Global water crisis leaves half of world food production at risk in next 25

theguardian.com

13 points·zhengiszen··4 comments

> The commission found that governments and experts have vastly underestimated the amount of water needed for people to have decent lives. While 50 to 100 litres a day are required for each person’s health and hygiene, in fact people require about 4,000 litres a day in order to have adequate nutrition and a dignified life.

This formulation grants an amount of wiggle room that makes the whole exercise pointless. Experts were previously wrong because they used a different definition of what "decent" and "dignified" mean? The resulting difference in water demand from upgrading a "dignified life" is a 40x-80x increase! If you can simply pick an arbitrary definition of what's good enough and then declare a crisis on the back of the new definition, there will never not be a crisis because declaring crises is how the NGO sector gins up funding and attention.

I would love if these reports described known mitigations and projected given adoption of those mitigations.

The collapse of the AMOC this century will spike this to a guaranteed total-failure rate of up to 60%, with another 20-30% of agriculture being “significantly impacted”.

The most-likely due date for this collapse is around the late 2040s to the mid-2050s.

So what happens when 60+% of all agriculture fails due to chaotic weather and changing rainfall patterns? Yeah… let’s use “it ain’t going to be pretty” to define a commensurate collapse of human populations world-wide due to starvation and food conflicts.

You can talk about water in exclusively economic terms, like this article. But to compare technical solutions you need to rely on much more boring operations research and that’s not going to even make readable news.

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