Lately our attention has settled on the current financial crisis and impending global recession.
Regretfully, little has been mentioned regarding the present water crisis that has been accumulating very real casualties and creating a potentially destabilizing conflict across the globe-even in the U.S. where states compete for resources.
Water is the ultimate renewable resource, but the demand for clean water has nearly quadrupled in the last 50 years mostly resulting from overpopulation and human mismanagement. The water crisis is directly responsible for many of the problems facing the world today including poverty, food shortage and disease. However, the solution could lie in a combination of free trade, desalinization and ultraviolet disinfection.
The lack of clean water can be blamed for causing an estimated 1.8 million deaths a year from related diseases. The victims are primarily children in underdeveloped regions, but women suffer as well. Women are tasked to take care of the sick or walk for miles each day in search of water, and many young women are taken out of school and denied an education in order to fulfill these responsibilities. This exacerbates the problem by providing no opportunity to escape the endless cycle of poverty and disease.
Conflict will brew as competition over natural resources like rivers and lakes increases. Disputes have already erupted over who gets what in the case of a shortage among casinos and residents. In Los Angeles, the diminishing water supply isn’t capable of sustaining the city’s extraordinary population growth due to immigration, which alone accounts for two-thirds of U.S. population growth. Texas is at risk due to drought and overpopulation as well. El Paso and San Antonio could run out of water by 2018.
Trade could be a possible solution for distributing clean water to regions where it is needed most, but it is an unpopular idea. Canada, one of the few regions where clean fresh water is plentiful, has recently considered the idea of trading water as a commodity, but public outrage promptly buried the proposal. Trading water as a commodity over the open market needs to gain acceptance in order to alleviate the current crisis.
Desalinization, the process of turning salt water into fresh water, seems the most promising and viable solution. The process, is expensive, but recent technological improvements in wind power and chlorine-tolerant membranes should lower costs. Ultraviolet disinfection provides a major advantage by eliminating the need for storing hazardous chemicals because it is a physical treatment process, not chemical.
We need to invest resources into underdeveloped countries that lack the infrastructure to raise sanitation levels. Poverty might be impossible to destroy, but we should try our best to use our resources to alleviate the problems in both our country and around the world.
Jesse Fornear is a senior economics and public policy double major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
