Sps supplement Rough Draft-endi2011 Alpharetta 2011 / Boyce, Doshi, Hermansen, Ma, Pirani
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- Short timeframe for water shortages-2030 Arsenault
- Water shortages destroys human rights- Arsenault
Water Wars Adv – Impact ExtWater shortages lead to a laundry list of impacts. Vidal, Environment Editor at The Guardian, talks of expert reports, 6 [John Vidal, environment editor The Guardian; “Cost of water shortage: civil unrest, mass migration and economic collapse”; 8/17/2006; http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/aug/17/water.internationalnews; Boyce] Cholera may return to London, the mass migration of Africans could cause civil unrest in Europe and China's economy could crash by 2015 as the supply of fresh water becomes critical to the global economy. That was the bleak assessment yesterday by forecasters from some of the world's leading corporate users of fresh water, 200 of the largest food, oil, water and chemical companies. Analysts working for Shell, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Cargill and other companies which depend heavily on secure water supplies, yesterday suggested the next 20 years would be critical as countries became richer, making heavier demands on scarce water supplies. In three future scenarios, the businesses foresee growing civil unrest, boom and bust economic cycles in Asia and mass migrations to Europe. But they also say scarcity will encourage the development of new water-saving technologies and better management of water by business. The study of future water availability, which the corporations have taken three years to compile, suggests water conflicts are likely to become common in many countries, according to the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, which brought the industrial groups together. Lloyd Timberlake, spokesman for the council, said: "The growing demand for water in China can potentially lead to over-exploitation and a decline in availability for domestic, agricultural, industry and energy production use. This inevitably leads to loss of production, both industrial and agricultural, and can also affect public health - all of which in turn will ultimately lead to an economic downturn. The question is how can business address these challenges and still make a profit." The corporations were yesterday joined by the conservation group WWF and the International Water Management Institute, the world's leading body on fresh water management, which said water scarcity was increasing faster than expected. In China, authorities had begun trucking in water to millions of people after wells and rivers ran dry in the east of the country. "Globally, water usage has increased by six times in the past 100 years and will double again by 2050, driven mainly by irrigation and demands of agriculture. Some countries have already run out of water to produce their own food. Without improvements ... the consequences will be even more widespread water scarcity and rapidly increasing water prices," said Frank Rijsberman, director of the institute. The institute, funded by government research organisations, will report next week that a third of the world's population, more than 2 billion people, is living in places where water is overused - leading to falling underground water levels and drying rivers - or cannot be accessed. Mr Rijsberman said rising living standards in India and China could lead to increased demand for better food, which would in turn need more water to produce. He expected the price of water to increase everywhere to meet an expected 50% increase in the amount of food the world will need in the next 20 years. According to the institute's assessment, Egypt imports more than half of its food because it does not have enough water to grow it domestically and Australia is faced with water scarcity in the Murray-Darling Basin as a result of diverting large quantities of water for use in agriculture. The Aral Sea in central Asia is another example of massive diversion of water for agriculture in the Soviet era causing widespread water scarcity, and one of the world's worst environmental disasters. Researchers say it is possible to reduce water scarcity, feed people and address poverty, but the key trade-off is with the environment. "People and their governments will face some tough decisions on how to allocate and manage water," says the institute's report. In a further paper, WWF said yesterday that water crises, long seen as a problem of only the poorest, are affecting the wealthiest nations. "In Europe, countries along the Atlantic are suffering recurring droughts, while water-intensive tourism and irrigated agriculture are endangering water resources in the Mediterranean. In Australia, salinity is a major threat to a large proportion of its key agricultural areas", said Jamie Pittock, director of WWF's freshwater programme. In the United States, Mr Pittock said, large areas are already using substantially more water than can be naturally replenished. "This situation will only be exacerbated as climate change is predicted to bring lower rainfall, increased evaporation and changed patterns of snow melting." Three visions of the future 1. Misery and shortages in the megacities and drought in Africa By 2010, 22 megacities with populations larger than 10 million face major water and sewerage problems. The situation is gravest in China, where 550 of the country's 600 largest cities are running short. Growing demand for water by industry leads to serious over-exploitaion with less and less water available for consumers and farmers. This leads to a fall in Chinese food production, which in turn leads to more imports and impacts on other countries. Friction and unrest grow worldwide as the middle classes struggle to pay bills. Businesses are exposed to charges of moral culpability and litigation over water use. Waves of immigrants flood in to Europe from increasingly drought-torn Africa 2. China leads recycling rush as world moves to a new hydro economy By 2010, the water shortage in many developing countries is recognised as one of the most serious political and social issues of the time. Lack of water is stopping development and in many countries the rural poor suffer as their water and other needs take second place to those of swelling cities and industry. Local government worldwide is increasingly distrusted over water allocation, and historical divides between rich and poor are exacerbated by water shortages. However, by 2025 a worldwide hydro economy is developing, led by China. Vast new investments are made in recycling water and the cost of desalination is greatly reduced. Innovative small-scale water treatment processes become the norm 3. Water is the means of social control as floods and disease devastate world Water becomes a key symbol of protest around the world and is seen as the most serious social and political issue of the generation. By 2015, multinational companies are accused regularly of taking too much water in developing countries, cholera breaks out in London, and governments start to use water as a form of social control, subsidising some sectors and rationing it to others. Great floods follow each other in quick succession. Deforestation leads to massive mudslides in Asia and increasing flooding affects Europe, damaging industry. A second New Orleans flood destroys the city again. Global focus grows on the "export" of water via crops such as wheat or fruit Short timeframe for water shortages-2030 Arsenault, Reporter for Al Jazeera, 6/29/2011 [“Water wars: 21st century conflicts?”, June 29th, 2011, http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/2011622193147231653.html] After droughts ravaged his parents' farmland, Sixteen-year-old Hassain and his two-year-old sister Sareye became some of the newest refugees forced from home by water scarcity. "There was nothing to harvest," Hassain said through an interpreter during an interview at a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya which is housing some 160,000 Somalis displaced by a lack of water. "There had been no rain in my village for two years. We used to have crops." As global warming alters weather patterns, and the number of people lacking access to water rises, millions, if not billions, of others are expected to face a similar fate as water shortages become more frequent. Presently, Hassain is one of about 1.2 billion people living in areas of physical water scarcity, although the majority of cases are nowhere near as dire. By 2030, 47 per cent of the world’s population will be living in areas of high water stress, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Environmental Outlook to 2030 report. Some analysts worry that wars of the future will be fought over blue gold, as thirsty people, opportunistic politicians and powerful corporations battle for dwindling resources. Dangerous warnings Governments and military planners around the world are aware of the impending problem; with the US senate issuing reports with names like Avoiding Water Wars: Water Scarcity and Central Asia’s growing Importance for Stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan. With rapid population growth, and increased industrial demand, water withdrawls have tripled over the last 50 years, according to UN figures."The war was also a reason why we left," Hassain said. "There was a lot of fighting near my village." "Water scarcity is an issue exacerbated by demographic pressures, climate change and pollution," said Ignacio Saiz, director of Centre for Economic and Social Rights, a social justice group. "The world's water supplies should guarantee every member of the population to cover their personal and domestic needs." "Fundamentally, these are issues of poverty and inequality, man-made problems," he told Al Jazeera. Of all the water on earth, 97 per cent is salt water and the remaining three per cent is fresh, with less than one per cent of the planet's drinkable water readily accessible for direct human uses. Scarcity is defined as each person in an area having access to less than 1,000 cubic meters of water a year. The areas where water scarcity is the biggest problem are some of the same places where political conflicts are rife, leading to potentially explosive situations. Some experts believe the only documented case of a "water war" happened about 4,500 years ago, when the city-states of Lagash and Umma went to war in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. But Adel Darwish, a journalist and co-author of Water Wars: Coming Conflicts in the Middle East, says modern history has already seen at least two water wars. "I have [former Israeli prime minister] Ariel Sharon speaking on record saying the reason for going to war [against Arab armies] in 1967 was for water," Darwish told Al Jazeera. Some analysts believe Israel continues to occupy the Golan heights, seized from Syria in 1967, due to issues of water control, while others think the occupation is about maintaining high ground in case of future conflicts. Senegal and Mauritania also fought a war starting in 1989 over grazing rights on the River Senegal. And Syria and Iraq have fought minor skirmishes over the Euphrates River. Middle East hit hard UN studies project that 30 nations will be water scarce in 2025, up from 20 in 1990. Eighteen of them are in the Middle East and North Africa, including Egypt, Israel, Somalia, Libya and Yemen. Darwish bets that a battle between south and north Yemen will probably be the scene of the next water conflict, with other countries in the region following suit if the situation is not improved. Yemen's capital Sanaa, from where president Ali Saleh left the country after he was injured during protests, could effectively run out of water by 2025, hydrology experts say. Water shortages could cost the unstable country 750,000 jobs, slashing incomes in the poorest Arab country by as much as 25 per cent over the next decade, according to a report from the consulting firm McKinsey and Company produced for the Yemeni government in 2010. Living in one of the driest countries on earth, Yemenis depend on fresh water from rapidly depleting underground aquifers and infrequent rainfall. "We expect many of the private wells to dry up soon," Yemen's then minister for water resources Abdul Rahman Fadhl Iryani, told The Los Angeles Times newspaper in 2009. "After that, we will have to find a new source, or keep drilling deeper." It is a story being repeated with various degrees of severity across the Middle East, parts of Asia and even the American south-west. Iryani recently resigned his post to protest president Saleh’s crackdown on protesters. Commentators frequently blame Yemen's problems on tribal differences, but environmental scarcity may be underpinning secessionist struggles in the country's south and some general communal violence. "My experience in the first gulf war [when Iraq invaded Kuwait] is that natural resources are always at the heart of tribal conflicts," Darwish told Al Jazeera. "The world Sharia [Islamic law] has its linguistic origins in 'water from a well'." The Nile is another potential flash point. In 1989, former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak threatened to send demolition squads to a dam project in Ethiopia. The current tenuous political situation in Egypt means that "if the army wants to divert attention away from criticism it would probably do something against Ethiopia," Darwish said. "The Egyptian army still has jungle warfare brigades, even though they have no jungle." On the Nile, cooperation would benefit all countries involved, as they could jointly construct dams and lower the amount of water lost to evaporation, says Anton Earle, director of the Stockholm International Water Institute think tank. "If you had an agreement between the parties, there would be more water in the system," he told Al Jazeera. The likelihood of outright war is low, he says, but there is still "a lot of conflict" which "prevents joint infrastructure projects from going ahead". Water shortages destroys human rights- Arsenault, Reporter for Al Jazeera, 6/29/2011 [“Water wars: 21st century conflicts?”, June 29th, 2011, http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/2011622193147231653.html] Strife over water, like conflicts more generally, will increasingly happen within states, rather than between them, Barlow says, with large scale agribusiness, mining and energy production taking control over resources at the expense of other users. Back in the Kenyan refugee camp, on the front line of the world’s water crisis, Hassain hopes to start a new life, away from the parched fields, dead cattle and social violence ruining communities in his native Somalia. "I have never been to school," he said. "I want to go now that I am here." Dealing with water refugees like Hassain is a global challenge, and it is expected to get worse. The IPPC, the UN panel which analyses climate science, concluded that: "Water and its availability and quality will be the main pressures on and issues for, societies and the environment under climate change." Dealing with these pressures will require improved technologies, political will and new ideas about how humans view their relationship with the substance that sustains life. "A human rights approach to water, for Hassain, means he doesn't have to accept his fate as some inevitable tragedy," said Ignacio Saiz. "People have the right to expect access to a basic life resource like water by virtue of being human, regardless of the social situation they are born into. Alongside the worrying development of water scarcity, I am hopeful that we will see increasing struggles to see access to water as a right, and not a priviledge." Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.84 Mb. Share with your friends:
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