Water conflicts in Himalayas on Monday 8th September from to in Parliament Visitors Centre

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1 Water conflicts in Himalayas on Monday 8th September from to in Parliament Visitors Centre Olli-Pekka Haavisto (Siemenpuu foundation / Friends of the Earth Finland): Global freshwater crisis; an overview

2 A majority on Earth face severe self-inflicted water woes within 2 generations: Scientists Bonn Declaration issued the 24th Sept 2013 by 500 scientists at 'Water in the Anthropocene' conference In the short span of one or two generations, the majority of the 9 billion people on Earth will be living under the handicap of severe pressure on fresh water, an absolutely essential natural resource for which there is no substitute. This handicap will be self-inflicted and is, we believe, entirely avoidable. After years of observations and a decade of integrative research convened under the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) and other initiatives, water scientists are more than ever convinced that fresh water systems across the planet are in a precarious state. Mismanagement, overuse and climate change pose long-term threats to human well-being, and evaluating and responding to those threats constitutes a major challenge to water researchers and managers alike. Countless millions of individual local human actions add up and reverberate into larger regional, continental and global changes that have drastically changed water flows and storage, impaired water quality, and damaged aquatic ecosystems. Human activity thus plays a central role in the behavior of the global water system.

3 A majority on Earth face severe self-inflicted water woes within 2 generations: Scientists Water in the Anthropocene A new geologic epoch, "The Anthropocene," is characterized by humanity's growing dominance of Earth's environment and a planetary transformation as profound as the last epoch-defining event -- the retreat of the glaciers 11, 500 years ago. Among examples of humans' planet-altering imprint on the world: Humanity uses an area the size of South America to grow its crops and an area the size of Africa for raising livestock Due to groundwater and hydrocarbon pumping in low lying coastal areas, two-thirds of major river deltas are sinking, some of them at a rate four times faster on average than global sea level is rising More rock and sediment is now moved by human activities such as shoreline in-filling, damming and mining than by the natural erosive forces of ice, wind and water combined Many river floods today have links to human activities, including the Indus flood of 2010 (which killed 2,000 people), and the Bangkok flood of 2011 (815 deaths) On average, humanity has built one large dam every day for the last 130 years. Tens of thousands of large dams now distort natural river flows to which ecosystems and aquatic life adapted over millennia Drainage of wetlands destroys their capacity to ease floods-a free service of nature expensive to replace Evaporation from poorly-managed irrigation renders many of the world's rivers dry -- no water, no life. And so, little by little, tens of thousands of species edge closer to extinction every day

4 WATER SITUATION ON THE EARTH Approximately 1/3 of the Earth s population live in countries that are afflicted by a medium or severe water stress. UN determines the water stress as a 10% overuse of the renewable water resources. By using this determination more than 80 countries have suffered freshwater scarcity since the middle of the nineties. That means approximately 40% of the world s population. (CSD (1997): Comprehensive Assessment of the Freshwater Rseources of the World; UN/WWAP (2003): World Water Development Report: Water for People, Water for Life.) Humankind uses already 50% of all freshwater on the Earth. (Pacific Institute (2009):The World s Water ) Protecting the world s freshwater resources requires diagnosing threats over a broad range of scales, from global to local. Here we present the first worldwide synthesis to jointly consider human and biodiversity perspectives on water security using a spatial framework that quantifies multiple stressors and accounts for downstream impacts. We find that nearly 80% of the world s population is exposed to high levels of threat to water security. (C. J. Vörösmarty, P. B. McIntyre, M. O. Gessner, D. Dudgeon, A. Prusevich, P. Green, S. Glidden, S. E. Bunn, C. A. Sullivan, C. Reidy Liermann & P.M. Davies: Global threats to human water security and river biodiversity, Nature 467, (30 September 2010) doi: /nature09440, Received 21 January 2010; Accepted 19 August 2010, Published online 29 September 2010, Corrected 30 September 2010.)

5 In the study 405 river basins are evalueted (the basin boundaries according to Global Runoff Data Centre). They cover 66% of the global land area, excluding Antarctica and represent 65% of the global population in (To not including land areas include e.g. Greenland, the Sahara desert, the Arabian peninsula, the Iranian, Afghan, and Gobi desert in Asia, the Mojave desert in California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona, and the Australian desert. Agriculture accounts 92% of the global blue water footprint. In 201 basins with 2,67 billion inhabitants there was severe water scarcity during at least one month of the year. The ecological and economic consequences of increasing degrees of water scarcity as evidenced the Rio Grande, Indus and Murray-Darling basins can include complete desiccation during dry seasons, decimation of aquatic biodiversity, and substantial economic disruption. In other words, it is observed severe ecological and economical effects. Source: Hoekstra et al.: Global Monthly Water Scarcity: Blue Water Footprints versus Blue Water Availability, Feb 2012, Vol. 7 Issue 2, PloS ONE,

6 THE GLOBAL QUALITY OF THE WATER CRISIS All production needs freshwater: agriculture, industry, services. Under the prevailing circumstances of the limitless economic growth the water use tend to grow endlessly, too. This leads to the both quantitatively and qualitatively deepening water crisis. THIS IS THE CONNECTION, THE GLOBAL TRADE, THAT MAKES THE WORLDWIDE WATER CRISIS ESSENTIALLY GLOBAL INSTEAD OF COINCIDENTALLY SEVERAL LOCAL OR REGIONAL WATER PROBLEMS AT THE SAME TIME. The economy of our planet is based on inequality: they who have afford to pay the products use also the water needed for the production of those products. Through global trade people who are wealthy enough to buy products or services can and do use water everywhere on the Globe, that is, through trade the global North can do harm and destroy natural water cycles the water circulation of the Mother Earth. (Notice that the global South can be in the geographical north and the global North in the geographical south.)

7 VIRTUALWATER FLOW OF AGROPRODUCTS RED IMPORT, GREEN EXPORT, GIGA CUBIC METERS PER YEAR (10 9 m3/a) SOURCE: CHAPAGAIN, A. K. and HOEKSTRA, A. Y. (2004): Water footprint of nations, UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education.

8 As Limits to Growth concluded in 1972: If the present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. Turner, G. (2014) Is Global Collapse Imminent?, MSSI Research Paper No. 4, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, The University of Melbourne. Solid line: MIT, with new research in bold. Dotted line: Limits to Growth businessas-usual scenario. GUARDIAN 2 Sept 2014: So far, there s little to indicate they got that wrong.

9 Turner, G. (2014) Is Global Collapse Imminent?, MSSI Research Paper No. 4, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, The University of Melbourne Abstract The Limits to Growth standard run (or business-as-usual, BAU) scenario produced about forty years ago aligns well with historical data that has been updated in this paper. The BAU scenario results in collapse of the global economy and environment (where standards of living fall at rates faster than they have historically risen due to disruption of normal economic functions), subsequently forcing population down. Although the modelled fall in population occurs after about 2030 with death rates rising from 2020 onward, reversing contemporary trends the general onset of collapse first appears at about 2015 when per capita industrial output begins a sharp decline. Given this imminent timing, a further issue this paper raises is whether the current economic difficulties of the global financial crisis are potentially related to mechanisms of breakdown in the Limits to Growth BAU scenario. In particular, contemporary peak oil issues and analysis of net energy, or energy return on (energy) invested, support the Limits to Growth modelling of resource constraints underlying the collapse.

10 Crisis of the Whole We are living a systemic crisis. It isn t only a deep economic crisis, an environmental crisis, a food crisis, a water crisis, a financial crisis, an institutional crisis or a crisis of humanity. It is a crisis of the whole. This slide is from the presentation by Pablo Solon, The Executive Director of the Focus on the Global South, at the international conference on Buen vivir on the 2nd May 2014 in Manila, Philippines.

11 Thank you for your attention!