Water is a finite resource on our planet. We can only rely on what we have, which translates to about 2.5 percent of drinkable fresh water. Of that amount, only 0.4 percent currently exists in lakes, rivers, and moisture in the atmosphere. The strain of this limited supply grows by the day and as this continues, the detrimental impact will continue to be felt in places least equipped to find alternative solutions—in particular, the African continent.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The global population is estimated to reach around 9.6 billion people by 2050. This is triple the number of humans on the planet just a few decades ago, having to exist with the same amount of water, not taking into account the nonhuman animals and plants that also rely on water to survive.

More than a third of the planet’s population living without access to clean, safe water live in sub-Saharan Africa. And nearly two-thirds—some four billion people—live in water-scarce areas. With this number set to steadily rise, the United Nations predicts that around 700 million people across the world might be “displaced by intense water scarcity” by 2030.

Scarcity-Led Conflict and Crisis

Each year, the world is seeing extreme water-related events including heatwaves and droughts. In 2021 on the African continent alone, Madagascar, Kenya, and Somalia experienced severe water shortages. And with scarcity, conflict tends to follow.

A number of African conflicts are being fueled by competition for dwindling natural resources. At a state level, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan have been engaged in a continuing dispute over fresh water in the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Similar issues are playing out across every level of society.

Cameroon, for instance, experienced a violent dispute over water between fishermen and herders in a town near the border of Chad in December 2021. The disagreement over rights to water found in a shrinking Lake Chad led to the death of 22 people and a further 100,000 people displaced from their homes as the two groups fought.

“Once conflicts escalate, they are hard to resolve and can have a negative impact on water security, creating vicious cycles of conflict,” said Susanne Schmeier, senior lecturer in water law and diplomacy at IHE Delft.

This negative feedback loop fueled by conflict is further compounded by the effect on water quality, agriculture, and forced migration. “With very rare exceptions, no one dies of literal thirst,” said Peter Gleick, head of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute. “But more and more people are dying from contaminated water or conflicts over access to water.”

This insight speaks to the complex interplay between water shortage and conflict. According to research from the Pacific Institute, the impact of water on agriculture plays an even greater role in contributing to conflict—a view backed up by the fact that agriculture accounts for 70 percent of fresh water use in Africa.

Another conflict-causing factor is the social impact of water shortages. With up to a quarter of the world’s population facing serious water scarcity at least one month of the year, people are being forced to migrate. In 2017, at least 20 million people from Africa and the Middle East left their homes due to food shortages and conflict caused by serious drought.

Food Insecurity Due to Impact on Wildlife and Agriculture

Food insecurity caused by water shortages is being compounded by the loss of wildlife. With a drop in their rainy seasons, Kenya’s sheep, camels, and cattle have been in decline. This has led to a threat of 2.5 million people potentially going without food due to drought, according to the United Nations.

The impact of drought is taking a severe toll on agriculture, particularly in counties where this forms the mainstay of their economy. In South Africa, for instance, agriculture is key to the functioning of the country when it comes to job creation, food security, rural development, and foreign exchange.

Water shortages in the country impact both commercial and subsistence farmers. But it is the subsistence farmers who are hardest hit by the droughts, according to a 2021 paper published by a group of international scientists in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

While commercial farmers are able to offset a lack of rain through alternative water supplies, as well as storage and irrigation technologies, subsistence farmers who are reliant on rain, the scientists write, “are particularly susceptible to drought as they highly depend on climate-sensitive resources.” They also point out that the impact is worsened by the fact that this form of farming is tied to farmers’ own food security.

Adaptation

There is no way to avoid the impacts of water scarcity and drought. The best thing to do is manage and mitigate risk where possible. A tool proposed by the group Water, Peace and Security is an early warning monitor capable of tracking information on rainfall, crop yields, and political, economic, and social factors. According to the group, this tool would “predict water-related conflicts up to a year in advance, which allows for mediation and government intervention.”

Another common de-risking approach to conflict is water-sharing agreements. Since the end of World War II, 200 of these agreements have been signed. Despite this, the UN has consistently failed to introduce a Water Convention that would see over 43 countries sharing transboundary rivers and lakes.

A good example where a water-sharing agreement helped avoid conflict can be found in Southern Africa. In 2000, with tensions rising over shared resources, an agreement was reached between Lesotho, South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia that helped avoid further issues.

Reducing water loss remains the most recommended method countries should adopt to avoid future catastrophes. Agriculture and mining, in particular, are two industries that could do more to limit their water wastage. Another policy, suggested by Iceland, is to increase the price of water in relation to its supply, as a way to help curb water wastage.

Desalination is also a popular method used to free up more water, using seawater to increase supply. Saudi Arabia, for instance, uses desalination to supply the country with at least 50 percent of its water supply. Water recycling, known as “gray” water is another low-cost alternative used by farmers to offset the impact of drought.

As water scarcity continues to become more commonplace, so too will these mitigation and adaptation strategies. The question is, will they be enough?

Author Bio: Robin Scher is a writer based in South Africa. He is a graduate of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. Find him on Twitter @RobScherHimself.

For advocates of cryptocurrency, the promise of an economic future that is managed by a blockchain (a decentralized database that is shared among the nodes of a computer network, as opposed to being held in a single location, such as a central bank) is compelling. For anyone paying attention, the rapid expansion of cryptocurrency has been stunning. In 2019, the global cryptocurrency market was approximately $793 million. It’s now expected to reach nearly $5.2 billion by 2026, according to a report by the market research organization Facts and Factors. In just one year—between July 2020 and June 2021—the global adoption of cryptocurrency surged by more than 880 percent.

But the increasing popularity of cryptocurrency has environmentalists on edge, as the digital “mining” of it creates a massive carbon footprint due to the staggering amount of energy it requires. Based on data from the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Indexfrom Digiconomist, an online tool created by data scientist Alex de Vries, the carbon footprint of Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, is equivalent to that of New Zealand, with both emitting nearly 37 megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, according to a February 2021 CNBC article.

To understand why this is a problem, it’s important to explain what goes into creating a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. Unlike fiat money, which is regulated through central banks, transactions in Bitcoin are tracked through a public ledger consisting of a network of computers around the world: the blockchain. “Mining”—a process in which computational puzzles are solved in order to verify transactions between users, which are then added to the blockchain—allows this validation to take place, which is an energy-intensive process.

It’s been a bit of a wild ride for Bitcoin. The market price of a single bitcoin plunged below $30,000 in June 2021 for the first time since January 2021—falling by more than half from its April peak of around $65,000. Nevertheless, some analysts and billionaire investors are still feeling bullish about the crypto coin, as several leading businesses continue to adopt the currency.

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Goldman Sachs started trading Bitcoin futures (agreeing to transact the coin at a predetermined future date and price). Tesla invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin. PayPal announced in March 2021 that it would allow its U.S. customers to use cryptocurrency to pay its millions of online merchants. In September, El Salvador became the first country to make bitcoin legal tender. This, coupled with the fact that big-name brands like AT&T, Home Depot, Microsoft, Starbucks and Whole Foods now accept bitcoin payments, could pave the way for mainstream use. But if the bulls are right and the price of a single Bitcoin eventually hits $500,000, it would pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than what is released by countries like Brazil or Mexico.

Another sector shaken up by digital assets is the art world, as digital artworks have been making headlines for the huge amounts they’ve been selling for on the market through the use of nonfungible tokens, more commonly known as NFTs, a type of guarantee backed by the Ethereum blockchain. In simpler terms, the works are created, or “minted,” through a process called proof-of-work (PoW), which establishes its unique identity, as explained in an article on Hyperallergic.

This is arguably an improvement over the traditional art market when it comes to storing the value of the original work but is terrible for carbon emissions. The carbon footprint of a single Ethereum transaction as of December 2021 was 102.38 kilograms of CO2, which is “Equivalent to the carbon footprint of 226,910 VISA transactions or 17,063 hours of watching YouTube,” according to Digiconomist. Meanwhile, the electrical energy footprint of a single Ethereum transaction is about the same amount as the power that an average U.S. household uses in 8.09 days, the website further states.

In March 2021, Austrian architect Chris Precht announced that he was “[abandoning] plans to sell digital artworks backed by NFTs due to the environmental impact of mining the digital tokens,” according to Dezeen magazine. He said that he had created three digital artworks and wanted to sell them using blockchain technology. “I wanted to create 300 tokens because I had three art pieces and I wanted to make each one in an edition of 100. … I would have used the amount of electricity I usually use in two decades,” Precht explained.

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“[W]e’re largely powering 21st-century technology with 19th-century energy sources,” Andrew Hatton, head of information technology at Greenpeace United Kingdom, told CNBC. He attributes this energy usage to the “huge amount of data-crunching needed to create and maintain this cyber-currency,” a process that demands a lot of electricity. The problem, according to Hatton, is that “only about a fifth of the electricity used in the world’s data centers comes from renewable sources.”

Another crucial aspect of cryptocurrency is that there is only a limited supply available. So, over time, as more bitcoin is mined, the complex math problems needed for transactions get harder to solve, demanding more energy in turn. The system is designed this way so that each digital token that gets issued contains its own unique cryptographic reference to the blockchain, ensuring its security. The issue of energy usage over time is further exacerbated by incentives attached to mining. In terms of Bitcoin, each time a miner solves the complex hashing algorithm required to produce bitcoin (the “PoW”), they receive a small amount of the cryptocurrency itself.

The inherent problem with this, as Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Ethereum, toldCNBC, is that “the more successful bitcoin gets, the higher the price goes; the higher the price goes, the more competition for bitcoin; and thus the more energy is expended to mine [it].” As the price continues to rise, so will the incentive to mine the cryptocurrency, creating a feedback loop that spells trouble for the climate.

According to December 2021 figures from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, Bitcoin makes up around 0.52 percent of the total global electricity consumption. That might not sound like much, but Digiconomist calculates Bitcoin’s total annual power consumption to be around 204.50 terawatt-hours, equivalent to the power consumption of Thailand.

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“Such numbers should be taken with a good deal of salt. Bitcoin’s energy use depends crucially on its price, which swings wildly. The authors [of a paper published in April in the journal Nature Communications] assume that the long-term trend will be upward because the rate at which new bitcoins are created is designed to halve every four years. Reality will doubtless prove more complicated,” noted the Economist. “But the general picture—that bitcoin is a dirty business—fits with other research. One oft-cited model, which uses publicly available blockchain data, reckons its global energy consumption is already equal to that of Kazakhstan, and that its carbon footprint matches Hong Kong’s.”

Another problem besides the gargantuan energy usage is where that energy comes from. There is no definitive statistic related to the proportion of renewable versus fossil fuel-powered electricity used for bitcoin mining. Earth.org cites two conflicting measures of Bitcoin’s energy usage: CoinShares, a cryptocurrency asset management and analysis firm, reported in 2019 that 74.1 percent of Bitcoin’s electricity comes from renewables, while the University of Cambridge puts that number at 39 percent, according to a report it issued in 2020.

A better indicator of Bitcoin’s electricity source is not how it is powered but where its power comes from. A March 2021 article by Quartz estimates that since April 2020, “around 65 percent of bitcoin mining capacity, or hashrate, was based in China due to its cheap electricity.” This figure should give a better understanding of the primary source of fuel currently powering Bitcoin.

In May 2021, at least half of China’s significant share of bitcoin mining was located in the coal-rich province of Xinjiang, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, cited by Quartz. In 2020, 63 percent of China’s bitcoin mining came from coal-fired plants, Fortune reported in July 2021, citing figures from Rystad Energy. “The energy research firm estimates that if China were to eliminate bitcoin mining, it would cut CO2 emissions by 57 million… [metric tons]—the equivalent to what the entire country of Portugal emits in a year,” the Fortune report noted.

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Despite these figures, a more renewable, energy-conscious future may lie ahead for cryptocurrency. In September 2021, Chinese President Xi Jinping told the UN General Assembly that his country would “strive to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.” That could lead to provinces such as Xinjiang being forced to move more toward renewables. The call from Beijing has also prompted nearby territories such as Inner Mongolia (which made up 8.7 percent of China’s bitcoin mining in 2020) to ban all crypto mining in mid-2021. If the change doesn’t come from within China after these crackdowns, bitcoin mining may grow somewhere else as miners look “to explore clean energy like surplus natural gas, shifting their focus from China to countries like Iceland, Norway, and Canada,” according to Quartz.

It’s important that any valid criticism of Bitcoin considers the broader perspective around energy usage. As Michel Rauchs, a research affiliate at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, explained to CNBC, “Although we agree the amounts [of energy needed by Bitcoin] are ludicrous right now, that is still half as much as inactive home appliances in the U.S. consumed.” A similar line of logic could be applied to a variety of everyday tasks such as sending emails or using the internet in general, both of which use up a fair share of energy too.

“What we have here is people trying to decide what is or is not a good use of energy,” Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer of CoinShares, told CNBC. For Demirors, Bitcoin’s energy transparency places it in a better position than other, more opaque energy-consuming industries such as the banking industry.

To this effect, a May 2021 report produced by Galaxy Digital, a financial services and investment management firm based in New York, puts the energy consumption of Bitcoin at less than half that produced by the banking and gold industries. Putting this finding into perspective, the report’s authors note that “Bitcoin is a fundamentally novel technology that is not a precise substitute for any one legacy system.” What this means is that, unlike traditional currency or gold, Bitcoin is “not solely a settlement layer, not solely a store of value, and not solely a medium of exchange.” This makes Bitcoin’s relative energy consumption productive in comparison to comparative sectors, given its robust potential uses.

Galaxy Digital’s report further addresses the source of energy used by miners to generate Bitcoin. “Critics often assume that the energy expended by miners is either stolen from more productive use cases or results in increased energy consumption,” according to the report. “But because of inefficiencies in the energy market, bitcoin miners are incentivized to utilize nonrival energy that may otherwise be wasted or underutilized, as this electricity tends to be the cheapest.” A recent case in point can be found in El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele has announced the use of geothermal energy to power its bitcoin mining.

The promise of such an endeavor offers hope for a more sustainable cryptocurrency future. Whether this will make much difference to the climate crisis in light of government and industrial inaction remains to be seen. Even if cryptocurrency finds a way to coexist with a fossil-free future, critics point out that the majority of the wealth created by Bitcoin goes to a disproportionately small number of investors. An article in the Wall Street Journal, while referring to a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research—which was conducted by researchers from the MIT Sloan School of Management and the London School of Economics—stated that “the top 10,000 bitcoin accounts hold 5 million bitcoins, an equivalent of approximately $232 billion.” Speaking about Bitcoin, Antoinette Schoar, a finance professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of the study, said, “Despite having been around for 14 years and the hype it has ratcheted up, it’s still the case that it’s a very concentrated ecosystem.”

A version of this article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Robin Scher is a writer based in South Africa. He is a graduate of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. Follow him on Twitter: @RobScherHimself.

The paradox of combating climate change is that the extent of the emergency extends far beyond the actions taken by individuals to mitigate the climate crisis, yet collective action is what is most required to address this issue. There are so many examples of this dilemma—from recycling to how power is being generated, to what people should consume. In each case, broad-based action is required to shift the dial, and while it might seem insurmountable, every little bit counts. A great example of this sentiment in action can be found in the growing field of eco-friendly web design.

In a 2013 study, the internet’s annual carbon footprint was measured at 830 million tons of carbon dioxide. This would put the web’s electricity output at roughly the same level as the aviation industry. “If the internet were a country, it would now rank sixth in the world for its electricity demand,” states a 2014 article in the Guardian by Gary Cook, a senior IT analyst with Greenpeace.

Meanwhile, with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic leading to people working remotely from their homes and increasingly relying on at-home entertainment, some countries reported a 20 percent increase in “internet traffic” since March 2020, according to a January 2021 article in Science Daily. Extrapolating that data through the end of 2021, the “increased internet use alone would require a forest of about 71,600 square miles—twice the land area of Indiana—to sequester the emitted carbon,” according to the study, which was conducted by researchers from Purdue University, Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It’s no wonder then that there is a growing interest in making the internet a more eco-friendly place. For instance, Tim Frick’s company Mightybytes is helping to create a more sustainable interweb for all. In an interview with the American Marketing Association (AMA), Frick explained how in the past, the internet was viewed as a “green solution” due to the paper-free nature of its existence. But, as more products and services go online, the need to think about the digital carbon offset has become increasingly important.

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“On its own, a digital product might be lighter in terms of carbon emission and environmental impact, but when you multiply that by the number of users on the internet, that’s a potentially very large environmental impact and a big concern,” Frick told AMA, adding that it’s not just the carbon offset of a physical product that determines its environmental impact; it’s also its digital footprint.

Another way to understand why this is the case, Frick explained, is to look at the energy consumption of training a single artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm. According to a University of Massachusetts Amherst report, the amount of electricity used for this process has the equivalent amount of CO2 emissions generated by five average American cars throughout their lifetime. When you begin to consider that thousands of algorithms are being created and trained every day, the scaling effect really begins to hit home.

What does eco-friendly web design look like?

For Frick and his team, sustainability starts by “including the planet as part of your stakeholders.” Website design should prioritize the user (thus the industry term UX, or user experience), which Frick argues should include considering the environment in how things get made. Many internet users and brands don’t consider how much energy is used to power a particular website. According to Frick, “by making your site fast, efficient and easy to find and load, you’re making it better for the planet.”

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If this seems a bit abstract to you, there are tangible ways to measure roughly how a site ranks in terms of its eco-efficiency. Frick’s company Mightybytes, for instance, has created Ecograder, a platform where you can enter any URL and get a rating based on that website’s environmental impact. This ranking is based on various indicators which include performance, user experience, SEO ranking and whether the site uses renewable energy.

Eco-Friendly Web Design in Action

Dutch programmer Danny van Kooten offers a good working example of how a small adjustment to a piece of code can make a substantial difference. Featured in Wired in 2020, Van Kooten is the creator of a WordPress plug-in that helps website owners to allow their visitors to sign up for their Mailchimp mailing lists through an embedded form. Van Kooten had previously decided to cut down on his carbon footprint by giving up air travel and eating beef. But when he realized that his plug-in was responsible for making websites larger through the addition of several thousand lines of code required to execute its function, he realized he could do more for the environment than his personal consumer choices.

Over time, this extra code meant extra energy, so Van Kooten decided to simplify his plug-in. Although he only managed to reduce its data use by 20 KB, with more than 2 million sites using his plug-in, the cumulative effect on energy usage is significant. With that small adjustment, Van Kooten was able to save the world roughly 59,000 kilograms of CO2 each month, which is “roughly the equivalent to flying from New York to Amsterdam and back 85 times,” according to the article in Wired.

Frick, while speaking to Wired, offered another example in the form of ad code. “It’s constantly pinging servers; it’s not very efficient,” he said. Frick’s company, for example, found that when U.S. companies like USA Today were forced to remove certain tracking code from their sites due to European Union regulation, “USA Today’s homepage shed 90 percent of its data size and loaded 15 times faster.”

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Sustainable fonts have become another popular form of environmentally friendly web design. An article published by Fast Company explores how this simple design choice is improving website efficiency and with it, its impact on the planet. The piece describes the efforts of Amsterdam-based design studio Formafantasma that redesigned its website in a collaborative project with Studio Blanco, a design agency, to make “[t]he site [look] about as plain as possible” by using Arial and Times New Roman as its only fonts. As Formafantasma co-founder Andrea Trimarchi explained to Fast Company, the reason for this design comes down to how a website loads.

“All the content that needs to be loaded in a page, including fonts, logos, etc., are a request to the server,” said Trimarchi. “Arial and Times New Roman are default fonts on both Macs and PCs, which means there are no extra requests required.” By saving the site from making these extra requests, the design ultimately conserves energy. Similar to Van Kooten’s bit of coding, this small amount of energy saved adds up over time. Other default fonts the Fast Company article lists include Courier New, Georgia, Verdana and Helvetica. Another advantage to using default fonts is that it means websites load faster. So, while the site may look more generic, the user experience is improved. And going forward, the simplified look of a website will serve as an indicator of its sustainability.

Despite the overwhelming majority of websites that remain wasteful in their energy expenditure, Frick remains hopeful of the growth of sustainable web design. Since first developing Ecograder in 2011, “[w]e’ve seen this burgeoning community growing globally,” Frick said during his interview with AMA, “but I would say it’s far from the majority. The only way to make a good, positive impact is at scale, so I would like to see most web designers and developers doing this as opposed to a minority.”

Robin Scher is a writer based in South Africa. He is a graduate of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. Find him on Twitter @RobScherHimself.

his article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.