World Water Day

The United Nations (UN) established World Water Day in 1993 as an event to highlight the critical nature of our relationship and the challenges associated with managing the world’s water resources. Each year World Water Day focuses on a specific issue and this year the UN draws our attention to “Water and Food Security”.

The average person living in the United States has a ready supply of clean and affordable tap water so it slips below our perception that almost 3 billion people on the planet live without that luxury. In fact the UN estimates that more than one in six people worldwide lack access to 5-13 gallons of safe freshwater a day to ensure their basic needs for drinking, cooking, and cleaning.

As the global temperatures continue to rise, as the severity and duration of drought conditions continue to magnify I think we're bound to see the tensions between a climate-water-food security nexus.

It takes, roughly, 1500 tons of water to grow 1 ton of grain so the math clearly paints food production as an incredibly water intensive process.  But cities and urban areas have water substantial economic development and drinking water needs of their own. 

The world’s population continues to concentrate in urban areas so I wasn't too surprised to realize that cities are diverting surface water toward reservoirs and away from agriculture. But because everybody has to eat, and the water demands of agriculture have to come from somewhere, ground water pumping has stepped up.

Over the past forty to fifty years we’ve seen a doubling of the amount of groundwater pumped in order to irrigate cropland. As a person living on one of the  largest aquifers in the world (the Ogallala) I've been around groundwater conversations my whole life. You cannot convince me that the rate at which we are depleting groundwater resources is sustainable. 

Essentially we live in a world with increasing water demands at the same time as our  supplies are depleted.  And that creates a global undercurrent ripe for conflict.

According to the United States Pentagon water stress can act as a “threat multiplier” by (1.) causing migrations of people away from ag-lands due to the salinization of soils, (2.) and exacerbating the sort of tensions that lend well to social unrest and armed conflicts. Today, drought, thirst, and hunger are exacerbating the conflicts and humanitarian disasters in Darfur and Somalia. 

I would agree with Sandra Postel, the Global Water Policy Project Director, when she says “[i]t’s through water that we’ll feel the strains of climate change  - when we can no longer count on familiar patterns of rain, snow and river flow to irrigate our farms, power our dams, or fill our city reservoirs.” She goes on to say that our decisions about water – how we  use, allocate, and manage it – are ethical by their very nature; these decisions ultimately determine the survival of most of the planet’s species including our own. 

Next time you turn on the faucet I’d encourage you to wonder how much water you consume every day? Join the World Water Day 2012 campaign and find out how can you can reduce your water footprint.