Calif. Aquaduct: Peter Gleick: Deal With the Water Crisis Now!

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WIRED MAGAZINE: 16.10

Politics : Law RSS

Peter Gleick: Deal With the Water Crisis Now

By Matthew Power Email 09.22.08
Portrait: Mario Hugo
The 2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To

1. Parag Khanna: Embrace the Post-American Age
2. David Laibson: Tweak Human Behavior to Fix the Economy
3. Carolyn Porco: Use Big Robots — and Big Rockets
4. Leroy Hood: Look to the Genome to Rebuild Health Care
5. Montgomery McFate: Use Anthropology in Military Planning
6. Peter Gleick: Deal With the Water Crisis Now
7. Jagdish Bhagwati: Keep Free Trade Free
8. Ellen Miller: Make Washington More Like the Web
9. Ram Shriram: Open Up the Airwaves
10. A.T. Ball: Wage Smarter War With Agile Army IT
11. Steve Rayner: Take Climate Change Seriously
12. Mitchell Joachim: Redesign Cities From Scratch
13. Mark Smolinski: Detect Epidemics Before They Start
14. Charles Ferguson: Beware of New, Easy-to-Make Nukes
15. Robert Dalrymple: Get Ready for Extreme Weather

Among the challenges facing the next president, few are more complex—scientifically, politically, and economically—than the unsustainable global demands on fresh water supplies. Sources are drying up in the US and worldwide, raising the specters of hunger, disease, and international conflict. No one has a clearer view of these issues than Peter Gleick, president and cofounder of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland, California-based environmental think tank. So what will the new president need to understand about water? Here are eight slides from Gleick's hypothetical PowerPoint presentation.

The US mismanages water at all levels. For instance, states compete for resources.
Proposal: Establish a non-partisan national water commission to recommend policy changes.

Drought costs $6-8 billion a year. Rivers are over-allocated. Reservoir levels are falling.
Proposal: Promote water conservation to reduce pressure on limited supplies.

Domestic water supplies and systems are vulnerable to multiple security threats.
Proposal: Improve monitoring. Hold water-security workshops at the US War Colleges, State Department, CIA, and DHS.

Water has profound implications for international security as well.
Proposal: Empower the US State Department to address global water-related disputes.

Nearly 1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water...
Proposal: Fund clean-water, sanitation, and hygiene projects in the developing world.

...leading to 2.5 million deaths annually from preventable illnesses and malnutrition.
Proposal: Take a leadership role in eliminating waterborne diseases.

Climate change will intensify flooding, storms, drought, and disease.
Proposal: Factor the effect of climate change on water supplies into all new infrastructure projects.

Taking water seriously is a no-brainer.
Proposal: Put water at the center of your administration's strategic agenda.

Peter Gleick is President of the Pacific Institute.


==================================================================


Leaked Pentagon report warns climate change may bring famine, war: report

LONDON (AFP) Feb 22, 2004
A secret report prepared by the Pentagon warns that climate change may lead to global catastrophe costing millions of lives and is a far greater threat than terrorism, The Observer said on Sunday.

The report was ordered by an influential US Pentagon advisor but was covered up by " US defense chiefs" for four months, until it was "obtained" by the British weekly.

The leak promises to draw angry attention to US environmental and military policies, following Washington 's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and President George W. Bush's skepticism about global warning -- a stance that has stunned scientists worldwide.

The Pentagon report, commissioned by Andrew Marshall, predicts that "abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies," The Observer reported.

The report, quoted in the paper, concluded: "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life.... Once again, warfare would define human life."

Its authors -- Peter Schwartz, a CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of Global Business Network based in California -- said climate change should be considered "immediately" as a top political and military issue.

It "should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern", they were quoted as saying.

Some examples given of probable scenarios in the dramatic report include:

-- Britain will have winters similar to those in current-day Siberia as European temperatures drop off radically by 2020.

-- by 2007 violent storms will make large parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable and lead to a breach in the acqua duct system in California that supplies all water to densely populated southern California

-- Europe and the United States become "virtual fortresses" trying to keep out millions of migrants whose homelands have been wiped out by rising sea levels or made un-farmable by drought.

-- "catastrophic" shortages of portable water and energy will lead to widespread war by 2020.

Randall, one of the authors, called his findings "depressing stuff" and warned that it might even be too late to prevent future disasters.

"We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years," he told the paper.

Experts familiar with the report told the newspaper that the threat to global stability "vastly eclipses that of terrorism".

Taking environmental pollution and climate change into account in political and military strategy is a new, complicated and necessary challenge for leaders, Randall said.

"It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat," he said.

Coming from the Pentagon, normally a bastion of conservative politics, the report is expected to bring environmental issues to the fore in the US presidential race.

Last week the Union of Concerned Scientists, an influential and non-partisan group that includes 20 Nobel laureates, accused the Bush administration of having deliberately distorted scientific fact to serve its policy agenda and having "misled the public".

Its 38-page report, which it said took over a year to prepare and was not time to coincide with the campaign season, details how Washington "systematically" skewed government scientific studies, suppressed others, stacked panels with political and unqualified appointees and often refused to seek independent expertise on issues.

Critics of the report quoted by the New York Times denied there was deliberate misrepresentation and called it politically motivated.

The person behind the leaked Pentagon report, Andrew Marsall, cannot be accused of the same partisan politicking.

Marsall, 82, has been an advisor for the defense department for decades, and was described by The Observer as the author of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's plans for a major transformation of the US military.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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