton crops. The Middle East is now one of the regions on the globe with the shortest supply of water per capita in the world. In Syria, the water crisis was further worsened by the megalomaniac agricultural projects of the 1950s, which led to the “displacement of rural communities”, as Francesca de Châtel points out. As rivers and wells started running dry as a consequence of these policies, villagers abandoned their homes and sought jobs in urban areas. The context became ripe for the emergence of social turmoil that was very easily capitalized on in the ensuing civil war. The shortage of water reported in rural areas expanded to urban centers, even to neighboring Lebanon, overrun by refugees. To use an oxymoron, Syria serves as an example to show that the shortage of water has a cascading effect.
When prompted to answer on a whim, anyone would say that Bangladesh, a country threatened by the rising global sea levels, would be the last to suffer from water shortage. Yet a closer look will reveal it is actually true. In the hot season, the monsoon brings in significant amount of rainfall, but the dry season is often accompanied by drought. Here, the fluctuation between abundance and shortage is one of the highest on the globe, fuelled by the absence of the infrastructure required to store water during the rainy season. Furthermore, Bangladesh is the perfect example of the interdependence of countries in terms of river water. A country with 170 million inhabitants and home to the world’s biggest delta, Bangladesh is located at the junction of three large rivers – Brahmaptra, Meghna and Ganges, all three however springing in neighboring China and India. Only 7% of Bangladesh’s water sources originate in its own territory. For this reason, the accelerated population growth in India and China – which in turn comes with an increase in water consumption – represents a constant threat to Bangladesh, which has no control over the debit of rivers crossing its territory.
Yet perhaps the best example illustrating the effects of having limited access to water is Nigeria. Nigeria has plenty of water sources, but poverty, pollution and overpopulation make them inaccessible. An estimated 60 million people have no access to running water in Nigeria, and based on the current climate forecast, this could displace hundreds of millions of people by 2030, with unpredictable social consequences. The ongoing Nigerian civil war pitting Fulani animal breeders against farmers, is considered to have religious underpinnings, yet it does have an unquestionable stake – the increasingly limited access to war, given that the Sahara Desert is advancing southwards at a rate of 600 meters per year. French journalist and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy has recently documented the bloody conflicts that continued in various spots on the world map despite the pandemic. His travels resulted in the publication of a collection of reports titled “The Will to See – Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope”. One of the most heart-rending chapters in the book is the author’s account of the civil war in Nigeria. Lévy outlines the type of atrocities this aggressive Fulani migration can cause, sending an implied warning to the reader: desertification is also a breeding ground for extremism of all sorts.
Water reform
What can we do? The first impulse is also the best answer: a more rational use of water, in addition to recycling waste water via the proper filtering and cleansing operations. It’s what beer factories have already started doing. Heineken, for instance, claims its beer factories in Mexico consume approximately 2.5 liters of clean water for every liter of beer produced. It might seem a lot, but other companies use five liters of water to produce the same amount. Some time ago, large corporations had started vetting and monitoring their suppliers, lest they should overwork their employees or use children in production chains. More recently, corporations have started looking at how suppliers use water, thus avoiding the risk of local protests surfacing against “foreigners” who’ve come to exploit the liquid riches of their land. The accumulated experience of such saving/monitoring activities apparently worked, as the case was in 2017 when Cape Town was on the brink of running out of water supply. It was the AB InBev beer producer that taught local authorities how to cut water losses in the system and thus overcome the crisis.
Right now, very few people list water shortage as an economic or social threat – for instance, as much as a third of the world’s banks do so. Water prices continue to be underrated, probably due to the same mix of circumstances and poor judgment. But one cannot rule out the fact that, one day, in a not too distant future, water will become a factor as important as carbon emissions in climate, social and political forecasting. Just as natural gas reserves are very much in fashion in Europe today, it is not too much to consider that water reserves will become a similar concern, sooner or later. The summer of 2022 is a cautionary tale in this respect.
