Globally, around 80 percent of freshwater is used for food production and agriculture. Out of all the water covering the earth, only 2 percent is fresh. That remaining 10 to 20 percent is set aside for industry.
Urban Africa, with ever expanding populations, already suffer food scarcity. Many have to exist on as little as twenty litres of water per day. The bare minimum recommended by public health is twice that.
Where water provision is piped to homes, lack of quality drinking water never need happen if water companies get on top of their numerous leak problems due to poorly directed investment. First World countries lose between 16 and 40 percent through leakage.
Recently, Jackson, capital of Mississippi, suffered severe flooding which crippled their already faltering water plant infrastructure, neglected for decades. See
Climate change is impacting the freshwater accessibility at a rapid pace. Anthropogenic induced warming has accelerated temperatures such that the Himalayas (glacial loss impacted the monster flooding in the Indus Valley) will lose 40 percent of ice by 2100. We have relied on glaciers to store our global freshwater. Once the glaciers melt, widespread water shortages will occur in places like Peru and California.
We already see drought hitting the people stranded in the Horn of Africa. The images of their slow and painful deaths through lack of food and water is made worse by wars in the world making them victims of extreme events.
In Asia alone, it is likely a billion people will be facing water shortages….and the World Bank estimated cities around the world will have two thirds less water to supply to their citizens.
Phoenix in the US and London in the UK are already in emergency planning mode.
200,000 people die each year in India due to little or no access to clean drinking water. It is estimated by 2030 the country will lose half of the water it currently relies on.
Pakistan had 5,000 cubic meters for its population when the country was newly formed in 1947. It now has 400 maximum.
Freshwater lakes are drying up around the world. See
Where countries have relied on their reservoirs, they too see them drying up with insufficient rainfall predicted in coming years to ever replenish them. See this US situation:
Freshwater lakes are also vulnerable to climate-fuelled aquatic plant growth which will further the vicious cycle of warming as these plants will emit 16 percent of the world’s natural emissions. See:
When freshwater lakes become full of warmwater-friendly bacteria, millions who sought that safe water over past centuries could no longer do so. Fish which swam in abundance die – a mainstay food for local people, and a business for many too.
Aquifers took millions of years to develop, but in our urgency to supply ourselves with water, we are draining them. Wells which once drew water from a depth of 500 ft need DRILLING down to 1000 ft.
Shortages of food and water push people into desperate measures.
We knew this was coming yet governments (often lobbied and funded by corporations) have not worked globally to prevent this worsening situation.
Instead they ‘plan for growth’ and promise ‘green alternatives’ but that greening more likely comes in the form of more algae blooms on our rivers and fresh water lakes.
Recent excessive flooding, rising sea levels and glacial melt combined with monsoon seasons make us have to address the world crises with full force.
Water covers much of our planet, but a small percentage is drinkable. The land we walk on is a thin crust, constantly moving over thousands of years to give us mountains to lowlands. We have built cities only to watch them sink beneath the waves. We arrive on islands which have emerged from below oceans. We arrive, develop communities, grow populations, then these also disappear, swallowed back under the sea. As the weight of ice sheets retreated 12 thousand years ago, the land beneath rose up as land not under ice sank below sea levels, that process almost imperceptible until the threat has become obvious in this last few decades. Planning human habitation must now take these known factors into account. Read more about this amazing geological process:
Understand that tornados are getting wider and longer, increasing over the past 30 years in America. Not a good idea to rebuild homes in well known ‘tornado corridors’.
Industries may now need relocating due to huge storm effects, as happened when Hurricane Harvey caused a single petrochemical plant to tip half a billion gallons of toxic industrial wastewater into Galveston Bay. (See Houston Chronicle report ‘Silent Spills’ by Frank Bajak and Lose Olsen, May 2018). That one storm caused more than one hundred toxic releases.
People who have lost their homes, as in the Katrina disaster when the levees broke as the seas rose, had to accept they could never return. The Lower Ninth Ward now has less than one-third of its population who lived there before Katrina. Communities evacuated had their history and family networks stolen by Nature’s brutality. It has taken 30 years to begin building protective levees along the Mississippi River and West Shore Lake Pontchartrain. This should have begun before Katrina.
Low lying Louisiana’s coastline is being swallowed up by the sea. It is estimated seas could rise by 2 feet by 2050 and 4 feet by 2100. The climate change induced weather patterns will result in the drowning of the vital wetlands and marshes. There are plans to rescue the wetlands, but time is not on the side of humankind. See:
Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, is being rebuilt in a new location as Jakarta is sinking. It’s new name is Nusantara. Over 30 million people live in Jakarta. The city now sits below the sea level, and by 2050 it will likely be submerged. There could have been other solutions which other countries have demonstrated, but these needed to have been well planned and funded. It is too late now.
Chicago is also showing signs of sinking. The city is only a few feet higher than nearby waterways and Lake Michigan. In 1854 a cholera outbreak killed 6 percent of the entire population of Chicago. That was because of disastrous sewage leakage. To combat this, engineers worked out, using railroad jacks, they could raise the whole city. See
The population of 2.7 million people relies still on ingenious engineers to solve the continuing need to update the sewage and drinking water systems. They do so with a long running Tunnel and Reservoir Project which began in 1975. Still, those with homes on the shoreline see inches of water levels when lake levels are high threatening to overwhelm their homes.
Dramatic storms which historically pound the West coast of America could be cleverly exploited to engineer the water into depleted aquifers:
Flooded areas of Pakistan look as though an ocean has deposited itself there. Hardly any land visible for the population to cling to whilst they await rescue.
Scientists have long since explained why this has been progressively worsening over the past 50 years. This article lists the unique factors that make the Indus Valley so likely to be made uninhabitable:
Pakistan has more than 7,000 glaciers. They are melting due to ? – yes, we all know, accelerated production of greenhouse gases. There is no heavy industry in Pakistan to contribute to greenhouse gases. Their carbon footprint is relatively low compared to major greenhouse gas emitters. They all know who they are, and none are moving fast enough to make a big enough dent in their outputs to stop the warming and consequential melting, of the glaciers.
See where your country scores in the list of Co2 emitters:
The Shisper Glacier is above the Hassanabad Hunza which is threatened by this ever growing glacier which is moving toward the population. See the article on the subject.
Above them the vast Shisper glacier dominates the landscape: A river of jagged black ice moving towards them at as much as four metres per day.
Climate change is causing most glaciers worldwide to shrink, but due to a meteorological anomaly this is one of a few in the Karakoram mountain range in northern Pakistan that are surging.
This means hundreds of tonnes of ice and debris are pushing down the valley at ten times the normal rate or more, threatening the safety of the people and homes below.
Flash floods caused by glacial lakes, ice and rock falls, and a lack of clean and accessible water are all serious risks for those close to its path.
“When a glacial lake bursts there is an enormous amount of not only ice, water and debris that falls through, but also mud and this has devastating effects, it basically destroys everything that comes in its way,” said Ignacio Artaza of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Pakistan.
Earlier this year, after warnings something like this might happen, the Hassanabad Hunza bridge collapsed due to terrible flooding. See the article about it.
The location of the Hassanabad Bridge was very important and it was a vital link between the northern areas of Pakistan and the rest of the country. This bridge was first constructed in 1972 and it connects Shinaki Hunza with Karimabad Hunza. This bridge was the only main source which connects Gilgit Baltistan with China via Karakoram highway. In Hassanabad, Karakoram Highway passes over a side stream of the Hunza River which is fed from the Shishpar Glacier, located about 10km above Hassanabad. It was over the Hunza River’s tributary, between Aliabad and Murtazabad. The local authorities have started rehabilitation work and a temporary bridge will be installed soon. (see Aug 10th 2022 https://youtu.be/SfgBIUk376A)
There are YouTubes of this amazing mountain range in the Himalayas. Comments by travellers such as “The much renowned Hunza valley is often referred to as heaven on earth, enveloped in the grand Himalayas and the Karakoram mountain ranges, this place has been a great tourist attraction for many years. There are spectacular views of Rakaposhi mountain (7788 meters).” July 2017.
Those of us in rich industrialized nations have inflicted this on some of the poorest people in the world. Yet our leaders tell us we will continue to grow more wealthy. We are tied in to running on the wheel which must reward investors first before we can consider decreasing the temperature of an ever warming climate. The more we compete to be bigger and stronger economies, the greater the death knell sounds for whole countries which suffer outright calamitous weather impacts as a result. No amount of aid we might muster for Pakistan will restore its natural rhythm of agriculture it once boasted throughout the centuries.
Industry behaves in a cavalier way ever since shareholders were legally given first rights on all profits. Thus investors pour funds into anything which promises rewarding returns, even if the outcome is anti life on earth.
Since the early 2000s, dire warnings of the looming disaster for countries with melting glaciers were clearly articulated by scientists and those who trekked and climbed mountainous regions. Monsoons in Pakistan grew mightier, until July 2022, when the rains were relentless and monstrous by August. Images of desperate farmers trying to rescue their family members, often unable to as the flooding became so treacherous it swept everything away before it.
The historic Indus River, rising in Tibet, the Indus crosses through India and Pakistan fed by a multitude of tributaries before it reaches the Arabian Sea. The signs of ancient civilisations which tourists travelled to see were The Indus Valley Civilisation, also known Indus civilisation, was a Bronze Age civilisation in the northwestern regions of South Asia, lasting from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE, and in its mature form from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE.Wikipedia
Harappan civilization people built “levees” to control floods. It is obvious that Indus river would flood often.
Levees are raised platforms or earthfills.
In India there are examples of how the ancient Harappans coped with flood waters with engineering works.
There are many articles about the glaciers melting in Pakistan.. One here entitled ‘Hell and ice water: Glacier melt threatens Pakistan’s future’ was written in January 2020. The authors point out the Indus Basin supplies 90 percent of the food for Pakistan. Farming depends on irrigation from the river, which heavily relies on meltwater from the ice sheets. The ice sheets no longer provide timely water flows, farming will be impossible in the Basin.
The farmers have just lost everything they produced. The country is already in debt, just getting an IMF grant through which should have helped the country pre-flooding. It is $1.3 million. It is estimated Pakistan will now need $100 billion if it is to rebuild its infrastructure. But how do you put back the soil lost, how do you give back livelihoods, how do you bring back lives lost?
Approximately 26.5 million out of 221.8 million Pakistani citizens live below the national poverty line,
After the 1947 partition of British India, the development of infrastructure in Pakistan grew and has made steady progress in the last five decades. According to the World Bank Group, however, this rate of improvement has also been “among the slowest for the majority of public infrastructure sectors.” Further, this rate of improvement has failed to ameliorate infrastructure conditions for Pakistani citizens and disproportionately hurt the poor in the country.
In the mid-1950s, investments in infrastructure and heavy industry were accompanied by an agricultural revolution in a fertile Pakistan that even a richer India could not surpass. Despite being a nascent state, Pakistan successfully created its state institutions and industries from scratch. This was done against the specter of a well-off India with a greater share of urban population and established infrastructure. For a variety of social reasons combined with political turmoil, the economic tides soon took a turn for the worse as income contracted, inequality rose and inflation swallowed the most vulnerable – the poor – in Pakistan. – See Article.
On many occasions, the dire state of the country’s economy stifled project implementation, which suffered yet another balance of payments crisis in 2018, as well as by government bureaucracy. Thus, the construction of a power plant in Gwadar, a Pakistani port located in the province of Baluchistan and leased to Chinese companies, experienced a three-year delay, awaiting local government authorization.
In 2019, China gave Pakistan $1 billion to cover the costs of 27 projects in education, agriculture and poverty alleviation. Most of these projects are concentrated in Southern Punjab and Baluchistan, which scored few points on the Human Development Index and correspondingly have many impoverished villages.
The idea that a recovery plan will ever emerge to save Pakistan seems far off. They have appealed for international help, and small amounts of aid packages are arriving. But this area is not in a politically strong position, despite its nuclear weapons.
Earthquakes are also a major issue. Building infrastructure to withstand monster monsoons and moderate to strong earthquakes is not going to be easy with worsening climate change impacts such as excessive heatwaves and droughts.
So who will feed the 221 million population without their high output farming community supplying the food in the flooded Indus Valley? The Global Food Crisis is already extreme in countries who depend on other nations to help with food aid. Where will the homeless restart their lives? Will those who invest expect far more back than Pakistan can afford to give?
David Wallace – Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future, tells us a truth we must, by now, all understand. He says it is “…the end of normal” because ” we have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place…”
Another quote describing the cycle of Nature’s rage against us:
“A warming planet leads to melting Arctic ice, which means less sunlight reflected back to the sun and more absorbed by a planet warming faster still, which means an ocean less able to absorb atmospheric carbon and so a planet warming faster still. A warming planet will also melt Arctic permafrost, which contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the earth’s atmosphere, and some of which, when it thaws and is released, may evaporate as methane, which is thirty-four times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is eighty-six times as powerful. 80, 81 A hotter planet is, on net, bad for plant life, which means what is called “forest dieback”—the decline and retreat of jungle basins as big as countries and woods that sprawl for so many miles they used to contain whole folklores—which means a dramatic stripping-back of the planet’s natural ability to absorb carbon and turn it into oxygen, which means still hotter temperatures, which means more dieback, and so on. Higher temperatures means more forest fires means fewer trees means less carbon absorption, means more carbon in the atmosphere, means a hotter planet still—and so on.
A warmer planet means more water vapor in the atmosphere, and, water vapor being a greenhouse gas, this brings higher temperatures still—and so on. Warmer oceans can absorb less heat, which means more stays in the air, and contain less oxygen, which is doom for phytoplankton—which does for the ocean what plants do on land, eating carbon and producing oxygen—which leaves us with more carbon, which heats the planet further. And so on. These are the systems climate scientists call “feedbacks”; there are more. 82 Some work in the other direction, moderating climate change. But many more point toward an acceleration of warming, should we trigger them. And just how these complicated, countervailing systems will interact—what effects will be exaggerated and what undermined by feedbacks—is unknown, which pulls a dark cloud of uncertainty over any effort to plan ahead for the climate future. We know what a best-case outcome for climate change looks like, however unrealistic, because it quite closely resembles the world as we live on it today. But we have not yet begun to contemplate those cascades that may bring us to the infernal range of the bell curve.”
Now we are face to face with an impasse. On the one hand, we insist we cannot manage our lives without a dependence on fossil fuels, yet knowing the industrial pollution has resulted in excessive greenhouse gas production; and on the other hand a global energy crisis is forcing us to reduce our usage of fossil fuels, which will cause many to die of cold this winter.
The First World may soon be reduced to a Third World existence. Yet still humanity will not pull together to form a coherent rescue plan for the planet. Instead, brutal wars are still on going, and those making excessive profits from their industries simply plan for growth. The age-old models of ruthless, selfish ‘winner takes all’ philosophy still prevails, and all that remains is a gasping planet, its wondrous beauty diminishing each day.
The list of links of homelessness caused by excessive and extraordinary natural events is endless. Disease, malnutrition, no clean drinking water, no land on which to grow food, no shelter from further weather events….and on and on.
An example given is the flooding of vineyards which increased groundwater at the Terranova Ranch, near Fresno, California which diverted water from a full flood-control channel.
An excellent explanation of the action of groundwater is here:
During the rainstorm water soaked into the ground in the hill above the driveway. As happens with water below ground, it started moving along underground layers of soil and rock that are porous enough to allow water to move through it. After a storm, water doesn’t move straight down into the ground, but, rather, it moves both downward and horizontally along permeable layers. The water is moving downhill (“down-gradient”) toward a creek at the bottom of the hill.Normally, the water would just flow underground to the bottom of the hill and seep out of the stream banks into the creek. But here the driveway was dug deep enough into the ground so that it cut into the permeable layer of soil that carries the underground water downhill. Thus, you can see groundwater seepage coming to the surface.By the way, it is seepage such as this that helps keep water flowing in many creeks and streams during periods of drought…….
Why hasn’t the funding been made available to exploit this resource?
Many countries and major cities like Mexico City, are suffering from drought and yet this predicted problem, due to climate change, has not been acted upon to create resilience against this threat to life, to all living things.
In Canada the importance of wetlands in times of drought has been highlighted:
The challenge is to move away from simply responding to crises with aid and instead develop a more proactive resource management approach that identifies risk and targets programs such as wetland protection and restoration to reduce that risk. Building resilience lessens the need for costly crisis-oriented government interventions. We need to conserve wetlands rather than pay billions of dollars for drought aid. We need to put programs and incentives in place to make it worthwhile for farmers to retain those wetlands and safeguard the benefits they provide our watersheds. We need governments promoting wetland protection policies not drainage policies. Sadly, Saskatchewan is still the only Province without a Wetland Protection Policy and WSA continues to develop drainage projects in the face of drought and climate change. We are being “hydro-illogical”.
For more information about wetlands and watershed stewardship, and the Lower Qu’Appelle Watershed Stewards visit: https://www.lqws.ca
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the power sector accounted for nearly two-thirds of global emissions growth in 2018, with coal use for power generation alone producing 10 Gt of CO 2.
Many countries have ageing nuclear power stations. They are not renewable. France is proud of its history of cheap and clean electricity.
Nuclear fission is a clean energy process but needs electricity from the existing fossil fuel powered grid to create the electric arc which builds the plasma.
As we know, all heavily bombed countries, like Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Tigray, Lebanon, Palestine……. all lose their functioning infrastructure including the vital power grid.
And then there is the thousands of miles of pipelines required for the carbon capture plan……(snake oil hard sell?)
It is additionally egregious to see wind farms destroyed after construction in Africa, as in Tigray, or thermal power plants blown up in Ukraine. When we try to be future proof, we cannot protect from the insanity of war.
But humans do try against the odds to build on what we have always known about carbon capture.
Support indigenous people and read about their rescue and commitment to wetlands previously botched by cattle farmers, now helping with carbon capture:
And most of us are acutely aware of these and of our dependency.
Whilst using alternatives for producing energy to power the electricity we need at the most basic level is a priority, we also measure the carbon footprint of production of renewables. There is no scaleable model which can prove zero carbon footprint.
As wildfires threaten electricity infrastructure, the whole networked design also needs a rethink.
Where forests are in hilly areas, once they burn down and then rain falls, there is nothing to hold the land and landslides occur. It takes decades, even centuries, to grow forests to retain land, to help the planet breathe. Now once spectacular forests are lost and the land cannot hold against heavy rain.
Consider this:
The World’s Oldest Underground Fire Has Been Burning For 6,000 Years
The fire fighters in Gironde, South Western France, have reported fires running underground and igniting miles away from the fires they were fighting. Some 30 or so fires were emerging at the same time.
We are in a cycle of harm, as usual. We are on the back foot because we did not have the sense to redesign our ageing infrastructure 100 years ago. We are too busy fighting each other for scarce resources, and the fighting produces more carbon footprint, more emissions, more contamination of our precious planet.
Don’t drown out the voices of those who have the solutions because their ideas don’t produce a quick investment return. But also beware of snake oil salesmen, and invest in those who can prove sustainable redesign and build projects. Save lives and do no harm.
Please read the above. Learn how each of us can stay informed and help with solutions. We cannot be silent or passive. We can help if we use our 7 billion minds together.
See how young scientists are working on Tech Solutions:
Virunga National Park, home, to the last mountain gorillas and people of the Congo, has been placed in a deal to auction off the precious territory to countries like the US and UK so they can drill for oil!
This is a major and significant betrayal of all those posturing leaders who have promoted climate change pledges.
Fossil fuels must be allowed to decline. PLEASE – NO MORE DRILLING FOR NEW OIL SOURCES. WE KNOW WE ARE TIPPING INTO CLIMATE CATASTROPHE ALREADY.
Whatever we do from this day forward to innovate we must first establish with evidence our activities WILL DO NO HARM.
Clearly, DRILLING in new territory oil WILL DO GREAT HARM. We all know the immense poverty of the Congolese will not be changed by this auction. The rich will get richer as always.
This metaphor is so appropriate as we miss deadlines for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, as we plunder finite resources to intensely build renewables and electricity storage technology, thus expanding the greenwashing message.
We cannot unlearn the centuries of intelligent technological development. We rightly pride ourselves in these magnificent achievements and we are still excelling. We love and wonder at our economic miracles based on technology in all spheres. We cannot stop. We will not stop. We will go down with the ship. We are committed.
I recognise my efforts to study how we have evolved to become such a threat to this incredibly wonderful planet has led me to this sad conclusion. The last straw was when I read of another start-up brilliant idea from two young Finnish entrepreneurs – to store electricity using a sand battery.
Sand Battery
It is such a clever idea. Like all solutions it will have to harm the planet immeasurably if it is to be mass produced. I have written of the harm lithium batteries cause, but sand seems so much kinder.
So I asked myself, as I was impressed with the concept, has the Earth enough sand to meet the demand it currently has provided, let alone add to the demand created this new invention?
That blog highlighted a 2019 UN Report on the problem urging global governance of this scarce resource.
Everything we try to do to combat climate change involves us doing what we know best: plunder the remaining resources this Earth can offer to create products which are widely sold to tell us we are using them to combat climate change.
Rivers are the source of the gritty sand which is in demand here.
Builders Sand
The alarming destruction is rarely put before us as the crisis it is. The Guardian tackled the issue here.
From Cambodia to California, industrial-scale sand mining is causing wildlife to die, local trade to wither and bridges to collapse. And booming urbanisation means the demand for this increasingly valuable resource is unlikely to let up……
Greenpeace has been campaigning on this subject for a long time. But maybe people do not take any notice as they say, ‘well they would, they are Greenpeace’ as if they are bored with their continual efforts to protect our planet.
Combine Fracking with Sand mining and you get appalling ecological harm. In this linked article it says:
The journal Science reported that there have been over 300 earthquakes above magnitude 3 on the Richter scale, which are therefore deemed significant, from 2010 to 2012. This equates to 100 a year – which is compared with a past average of 21 per year.
But there is no protection of any real meaning as the gas obtained has turned around the economy of the US, which in turn is keeping gas supplied to many nations who would otherwise have to seek it from less friendly nations.
Everything we do to keep our endeavors moving forward, in the way we have chosen through technology, is causing immense harm to the planet. We do not appear to have any alternative ideas going by what the corporate world presents to us.
Given the will, emissions can be reduced effectively without adverse consequence: see
We can make immediate changes if we use our well documented intelligence. Maybe we are really not that clever? Or are we being led by the nose to inevitable destruction through Greenwashing techniques and investments in destructive processes?
borderslynn 
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