By 2040, nearly 600 million children will live in areas of extremely high water stress.By 2030, annual global water requirements will exceed current sustainable water supplies by 40 percent.Should current trends persist without mitigation: And then there’s the water out in the environment - the water that either comes, sometimes in destructive torrents, or doesn’t come, for months that add up to drought. There’s the water we use every day at home, in offices and factories, on farms. We’re used to separating out our experience of water, especially in the developed world. Nourished by unusually warm ocean temperatures, slow-moving hurricanes in the Atlantic and supertyphoons in the Pacific explode with power and intensity just before coming ashore, where they release torrential, flooding rains. Fueled by one record-dry summer after another, megafires rage across the American West. Snow that now falls as rain, stealing from a kind of “water savings account” that whole regions rely on, where winter snows pile up in mountain ranges, then melt gradually through the spring and summer to provide a steady flow of water.Įvery day we’re seeing the dawn of a kind of brutal intensity to the climate, and to the weather, that feels all new. Rain that falls in fewer events - fewer rainy days and fewer storms - but with much more intensity and volume. Rain that doesn’t fall anymore where we expect it. We don’t often connect the dots when we talk about the impact of climate change, but it is almost all about water. But that impact is likely to be so dramatic, we may not notice. As it is, the progress we’ve made in the United States and around the world will cushion the impact of climate change. If climate change weren’t transforming everything about who gets water, and how much, it would be great news - the foundation of a new water ethic. Which is to say, every gallon of water we use today does three times the work it did in 1965.įarmers today use a little less water than farmers did in 1965 - but they irrigate 45 percent more land and raise twice as much food. economy in that half-century without using a single new gallon of water. The United States today uses less water every day, for all purposes, than it did in 1965. We’ve also made dramatic progress across the past 50 years. If we were still consuming water at the rate we did in 2005, we would be using 5 billion more gallons of water a day than we are. data), the typical American went from using 100 gallons of water per day at home to using 83 gallons. In the 10 years between 20 (the most recent year for which there is U.S. In the past decade, we have made dramatic progress in water. So we certainly aren’t ready for the future. When it comes to water, we aren’t ready for what’s happening to us right now. city: The flooding is not devastating, but it is sudden, it’s new, it’s relentless, it’s hugely disruptive, and it’s not going away. That’s the most obvious lesson from the flooding in Charleston, a single problem in a single U.S. You don’t have to imagine the future of water: It’s here. “Because we could easily end up at the end of the day with no way to get the kids.” There have been occasions when they didn’t take the children to day care, because flooding was predicted during the day. “We have to watch the weather, we have to watch the tides, we have to talk to the people at the day care,” she said. That’s very disturbing in the 21st century.įatima Lahmami Langlois | Rotary Club of Montreal More than a billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water. Half of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from waterborne diseases. News & Features (down arrow opens sub-menu)> Our Programs (down arrow opens sub-menu)> Get Involved (down arrow opens sub-menu)> Search SubmitĪbout Rotary (down arrow opens sub-menu)>
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