Fresh Water Trends and Issues

Fresh water is any water that is not salty or contaminated. Inland lakes, ponds, rivers, wetlands and groundwater constitute the fresh water biome but are less than one percent of the total global water supply. Author’s Note: Although most of the world’s fresh water is stored in glaciers and icecaps (about 7,000,000 cubic miles), mainly in the polar regions and in Greenland, that water is not readily available to human consumption so is not considered in this post. Fresh water ecosystems are critical to terrestrially based flora and fauna, including humans, because they provide water for natural habitat, agriculture, drinking, energy, food processing, industry, recreation, transportation, and many other cultural and economic enterprises. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), although most of the world is not running out of fresh water, a number of nations and regions face chronic fresh water shortages that are likely to worsen as the result of unsustainable withdrawal rates arising from increasing demands, inefficient use or management, changing climatic and precipitation patterns, difficulty in finding new water resources, and pollution and source water contamination (including both surface-water and groundwater).

Anyone possessing even a modest knowledge of world climate patterns knows that fresh water is not uniformly distributed. Deserts and semi-arid regions are by definition water-deficient. However, even areas with moderate to high amounts of natural annual precipitation can suffer from shortages of fresh, drinking water. Those shortages can and do affect national and regional security by causing human health problems, increasing conflicts between competing users, and damaging ecosystem health all of which alone or in combination may result in ecosystem collapse, population displacement, increases in mortality and potentially resulting in conditions that approach chaos and societal collapse. In 2002, the UNEP issued a chilling statement: “If present consumption patterns continue, two out of every three persons on Earth will live in water-stressed conditions by the year 2025.”

Real World Examples: It’s easy to point to various African countries, China (whose two great rivers, the Yangtze and the Huang, are basically so polluted that they no longer supply drinking water), India, Indonesia, or even England, suffering as it is under a ten-year drought, as having chronic and systemic water shortages and numerous other challenges in the provision of fresh water to their people. It’s also easy to hold up Russia as a horrific example of a nation where environmental damages to its fresh water supplies are so severe that the word chaos is not too harsh a description. However, rather than searching the world for the worst examples of countries or regions where fresh water supply is problematic, it may be more instructive to stay closer to home and examine the American experience.

We don’t have to look too hard to find fresh water problems all throughout the Great Plains, where drawdown of the Ogallala Aquifer has resulted in decreasing agriculture since the 1970s. Or in Clark County and Las Vegas, Nevada, where out of control urban growth from the 1960s to the present all but requires the mining of fossil groundwater throughout much of the southern part of the State so that gaming-inspired development can continue. Historical Background: The Colorado River Compact is a 1922 agreement among seven Southwestern states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, and California) in the basin of the Colorado River governing allocation of rights to the River’s water among the parties of the interstate compact. In recent years, the Compact has become the focus of great concern following a protracted decrease in rainfall in the Southwest. Specifically, the amount of water allocated was based on an expectation that the River’s average annual flow was 16.4 million acre feet. Recent tree ring studies, however, concluded that the long-term average water flow of the Colorado is significantly less. Estimates have included 13.2 million acre feet, 13.5 million acre feet, and 14.3 million acre feet per year. Many analysts have concluded that the Compact was negotiated in a period of abnormally high rainfall and that the recent dry conditions are not a drought but a return to historically typical patterns. The decrease in rainfall has led to widespread dropping of reservoir levels, particularly at Lake Powell, where the exposure of long-inundated canyons has increased calls for the permanent removal of the reservoir.

Author’s Rant: Several years ago, the U.S. began pressuring Canada to sell some portion of its abundant fresh water resources, despite that fact that massive diversions would likely prove environmentally disastrous, especially for the Canadians but also for Americans since exotic organisms could be introduced to our ecosystems. Of course, that fresh water infusion would certainly not create the best opportunity for Americans to curb our already profligate water use. For very informative expositions of why and how the alarming water transformations have occurred, see the following materials.

Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry: Water — The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century, Boston: Beacon Press, 2006;

Alex MacLean, Over: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point, New York: Abrams Books, 2008;

Pacific Institute, The World’s Water 2008-2009, Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2010.

For something a little dated but still absolutely on-point, see Marc Reisner’s classical, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water, New York: Penguin, 1993.

Web devotees should consult: “Fresh water Ecoregions of the World” (FEOW), a cooperative venture of the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Federation at www.feow.org; Aaron Wolf’s “Transboundary Fresh water Disputes Database” at http:ly/osu_TFDD; or the USGS’s authoritative “Water Use in the United States” http://water.usgs.gov/watuse/. For directly related information, see desertification, global water shortage, salinization, and sustainable development.