Around 1 billion people today do not have adequate water for drinking, agriculture or for sanitation. This is a major cause of death worldwide. In many places, population growth, climate change and depleted aquifers combine to threaten masses of people with severe shortages now and in the future. The fresh water we depend on comes from 3 major sources: glacial melt, rainwater, and underground aquifers.

Melting Glaciers

Glaciers are melting at unprecidented rates around the world. One such area is Bolivia, where the glaciers whose Summer melt-off has provided the water for hundreds of thousands of people are now disappearing or completely gone. The reservoir that collects the water from the glacier provides 80% of the drinking water to the city of El Alto and the outskirts of La Paz. According to the most recent census, El Alto has a population of 827,000 people [es], which is increasing every year at a rate of 5.1% per year.
read about Bolivia: Melting glaciers

Halfway around the world, Himalayan glacial melt threatens the water supply for 1.3 billion people. The glaciers of the Himalayas store more ice than anywhere on Earth except for the polar regions and Alaska. The steady flow of water from their melting icepacks fills seven of the mightiest rivers of Asia: the Indus River in Pakistan, the Brahmaputra that flows through Bangladesh, the Mekong that descends through Southeast Asia, the Irrawaddy in Burma, and the Yellow and Yangtze rivers of China. Himalayan glaciers release water steadily throughout the year, most critically during the hot, dry, sunny periods when water is most needed.

The United Nations body studying global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released a report in May 2009 warning that these glaciers could be much smaller within three decades. "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps getting warmer at the current rate."

There are many uncertainties in predicting the effects of Climate Change on these glaciers, and there has been criticism of this report. A more conservative estimate by Yao Tandong, a Chinese glaciologist who specializes in the Tibetan Plateau, is that 30% of the glaciers will disappear by 2030, 40% by 2050, and 70% by 2100. (Ice, Snow & Water, 2009 conference report from U.C.San Diego

This is going to make for much less dry season water in these regions. And the question which wise planners would be asking is how many people could comfortably live in these regions, with a margin of error for years of Drought or unseasonable weather patterns.

Drought and Famine

The 2 to 5 years of drought in East Africa has forced up to 4 million Kenyans to rely on donated food and water for survival as the crops wither and cattle die on the barren land. The international aid group Oxfam warns that close to 23 million people across East Africa face severe hunger after five years of little or no rain. The most stricken areas are the arid swaths of northern Kenya, which were hit this year by a devastating drought. The scant rains have meant that many people are surviving off dirty, germ-infested water, which is how cholera spreads. Roughly one in 10 Ethiopians and Kenyans, and half of all Somalis, need handouts to survive.

That is to say, there are more people living on the land than the land can support in a bad year. We can and must help in the present emergency, but in thinking about the future, it would be useful to know how many people the land can support in a bad year.

Depleted Aquifers

Back home in the U.S., perhaps the most troubling long-term news concerns the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer This aquifer is the single most important source of water in the High Plains region, providing nearly all the water for residential, industrial, and agricultural use. Because of widespread irrigation, farming accounts for 94 percent of the groundwater use. Irrigated agriculture forms the base of the regional economy. Because much of the Plains is semi-arid and the aquifer is overlaid by a layer of impermeable rock, there is very little replenishment of the aquifer, and the water level is dropping over 2 feet per year.

It supports about one-fifth of the wheat, corn, cotton, and cattle produced in the United States. Crops provide grains and hay for confined feeding of cattle and hogs and for dairies. The cattle feedlots support a large meatpacking industry. Nebraska gets about 46% of its irrigation water from the Ogallala, followed by Texas (30%) and Kansas (14%) Read more

Without irrigation from the Ogallala Aquifer, there would be a smaller regional population and far less economic activity. Irrigated land in the Texas region (Southern High Plains) declined by about one third, from 1.58 million ha in 1958 to 1.13 million ha in 1994. Some of this loss of productive land has been compensated by more efficient irrigation methods. But the amount of food supplied to the U.S. and to the world, is going to be reduced.

People migrated out of these regions amidst great hardships in the droughts and dust storms of the 1930's. We could now be implementing policies to reduce population growth today, or at the very least eliminating the government policies that encourage population growth.

Drought and Overpopulation Combine

In another breadbasket region of the U.S., the San Joaquin Valley in California, Drought and Overpopulation are combining to reenergize California's perennial water wars. San Joaquin - Read more California's water supply is pretty much dependent on winter rain and snow in the North-eastern mountains. This water is transported through two major river systems, the Sacaramento in the north and the San Joaquin in the central regions. These rivers meet in the Delta near Sacramento and flow into the San Francisco Bay. Massive pumps take water from the Delta and send it via a web of aquaducts to water 5 million acres of crops in the San Joaquin Valley and to provide much of the water for the Los Angeles area, currently home to over 20 million people.

Distribution of this water has been a major political issue in the State for a century or longer. And the building boom of the past decades has only made it worse. Demands on the water system are usually categorized into three (3) sources: Agriculture, residential users (20%), and environmental needs. What is missing from this analysis is developers. Residential users are being asked nicely, fined, and surcharged for their water use, but developers are being encouraged to build more and more housing. In some regions, this is even called "smart" growth, but there is nothing smart about encouraging yet more people to live in a semi-arid region. Instead, it would be smart to restrict builders from building when they can not show adequate water supply during periods of extended drought, and to charge builders fees which truely cover the traffic, water and other infrastructure, educational environmental costs they are imposing on the residents of the region. By lumping residential users together with developers, the developers have managed to evade responsibility for their share in overtaxing the water supplies, and evaded having to pay for the environmental degradation they have caused.

Due to it's climate, it's soil, and this water, the Valley supports a $20 billion crop industry, more than any other individual state in the U.S. But there are two competing claims for this water. However, the State is adding 1 million people every 3-4 years, and the County is adding 2-3% per year, growing from 540,257 in 1998 to 672,388 in 2008.

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