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Topic: Then will you find that money cannot be eaten
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Frustrated Mess
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 8312
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posted 15 March 2006 11:27 AM
quote:
Across the world, they are coming: the water wars. From Israel to India, from Turkey to Botswana, arguments are going on over disputed water supplies that may soon burst into open conflict.Yesterday, Britain's Defence Secretary, John Reid, pointed to the factor hastening the violent collision between a rising world population and a shrinking world water resource: global warming. In a grim first intervention in the climate-change debate, the Defence Secretary issued a bleak forecast that violence and political conflict would become more likely in the next 20 to 30 years as climate change turned land into desert, melted ice fields and poisoned water supplies.
The Water Wars
From: doom without the gloom | Registered: Feb 2005
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lagatta
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2534
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posted 15 March 2006 11:53 AM
Very interesting article, but personally I think it could have gone into your earlier thread on environmental destruction; both should be in environmental issues - we had been pressuring to have such a forum for years, we must use it. Beyond the great gap between the richest and poorest countries, I think the following item is worthy of note: quote:
* By contrast the average US citizen uses 500 litres per day, and the British average is 200.
I haven't lived in Britain, but living in Italy, France and staying for several months in the Netherlands, I noted that there is a far greater effort to conserve water in those wealthy Western countries with a comparable standard of living. I suspect our performance may be about as poor as the USians'. There already are water wars. Access to aquifers is a major factor in Middle Eastern and African conflicts, and to disputes in other parts of the world, not only between governments, but also between governments and Aboriginal peoples. The question of water privatisation was very important in recent political changes in Bolivia.
From: Se non ora, quando? | Registered: Apr 2002
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Frustrated Mess
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 8312
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posted 15 March 2006 12:17 PM
I had no idea there was a environmental forum. If the moderators wish to move this there, I have no objection.You are right that the water wars are already on-going. Much of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I believe, revolves around water. In the Horn of Africa, tribes are now embroiled in conflict over diminishing agricultural land and water and threeatens to spill over into a regional war.
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Akiru Lomukuny's clan has already seen one boy killed, a girl raped and dozens of women beaten just for trying to get a drink of water. Now, she says, things are about to get a lot worse. Drought has tribes fighting for water
From: doom without the gloom | Registered: Feb 2005
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Frustrated Mess
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 8312
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posted 16 March 2006 10:11 AM
quote:
Where there was once an excess of water, there is now a looming shortage.This week, as the city plays host to the Fourth World Water Forum, a six-day conference of water experts, it serves as an arresting example of the effects on water supplies of unchecked urban growth, shortsighted management and political inertia. "It is a system held together by a thread," said Manuel Perló Cohen, director of the University Program for Studies of the City at Mexico's National Autonomous University. Mexico City and its surrounding suburbs, broadly known as the Valley of Mexico, now extract water from their aquifers more than twice as fast as they replenish them.
Once a Vision of Water
From: doom without the gloom | Registered: Feb 2005
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