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| Water is the Oil of the 21st Century |
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By Jim Harris
“If the wars of [the 21st] century were fought over oil,
the wars of the next century will be fought over water.”
—Ismail Serageldin, former VP, World Bank,
Newsweek, 1995.
Two-thirds of the Earth is covered by water, but 97.5 per cent of that is undrinkable seawater. Only 2.5 per cent of the world’s water is fresh and 75 percent of that is locked up in ice caps and glaciers. Of the remaining amount, 60 per cent comes in monsoons and floods and isn’t captured, and 20 per cent is in areas too remote for human access. That leaves only 0.01 per cent of the world’s total as accessible, drinkable water. Put another way: if all the water on earth were represented by an 11 litre jug, the freshwater would fill a single cup and all we can access would be the last drop.
Why that’s bad
Since 1950, global water use has tripled, leading to shortages in many regions. Today, 1.1 billion people worldwide don’t have access to safe drinking water and over the next 25 years that is predicted to grow to three billion people.China and even the U.S. are experiencing water shortages: almost two-thirds of China’s 660 cities report shortages,while southwestern U.S. states are consuming more than nature can provide. Shortages are caused by four factors:
Pollution. With China’s rapid industrialization has come pollution. Industrial water contamination has left millions without safe drinking water. Exceeding capacity. Around the world water is being drawn heavily from rivers; the Yellow River in China, the Nile in Egypt and the Colorado in America frequently run dry. Deep aquifers—underground water reservoirs—had been a reliable source but the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches from Texas to South Dakota, has 200,000 wells tapping it and pulling out 13 million gallons a minute, 14 times faster than nature’s replenishment rate.
Agriculture. Worldwide, agriculture uses twothirdsof all water. Between 1998 and 2004, China’swheat production fell 70 million tons to 322 milliontons, because of declining water availability. ButChina’s production will have to increase by 170 milliontons if it’s to feed its population by 2025. Theeasiest way to reduce domestic water consumptionis to import food, therefore exporting the burden ofwater resources to another region.New uses. Fab plants, which make the wafersused for computer CPUs, require massive quantitiesof very pure water. Globally, semiconductor fabplants use 1.5 trillion litres of water annually. Ofcourse, computers and semiconductors are at theheart of the new economy.
The Water Market
The US$400 billion global water market will growto US$740 billion in 2010—equal to one per cent of global GDP. Water technologies for conservation, sewage treatment, purification, remediation and desalinization will experience significant growth. Two of the most profitable will be conservation and sewage treatment. Conservation can have significant results ina variety of settings. In agriculture, the “Green Revolution” introduced high-yield seeds to developing nations. It was supposed to increase food production but it’s now having the opposite effect: replacing drought-resistant indigenous crops with water-guzzling varieties has created an irrigation crisis. In industry, closed loop systems, in which water required for a process is used repeatedly,would not only reduce use but also cut pollution. And in Canadian homes, 40 per cent of water is simply flushed down the toilet. Moving from a regular toilet to an ultra low-flush toilet can cut use by more than 60 per cent. Sewage treatment would benefit the Great Lakes, the largest surface freshwater system on the earth. They contain 84 per cent of North America’s surface fresh water and 21 per cent of the world’s supply. And Toronto dumps sewage into Lake Ontario. We need to employ bio-mimicry—looking at how nature deals with biological waste—and copying it. John Todd, the world leader in natural methods ofsewage treatment, has shown how Toronto could treat all its sewage using nature lagoons with plantlife. And it would be far cheaper than today’s process.
See www.oceanarks.org for more.
By: Jim Harris
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