The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [51]
Since construction of the High Aswan Dam almost all flow in the Nile River is now either diverted for irrigation or evaporates away behind reservoirs. 213 Dams along Africa’s Volta River system can hold back or release more than four years’ worth of its total river flow. Water passage through the Euphrates-Tigris in the Middle East, the Mae Khlong in Thailand, the Río Negro in Argentina, and the Colorado in North America is similarly controlled. But hydrologic data are seldom released. Many countries even classify them, so their downstream neighbors can’t tell if they are complying with international water-sharing agreements.214
These are the reasons why our group of scientists and engineers were in that Washington, D.C., hotel room, and in other meeting rooms like it in Rome, San Francisco, Barcelona, Paris, Orlando, San Diego, Columbus, and Lisbon. There are now over five hundred of us in thirty-two countries, working on a bold new idea to globalize information about water resources, by measuring it everywhere and all the time, from space. The technology to do it is a satellite called a wide-swath altimeter. It uses a remarkable radar technology that Ernesto Rodriguez invented, called a “Ka-band radar interferometer” or KaRIn (named adorably after Ernesto’s wife). We’re going to put KaRIn into space, mounted on a satellite called SWOT.215
SWOT will point not one but two radars—tethered to each other by a thirty-foot boom—toward the Earth. Like two giant police radar guns they will stare down at the planet, zapping millions of rivers, lakes, coastlines, and other wet spots on its rotating face while hurtling through orbit at over fifteen thousand miles per hour. Even one SWOT satellite will stream three-dimensional water-level maps of the entire world, day and night. This technology will constantly scan the pulse of the planet’s plumbing. It will unveil its throbs and ebbs of circulating water in all their complexity for the first time. Then, we will post the data online for free.
Billions care about the fate and availability of their water. Especially where it is scarce, little information is available, and lives depend on it. Our satellite is currently wending its way through the political labyrinth of being approved, built, and launched. We are hoping it can be up and orbiting by 2018. But regardless of SWOT’s particular fate, I am confident that by 2050, its successors will have made globalized water resource information transparently available for everyone and everywhere on Earth, as has now been done very successfully with other kinds of satellite data.216 No more water secrets or scientific question marks. It will completely transform the way we study and manage our most vital natural resource.
Wars over Water?
It has become fashionable to declare water the “next oil,” over which the world is bracing to go to war in the twenty-first century. Googling “water wars” yields over three hundred thousand hits; the phrase is showing up in scholarly articles as well as newspaper headlines.217 “Fierce competition for freshwater,” said U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan in 2001, “may well become a source of conflict and wars in the future.” His successor, Ban Ki-Moon, in a 2007 debate of the U.N. Security Council, warned of water scarcity “transforming peaceful competition into violence,” and floods and droughts sparking “massive human migrations, polarizing societies and weakening the ability of countries to resolve conflicts peacefully.”218
International relations professor and journalist Michael Klare gets more specific. He expects four rivers in particular—the Nile, Jordan, Tigris-Euphrates, and Indus—to provoke “high levels of tension along with periodic outbreaks of violent conflict.”219 Those four are good picks. They are already oversubscribed, and shared