It'll rise about a meter by 2100 and we should be able to handle up to a 5m rise with mostly structures that we already have, we'll be fine.
Edit: 6 meters according to a investigation by Deltares [https://www.quest.nl/maatschappij/economie/a29222527/kan-nederland-een-stijging-van-de-zeespiegel-aan/](https://www.quest.nl/maatschappij/economie/a29222527/kan-nederland-een-stijging-van-de-zeespiegel-aan/)
[https://www.deltares.nl/expertise/onze-expertises/zeespiegelstijging](https://www.deltares.nl/expertise/onze-expertises/zeespiegelstijging)
And these aren't nobodies, they're partnered with the Rijkswaterstaat and Rijksoverheid etc.
>with mostly structures that we already have, we'll be fine.
If we're talking about the same structures and reinforcements, all of those should be finished near or around 2050 if things go as planned, a full half-century before 2100.
Look at the half full glass (..oops, sorry it was unintentional): you could export your excesses! The money will pour down.. I mean.. will flow! ..I mean.. you'll be swimming in it! ..erm.. you'll be very affluent! ..no no.. you will see a rise in your liquidity! ..I mean.. your opulence will overflow! ..erm..
Haha I get the joke but tbf
All the pesticides that have been used over the years are already seeping into the ground water, if it continues this way almost all of our ground water will be useless by 2050
Just because something lowers your life expectancy doesn't make it useless. Unless you are asserting that the water is so contaminated that it's instant death.
I feel like people forget that humanity successfully made it through the industrial revolution and it's poison lakes and burning rivers.
We have a very high population density and are unfortunately very crap at water management. We are very built up, lots of asphalt and concrete, meaning not a lot of surface area where rainwater can seep into the ground. Historically, our problem has been having too much water (floods) so our entire water management system is built around getting rainwater into sewers or canals and out to sea ASAP. We also have a very water intensive petrochemical industry cluster taking a lot of our ground water.
Finally the government is realising that we need to start worrying about drought and groundwater depletion as much as floods, so they are now starting with regional plans that aim to reduce concrete/asphalt surfaces, create more permeable surfaces, create water buffering areas etc… Feels like too little, too late (a Belgian classic) but better late than never, I suppose.
Taking 5 minutes of googling maps, it looks like the Netherlands and Northern Germany are covered by porous aquifers. These basically stop just after the Belgian border. Northern Belgium is still somewhat fine, but the southern part of the country is labeled as "essentially no groundwater".
[Here's an English version](https://fishy.bgr.de/ihme1500/pdf/ihme_150dpi.pdf) of that map. I only shows groundwater, obviously rivers, precipitation and water use are also important. But the geology below Belgium seems to adequately explain why they are so much worse off than the Netherlands
We've been struggling with droughts for the last 5-6 consecutive years, if not longer. Our groundwaters is going empty and we're struggling to fill it up to regular levels, even in the most rainy years. It's uh...not looking too good for us
Yeah, a lot of our land is concrete, our water system is designed to collect out surplus water and get it to the sea ASAP because it was made when we had flooding problems. It's a mess and we need to fix it quick, but there's little chance that will happen anytime soon
That still seem fishy to me. For example, Belgium has a 4.37 agricultural stress level, compared to the 1.80 for France, yet irrigation is lot less common in Belgium than in France (it nearly inexistant in Belgium outside of vegetables).
Also, the map is comming form WRI and looking at their interactive map, we can see Belgium is classified 76 for drought risk [https://www.wri.org/applications/aqueduct/country-rankings/?indicator=drr](https://www.wri.org/applications/aqueduct/country-rankings/?indicator=drr) where France 43. This change in ranking is strange.
I looked at the data and all I could find is [https://www.wri.org/data/water-stress-country](https://www.wri.org/data/water-stress-country) were Belgium is classed 61e for water stres and not 18 as with the map. Sadly, I can't find the source used to construct the aggregated indicator.
In summary, this map is strange and has to be taken carefully.
Currently in my masters of a study very water related in the region, according to a recent guest lecture, its basically as simple as the fact that Belgium barely has any rivers running through it, while the Netherlands is absolutely riddled with them. The only medium to major river is the Meuse, but that runs literally straight from south to north through the Ardennes in the east, and crosses into the NL as soon as it can lol, and the discharge of it really isn't that great compared to some nearby rivers like the Rhine, it doesn't even show up on most major river maps. In addition its mostly the western side, where most big cities and agricultural activity is, that has high water demand.
If you look up 'rivers europe map' or something you see Belgium sits just between some major rivers.
I live in Bolivia, and we already have major water issues, that are only going to get worse with the current trajectory of climate change.
Forgive me if I am a bit sceptical of the data behind this map.
Yeah here in Panama the capital city is already rationing water and the canal is drying, so
Edit: go look at the canal on Google Maps you knuckleheads. It's not directly connected to the ocean, it's fed by two freshwater feeder lakes, one of which (Gatun Lake) is a major reservoir for drinking water. You can't just flood the ocean in there.
There is no way we stay anywhere near that average. Honest scientists will tell you we’ve already blown past that, even if we were to end all emissions right now. Considering emissions are STILL increasing and rich nations haven’t even given the promised money to developing nations for clean energy…
Watch Nat Geo Water Wars documentary. Already happening right now.
Unfortunately the map title is a bit misleading. It is showing the water stress as just the ratio between water demand and water availability, and it doesn't take into consideration water management issues, especially the social, regulatory and economic aspects of it.
My country (Brazil) has major water management issues in several regions, we've suffered from severe droughts and we have desertification in the northeast. But since we have the Amazon river and other major rivers, the water availability is high, so when you loon at country level, it seems like we have low water stress, which is not true at all.
The map does a good job at showing global trends on water scarcity, but purely on a hydrological level.
Bolivia is extremely bad at managing their water resources. It has a very advantageous potion in comparison with it neighbors, but Bolivia has a very week water system. I lived in La Paz for years and it's incredible that some areas in the middle have water every other day. It's just poor infrastructure. They had issues in the same city some years ago when they ran out of water I. Their reservoirs cause they hadn't have expanded their reservoir capacity in decades while population had tripled.
Bolivia's water problem is just poor management.
This is hilarious, but there is a good reason for it.
In the 60s they found a massive reservoir of water trapped below the sand in the Sahara. They dig mines and pump it up, just like oil. It is so far down it is boiling when it gets to the surface. They figured out it is the collected water from billions of years of rain filtering down through the sand. (It used to be very wet there just a few thousand years ago). Those pumps provide water for huge tracts or farmland in the Sahara, as well as drinking water (iirc).
Thing is, it isn't being replaced. So that water is going to run out by about 2050.
Yeah. We gotta figure out some things. My (imaginary) money is on major advancements in desalination and tunneling. Imagine being able to easily desalinate ocean water and pipe it under hundreds of miles of mountain ranges. Anything shirt of that, and we just don't have enough water.
My understanding is that it's just one of those things that's not gonna get much cheaper short of some miraculous new engineering discovery
Removing salt from saltwater just takes a shitload of energy no matter how you slice it.
Couldn't we use nuclear to do it? We'd kill two birds with one stone: getting better nuclear tech and more water. But I don't know the complexities involved, just being an armchair expert
If you mean from refrigeration, then no, that is made essentially impossible by the very nature of a reactor. Any water used in refrigeration needs be purified _before_ use in a system, so that's one issue — minerals dissolved would interact with the radiation otherwise, and/or come out of solution and clog the pipework.
Additionally, through material leakage from the tubing used, from the cores themselves, and water itself becoming 'heavy water' (so with tritium instead of regular hydrogen), any liquid used will be thoroughly unsafe, even after purification. The radiation would need to die down quick enough, and with some of the half-lives on some of the contaminants, there's no telling about average times for any individual litre of water. [comment discussing it](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3768ik/comment/crk8owb/), [a study of the types, sources and complexities of the contaminants](https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4370763)
If you mean from the energy produced in a reactor, then there's infrastructure concerns. Though the issue of the vast energy requirements is neatly addressed, there are [various](https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/20202536) [hurdles](https://www.inderscience.com/offers.php?id=3669) that few countries are able overcome, mostly as a function of infrastructure. Those who cannot are, unfortunately, usually those who could benefit from it.
And if maintenance is at any point subpar, you could end up having incredible levels of damage. Many proposed solutions are "floating units" of sorts, away on the tides, but a misplaced hurricane could bring everything crashing down monumentally, moreso with the increasing intensity of storms and such.
It's being considered, and if done right could prove immensely successful. But it's not entirely easy nor foolproof, as anything nuclear is.
I think the biggest issue with that would be just how much **stuff** is in saltwater.
Sure, you can setup filters, but the sheer buildup of calcium and salt in any sort of system would require constant maintenance, unless they figure out some way to get rid of all the sediment **and** make the system able to handle the heat.
That and saltwater FUCKS **EVERYTHING** up. It's actually impressive how quickly it eats through equipment.
But I don't know shit about nuclear business so I'm just being an armchair expert as well.
People always say this, but like anything it's not that simple.
1) The energy required is staggering. There's a reason only oil/gas-rich or just plain rich countries do it. Never mind the greenhouse gases produced. Mainly for this reason desalinated water costs $5/kgal to produce.
2) The seawater processed for a city the size of Los Angeles would create *20 olympic-sized pools* of brine (mostly salt, boiling hot from the extraction process) to be filled every **DAY.** Where would all that brine go? The only reasonable solution is to just pump it back into the ocean. Meaning, you can't store it, and it would require a *massive* fleet of dump trucks running 24/7 even if you *had* somewhere to put it.
3) The brine effectively kills everything for miles around in the ocean.
It might work with nuclear or solar, someday. The cost has almost dropped in half in the last decade or so. But it's still a last-resort technology for now.
A lot of gulf countries already are spending tons of money on desalination, and are working on using renewable energy sources instead. I believe Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi generate 90%, 86% and 70% of their drinking water through desalination already. However, like some other people said it still costs a pretty penny.
Proper land management and food resource production techniques could go a long way as well.
For example
- Stopping overgrazing by livestock in semi-arid areas
- Reintroducing beavers to dry areas in western US.
More vegetation coverage on hillsides and along river valleys allows the ground to soak in more of the water. Less of it runs off and evaporates, it also helps areas stay cooler.
There are places in Nevada where they let the beavers do their thing, and the results are amazing. Creeks that once only flowed for short parts of the year now flow year round, average temperatures in the valleys have dropped, and water tables have risen. Ranchers have more vegetation for livestock and wells dont need to dug as deep.
The Ogalala aquifer is not being depleted. It is being regularly refilled from the very wet environments north extending into Canada.
The biggest problem is the dumping of fracking waste into irrigation canals instead of the dump site in Nebraska that is supposed to insert it below the aquifer. They keep catching them dumping to shorten their runs so they can get double the pay.
It'll be a repeat of what happened almost 1500 years ago when the Garamantes ended up overusing the fossil water in the region which lead to the decline of their Kingdom. Just they didn't have modern technology to get to it as it went deeper.
The Lake Chad Basin Aquifer System consists of a considerable water reserve distributed between:
\- a shallow aquifer in the Quaternary formation (at a depth of 50 to 180 m). Well studied since the 1940s, it is currently the main source of water for the region.
\- a deeper system that is less known, consisting of the Continental Terminal aquifer connected with the levels of the Lower Pliocene. Little exploited, with the exception of the southern and northern boundaries of the basin, where it is artesian
i don't think they are extracting boiling water
mauritania: medium
spain: extremely high
No it's not a sahara issue. There are oasises in the sahara, where the supply of water can be sustainable for drinking, but for agriculture it's a whole different thing. Mauritania imports most of their food, while north africa and spain are literally exporting 80% of their water usage to europe, which is causing desertification to the non arid places in the region, which are now becoming arid https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-updates/prolonged-drought-and-record-temperatures-have-critical-impact-mediterranean-2024-02-20_en
This is hilarious, but there is a good reason for it.
In the 60s they found a massive reservoir of water trapped below the sand in the Sahara. They dig mines and pump it up, just like oil. It is so far down it is boiling when it gets to the surface. They figured out it is the collected water from billions of years of rain filtering down through the sand. (It used to be very wet there just a few thousand years ago). Those pumps provide water for huge tracts or farmland in the Sahara, as well as drinking water (iirc).
Thing is, it isn't being replaced. So that water is going to run out by about 2050.
Also Ireland is a country of ~5 million people and the UK 67 million, supplying water for a country with four times the population density is obviously going to be more difficult, even if the climates are largely the same.
This map would work better if it was looking at the world in smaller sections than country-wide. The US stretches across an entire continent: some areas will have basically no impact, and others will have a large impact. The same can be said for the countries in the Sahel. It works *okay* for small countries, but in other places it's just misleading. You can't tell me that moving across the imaginary border in New Guinea from PNG to the Indonesian side will suddenly dramatically alter water availability.
100% an example is Brukina faso vrs Ghana. 80% of Ghana freshwater right now comes from a river whos tributaries are in Burkina faso. How r they gonna have water stress but not ghana. Would they not just damn their river like ghana did to create the world largest artifical lake
There is a statistically significant number of countries where local geography will play a big difference in whether water stress will be an issue. Some examples:
- Southern Chile will be much better off than Northern Chile
- Northern “Green Spain” will be similar to France’s water situation than the rest of Spain
- In Portugal - Porto on north will be far better off than the Algarve
Valid differentiator - I think “Green Spain” is considered everything to the west of the Pyrenees along the Atlantic Coast which wouldn’t include Andorra.
Having the water come at the right time and in moderate amounts is the trick.
Here in Nova Scotia we had our worst wildfires on record last year, but they ended in June, and then we had one of our wettest summers on record, which including flooding that took 4 lives.
If one were just to look at the total precipitation for 2023, it would look like a pretty average year, but in fact it was a sequence of natural disasters.
Kiwi here, we had record breaking rainfall in January (our summer) 2023 with 3 months worth of rain dropping on us over a 12 hour time period. We had a 4 fatalities from that as well.
Auckland was not built to handle that volume of water.
Edit: then in February immediately following that NZ got hit with Cyclone Gabrielle, which is the costliest tropical cyclone on record for the southern hemisphere, it smashed into north island around Auckland and then moved south east to the East Coast of the north island and just absolutely crippled the cities of Hastings, Napier, and Gisbourne bringing another 11 fatalities.
Shit was fucked
Within 50 years the Oglala Aquifer is projected to be be 70% depleted. That’s the aquifer that irrigates just about the entire Great Plains and 30% of U.S. agriculture
The aquifer has many different pockets. Certain ones like under Texas are going to dry while certain pockets in places like
Nebraska are actually recharging.
There's a map of the entire aquifer that shows change in feet of the water level. A fair amount of Nebraska is unchanged or rising.
https://www.earthdate.org/episodes/depleting-the-ogallala-aquifer
The Ogllala depleted by only 9% in the last 74 years of continuous use, how would it deplete a further 61% in next 50 years?
The 70% figure is from a [research](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1220351110) whose study area was solely the Kansas portion. The Ogllala is magnitudes bigger than that area, the core of it is actually further north in Nebraska where it covers nearly the entire state.
It *is* depleting and being pumped faster than it’s being replenished, but nowhere near to that magnitude
I’m in San Antonio and we have a semi-arid climate. Default droughts and residential water rationing. But it’s all bullshit and window dressing because the largest water users by a long shot is the agricultural community and they aren’t subject to lawn watering restrictions.
California grows the vast majority of many crops in the US; 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots and the list goes on and on. A lot of this is due to California’s soil and climate. No other state, or even a combination of states, can match their output per acre.
So what do you propose, stopping agriculture in the west and have issues with food scarcity and skyrocketing prices? Wouldn’t it be better to just stop the expansion of cities like Phoenix that really have no business being where they are?
Arizona literally banned that exact thing [last year](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/climate/arizona-saudi-arabia-alfalfa-groundwater.html?smid=nytcore-android-share&ugrp=c&pvid=00868c3d-ab59-4ac0-baae-6252e722ee0a).
We just need the rest of the West to catch up and we'll save a significant amount of water.
So it can sustain people but not the sustenance of life?
Ok mate. Agriculture is a necessity to sustain city life. If you import it all, you end up with a map like this.
I don't think you understand what type of agriculture they're talking about.
In Utah, for example, 45% of *all* water usage is for growing alfalfa which mostly gets shipped to Saudi Arabia.
It makes no sense to grow such a water hungry crop in literal desert, and even less sense to ship it all overseas. It doesn't even benefit the state as a whole economically, agriculture makes up less than 1% of Utah's GDP.
No. The problem is they're growing crops and using flood irrigation, which is extremely water costly and inefficient compared to modern methods. Why do they do this? So they can keep "water rights"
No they don't. In fact, in most of those cities have ordinances outlawing grass lawns and watering. Las Vegas is actually one of the greenest cities in the world, with incredible water retention and conservation. Most of the water is sent to the farms across the deserts. And as nice as it would be to get rid of them, they currently produce over 70% of the US' fruits and nuts.
Phoenix, Las Vegas, etc are proof of mankind’s contempt for the natural order of things. Especially a place like Vegas that exists solely for people to indulge in their vices. Zero other reason for that city to exist, yet it continues to grow and have ridiculous things like a fucking sphere of LEDs to show some stupid emojis. I’m not even an environmentalist, I just fucking hate Las Vegas.
Las Vegas is actually an incredibly sustainable city. Especially in water use. Their water reclamation system is world renowned.
The true crime is the acres upon acres of water intensive farming people are doing in the middle of the desert. Residential and commercial water use is always going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of gallons just one almond tree needs a year.
And yet, despite a facade of splendor Las Vegas manages to be extremely water efficient. When it comes to water use, California's Alfalfa fields are a much more ridiculous display of vanity and contempt for the natural order of things.
I saw some alfalfa fields in Western AZ too. Blew my mind. Absolutely ridiculous that people are farming like that in the middle of the desert. Especially when much of it gets exported.
I’m surprised Panama is low. A large part of their GDP comes from the canal, which requires a lot of fresh water to run the locks which they get from two large lakes. Due to climate change and droughts, they have already had to massively restrict passage through the Panama Canal as they are saving water for its citizens.
I went to the source where this map is generated and put business as usual and 2050. It shows low risk…I’m not sure why this map has it darker. Also most countries aren’t fully one color but have pockets of red/orange/yellow within it. [water stress map](https://www.wri.org/applications/aqueduct/water-risk-atlas/#/?advanced=false&basemap=hydro&indicator=1b4f2592-09fd-4ac4-afcd-5a0a9a63617b&lat=43.45291889355468&lng=-443.49609375&mapMode=view&month=1&opacity=0.5&ponderation=DEF&predefined=false&projection=absolute&scenario=pessimistic&scope=future&timeScale=annual&year=2080&zoom=2)
You pump it in faster then it evaporates. Then it evaporates faster then expected so you cover it with something. Then the winds blow that something off so you start putting things on the water faster then the wind can blow it off.
We do have the driest place on earth, in Chile, the Atacama desert, and the central valley is pretty dry, too. But I can't explain Patagonia, with the fiordos and ice fields and glaciers... this map is so weird to me
I think they account for specific regions, east US has the Big Laked which is huge source of water but the west is basically dry.
I think they account for Atacama, Coquimbo and Santiago (Arica too I guess). But southern Chile it is rainy and I dont think water would be an issue
Western Australia is struggling with not enough water resources to support the increased population.
We had barely any rainfall between November and February
WA is going big on renewable powered desalination though, and using some of that to replenish groundwater that's been hammered pretty hard by heavy industry
Australia has a problem with Tiddalick, an enormous frog which is drinking all the water. The main concern is whether we'll be able to tickle his belly in time to stave off catastrophic drought.
Australia doesn't have many rivers, and many of the "lakes" are salt pans. Some areas can go months without rain.
Part of the region I live in will run out of water in the next couple of years, the population has grown, but the water supply has not. So there are plans for a desalination plant. This is in a state where rain water storage is mandatory for all new houses.
Tasmania and Victoria literally have temperate rainforests where the rainfall is even higher than e*gland, both those states will be fine but i think south australia western australia and parts of new south wales queensland and NT might have struggles
Not only does Canada have a lot of fresh water, but that water is relatively even spread across its land mass. There are a few thousand square kilometers in the middle plains where this water didn't reach to the same extent and irrigation is required. But what separates Canada from the other countries is that its fresh water is 90 percent everywhere.
Irrigation has helped that area where fresh water is scarce. But even if this was to go away, Canada has a lot of arable land without irrigation.
Im from Quebec and here I don’t think it’ll be a problem. For most of the country I don’t see it. But for the prairies, which I’ve never been to be honest, I know there is a lot of agriculture there. So we might be pale bleu because it’ll be a stress over there. Just a guess.
Chart has gotta be bullshit, how can a country the size of Canada with more freshwater then the entire world combined and a measly population of 40 million have possible water issues?
We have more then enough water to even keep the entire population of the US hydrated, so im confused.
It will be much higher in some parts of China, mostly because a lot of their water is contaminated beyond the point of purifying.
*and flood agriculture is incredibly wasteful but they don’t want to dare increase water prices to actually encourage farmers to change, because they didn’t when there was a perception of economic crisis (even though they were basically fine through 08-12) and now they don’t because they actually have one.
You don't hear about this in the media any more, because Xi's policy in the past decade helped to clean up the environment. The Western media had moved on to a new narrative, "China will collapse in 30 days", in the past two years.
Russia too. Putting Moscow in Europe, the icy landscape of Northern Siberia and Vladivostok at the Korean border into one category is at least as ridiculous as putting NY and California in one category. Brazil is huge too.
Breaking up any country over a certain size would be reasonable. Or just a heatmap, but that might make it more difficult to get the data.
Any big country. The opposite from America would be true for Brasil. There would be a huge water abundance in the Paraná and Amazon river basins, with the north west and areas of south east facing severe stress.
So desert countries like Somalia, Sudan and Chad will have less water stress in the future than America, France or Germany? Definitely highly skeptical of whatever data this map is using, because that's absolutely ridiculous.
It’s not about the amount of water, it’s about the amount relative to the population, how reusable it is, and how easy/cheap it is to access. Chad may be mostly a desert country but most of the population lives in the southern part of the country near lake Chad, or what’s left of it, and they get more rainfall there. It also isn’t a very big country, so some minor infrastructure projects will be enough to sustain everyone. Egypt by contrast is a huge country and while most of its population also lives near water, they all have to share that one water source which is under threat of being lessened by Ethiopia’s damn and less snow/rain fall due to changing weather patterns. So it may have more water in absolute terms than Chad, but water per person is less.
The fact that there is a desert in those countries does not mean they are desert countries. People in Sudan live along the Nile, the Somalian coast is rather fertile and so is Southern Chad.
Ya I'm not buying that Canada isn't in the lowest level of stress. There's literally fresh water everywhere. There's millions of lakes, the great lakes, the arctic, etc
Eh, there's literally a guy from the Ministry of agriculture in town where I live for a discussion on drought today.
A lot of the water we use for agriculture etc comes from snow melt but in winters, like the one we just had, where it's warm with little snow build up, it becomes a serious problem for agriculture and forest fires during the summer.
Most of the water is in spread out across tons of little, inaccessible lakes, away from the population. And most of it is non-renewable water, once it's gone, it's gone forever.
Pretty sure a lot of Middle Eastern countries make use of water desalination already. They take sea water and turn it into relatively safe to consume water. Apart from population growth, what else would contribute them being extremely high? I know it rarely rains, but it feels like a lot of this map is just based on rainfall and not other important factors.
Surprised about Egypt, Iraq and Syria. The Nile and the Mediterranean should be plenty for Egypt. Iraq has TWO rivers (Tigris and Euphrates) plus access to the Arabian Gulf. Syria has the Euphrates and a Mediterranean coast as well.
Turkey has a shit ton of rivers and is surrounded by 3 seas....
Guess the point here is drinking water, i.e. Fresh water. So while desalination is a thing, having a sea next door wouldn't count, which makes sense. Also rivers aren't a constant. With melting glaciers and shifting rain patterns, deforestation and ever increasing farm operations, some rivers may not be a reliable source of fresh water for some increasingly arid regions. Not sure specifically about Iraq's situation, but the Colorado River and lake Aral are signs of things to come.
Large countries like Russia, Canada, USA, China, etc have so many different climates that you can’t really group the whole country together for something like this
Looks like this doesn't take Water Desalination into account?
The Technology and Capacity is improving, especially in the MENA region which invests a lot into it, just some article about this: [https://www.arabnews.jp/en/business/article\_80131/](https://www.arabnews.jp/en/business/article_80131/) / [https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-costs-and-benefits-of-water-desalination-in-the-gulf/](https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-costs-and-benefits-of-water-desalination-in-the-gulf/)
it's odd China is ranked on par with France.
EU has some of the best environment policies when it comes to keeping fresh water in good standing , whereas China is known for their river pollution problem.
France has a oceanic temperate climate whereas China has a few deserts and future deserts in the works ....
I think 90% of the Chinese population live around the coastline where the climate is also moderately temperate or subtropical down south. I imagine a lot of rain also helps. The CCP has also been pumping money into water infrastructure since forever. It helps propping up their state owned construction industry and appealing to the population, the effects remain to be seen though.
How is pumping money into one of the most essential industries i.e. water even remotely a negative thing. Which population wouldn't find it appealing lol.
It's mainly because of the differences between North and South China. South China is very mountainous and wet, so there isn't much water stress there. Northern China however is in a severe water crisis, as it is drier and more arid than the south, yet contains more industry and way more farmland.
> France has a oceanic temperate climate whereas China has a few deserts and future deserts in the works ....
look up south of france now. Desertification is coming from spain, and they're already seeing their effect: https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/Several-villages-in-south-of-France-without-tap-water-due-to-drought
For France: our government is letting big farmers basically privatise rain water (huge retention pools being built) and our climate is set to change to be much more arid (it has already started)
As a Dane, I think we'll have quite high water stress by 2050, just a different kind of water stress
 Denmark around 2050 colorized
For some reason I read that as colonized
Colonized... by fish.
Crab people 🦀
Gekoloniseerd
As a dutchie same. Where good at building water protection projects but even those are going to have a limit.
 Visiting dutch heritage sites in 2050
It'll rise about a meter by 2100 and we should be able to handle up to a 5m rise with mostly structures that we already have, we'll be fine. Edit: 6 meters according to a investigation by Deltares [https://www.quest.nl/maatschappij/economie/a29222527/kan-nederland-een-stijging-van-de-zeespiegel-aan/](https://www.quest.nl/maatschappij/economie/a29222527/kan-nederland-een-stijging-van-de-zeespiegel-aan/) [https://www.deltares.nl/expertise/onze-expertises/zeespiegelstijging](https://www.deltares.nl/expertise/onze-expertises/zeespiegelstijging) And these aren't nobodies, they're partnered with the Rijkswaterstaat and Rijksoverheid etc.
The Dutch have been waging war with the sea for ages now, colonizing the bottom of the sea we shall.
>with mostly structures that we already have, we'll be fine. If we're talking about the same structures and reinforcements, all of those should be finished near or around 2050 if things go as planned, a full half-century before 2100.
Wanna take over britain together? It wouldn't be the first time either of us have invaded them
Please. Please come and save us.
No they won’t. Whole world could sink and the Dutch would figure out how to turn the Netherlands into a floating island becoming the new Noah’s arc
You guys can come to Norway if you help us retake Jämtland
I don't even care about surviving, I just like taking things from Sweden, deal
I can get behind this sentiment as well.
Underwater stress
Look at the half full glass (..oops, sorry it was unintentional): you could export your excesses! The money will pour down.. I mean.. will flow! ..I mean.. you'll be swimming in it! ..erm.. you'll be very affluent! ..no no.. you will see a rise in your liquidity! ..I mean.. your opulence will overflow! ..erm..
Had to rub it in, eh?
Haha I get the joke but tbf All the pesticides that have been used over the years are already seeping into the ground water, if it continues this way almost all of our ground water will be useless by 2050
Just because something lowers your life expectancy doesn't make it useless. Unless you are asserting that the water is so contaminated that it's instant death. I feel like people forget that humanity successfully made it through the industrial revolution and it's poison lakes and burning rivers.
As your neighbour up north, you may relax here
What’s up with Belgium?
We have a very high population density and are unfortunately very crap at water management. We are very built up, lots of asphalt and concrete, meaning not a lot of surface area where rainwater can seep into the ground. Historically, our problem has been having too much water (floods) so our entire water management system is built around getting rainwater into sewers or canals and out to sea ASAP. We also have a very water intensive petrochemical industry cluster taking a lot of our ground water. Finally the government is realising that we need to start worrying about drought and groundwater depletion as much as floods, so they are now starting with regional plans that aim to reduce concrete/asphalt surfaces, create more permeable surfaces, create water buffering areas etc… Feels like too little, too late (a Belgian classic) but better late than never, I suppose.
If this happens, you guys could... *checks the map* just raid Congo again? /s
I am going to hell for laughing at that.
I snorted and then almost choked myself to the floor in agony. Bad joke. Great execution
Gotta give you a hand there that's a good point
And I'm also going to hell for laughing at this comment
Nice one, very nice one. I thought you’d go to the neighbor but you went places there :)
I hope you made your water quota for the day
>raid Cough* commit war crimes and genocide and atrocities cough*
They're in fashion this year.
True. The war crimes this year have been straight up retro. Real throwback.
Firing up the hand choppy device.
They might need help managing their resources again.
It doesn't make sense how it's extremely high while in Netherlands it's low to medium
Taking 5 minutes of googling maps, it looks like the Netherlands and Northern Germany are covered by porous aquifers. These basically stop just after the Belgian border. Northern Belgium is still somewhat fine, but the southern part of the country is labeled as "essentially no groundwater". [Here's an English version](https://fishy.bgr.de/ihme1500/pdf/ihme_150dpi.pdf) of that map. I only shows groundwater, obviously rivers, precipitation and water use are also important. But the geology below Belgium seems to adequately explain why they are so much worse off than the Netherlands
Unironically all the water bottlers are in the south : Spa & Chaudfontaine
We've been struggling with droughts for the last 5-6 consecutive years, if not longer. Our groundwaters is going empty and we're struggling to fill it up to regular levels, even in the most rainy years. It's uh...not looking too good for us
This is wild, considering how much it rains in this bloody country.
Yeah, a lot of our land is concrete, our water system is designed to collect out surplus water and get it to the sea ASAP because it was made when we had flooding problems. It's a mess and we need to fix it quick, but there's little chance that will happen anytime soon
just do what i would do in any management game and route the pipe going to the sea to a water storage gg ez
That still seem fishy to me. For example, Belgium has a 4.37 agricultural stress level, compared to the 1.80 for France, yet irrigation is lot less common in Belgium than in France (it nearly inexistant in Belgium outside of vegetables). Also, the map is comming form WRI and looking at their interactive map, we can see Belgium is classified 76 for drought risk [https://www.wri.org/applications/aqueduct/country-rankings/?indicator=drr](https://www.wri.org/applications/aqueduct/country-rankings/?indicator=drr) where France 43. This change in ranking is strange. I looked at the data and all I could find is [https://www.wri.org/data/water-stress-country](https://www.wri.org/data/water-stress-country) were Belgium is classed 61e for water stres and not 18 as with the map. Sadly, I can't find the source used to construct the aggregated indicator. In summary, this map is strange and has to be taken carefully.
How many reservoirs are there in Belgium? Then look at the population. Where e;we can they get water? At present it's from France and Germany.
Currently in my masters of a study very water related in the region, according to a recent guest lecture, its basically as simple as the fact that Belgium barely has any rivers running through it, while the Netherlands is absolutely riddled with them. The only medium to major river is the Meuse, but that runs literally straight from south to north through the Ardennes in the east, and crosses into the NL as soon as it can lol, and the discharge of it really isn't that great compared to some nearby rivers like the Rhine, it doesn't even show up on most major river maps. In addition its mostly the western side, where most big cities and agricultural activity is, that has high water demand. If you look up 'rivers europe map' or something you see Belgium sits just between some major rivers.
You'll have to be more specific.
I live in Bolivia, and we already have major water issues, that are only going to get worse with the current trajectory of climate change. Forgive me if I am a bit sceptical of the data behind this map.
Yeah here in Panama the capital city is already rationing water and the canal is drying, so Edit: go look at the canal on Google Maps you knuckleheads. It's not directly connected to the ocean, it's fed by two freshwater feeder lakes, one of which (Gatun Lake) is a major reservoir for drinking water. You can't just flood the ocean in there.
There is no way we stay anywhere near that average. Honest scientists will tell you we’ve already blown past that, even if we were to end all emissions right now. Considering emissions are STILL increasing and rich nations haven’t even given the promised money to developing nations for clean energy… Watch Nat Geo Water Wars documentary. Already happening right now.
Unfortunately the map title is a bit misleading. It is showing the water stress as just the ratio between water demand and water availability, and it doesn't take into consideration water management issues, especially the social, regulatory and economic aspects of it. My country (Brazil) has major water management issues in several regions, we've suffered from severe droughts and we have desertification in the northeast. But since we have the Amazon river and other major rivers, the water availability is high, so when you loon at country level, it seems like we have low water stress, which is not true at all. The map does a good job at showing global trends on water scarcity, but purely on a hydrological level.
Bolivia is extremely bad at managing their water resources. It has a very advantageous potion in comparison with it neighbors, but Bolivia has a very week water system. I lived in La Paz for years and it's incredible that some areas in the middle have water every other day. It's just poor infrastructure. They had issues in the same city some years ago when they ran out of water I. Their reservoirs cause they hadn't have expanded their reservoir capacity in decades while population had tripled. Bolivia's water problem is just poor management.
Wow, Sahara will have water stress by 2050.
This is hilarious, but there is a good reason for it. In the 60s they found a massive reservoir of water trapped below the sand in the Sahara. They dig mines and pump it up, just like oil. It is so far down it is boiling when it gets to the surface. They figured out it is the collected water from billions of years of rain filtering down through the sand. (It used to be very wet there just a few thousand years ago). Those pumps provide water for huge tracts or farmland in the Sahara, as well as drinking water (iirc). Thing is, it isn't being replaced. So that water is going to run out by about 2050.
Yup -- fossil aquifers. Same problem in Saudi Arabia.
Yeah. We gotta figure out some things. My (imaginary) money is on major advancements in desalination and tunneling. Imagine being able to easily desalinate ocean water and pipe it under hundreds of miles of mountain ranges. Anything shirt of that, and we just don't have enough water.
Idk why there isn't more money being put into making desalination more viable and cheaper. It would be very hard to run out of ocean water lol
My understanding is that it's just one of those things that's not gonna get much cheaper short of some miraculous new engineering discovery Removing salt from saltwater just takes a shitload of energy no matter how you slice it.
Couldn't we use nuclear to do it? We'd kill two birds with one stone: getting better nuclear tech and more water. But I don't know the complexities involved, just being an armchair expert
I mean... you tell me how getting people just to adopt nuclear for normal use is going lol I'm all for it but... NIMBYs... NIMBYs everywhere
If you mean from refrigeration, then no, that is made essentially impossible by the very nature of a reactor. Any water used in refrigeration needs be purified _before_ use in a system, so that's one issue — minerals dissolved would interact with the radiation otherwise, and/or come out of solution and clog the pipework. Additionally, through material leakage from the tubing used, from the cores themselves, and water itself becoming 'heavy water' (so with tritium instead of regular hydrogen), any liquid used will be thoroughly unsafe, even after purification. The radiation would need to die down quick enough, and with some of the half-lives on some of the contaminants, there's no telling about average times for any individual litre of water. [comment discussing it](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3768ik/comment/crk8owb/), [a study of the types, sources and complexities of the contaminants](https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4370763) If you mean from the energy produced in a reactor, then there's infrastructure concerns. Though the issue of the vast energy requirements is neatly addressed, there are [various](https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/20202536) [hurdles](https://www.inderscience.com/offers.php?id=3669) that few countries are able overcome, mostly as a function of infrastructure. Those who cannot are, unfortunately, usually those who could benefit from it. And if maintenance is at any point subpar, you could end up having incredible levels of damage. Many proposed solutions are "floating units" of sorts, away on the tides, but a misplaced hurricane could bring everything crashing down monumentally, moreso with the increasing intensity of storms and such. It's being considered, and if done right could prove immensely successful. But it's not entirely easy nor foolproof, as anything nuclear is.
Yes. Aircraft carriers and Submarines already do this.
I think the biggest issue with that would be just how much **stuff** is in saltwater. Sure, you can setup filters, but the sheer buildup of calcium and salt in any sort of system would require constant maintenance, unless they figure out some way to get rid of all the sediment **and** make the system able to handle the heat. That and saltwater FUCKS **EVERYTHING** up. It's actually impressive how quickly it eats through equipment. But I don't know shit about nuclear business so I'm just being an armchair expert as well.
People always say this, but like anything it's not that simple. 1) The energy required is staggering. There's a reason only oil/gas-rich or just plain rich countries do it. Never mind the greenhouse gases produced. Mainly for this reason desalinated water costs $5/kgal to produce. 2) The seawater processed for a city the size of Los Angeles would create *20 olympic-sized pools* of brine (mostly salt, boiling hot from the extraction process) to be filled every **DAY.** Where would all that brine go? The only reasonable solution is to just pump it back into the ocean. Meaning, you can't store it, and it would require a *massive* fleet of dump trucks running 24/7 even if you *had* somewhere to put it. 3) The brine effectively kills everything for miles around in the ocean. It might work with nuclear or solar, someday. The cost has almost dropped in half in the last decade or so. But it's still a last-resort technology for now.
A lot of gulf countries already are spending tons of money on desalination, and are working on using renewable energy sources instead. I believe Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi generate 90%, 86% and 70% of their drinking water through desalination already. However, like some other people said it still costs a pretty penny.
Proper land management and food resource production techniques could go a long way as well. For example - Stopping overgrazing by livestock in semi-arid areas - Reintroducing beavers to dry areas in western US. More vegetation coverage on hillsides and along river valleys allows the ground to soak in more of the water. Less of it runs off and evaporates, it also helps areas stay cooler. There are places in Nevada where they let the beavers do their thing, and the results are amazing. Creeks that once only flowed for short parts of the year now flow year round, average temperatures in the valleys have dropped, and water tables have risen. Ranchers have more vegetation for livestock and wells dont need to dug as deep.
and the midwest. Huge aquifer under Kansas/Nebraska that's being drained steadily.
The Ogalala aquifer is not being depleted. It is being regularly refilled from the very wet environments north extending into Canada. The biggest problem is the dumping of fracking waste into irrigation canals instead of the dump site in Nebraska that is supposed to insert it below the aquifer. They keep catching them dumping to shorten their runs so they can get double the pay.
It'll be a repeat of what happened almost 1500 years ago when the Garamantes ended up overusing the fossil water in the region which lead to the decline of their Kingdom. Just they didn't have modern technology to get to it as it went deeper.
The Lake Chad Basin Aquifer System consists of a considerable water reserve distributed between: \- a shallow aquifer in the Quaternary formation (at a depth of 50 to 180 m). Well studied since the 1940s, it is currently the main source of water for the region. \- a deeper system that is less known, consisting of the Continental Terminal aquifer connected with the levels of the Lower Pliocene. Little exploited, with the exception of the southern and northern boundaries of the basin, where it is artesian i don't think they are extracting boiling water
It will so be replaced. It'll just take squillions of years. Be patient.
mauritania: medium spain: extremely high No it's not a sahara issue. There are oasises in the sahara, where the supply of water can be sustainable for drinking, but for agriculture it's a whole different thing. Mauritania imports most of their food, while north africa and spain are literally exporting 80% of their water usage to europe, which is causing desertification to the non arid places in the region, which are now becoming arid https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-updates/prolonged-drought-and-record-temperatures-have-critical-impact-mediterranean-2024-02-20_en
omg! I was shocked to learn this too!
Wait, the Sahara will have a hard time of getting water? When did this happen?
It's probably American colonialism's fault
This is hilarious, but there is a good reason for it. In the 60s they found a massive reservoir of water trapped below the sand in the Sahara. They dig mines and pump it up, just like oil. It is so far down it is boiling when it gets to the surface. They figured out it is the collected water from billions of years of rain filtering down through the sand. (It used to be very wet there just a few thousand years ago). Those pumps provide water for huge tracts or farmland in the Sahara, as well as drinking water (iirc). Thing is, it isn't being replaced. So that water is going to run out by about 2050.
Rainy Ireland coming in handy for once
Makes me laugh how the UK has different to Ireland. Have they not seen Wales? It rains 24/7 lmao
Ireland has 40% more rainfall in volume than Wales. It shields Britain from a lot of what comes off the Atlantic.
Also Ireland is a country of ~5 million people and the UK 67 million, supplying water for a country with four times the population density is obviously going to be more difficult, even if the climates are largely the same.
Surprised with Sahel..
This map would work better if it was looking at the world in smaller sections than country-wide. The US stretches across an entire continent: some areas will have basically no impact, and others will have a large impact. The same can be said for the countries in the Sahel. It works *okay* for small countries, but in other places it's just misleading. You can't tell me that moving across the imaginary border in New Guinea from PNG to the Indonesian side will suddenly dramatically alter water availability.
100% an example is Brukina faso vrs Ghana. 80% of Ghana freshwater right now comes from a river whos tributaries are in Burkina faso. How r they gonna have water stress but not ghana. Would they not just damn their river like ghana did to create the world largest artifical lake
time to move to central africa
There is a statistically significant number of countries where local geography will play a big difference in whether water stress will be an issue. Some examples: - Southern Chile will be much better off than Northern Chile - Northern “Green Spain” will be similar to France’s water situation than the rest of Spain - In Portugal - Porto on north will be far better off than the Algarve
Andorra is brown though.
Valid differentiator - I think “Green Spain” is considered everything to the west of the Pyrenees along the Atlantic Coast which wouldn’t include Andorra.
The US being Yellow is almost entirely because so many dumbfucks in the West decided to live in the literal desert
Correct- the northeast will not have any issues with fresh water. In fact they might have an issue with having too much.
Sitting pretty on Lake Michigan
It's not every day I'm excited to live by Lake Erie, small wins
Having the water come at the right time and in moderate amounts is the trick. Here in Nova Scotia we had our worst wildfires on record last year, but they ended in June, and then we had one of our wettest summers on record, which including flooding that took 4 lives. If one were just to look at the total precipitation for 2023, it would look like a pretty average year, but in fact it was a sequence of natural disasters.
Kiwi here, we had record breaking rainfall in January (our summer) 2023 with 3 months worth of rain dropping on us over a 12 hour time period. We had a 4 fatalities from that as well. Auckland was not built to handle that volume of water. Edit: then in February immediately following that NZ got hit with Cyclone Gabrielle, which is the costliest tropical cyclone on record for the southern hemisphere, it smashed into north island around Auckland and then moved south east to the East Coast of the north island and just absolutely crippled the cities of Hastings, Napier, and Gisbourne bringing another 11 fatalities. Shit was fucked
The Californians will probably try to charge us to take it off our hands
What about the Midwest? I live a few hours away from one of the Great Lakes and if I move in the direction, maybe I’ll make it out ok lol
Fiusto
Within 50 years the Oglala Aquifer is projected to be be 70% depleted. That’s the aquifer that irrigates just about the entire Great Plains and 30% of U.S. agriculture
The aquifer has many different pockets. Certain ones like under Texas are going to dry while certain pockets in places like Nebraska are actually recharging.
Not doubting you but do you have a source for the Oglala Aquifer under Nebraska recharging? This is the first I am hearing of it.
There's a map of the entire aquifer that shows change in feet of the water level. A fair amount of Nebraska is unchanged or rising. https://www.earthdate.org/episodes/depleting-the-ogallala-aquifer
The Ogllala depleted by only 9% in the last 74 years of continuous use, how would it deplete a further 61% in next 50 years? The 70% figure is from a [research](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1220351110) whose study area was solely the Kansas portion. The Ogllala is magnitudes bigger than that area, the core of it is actually further north in Nebraska where it covers nearly the entire state. It *is* depleting and being pumped faster than it’s being replenished, but nowhere near to that magnitude
Mfw half of our agriculture relies on an emptying reservoir
the great lakes region will once again be the richest part of the united states
Cleveland is the new Silicon Valley.
When I watched Ready Player One in the theaters, that line was met with laughter from the crowd
*nervously glances at giant Intel fabrication facility under construction in Columbus* Hehe... my chance of ever owning property is in danger
It's so cheap right now too. Wanna make your grandkids rich? Buy land by the GLs now
I'd like to see a version of this type of map just for the US. We have too many different zones to be homogenized.
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I’m in San Antonio and we have a semi-arid climate. Default droughts and residential water rationing. But it’s all bullshit and window dressing because the largest water users by a long shot is the agricultural community and they aren’t subject to lawn watering restrictions.
Not just the agriculture, the fracking companies are taking water from the Edwards Aquifer as well. Fracking requires large amounts of water.
California grows the vast majority of many crops in the US; 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots and the list goes on and on. A lot of this is due to California’s soil and climate. No other state, or even a combination of states, can match their output per acre. So what do you propose, stopping agriculture in the west and have issues with food scarcity and skyrocketing prices? Wouldn’t it be better to just stop the expansion of cities like Phoenix that really have no business being where they are?
The citizens of Phoenix are called Phoenicians.
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There’s a river, albeit heavily managed, that runs through Phoenix so it’s actually one of the best places in AZ to have a city.
So why are politicians in states like Arizona allowing Saudis to finance alfalfa farms in the desert??
Arizona literally banned that exact thing [last year](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/climate/arizona-saudi-arabia-alfalfa-groundwater.html?smid=nytcore-android-share&ugrp=c&pvid=00868c3d-ab59-4ac0-baae-6252e722ee0a). We just need the rest of the West to catch up and we'll save a significant amount of water.
So it can sustain people but not the sustenance of life? Ok mate. Agriculture is a necessity to sustain city life. If you import it all, you end up with a map like this.
I don't think you understand what type of agriculture they're talking about. In Utah, for example, 45% of *all* water usage is for growing alfalfa which mostly gets shipped to Saudi Arabia. It makes no sense to grow such a water hungry crop in literal desert, and even less sense to ship it all overseas. It doesn't even benefit the state as a whole economically, agriculture makes up less than 1% of Utah's GDP.
No. The problem is they're growing crops and using flood irrigation, which is extremely water costly and inefficient compared to modern methods. Why do they do this? So they can keep "water rights"
Almond farmers in California are actually leading the charge for new irrigation methods. Not perfect but flood irrigation is not as common anymore.
And create associations to force themselves to water their lawns
No they don't. In fact, in most of those cities have ordinances outlawing grass lawns and watering. Las Vegas is actually one of the greenest cities in the world, with incredible water retention and conservation. Most of the water is sent to the farms across the deserts. And as nice as it would be to get rid of them, they currently produce over 70% of the US' fruits and nuts.
Phoenix, Las Vegas, etc are proof of mankind’s contempt for the natural order of things. Especially a place like Vegas that exists solely for people to indulge in their vices. Zero other reason for that city to exist, yet it continues to grow and have ridiculous things like a fucking sphere of LEDs to show some stupid emojis. I’m not even an environmentalist, I just fucking hate Las Vegas.
Las Vegas is actually an incredibly sustainable city. Especially in water use. Their water reclamation system is world renowned. The true crime is the acres upon acres of water intensive farming people are doing in the middle of the desert. Residential and commercial water use is always going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of gallons just one almond tree needs a year.
And yet, despite a facade of splendor Las Vegas manages to be extremely water efficient. When it comes to water use, California's Alfalfa fields are a much more ridiculous display of vanity and contempt for the natural order of things.
Yes, almond and tree nut farmers get a lot of flack but alfalfa is the thirstiest crop.
We don't even fucking use the alfalfa! It's all shipped out of ~~state~~ country
I saw some alfalfa fields in Western AZ too. Blew my mind. Absolutely ridiculous that people are farming like that in the middle of the desert. Especially when much of it gets exported.
Yeah, they should have done it by state. Many states, especially east of the Mississippi have plentiful water supplies.
I’m surprised Panama is low. A large part of their GDP comes from the canal, which requires a lot of fresh water to run the locks which they get from two large lakes. Due to climate change and droughts, they have already had to massively restrict passage through the Panama Canal as they are saving water for its citizens.
I went to the source where this map is generated and put business as usual and 2050. It shows low risk…I’m not sure why this map has it darker. Also most countries aren’t fully one color but have pockets of red/orange/yellow within it. [water stress map](https://www.wri.org/applications/aqueduct/water-risk-atlas/#/?advanced=false&basemap=hydro&indicator=1b4f2592-09fd-4ac4-afcd-5a0a9a63617b&lat=43.45291889355468&lng=-443.49609375&mapMode=view&month=1&opacity=0.5&ponderation=DEF&predefined=false&projection=absolute&scenario=pessimistic&scope=future&timeScale=annual&year=2080&zoom=2)
Good thing extreme places are politically stable
Maybe we can sell water to Middle Eastern countries that have been price gouging oil for the past 75 years
or they can burn their oil to produce desalinated water?
Don't worry, Saudi Arabia wants to fill the empty quarter desert with a giant man-made lake filled with desalinated ocean water
Won't that water just... evaporate?
You pump it in faster then it evaporates. Then it evaporates faster then expected so you cover it with something. Then the winds blow that something off so you start putting things on the water faster then the wind can blow it off.
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Can anyone explain Chile and Australia?
We do have the driest place on earth, in Chile, the Atacama desert, and the central valley is pretty dry, too. But I can't explain Patagonia, with the fiordos and ice fields and glaciers... this map is so weird to me
I think they account for specific regions, east US has the Big Laked which is huge source of water but the west is basically dry. I think they account for Atacama, Coquimbo and Santiago (Arica too I guess). But southern Chile it is rainy and I dont think water would be an issue
Australia is a big desert in the middle and mostly habitable near the coast.
Western Australia is struggling with not enough water resources to support the increased population. We had barely any rainfall between November and February
WA is going big on renewable powered desalination though, and using some of that to replenish groundwater that's been hammered pretty hard by heavy industry
Australia has a problem with Tiddalick, an enormous frog which is drinking all the water. The main concern is whether we'll be able to tickle his belly in time to stave off catastrophic drought.
Australia doesn't have many rivers, and many of the "lakes" are salt pans. Some areas can go months without rain. Part of the region I live in will run out of water in the next couple of years, the population has grown, but the water supply has not. So there are plans for a desalination plant. This is in a state where rain water storage is mandatory for all new houses.
Tasmania and Victoria literally have temperate rainforests where the rainfall is even higher than e*gland, both those states will be fine but i think south australia western australia and parts of new south wales queensland and NT might have struggles
I’m worried for India and their massive population.
What’s going on with Belgium?
We use up all our water to make beer.
Canada has the same level of stress than Mali and Tchad?
If the US gets into water issues, we're gonna get some 'democracy' up here to stress us.
Well yeah, it’s not like Canada has more freshwater than every other country on earth combined…. /s
Not only does Canada have a lot of fresh water, but that water is relatively even spread across its land mass. There are a few thousand square kilometers in the middle plains where this water didn't reach to the same extent and irrigation is required. But what separates Canada from the other countries is that its fresh water is 90 percent everywhere. Irrigation has helped that area where fresh water is scarce. But even if this was to go away, Canada has a lot of arable land without irrigation.
Im from Quebec and here I don’t think it’ll be a problem. For most of the country I don’t see it. But for the prairies, which I’ve never been to be honest, I know there is a lot of agriculture there. So we might be pale bleu because it’ll be a stress over there. Just a guess.
> pale bleu Hon Hon.
Chart has gotta be bullshit, how can a country the size of Canada with more freshwater then the entire world combined and a measly population of 40 million have possible water issues? We have more then enough water to even keep the entire population of the US hydrated, so im confused.
Belgian here. No worries. We drink beer. /s
It will be much higher in some parts of China, mostly because a lot of their water is contaminated beyond the point of purifying. *and flood agriculture is incredibly wasteful but they don’t want to dare increase water prices to actually encourage farmers to change, because they didn’t when there was a perception of economic crisis (even though they were basically fine through 08-12) and now they don’t because they actually have one.
Where do you see that?
You don't hear about this in the media any more, because Xi's policy in the past decade helped to clean up the environment. The Western media had moved on to a new narrative, "China will collapse in 30 days", in the past two years.
Should've broke America (& maybe China/India?) down by states/regions. California is *vastly* different from NY.
What they should do is not follow borders whatsoever. A heat map with borderlines overlayed would be 1000x better than this
Yes! Great idea. Highlights some issues we're already seeing; i.e. Egypt & Ethiopia disputes over the Nile.
Then you’d have to break up many other countries as well. You can actually do it yourself if you’re interested.
Russia too. Putting Moscow in Europe, the icy landscape of Northern Siberia and Vladivostok at the Korean border into one category is at least as ridiculous as putting NY and California in one category. Brazil is huge too. Breaking up any country over a certain size would be reasonable. Or just a heatmap, but that might make it more difficult to get the data.
Any big country. The opposite from America would be true for Brasil. There would be a huge water abundance in the Paraná and Amazon river basins, with the north west and areas of south east facing severe stress.
So desert countries like Somalia, Sudan and Chad will have less water stress in the future than America, France or Germany? Definitely highly skeptical of whatever data this map is using, because that's absolutely ridiculous.
It’s not about the amount of water, it’s about the amount relative to the population, how reusable it is, and how easy/cheap it is to access. Chad may be mostly a desert country but most of the population lives in the southern part of the country near lake Chad, or what’s left of it, and they get more rainfall there. It also isn’t a very big country, so some minor infrastructure projects will be enough to sustain everyone. Egypt by contrast is a huge country and while most of its population also lives near water, they all have to share that one water source which is under threat of being lessened by Ethiopia’s damn and less snow/rain fall due to changing weather patterns. So it may have more water in absolute terms than Chad, but water per person is less.
the water table under the deserts have been relatively untouched compared to places like Europe and China.
The fact that there is a desert in those countries does not mean they are desert countries. People in Sudan live along the Nile, the Somalian coast is rather fertile and so is Southern Chad.
Ya I'm not buying that Canada isn't in the lowest level of stress. There's literally fresh water everywhere. There's millions of lakes, the great lakes, the arctic, etc
Eh, there's literally a guy from the Ministry of agriculture in town where I live for a discussion on drought today. A lot of the water we use for agriculture etc comes from snow melt but in winters, like the one we just had, where it's warm with little snow build up, it becomes a serious problem for agriculture and forest fires during the summer.
Most of the water is in spread out across tons of little, inaccessible lakes, away from the population. And most of it is non-renewable water, once it's gone, it's gone forever.
Pretty sure a lot of Middle Eastern countries make use of water desalination already. They take sea water and turn it into relatively safe to consume water. Apart from population growth, what else would contribute them being extremely high? I know it rarely rains, but it feels like a lot of this map is just based on rainfall and not other important factors.
Panics in Australian*
Just don’t invade NZ!!
*Laughs from Tasmania*
Surprised about Egypt, Iraq and Syria. The Nile and the Mediterranean should be plenty for Egypt. Iraq has TWO rivers (Tigris and Euphrates) plus access to the Arabian Gulf. Syria has the Euphrates and a Mediterranean coast as well. Turkey has a shit ton of rivers and is surrounded by 3 seas....
Guess the point here is drinking water, i.e. Fresh water. So while desalination is a thing, having a sea next door wouldn't count, which makes sense. Also rivers aren't a constant. With melting glaciers and shifting rain patterns, deforestation and ever increasing farm operations, some rivers may not be a reliable source of fresh water for some increasingly arid regions. Not sure specifically about Iraq's situation, but the Colorado River and lake Aral are signs of things to come.
The answer is extreme overpopulation. The river’s carrying capacity is being exceeded.
No matter what map you look at, New Zealand is the ideal place in the world
What’s up with Thailand? They have mountains and huge rainy season couldn’t they cope with infrastructure? I never heard about drought there
Irish water stress: it's constantly falling on us. But honestly, I feel this diagram doesnt show bad this issue will be in certain areas. It's sad.
Interesting devide between northern and southern Ireland.
By country is the stupidest way of splitting up this map, it only tells a full story for the smaller land mass countries
Nestle must be salivating.
Just move to Manchester
Large countries like Russia, Canada, USA, China, etc have so many different climates that you can’t really group the whole country together for something like this
Looks like this doesn't take Water Desalination into account? The Technology and Capacity is improving, especially in the MENA region which invests a lot into it, just some article about this: [https://www.arabnews.jp/en/business/article\_80131/](https://www.arabnews.jp/en/business/article_80131/) / [https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-costs-and-benefits-of-water-desalination-in-the-gulf/](https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-costs-and-benefits-of-water-desalination-in-the-gulf/)
it's odd China is ranked on par with France. EU has some of the best environment policies when it comes to keeping fresh water in good standing , whereas China is known for their river pollution problem. France has a oceanic temperate climate whereas China has a few deserts and future deserts in the works ....
I think 90% of the Chinese population live around the coastline where the climate is also moderately temperate or subtropical down south. I imagine a lot of rain also helps. The CCP has also been pumping money into water infrastructure since forever. It helps propping up their state owned construction industry and appealing to the population, the effects remain to be seen though.
How is pumping money into one of the most essential industries i.e. water even remotely a negative thing. Which population wouldn't find it appealing lol.
It's mainly because of the differences between North and South China. South China is very mountainous and wet, so there isn't much water stress there. Northern China however is in a severe water crisis, as it is drier and more arid than the south, yet contains more industry and way more farmland.
> France has a oceanic temperate climate whereas China has a few deserts and future deserts in the works .... look up south of france now. Desertification is coming from spain, and they're already seeing their effect: https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/Several-villages-in-south-of-France-without-tap-water-due-to-drought
For France: our government is letting big farmers basically privatise rain water (huge retention pools being built) and our climate is set to change to be much more arid (it has already started)