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Water Shortages Affect Food, Transit, Security
The Christian Science Monitor
March 20, 2008
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0320/p14s01-sten.html

A thousand tons of water produces just one ton of
grain.

For 15 years, the United Nations has been observing
"World Water Day," a time to consider the opportunities
and challenges presented by a resource essential to the
environment and to humankind.
It's becoming clear now that climate change may be
altering the way people and governments think about
water.

The UN reported this week that the world's glaciers are
melting at "an alarming rate." Like reservoirs,
glaciers store water and then release it at predictable
rates, around which humans have formed communities and
built economies. Agency France-Presse, the French news
service, quotes Achim Steiner, executive director of
the United Nations Environment Program, as saying:

"Millions if not billions of people depend directly or
indirectly on these natural water storage facilities
for drinking water, agriculture, industry, and power
generation during key parts of the year."
As a result of shrinking glaciers, people will have to
change their lifestyles, their farming, even move their
homes, Mr. Steiner says. Britain's Sunday Observer
further quotes Steiner as saying:

"While I'm always cautious about 'water wars,'
certainly the potential for water to become a trigger
for more tension and, where there's already conflict,
to exacerbate conflict is another issue that's not
hypothetical."

Global warming is raising ocean levels, meaning
seawater will encroach on wetlands, rivers, and
streams, according to recent reports by the US
Environmental Protection Agency and the National
Research Council (NRC), the research arm of the
National Academy of Sciences.
Climate change also could adversely affect
transportation, the NRC reported last week. The
Associated Press reports:

"The nation's transportation system was built for local
conditions based on historical weather data, but those
data may no longer be reliable in the face of new
weather extremes.. The report notes, for example, that
drier conditions are likely in the watersheds supplying
the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes. The
resulting lower water levels would reduce vessel
shipping capacity, seriously impairing freight
movements in the region, such as occurred during the
drought of 1988."

Water also complicates a shift from fossil fuels,
researchers pointed out at the recent annual meeting of
the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. The Toronto Star reports:

"University of Texas professor Michael Webber, an
environmental policy specialist, said so-called green
fuels for vehicles all require much more water to
produce than ordinary gasoline. Conventional oil
refineries use comparatively modest amounts of water,
largely for cooling.

"Webber said the water required for an alternate fuel
vehicle to travel a certain distance can be up to 100
times that required for a gas-powered vehicle. This
extra water use stems from the irrigation of crops like
corn that are turned into ethanol, or in the production
of the electricity for recharging hybrids."

In China, drought has made it difficult to supply
reservoir water for irrigation while also providing
generating capacity for downstream hydropower dams.
Reuters reports:

"The frequency of both the droughts and floods that
regularly batter China are expected to increase in a
warmer world. And rural demands could compound the
impact of short supplies, because China tends to time
releases of water to suit the needs of farmers rather
than power companies."

Lester Brown, head of the Earth Policy Institute think
tank in Washington, is concerned that declining water
supplies combined with the push for water-intensive
biofuels could be a threat to global food security.
Another Reuters story reports:

"The thing to keep in mind is that it takes 1,000 tons
of water to produce one ton of grain.... Seventy
percent of all the water we use in the world - that we
pump from underground or divert from rivers - is used
in irrigation. Not everyone has connected the dots to
see that a future of water shortages will be a future
of food shortages."