The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [48]
One of the maps is quite scary-looking and captures the combined effects of both climate and population trends on human water-supply stress. Most of the world is colored red (indicating less water availability than today) with a few places colored blue (more water availability, mostly in Russia and Canada) and even fewer in green (meaning little or no change). This fearsome red map suggests that by the year 2025 much of humanity’s water supply will be worse off, either from population growth, or climate change, or both.
The other two maps separate out the effects of population and climate change. The population-only map is even scarier than the combined map. Nearly all the world is bathed in red, with blue colors even rarer than before. Compared to it, the climate-only map seems almost benign, with roughly equal proportions of blue and red tones and even more in green. In other words, climate changes are expected to both harm and help water availability in different parts of the world, whereas population and economic growth harm it nearly everywhere.206 So even if our climate-change problems could somehow disappear tomorrow (and they won’t), we would still face enormous challenges to water supply in some of the hottest, most crowded places on Earth.
Drinking Sh**
It’s hard to imagine the world behind those red maps. To most people—especially living in cities—clean water is like oil and electricity: one of those things upon which they depend mightily yet give barely a passing thought. In my own city of Los Angeles, everyone will gladly pay a hundred dollars a month for cable television, yet would roar in protest if forced to pay that much for life’s elixir piped directly into their homes. When Governor Schwarzenegger declared a state of drought emergency, I studied my water bill closely for the first time in my life. For two months of clean drinking water, snared from faraway sources and delivered to my house by one of the world’s most expensive and elaborate engineering schemes, I was charged $20.67. I spend more on postage stamps.
If only everyone could indulge such ignorant bliss. While eight in ten people have access to some sort of improved water source,207 this globally averaged number masks some wild geographic discrepancies. Some countries, like Canada, Japan, and Estonia, provide clean water to all of their citizens. Others, especially in Africa, do so for under half. The worst water poverty is suffered by Ethiopians, Somalis, Afghanis, Papua New Guineans, Cambodians, Chadians, Equatorial Guineans, and Mozambicans.208 Even their statistics hide the most glaring divide—between cities and rural areas. Eight in ten urban Ethiopians have some form of improved water whereas just one in ten rural Ethiopians do.
As we saw in Chapter 3, cities empower efficient channeling of natural resources to people. It is far more economical to lay water pipes and sewerage in a densely populated area than to spread them across the countryside. For much of the world, even sewers are a luxury. Unbelievably, four in ten of us don’t even have a simple pit latrine. Small wonder that waterborne diseases kill even more people than our raging epidemic of HIV/AIDS. As Jamie Bartram of the United Nations World Health Organization writes:
Far more people endure the largely preventable effects of poor sanitation and water supply than are affected by war, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction combined. Yet those other issues capture the public and political imagination—and public resources—in a way that water and sanitation issues do not. Why? Perhaps in part because most people who read articles such as this find it hard