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A planetary water crisis is imminent by 2030, warn experts on the eve of the UN-Water Summit. [1]
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Date: 2023-03-17
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Demand for freshwater will outstrip the supply by forty percent by the end of this decade, warns the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The primary threat is from wasteful water practices such as overuse, pollution, and the spiraling impacts of the climate crisis.
The report noted that nations needed to act now and stop "subsidizing the extraction and overuse of water through misdirected agricultural subsidies, and industries from mining to manufacturing must be made to overhaul their wasteful practices." These practices threaten the global supply of water.
The UN 2023 Water Conference will be held in New York on March 22-24, 2023; the Potsdam report will be on the agenda.
According to Fiona Harvey's reporting, world leaders have been invited, but few will attend. She quoted Henk Olvik, a special envoy on the global water crisis.
“If we are to have a hope of solving our climate crisis, our biodiversity crisis and other global challenges on food, energy and health, we need to radically change our approach in how we value and manage water. [This] is the best opportunity we have to put water at the centre of global action to ensure people, crops and the environment continue to have the water they need”
Oh well. Our overlords are doing nothing as usual over this existential threat.
The report warns that the crisis must be dealt with internationally, as most nations depend on each other for their water; think the Himalayas, where billions depend on the Tibetan Plateau and the Nile River or the water cycle in a tropical rainforest.
Fiona Harvey writes in The Guardian:
Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a lead author of the report, told the Guardian the world’s current neglect of water resources was leading to disaster. “The scientific evidence is that we have a water crisis. We are misusing water, polluting water, and changing the whole global hydrological cycle, through what we are doing to the climate. It’s a triple crisis.” Mariana Mazzucato, an economist and professor at University College London, also a lead author, added: “We need a much more proactive, and ambitious, common good approach. We have to put justice and equity at the centre of this, it’s not just a technological or finance problem.” The report marks the first time the global water system has been scrutinised comprehensively and its value to countries – and the risks to their prosperity if water is neglected – laid out in clear terms. Like with the Stern review of the economics of the climate crisis in 2006 and the Dasgupta review of the economics of biodiversity in 2021, the report authors hope to highlight the crisis in a way that policymakers and economists can recognise. Many governments still do not realise how interdependent they are when it comes to water, according to Rockstrom. Most countries depend for about half of their water supply on the evaporation of water from neighbouring countries – known as “green” water because it is held in soils and delivered from transpiration in forests and other ecosystems, when plants take up water from the soil and release vapour into the air from their leaves.
There are recommendations by Potsdam to correct the process of wasteful water use in the report. They require international determination and action. They also need leaders to give a shit. All three of these are lacking.
x Incredible satellite image from space showing all the sediment pouring out into the Pacific from gushing rivers across Northern California.
Also notice the flooded Salinas Valley and muddied waters of the San Francisco Bay and rivers across the Sacramento Valley. pic.twitter.com/bLRKd3XOwI — Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) March 16, 2023
Mní wičhóni
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/17/2158735/-A-planetary-water-crisis-is-imminent-by-2030-warn-experts-on-the-eve-of-the-UN-Water-Summit
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