I can assure you there is plenty of water. There are floods in lots of places every year. The oceans are full of water that for just 5kWh we can desalinate 250 gallons.
The problem is that the water and energy aren't where the users want it to be.
But pipes are relatively cheap - if humanity cared enough, we could build pipes to distribute the plentiful water everywhere.
But it turns out the people without much water tend to be in very poor places and warzones where there isn't much appetite for spending money on pipes.
Before commenting water is cheap and plentiful please read the proposed definition.
> Water bankruptcy refers to “a state in which a human-water system has spent beyond its hydrological means for so long that it can no longer satisfy the claims upon it without inflicting unacceptable or irreversible damage to nature.”
Yeah but that definition is a deformation of what bankrupcy means for a business, and the use of the word bankrupcy is more alarmist than its "proposed definition".
"irreversible damage to nature" is vague. Is a dam causing irreversible damage to nature? It sure is. Can it solve a lack of water in the dry season, of course it can.
People are more ready to build dams and damage nature than to starve.
The whole notion of bankrupcy is unclear, and making headlines with alarmist claims that are not really felt on the ground is just going to make people cringe.
I find this other article [1] more informative, including for instance the global map of Vulnerability to Water-Related Challenges taken from the actual report [2].
UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
Sedimentation and low filling levels, hence increasing costs. Also
We found that 93% of studied reservoirs have not been fully filled up at least once during 2010–2022. Our analyses revealed that droughts are the most probable culprits. About 86% of the 398 reservoirs with accessible SPEI data exhibited significant susceptibility to drought, while 43% of the 525 reservoirs demonstrated notable sensitivity to ENSO events.
I enjoy running these kind of articles through an analysis using chatgpt. Language matters and this is a pretty terribly slanted article trying to hype up fear.
Sometimes I wonder if we would be better having a plugin that did this kind of analysis to give you a pointer towards if the writer is even trying to do their job of being objective or think they need to "make the news" to save the world.
The Smithsonian article uses a well-known set of high-impact narrative devices—catastrophic metaphor, point-of-no-return language, scale shock, authority stacking, vivid exemplars, moralization, and fear-to-action solution framing—to intensify perceived urgency and motivate concern.
Not sure the choice of the word "bankruptcy" is meaningful. "Bankruptcy" is short for "bankruptcy protection", where an insolvent debtor tells a court they have no way of paying back all their current debts with whatever assets they have, and the court deals with the creditors and restructures all those debts in an equitable way (according to the law), so the debtors liability is limited. This is one of the cornerstones of capitalism, the limited liability concept.
When it comes to nature, there is no limited liability. If you don't have water, you don't have water, there's no way to get any "bankruptcy protection" from anyone.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] threadDoes anyone know what this looks like for typical cases? The water just cuts off for a month in some places I guess?
The problem is that the water and energy aren't where the users want it to be.
But pipes are relatively cheap - if humanity cared enough, we could build pipes to distribute the plentiful water everywhere.
But it turns out the people without much water tend to be in very poor places and warzones where there isn't much appetite for spending money on pipes.
They actually scooped the UN by over a year :)
> Water bankruptcy refers to “a state in which a human-water system has spent beyond its hydrological means for so long that it can no longer satisfy the claims upon it without inflicting unacceptable or irreversible damage to nature.”
"irreversible damage to nature" is vague. Is a dam causing irreversible damage to nature? It sure is. Can it solve a lack of water in the dry season, of course it can.
People are more ready to build dams and damage nature than to starve.
The whole notion of bankrupcy is unclear, and making headlines with alarmist claims that are not really felt on the ground is just going to make people cringe.
[1] https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/our-world-is-entering-...
[2] https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:10445/Global_Water_Ban...
For many of these areas, desalination could meet the gap, but someone will need to pay for it. That is the main issue, no one wants to pay.
Large scale Desalination is getting increasingly achievable: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/11/20/we-need-more-w...
We found that 93% of studied reservoirs have not been fully filled up at least once during 2010–2022. Our analyses revealed that droughts are the most probable culprits. About 86% of the 398 reservoirs with accessible SPEI data exhibited significant susceptibility to drought, while 43% of the 525 reservoirs demonstrated notable sensitivity to ENSO events.
Worth a read: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
Sometimes I wonder if we would be better having a plugin that did this kind of analysis to give you a pointer towards if the writer is even trying to do their job of being objective or think they need to "make the news" to save the world.
The Smithsonian article uses a well-known set of high-impact narrative devices—catastrophic metaphor, point-of-no-return language, scale shock, authority stacking, vivid exemplars, moralization, and fear-to-action solution framing—to intensify perceived urgency and motivate concern.
When it comes to nature, there is no limited liability. If you don't have water, you don't have water, there's no way to get any "bankruptcy protection" from anyone.