Every drop matters.
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These three simple words will become increasingly important this century as population growth and climate change pile pressure on the globe’s water security.
It is not an exaggeration to say that how we, as a global community, manage our finite freshwater resources could determine our success or failure as a species.
American writer Mark Twain, it is claimed, once uttered: “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.”
And during the past decade in Australia we have seen nothing but fighting over the Murray-Darling Basin and how to manage the water that flows in, then down and eventually out of it.
The tension between how much water is allocated for productive use and how much is left for the environment is, and always will be, ever-present.
Where the balance lies is, largely, a matter of opinion. Opinion that can shaped by financial, emotional and political considerations. Science, it seems, has little role to play in the making of policy.
An irrigator on the banks of the Murrumbidgee in NSW will likely have a vastly different view to a tourism operator in Alexandrina in South Australia.
The fighting in Australia between states, between states and the Commonwealth, and between farmers and environmentalists has been unedifying at times.
But it is nothing compared to what could come to pass if hydro-political tensions flare around the globe.
The prospect of “water wars”, a notion once dismissed as the stuff of a Mad Max-like post-apocalyptic fantasy, is quickly gaining traction among academics and policy wonks.
A study emanating last year out of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre identified five potential conflict hotspots, including along the Nile, the Tigris/Euphrates and even the Colorado basin in the US.
With just 2.5 per cent of the world’s water fresh – much of that locked up, for now at least, in ice caps – and up to 3.6 billion people already living with some form of water scarcity, this is a monumental issue.
All the best for the week ahead, Ross.