All of the water on the planet today
was here before humans even existed.
We have yet to figure out how to make more.
To put a number on it, that's roughly
one sextillion,
260 quintillion liters of water on Earth.
97% of that is salt water, and the majority
of the remaining fresh water
is frozen in ice caps and glaciers.
So what's actually accessible
is just a fraction of a fraction.
Funneling enough of the world's fresh water
to where it's most needed is difficult at the best of times.
And it's only going to get worse.
17 countries are under extremely high water stress,
using over 80% of all the water they have every year.
Usually, these countries are dry to begin with,
and poor infrastructure contributes to wasted water.
The climate crisis further exacerbates
the reliability of the water supply
with erratic rainfall and hotter days.
When droughts do hit, they can be devastating.
Cape Town nearly ran out of dam water in 2018
and only narrowly avoided a crisis.
A human can only survive a few days without water.
It can take 3,500 liters of water
to grow the food each person needs per day.
That's over one liter per calorie consumed.
It takes 15,400 liters of water on average
for every kilogram of beef you eat.
That's about 50 bathtubs full of water.
In 1995, then-World Bank Vice President
Dr. Ismail Serageldin said,
The research indicates he's on to something.
The United Nations anticipates
that 2/3 of the world's population
will live in water-scarce regions by 2025.
Intense water scarcity could displace
700 million people globally in the years following.
The chance of cross-border conflicts over water
could rise by 95% in the next century.
The UN also pinpoints five hot spots for future water wars.
The Nile, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus,
Tigris-Euphrates, and the Colorado rivers.
But disputes over water aren't something new.
There have been at least 655 instances
of conflict over water throughout history.
However, fewer than 30 of them resulted in armed aggression.
Scarcity is actually less likely to cause conflict
than other factors, such as the threat
of a water source being tampered with
by, say, pollution or an upstream dam.
Egypt, for instance, has ongoing disputes
with many of the nine nations upstream along the Nile,
which regularly runs dry before it reaches the ocean.
One of those countries, Ethiopia,
is currently building a hydroelectric dam,
which Egypt sees as a threat to its precious water supply.
This is the latest incarnation
of a dispute along the Nile that goes back centuries.
Historically, water disputes have been one of many triggers
in broader political tensions.
Let's look at Kashmir.
Pakistan and India both claim ownership of the region
and the water that runs through it.
A 1960 treaty that divvies up the coveted tributaries
of the Indus River has actually held up well
through the years.
Still, tensions over dams built upstream
or diverted water flow have added
to the turmoil between the two nuclear-armed nations.
A 2018 IMF report ranked Pakistan third
among countries facing acute water shortages.
As the Himalayan glaciers that feed the Indus melt
due to climate change, tensions will only rise.
Another modern example
of water-fueled political strife is in Syria.
The civil war in Syria began for a wide variety of reasons,
but some analysts argue one key factor was water.
Syria is one of the driest countries in the world.
A drought from 2006 to 2011
caused 75% of farms to fail
and 85% of Syria's livestock to die-
As a result, 1.5 million people,
moved into cities to find work.
The deteriorating economy combined with the birth
of the Islamic State group, the spread
of protests from the Arab Spring,
and other complex factors set the stage
for the social unrest that roiled into a civil war in 2011-
a war that has led to the death
of over half a million people and displaced
12 million people, over half of the population.
This is how the water wars of the future will likely look.
Water scarcity contributes to economic and food insecurity,
social structures weaken, and violence erupts.
Now in India, the groundwater feeding the Ganges
has decreased by 50%, leaving those downriver
facing irrigation and food shortages.
400 million people depend on the Ganges
in both India and Bangladesh, which have been fighting
over how to effectively divert and divvy up
this resource since the 1970s.
Finally, let's look at the fifth potential conflict area
pinpointed by the United Nations.
The Colorado River supplies water to many large cities
in the southwest United States, including Los Angeles-
serving almost 40 million people
and irrigating nearly 5.5 million acres of land.
But thanks to climate change and increased damming,
it also frequently runs dry before it reaches Mexico.
As more people and places rely
on this dwindling river resource,
tensions may rise and result in friction.
On the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border
is an adjacent crisis.
Desperate families from El Salvador, Guatemala and more
are fleeing not only violence but extreme poverty
and food and water insecurity.
The World Bank estimates that up to four million people
from Mexico and Central America
could be displaced by climate change in the next 30 years.
Worldwide, 16 million people were displaced
by weather-related disasters in 2018.
A quarter of the global population is running out of water.
But there are some real, actionable measures
that can help turn the tide.
Cape Town was narrowly able to avoid Day Zero
by adopting aggressive emergency measures,
like diverting water for agriculture to urban use,
implementing water-use tariffs,
and restricting water use to 50 liters per person per day.
But those aren't long-term solutions.
What cities can do to promote sustainable water usage
in the future is to invest in water infrastructure,
recycle wastewater, swap out
some hydration-intensive crops,
and greatly reduce livestock.
Until these solutions and others like it
are enacted on a global scale,
our limited supply of fresh water
will continue to be a flash point for conflict.
How we choose to deal with that
will define the water wars of the future.