Peak Oil News and Message Boards

vtsnowedin wrote:So is it a water problem or a population problem?

Newfie wrote:

vtsnowedin wrote:So is it a water problem or a population problem?

Population, in both Indian and Pakistan.

Approximately 117 million more people could face water shortages if global temperatures increase 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels compared to a 1.5-degree Celsius increase in temperatures, a new study suggests.

In a new study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, researchers examined how global freshwater could change under 1.5- and 2-degree Celsius increases in temperatures, targets set forth in the Paris Agreement.

"This is the first study to explore how limiting warming to 1.5 degrees [Celsius] would benefit global population exposure to water shortage using the HAPPI experiments," said Wenbin Liu, lead author of the study and assistant professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "Some regions would be better off, but some regions would be worse off."

The new study shows the benefit of maintaining global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. Limiting global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius translates to a less-severe decrease in water availability below normal conditions across most regions, including east and south Asia, east and west Africa and central Europe. For a few regions, however, this limit would be ineffective. Southeast Asia, northern Asia, southern Africa, southern Europe, the Mediterranean, eastern Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and northwest Canada would experience worsening water availability below normal conditions under both 1.5 degrees Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

Plain Language Summary

This study emerges from the lack of scientific investigations to inform climate policy about differences between two global warming targets (i.e., 1.5 and 2 °C) for the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C.” We seek to understand the following: How would water availability below normal conditions (the drier end of hydrological extremes) change at these targets? How would they affect the water shortage of human society? Could we limit the impact by stabilizing the global warming at 1.5 °C instead of 2 °C? To address these questions, we employ the HAPPI (half a degree additional warming, prognosis, and projected impacts) experiments, explicitly designed to differentiate impacts between these targets. Relative to the historical period, future water availability below normal conditions (less than median, e.g., 20th percentile or lower) would decrease in the midlatitudes and the tropics; the globe and most of the regions would endure water shortages. Relative to the 2 °C warming target, stabilizing temperature increase at 1.5 °C would constrain adverse impact on people suffering water shortages in most of the regions (particularly Central Europe, East Africa, East Asia, South Asia, and West Africa) but ineffective in Alaska/Northwest Canada, Southeast Asia, and Amazon. A global sum of this reduced risk is ~117 million people.

Wenbin Liu et al. Global Freshwater Availability Below Normal Conditions and Population Impact Under 1.5 and 2 °C Stabilization Scenarios, Geophysical Research Letters (2018)

Scarcity of water, high population density, power imbalances and climatic stressors are the main factors which push countries towards either political cooperation or tensions in transboundary river basins.

The Nile, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus, Tigris-Euphrates and Colorado rivers are "water hotspots," where "hydro-political interactions"are most likely to occur.

These areas are already under water stress, and future demographic and climatic conditions are expected to exert further pressure on scarce water resources.

Globally, the combined effect of climate change and population growth can increase the likelihood of water-related interactions in transboundary river basins by between 74.9 percent and 95 percent.

"The water famine we are facing is a result of over 30 to 40 years of ill advice by financial institutions, and that ill advice, on the one hand, mined the ground water, diverted river waters, destroyed the soil moisture, but is also the single biggest reason for climate change," she told Al Jazeera.

Newfie wrote:Yes, I saw that elsewhere also.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljaze ... 39066.html

"The water famine we are facing is a result of over 30 to 40 years of ill advice by financial institutions, and that ill advice, on the one hand, mined the ground water, diverted river waters, destroyed the soil moisture, but is also the single biggest reason for climate change," she told Al Jazeera.

In 1990, more than 90% of the population in Kenya's urban areas had access to clean water, according to the United Nations.
Now, it is estimated that just 50% of Nairobi's four and a half million residents have direct access to piped water.