Global Water Scarcity: A Looming Crisis and Solutions

Water scarcity is becoming a global crisis, threatening livelihoods and security as climate change intensifies.

### The Global Water Crisis: From Scarcity to Conflict and Innovation
* 🌍 Northern Kenya's nomadic tribes face **severe drought and water scarcity**, a situation that has **worsened over the last 60 years** as the region transformed from a **flourishing forest to a parched desert**.
* 💧 By 2025, it is projected that **half of the world's population** will experience water scarcity due to growing populations, mismanagement, and climate change, **intensifying global tensions**.
* 🧑 ‍🏫 Professor Hanf Frry emphasizes the **critical need to understand the consequences of diminishing water access** and explore **technological solutions for sustainable management**.
* 🌾 Practical Action is working to address water access challenges in communities reliant on pastoralism, where climate change has led to **violent conflicts over dwindling resources**.
* 👩 ‍🌾 Women and girls bear the brunt of water collection, often resorting to **dangerous methods to extract water**, highlighting the **urgent need for sustainable solutions**.
* 🔋 Innovative technologies, such as solar-powered water storage systems, are transforming the lives of women in these communities, allowing them to **shift from nomadic lifestyles to farming**, improving **food security and livelihoods**.
* 📊 The potential for conflict over water resources is a growing concern, with data indicating that **water scarcity can exacerbate social unrest**, as seen in regions like the Tigris-Euphrates Basin.
* 🇸🇬 Singapore's response to its water crisis, including the development of a **closed-loop water system** through advanced purification technologies, serves as a model for **self-sufficiency** and highlights the **urgent need for a global reevaluation of water as a critical resource**.

[Music] these expansive lands in Northern Kenya have been home to nomadic tribes for thousands of years. If we go to the culture TR, we might have a chance to see the livestock done this way. But as recently as 60 years ago, this place was a dense, flourishing forest. Now it has dried into a resource-poor, parched desert. The area is really suffering the impact of drought. The people of Takana and their livestock are on the front line of a battle beginning to play out all over the world. A battle to secure water. Growing populations, water mismanagement, and climate change mean that by 2025, half of the world's population will face water scarcity, and global tensions are rising. I'm Professor Hanf Frry, mathematician and writer. I want to explore why the world is toying with catastrophe over dwindling access to water and where the technology can help secure our future needs. This here is part of the Rift Valley, sometimes known as the Cradle of

humanity because this is where the earliest human-like fossils have been found, well, some of them at least. And the people who still live here, they have a very nomadic lifestyle. They move around looking for pasture, in search of water, searching for a supply of fresh water. Used to be the ultimate priority of the majority of our ancestors, but today over half of us live in towns and cities where we expect the water to come to us instead. And while it might seem like an unquenchable resource, every drop that we use is taken from an interconnected cycle that's responsible for all life on Earth. Earth, remember, is a giant rocky wet blob floating in space. All of the water that we have ever had and ever will have is already here, cycling endlessly around our planet. When rain falls, it goes into rivers and lakes, but it also seeps into sediments and cracks, forming these vast underground aquifers. Out at sea, water evaporates, becomes clouds that drift back over land to fall again, becoming a new store of fresh

water. This cycle has been happily stable for thousands of years, but now 8 billion humans are interfering. We are sucking up water from the rivers, we are damming them, blocking off the supply downstream, and we have extracted so much water now from deep underground that we've managed to shift the Earth's rotational axis by about 80 cm. And on top of all of that is climate change. We have got more intense rains, more erratic weather patterns, and prolonged spells of drought. The amount of water on Earth hasn't changed, but where the water is, and when and how it moves, is becoming more and more unpredictable. The people here were never strangers to drought, but now it is a constant, unrelenting concern. Joel and June work for Practical Action, an international development group that is responding to the crisis in the region. We identify areas with serious challenges in terms of access to water, access to food. We chose this place because of the problems that the community was experiencing here. The men practice

pastoralism, a tradition of roaming across grasslands, raising livestock to keep their families fed, but this is a way of life reliant on rain for pasture to grow, and that has left these people among the first victims of the effects of climate change. Can you remember what it was like when he was a boy? How have the rains changed since then? The pressure on the pasture, does that ever result in conflict? Is he angry about this, about how things have changed? The [Music] there are now routinely violent clashes over livestock, water points, and pasture. Hundreds lose their lives each year here. The strain is not only felt by the men responsible for herding the livestock but also by the women and girls of the community. Water is a function that is culturally left for the women. They used to go to the river, which is more than 10 km from this place. When the rivers run dry, women and girls have to dig what's called a scoop hole to extract the water saturated in the river bed. How deep are we talking? 10 m? Yes.

where you're having three people from one person to the other handing over the buckets of water. You take from me, you take from me up to the service. Wow, yes, most of the time it collapses in on them. Collapses in. Is it only sand? Yes, we have heard incidences where the scopal do collapse and we have fatalities as a result around here. Getting hold of water means accepting these unthinkable risks. Something practical action have been trying to change. These storage tanks are full of water drawn up from deep underground aquifers using solar power. It's enough of a supply of water to mean it can be used to grow crops in the rich soil. Laying down roots in the most literal sense means that these women are no longer nomadic water carriers. They are farmers, and these allotments have become the center of an astonishing shift in this community's livelihood. Susan is one of these women who grows and tends to her crops in the allotments. The harvest gives enough to feed the community with leftover produce.

the farmers can sell, earning money to pay for school for their daughters and your children. Could they go to school? [Music] Before and how about for you. How has your life changed? They used to face malnutrition problems a lot. It's women, so her life has changed greatly. If you can see from how she's looking, because that's how she has said it. She's glowing. I mean, there is quite a lot of work now for the women though, right? I mean, if you're taking care of the water, but now also the food. Has it changed the power dynamic slightly between the women and the men here? The people who live here, their lifestyle is having to change. It's having to adapt to the changing climate. But I think there's something amazingly positive about what can happen when you give a community access to a sustainable supply of water. I think the only question mark that I'm left with is how long-term this solution can be. I mean, the B hole could run dry. The solar panels could break. There could be all

kinds of things that happen that are totally outside of anybody's control, and I do wonder what happens to people who live in places like this in that kind of a future. Today, over two billion people live with some degree of water scarcity, and this could cause 700 million people to be forced from their homes by 2030. But in the region's most affected, access to water is now more than a humanitarian issue; it's a threat to national security. [Music] Darnish Massud Alivi is a peace and security technologist interested in how water deprivation is impacting different regions. Water is this resource that we all need, of course, and it's the kind of thing that can easily become a source of contestation. It can be used as leverage; it can be the very cause, the root cause of conflict. So, in the context, for example, of the Tigris-Euphrates Basin, Turkey is damming the river upstream, but that's having downstream consequences in a place like Iraq, where now with the absence of water, you're having

significant social unrest because temperatures are rising quickly, and the water flow is not the same in a way. Then, I mean, I think that the idea of, say, oil being a source of conflict, I think that that makes sense to a lot of people. But the way you're describing it is that that water is this absolutely critical pinch point. Almost nothing works without water, nothing at all. To predict where water scarcity could lead to conflict, Darnes is using data collected from space. NASA's Grace Mission has two sister satellites which orbit the Earth, precisely tracking their distance to one another. But this distance is affected by gravity. So, as water saturates the ground, the density and hence gravitational pull changes, causing the satellites to move closer together or further apart. Tracking this over time means that scientists can construct maps of where water is moving around the planet. So, if we look at Iraq here, this is how things looked in 2007. Now, when we look at it 9 years later in 2016, it's a sea of red. We're able to

look at how quickly water is being depleted in a particular country, and we take all that information that's freely available to us as raw data and compare it to all kinds of other information. So, for example, one of the things we're interested in is social unrest, and in particular, how social unrest correlates with how quickly water is being diminished. And what do you find? We find that there is a correlation in many instances. In a situation that's already stressed, already difficult, you add in issues around water, and it makes things worse. Danes's aim is to provide governments and authorities with data to better equip them for where conflict may arise in the future. So, when you're able to have these kinds of empirical ways of measuring how much water is there, you can have a conversation that's grounded in a set of facts. Different countries have different ideas around how they want to use water, and it becomes a sovereign matter, understandably a sovereign matter on a resource that's not, not, I mean, who owns it exactly, and

we're going to see more and more of these challenges as climate change begins to affect us more. When you look at the Amazon rainforest, 20% of the evaporant from the Amazon rainforest falls on US agricultural land. Whose is it right? The food security of the United States is directly tied to the Amazon rainforest. If someone comes along and says, Well, I'm going to chop down all the trees, that has a direct consequence on US food security. The level of water stress is only increasing, and the need for sharing resources is becoming more and more acute. When you're using water, as we all are, without necessarily seeing the much bigger picture, I think it's quite easy to forget this view that Danes are offering there, right? This very stark image of us from space with this limited and finite resource that will move around whether we want it to or not. It isn't just water-scarce conflict zones that are suffering; even here in London, a city built on a river, trying to control this wild natural resource is

becoming a problem. Dr. Anna Mi is an expert in water infrastructure systems. If I turn on a tap in London, where does that water actually come from? Around 80% of the water in London is coming from the River Thames, and then we have around 20% of water coming from the subsurface, so from the groundwater resources. London's water system is fed by rainfall, groundwater, and rivers that supply a network of reservoirs. From here, water is sent to treatment plants before being pumped into the taps across the city. The sewage is then treated and made safe before being discharged back into the environment. The entire cycle relies on rainfall to replenish the supply so that London can continue to operate. But this is a system that was originally built for a very different time. The reservoirs date from the beginning of the 20th century. The SE system has been built, yeah, exactly, 1860s, and we are now dealing with different weather patterns which bring different amounts of water at different times and bigger extremes and bigger extremes with very different city.

I mean, if we look around us, you I mean, just see how many construction sites are around us. One of the biggest dangers is flash flooding. The aging infrastructure cannot cope with the more extreme rainfall that's feeding into the already overburdened sewage system. And while too much water is a big problem for the city now, not having enough is a growing danger for the future. I guess we're quite lucky in London that it rains all the time. Well, it rains, but it's actually a relatively dry part of the UK, southeast of England. You know, London are at quite a high risk of droughts, surprisingly. Southeast England has a lower average rainfall than Perth and South Sudan. Combining those twin issues of growing demand and longer periods without rain means that even here, in 25 years, the reservoir is at risk of running dry. One thing that really struck me about what Anna was saying is that drought and flooding are two sides of the same coin. It's essentially the same problem that you're dealing with, the stresses that this water system is under.

and the way that that's only going to get worse. I can't help but wonder whether that would be much higher on the political agenda if it was the other side of the coin that we were worrying about. If we were concerned that one day you would turn on the tap at home and there wouldn't be any water there at all. Day Zero. The day the taps run dry. Mexico City, Bengaluru, and Cape Town have all been pushed to the brink as the city's reservoirs and wells fell to critical levels, forcing emergency action to be taken to save lives. But it was over 60 years ago that Singapore fell victim to day zero. Its residents no longer had access to a single drop of clean water, and ever since, securing the country's water has been a national priority. Where do you rank in the world in terms of how water stressed you are? We as dry at the Middle East. Harry Seer is an engineer for Singapore's National Water Agency and has been solving the country's water

problem for nearly three decades. Tropics, you're blessed with a lot of rain, right? And surrounded by water, yeah, I just R plenty of water. It rains every few days, and you should be ample water. The issue in Singapore, because we are so small, is a land constraint issue. We don't have the luxury like countries like the UK or the US, where we can afford to have huge lakes and reservoirs. You know, ours is a tiny place. This lack of space led Singapore to develop new water, a project Harry has been working on since its inception. Every drop of water is precious to us. We collect every drop of water after it's been used, clean it, and return it back into the system. Like London, Singapore gets some of its drinking water from reservoirs, and sewage is collected, treated, and released back into the environment. But here, treated wastewater is also pumped to new water factories, where it is purified and then sent back to feed water-hungry industries and top up reservoirs, creating an artificial cycle. This is high-level magic. Go then, tell me the high level.

magic okay a magician doesn't usually reveal his secrets, but okay fine. So, this is the first stage, microfiltration. Just imagine a filter; the water molecules can pass through, but the larger contaminants cannot. Does bacteria get caught at this stage? Yes, yeah, bacteria gets caught in this stage. Microfiltration is the first step of the three-stage purifying process. The second step, reverse osmosis, forces water molecules through tiny pores in a membrane, filtering out larger contaminants. And finally, a blast of UV radiation kills any remaining microbes that might have squeezed through, and it's ready to drink. I think I sort of imagine that you'd be like chemically treating it; you'd be like adding stuff to the water, but you're really just doing fancy sizing. That summarizes it perfectly, yeah, fancy filtration. Yeah, and you're left presumably with water that doesn't taste like sewage in the end. Spot on. Well, there's only one thing left to do. How long ago was this sewage? 24 hours ago. This was probably still in the sewage. Oh, that tastes like water. It is.

just water. That is amazing. Currently, the National Water Agency says that reclaimed new water supplies Singapore with about 40% of its water needs, and they hope to provide over half of it by 2060. In the decades since Singapore hit day zero, it has learned the importance of self-sufficiency. They're no longer beholden to the unpredictable movement of water. I have to be honest with you, I was a little bit squeamish before coming here, but it's very persuasive. How quickly did people get on board? If in the UK suddenly the government says, By the way, we're going to put sewage water back into the TXS, what happened there? I think in the element of trust, although it's high, is something that's easy to lose. One mistake overnight is, yeah, that does really strike me as something that you've sort of cracked, though, that people here do see the value of water. The principle is that water is not only for drinking; it's for life, right? If you valued water, then things will change, your philosophy, your thinking, your

approach. All will change. The future of the world's water supply is uncertain. We will continue to be faced with too little, too much, and battles over who owns it. Technology can help us to find it and hold on to it, but the most powerful change we can make in our relationship with water might just be the way we think about it. I think for a lot of people, saving water feels like a bit of a wishy-washy environmental concern, you know, like not using plastic straws. And I don't think we've realized, certainly not in the way that Singapore has, that water is this issue of national security concern. And here, they have to go right to rock bottom before they change their ideas about the value of water as a resource. And now, the only thing I'm hoping for is that the rest of the world learns that lesson before we get that far. [Music] [Music]

The Surprising Solutions to the World's Water Crisis

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Bloomberg Originals

Northern Kenya, once a dense forest, has transformed into a parched desert due to drought and climate change, affecting the nomadic tribes and their livestock.

By 2025, half of the world's population is expected to face water scarcity, leading to rising global tensions.

Human interference in the water cycle, along with climate change, has made the distribution and movement of water increasingly unpredictable, exacerbating the crisis.

The Impact of Climate Change on Pastoralism

Pastoralism, reliant on rain for grazing, is severely affected by climate change, leading to violent conflicts over resources.

Women and girls bear the brunt of the water crisis, resorting to dangerous methods to access water.

However, solar-powered storage tanks are providing a sustainable water supply, enabling women to transition from nomadic water carriers to farmers, ultimately transforming the community's livelihood.

The Impact of Water Scarcity on Global Conflict

Over two billion people currently face water scarcity, with 700 million projected to be displaced by 2030.

Water deprivation is becoming a national security threat, leading to social unrest, particularly in regions like the Tigris-Euphrates Basin.

Darnish Massud Alivi is using data from NASA's satellites to track water movement and predict potential conflict, aiming to provide governments with empirical data to address water-related issues.

The Impact of Climate Change on Water Resources

Climate change is increasing water stress and resource sharing challenges, with the Amazon rainforest's evaporation directly affecting US food security.

London's water supply comes primarily from the River Thames and groundwater, but the aging infrastructure struggles to cope with extreme weather patterns.

The city faces a dual threat of flash flooding and drought, with the reservoir at risk of running dry in 25 years due to growing demand and changing rainfall patterns.

Singapore's Innovative Approach to Water Scarcity

Singapore has faced critical water shortages since its independence, making water security a national priority.

The city's small size and land constraints led to the development of a unique water recycling project, New Water, which purifies and reuses wastewater.

The three-stage purification process includes microfiltration, reverse osmosis, and UV radiation, effectively providing clean drinking water and creating an artificial water cycle.

Singapore's Innovative Approach to Water Supply

Singapore's National Water Agency currently provides about 40% of the city's water needs through reclaimed water, with a goal of increasing that to over 50% by 2060.

The country's focus on self-sufficiency in water supply has changed the public's perception of water's value.

The uncertain future of the world's water supply highlights the need for a shift in our relationship with water and its importance as a resource.