How Global Warming Will Affect the Water Crisis

Posted by Tara Lohan, AlterNet at 3:50 PM on February 7, 2008.

Here's an important heads up: Things are going to get more bleak in the U.S. when it comes to available fresh water.

Here's what the UK's Telegraph had to say:

An impending crisis in America's water supply is signalled by a study that concludes more than half of the recent decline seen in the west can be linked to human activities. Scientists have been documenting significant changes in water flow in the western United States for the past 50 years. Now it has been found that to 60 percent of the changes in river flow, snow pack and winter air temperatures in the region during this period can be attributed to human-caused climate change.

Dr Tim Barnett of the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues conclude that for the inhabitants, from Seattle to Los Angeles, the results "are not good news" and call for immediate action to secure future supplies.

The report came from the journal, Science, and it also said there would be shifts in water supply worldwide. That's the funny thing about climate change. The winners would likely be "Eurasia, Alaska, Canada, and some tropical regions," with more water. Losers, where there would be substantial decline in water availabity, would be "southern Europe, the Middle East, southern Africa and southwestern North America."

Decreasing water availablity will also have a huge affect on not just drinking water, but agriculture.

As the Telegraph reports:

We were surprised by how much and how soon these regions could suffer if we don't adapt," says study co-author Marshall Burke. "For example, our study suggests that Southern Africa could lose more than 30 percent of its main crop, maize, in the next two decades, with possibly devastating implications for hunger in the region."

Potential losses in South Asia are also significant, he added, with projected losses of 10 percent or more for many regional staples, including millet, maize and rice. "For poor farmers on the margin of survival, these losses could really be crushing," Burke says.

This information comes on the heels of a new report from India, that "two billion people face acute water shortage this century as Himalayan glaciers melt due to global warming."

It is clear that attention to the water crisis -- in the U.S. -- and globally, needs to be elevated to a top international priority. People also need to start seriously addressing the links between global warming and water. As the world continues to warm, some people will be inundated with too much water and others with too little.

We need immediate action the U.S. to cut emissions and to join the international effort to battle climate change, and we need effective policy to establish water conservation measures, a reassessment of industrial agriculture's role in water use, and language that protects waters as a human right for all people.

Tagged as: water, global warming, climate change, water scarcity

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.