MilwaukeePhoto: Jeramey Jannene

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action. This year’s topic is water.

For most of history, cities have been unsanitary human death traps, unable to provide the two to three quarts of wholesome freshwater each of us must drink daily to stay alive or the minimum four to five gallons — roughly the equivalent of three to four modern toilet flushes — needed for the most elemental cooking, washing, and hygiene. Urban populations normally restocked only by net influx from impoverished countrysides. Water-borne diseases like dysentery, diarrhea, cholera, typhoid, malaria, and yellow fever have been, far and away, mankind’s deadliest killers.

Cheap, abundant freshwater and good sanitation was one of the key, often forgotten enablers of the demographic transformation that so dramatically increased human population size, longevity, and urban concentration. In 1800, only 2.5 percent of the world’s people lived in cities. Today it’s 50 percent. Projections are that 70 percent of us will do so in the future, even as world population itself surges from today’s 6.7 billion to over 9 billion by 2050.

Yet this next urban evolution cannot occur without crisis unless we reinvent our current paradigm of urban water supply and management to meet the demands of the dawning age of freshwater scarcity. In more and more parts of the world, demand is outstripping available supply of freshwater and water ecosystems are being tapped beyond sustainable replenishment rates. As a result, urban domestic needs are competing for limited supplies against other vital, water-intensive activities such as producing food, energy, and industrial goods. States that cannot feed, power, or provide adequate domestic water to their societies are highly prone to weaken and fail. Just as oil shortages transformed the history of the 20th century, freshwater scarcity is emerging as one of the defining fulcrums of geopolitics, national security, economics, environment, and daily living conditions of the 21st century.

Since none of the silver-bullet technologies, such as desalination, are ready for prime time to provide inexpensive, new supplies in requisite volumes, societies everywhere face the twin challenges of creating a new paradigm that uses existing water resources more productively while allocating sufficient water to sustain nature’s ecosystems themselves. New paradigms have been created before — always with great impacts on the breakthrough-making societies and world history.

The robustness of the Roman Empire was supported by a public water supply that served its largest cities and military garrisons. Its grand, imperial capital of one million people was sustained by eleven gravity-fed aqueducts, covering 300 miles, that brought clean, wholesome water — in amounts comparable to what we enjoy today — to private homes, fountains, and public baths, and continuously flushed away wastes through the city’s extensive sewer network into the Tiber. The seminal urban reform which helped launch the transformation of Augustus Caesar’s famous boast of turning a civil war-ravaged city of brick into a thriving capital of marble occurred in 33 B.C., when Augustus’ lifelong friend, trusted general, and later virtual co-emperor, the plebian-born Marcus Agrippa, took the office of Aedile or Mayor and — at his own personal expense — rehabilitated three decaying aqueducts, built a new one, cleaned out the sewers, and opened 500 public fountains and 170 baths. In the process, he helped establish the modern paradigm of a public municipal water supply, for the poor as well as the rich.

One million people may not seem like many today. But for the intervening centuries after Rome’s fall few cities in the world, and none in the West, ever achieved it again. These were dark ages in which most urban dwellers drank water thick with their own wastes and water beggars went door to door in medieval European cities. The wealthiest obtained cleaner water from the ubiquitous water carrier, mankind’s second oldest profession. Many drank beer or wine or water cleansed by a few drops of vinegar. In China, street vendors since ancient times sold boiling water and hot tea; Europeans took up tea, hot chocolate, and coffee, which were considered medicinal, when they became available after the 16th century voyages of discovery. By 1800, there were only six cities in the world that could support half a million people — London, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, Istanbul, and Canton. Yet two centuries later, there were 29 metropolises with over 7 million.

The breakthrough that enabled this remarkable rise of modern urban industrial civilization was the mid-19th-century Sanitary Awakening. Seminal reforms occurred in response to London’s Great Stink in the hot summer of 1858 when the Thames River putrefied with backed-up sewage. This struck terror in the hearts of legislators in Parliament — who for decades had been balking at public sanitary reform despite the fact that tens of thousands of common Londoners were dying from cholera and other filth diseases — because at the time conventional wisdom held that diseases were transmitted by bad smells, which of course they themselves could not escape, stuck as they were in the Houses of Parliament on the bank of the river. Motivated by this salutary personal fear they finally passed historic reforms — it took them only one month! London’s modern sewerage system, embankments, and water supply system soon set standards that all industrial nations strived to emulate and surpass in a virtuous circle of reforms.

The Sanitary Awakening gave rise to the 20th century public health revolution, the germ theory of diseases, vaccines and environmental reforms that eradicated many diseases, and the surge in world population and longevity that soon followed. By 1920 the residents of all rich, industrial cities in Europe and North America enjoyed abundant, clean freshwater for drinking, cooking and washing; death from waterborne disease fell sharply in America, and became negligible by 1940. In the second half of the 20th century, centralized wastewater treatment plants became increasingly common to collect and disinfect raw sewage before discharge into public waterways — such discharges today are often cleaner than the water into which they are released. 

Today’s freshwater scarcity crisis is closing the final chapter on the urban water paradigm of the industrial era. As water supplies grow scarce and ecosystems deplete, drawing more and more freshwater from ever farther distant sources is increasingly untenable. There are simply not enough good resources, and transporting huge quantities of water — which weighs a heavy 8.3 pounds per gallon or 20 percent more than oil — consumes much costly and often carbon-producing, energy.

A new paradigm shift — to an efficiency model for urban water — is urgently needed. Fortunately, one is starting to emerge in embryonic form from the trial and error experiments of cities around the world. It has two main parameters: First, to get more productive use from each drop of existing supply; second, to do so in ways that help sustain water ecosystems. The new paradigm, it is also increasingly clear, must be based on a holistic understanding of the total workings of each watershed environment — how withdrawals and injections of water affect the size, timing, and quality of flows throughout the ecosystem, for instance — and engineered as an
integrated complement rather than as a series of disconnected, separate tasks.

More and more, the holistic tool kit is utilizing nature’s own ecosystem services — for example, restoring wetland edges and community-friendly urban ponds to absorb flood waters and cleanse pollutants rather than concrete channelization, and re-foresting lands upriver to control sediment flows, slow run-off, and capture more groundwater. Cities like Philadelphia and Chicago are investing billions of dollars in new storm-water management systems that employ pervious concrete, green roofs, and rainwater harvesting to simultaneously capture more water for productive use, minimize polluting run-off, and recharge aquifers. In water-scarce Los Angeles, by contrast, half of all storm water today still rushes off to the sea uncaptured, unused, untreated, and worsening pollution.

Cities and industries are further extending urban water supplies by recapturing and reusing treated wastewater for various uses; while so-called “toilet to tap” won’t be ready for prime time until it overcomes its terrible image problem, it is technically feasible and bound to become more common. Wastewater itself is becoming viewed as a valuable commodity: Heat can be profitably recaptured from waste solids, and phosphates and other raw materials effectively mined from it and recycled. More industrial plants are also building smaller scale, decentralized wastewater treatment and recapture facilities on site to save the energy costs of transporting large volumes to and from centralized municipal plants.

The embryonic, new urban water paradigm, nevertheless, remains fragile and at risk of being stillborn under the weight of formidable impediments. These impediments include the very high cost of replacing old infrastructure, as well as entrenched mindsets, interests, and practices. The paradigm faces an as-yet-unproven roadmap. Fortunately the risk of its failing to catch on is offset partly by the sheer broadness of experimentation going on in far flung cities in China, India, Singapore, Australia, Israel, Europe, and the U.S.

History suggests that those cities and societies that deliver the farthest reaching breakthroughs are likeliest to be rewarded with invigorated economic growth and rising influence. And although re-inventing urban water management solves only one piece of the larger challenges of global scarcity, it is an important piece that leverages water resources for other critical uses like growing goods, producing energy, and making water-intensive goods. It is, moreover, also likely to be a bellwether of how well each nation is responding to the overall, epoch-making challenges of global freshwater scarcity. 

America starts out on the quest to pioneer a new water paradigm with many comparative advantages, including relatively ample water resource wealth, good technical know-how, political stability, and manageable population pressures. It has no good excuse not to seize the opportunity to lead the way.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali famously predicted 25 years ago that the “next war in the Middle East will be fought over water.” While that has yet to come to pass, the greatest present danger stems from failing nation-states — and not just in the bone-dry Middle East. With world water use growing at twice the rate of human population over the last century, many of the Earth’s vital freshwater ecosystems are already critically depleted and being used unsustainably to support our global population of 6.5 billion, according the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the situation can only be expected to get worse as the population pushes toward 9 billion by 2050. As great rivers run dry before reaching the sea, groundwater is mined deeper and deeper beyond replenishment levels, and water quality erodes with growing pollution, an explosive fault line is cleaving between freshwater Haves and Have-Nots across the political, economic, and social landscapes of the 21st century.

Among the water Have-Nots are the 3.6 billion who will live in countries that won’t be able to feed themselves within 15 years due largely to scarcity of water — likely to include giant India. Throughout history, states that have been unable to feed themselves with homegrown or reliably imported cheap food have stagnated, declined, and often collapsed, with grievous adjustments in living standards, population levels, and regional turmoil.

Health and humanitarian crises are likely to emanate from the dark side of the Have-Not divide where 1 billion abject poor lack regular access to clean, fresh water for minimal needs and 2.6 billion don’t have basic sanitation. Upriver water Have states increasingly exert control over the precious water flows to their dependent neighbors downstream, while within nations the wealthy and those with greatest political clout commonly enjoy the formidable competitive advantage of better, and often subsidized, access to the best water resources. Global warming exacerbates the water crisis with extreme, unpredictable floods, droughts, glacier melts, storm swells, and other water cycle–related depredations that fall disproportionately on already water-insecure, Have-Not regions and overwhelm existing, fragile water infrastructures. Such dislocating events are expected to create 150 million environmental refugees within a decade.

A tumultuous adjustment to the freshwater scarcity crisis lies ahead, and in our global society the feedback effects will buffet even the security of distant nations. Two cases from the headlines — Yemen and Pakistan — illustrate some of the problems and challenges.

Yemen

Arid Yemen is an impoverished, failing state, home to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which helped to train and arm the would-be Detroit-bound, Christmas suicide bomber from Nigeria. The Yemeni government is not much better than a large, corrupt tribe competing for control of the nation’s diminishing resources through patronage payoffs and proxy alliances with other strong tribes. There is warfare in the north between Houthi tribesmen and Saudi-backed government forces, while politically and economically disaffected southerners are trying to secede. The government is also battling al-Qaida, which flourishes in ungoverned no-man’s-lands.

Terrorism — which claimed 17 U.S. sailor lives in the attack in Aden Harbor on the USS Cole in 2000, and was beaten back for a few years with the help of U.S. drones — is resurgent. The Yemeni government’s policy of routinely releasing captured or repatriated terrorists after little more than a promise not to do it again frustrates the Obama administration’s efforts to shut the Guantanamo Bay prison, where about half of the remaining 200 prisoners are Yemeni.

One of the world’s most dire freshwater scarcity crises underlies Yemen’s extreme poverty and faltering state. The average Yemeni lives at eight times below the world freshwater availability poverty line, and has 1/20th the world average. Less than half have access to enough clean, fresh water for basic needs, while five-sixths lack adequate sanitation. Illegal well drilling is ubiquitous. Yet when the government tried to remove state subsidies for the diesel fuel powering the illegal pumps, riots forced it to desist. The lion’s share of the groundwater is commandeered (and used wastefully in flood irrigation) to grow the cash crop qat, a narcotic stimulant chewed by Yemeni men and an integral part of Yemeni culture.

The net result is an ecological and human catastrophe unfolding in slow motion: Water tables around the country are plunging — in many places two to four times faster than the natural replenishment rate. Soaring 7 percent annual population growth, adding to the current 23 million Yemenis, compounds the water scarcity crisis. As much as two-thirds of rural violence, including some deaths, is related to water. As life in rural areas grows untenable, Yemenis are crowding into already swollen cities, where water riots are not uncommon and mosques dispense minimum free water as charity to the poorest. In the capital, San’a, 100 of the 180 wells in use a decade ago have run dry. Within just five to 10 years, it is widely predicted to become the world’s first capital city to literally run out of water.

To try to retain some control, the government delegated power over water to local authorities and urban water companies. Al-Qaida is strongest in places like ancient Marib and Shabwa where no water companies operate, and it gains the support of the populace by providing health care and helping to dig wells. What viable diplomatic policy America and its allies can pursue in such a situation is unclear, as international financial aid simply disappears down the government’s sieve of corruption.

Pakistan

As dangerous as Yemen is as a failed state, it pales in comparison to Pakistan, which is nuclear-armed, Taliban-besieged, regionally fractious, and severely water fragile. Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida’s core leadership are believed to be hiding out in its rugged northwest regions.

American leaders had a big fright in April 2009 when Muslim fundamentalist Taliban fighters broke out of the northwestern provinces and struck within 25 miles of the Indus River’s giant Tarbela Dam, a critical site they’d attacked through terrorism before, and only 30 miles from the capital, Islamabad. The Tarbela Dam is the strategic heart of Pakistan’s irrigation, hydropower, and flood-control network. If the Taliban damaged or took control of the giant dam, and gained critical leverage over Pakistan’s food and energy security, the government’s viability would be imperiled.

While Pakistan’s American-trained elite counterterrorism forces and air power quickly rallied to beat back the Taliban, the U.S. responded to the Taliban’s show of strength in the spring of 2009 by accelerating its $7.5 billion five-year aid package to Pakistan — the lion’s share of which is focused on rehabilitating the nation’s perilously deteriorating and inadequate agricultural and hydropower waterworks. During her tumultuous October 2009 visit to Pakistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was repeatedly warned about the nation’s impending freshwater crisis.

At the heart of Pakistan’s crisis is the Indus River, its water lifeline and foundation of its farm economy, which provides the livelihood for 60 percent of Pakistanis. It’s already so badly overused that its water rarely reaches its now dried-up delta, and its huge fertile irrigated basin cropland is heavily reliant on overpumped groundwater and in dire need of a refurbished drainage system to remove poisoning salts. The Indus River also faces an alarming loss of up to a third of its flow by 2025 from the global warming–induced melting of its source Himalayan glaciers. In the same period, moreover, the nation’s population will grow 30 percent more to 225 million. Global climate change is further menacing monsoonal Pakistan with more unpredictable and intense seasonal floods and droughts. In a country where the water-storage capacity to buffer prolonged drought and loss of hydropower is only 30 days — 1/30th as much as in the U.S. and 1/15th as much as in China — the effects of climate change can quickly become catastrophic and destabilizing.

Complicating Pakistan’s water crisis is that most of its water originates outside its borders, in archenemy, nuclear-armed India — with whom it has fought several wars and still heatedly disputes the Kashmir border region — as well as in Afghanistan and China. The Indus water dispute with India, which helped trigger the first war between the countries, was resolved with a 1960 treaty. But under the strain of population growth and climate change, the treaty is in dire need of renegotiation. One source of tension is that both countries are building new hydropower dams on Indus tributaries in the Kashmir. Pakistan is also highly suspicious of India’s increased aid to Afghanistan for dams on rivers that flow into Pakistan; it fears it is an Indian subterfuge to put Pakistan in an east-west hydrological vise once America leaves Afghanistan. For their part, the Pakistanis have awarded their dam contract to China, India’s adversary with whom it has its own water disputes and testy political relations.  

The chessboard of Pakistan’s destiny is immensely complex, of course. But how it manages its critical water challenges — both from internal and external pressures — is one of the paramount variables in whether it will hold together as a coherent nation-state. Given its nukes, radical Muslim fundamentalists, and regional stature, what happens to it is of grave significance to American national security and Asian regional security.

The global water crisis is unfolding in many other places around the world, and in many different ways, posing vital national security challenges to the U.S.  Israel’s conflicts with Palestinians and Syria include contentious disputes over the vital water supplies of the West Bank and Golan Heights, which Israel won in the 1967 war and which today account for two-thirds of Israel’s total freshwater. Iraq’s national viability and prosperity depend significantly on how much water its upstream neighbors Syria and Turkey (the Middle East’s rising water superpower) permit to flow downstream. How tightly China, in its dam-building frenzy for economic growth, squeezes the waters from the 10 major Asian rivers originating in its Tibetan plateau will affect the prosperity and political robustness of downstream nations across Asia, China’s geopolitical status, and with it, U.S. national security interests. Whether and how big a food importer India becomes as its own water management runs short will affect global food prices, and conditions of famine and health, in food import–dependent countries worldwide.

Water and national security may not seem at first to be interconnected. But they are-increasingly so as the global freshwater scarcity crisis deepens.

• Read more about WATER: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization in the Los Angeles Times.
• Listen to Solomon discuss water on The Diane Rehm Show.
• Check out a Grist interview with Solomon.