In my bit of the UK there is a fairly common bit of geography, which is hilly peat bog ground. This is natures sponge, it absorbed rain to reduce flooding, and then kept the rivers higher in times of drought.
In WW2 and the decade or so after, the owners were forced to 'improve' the land or have it confiscated by WARAG. The solution was to drain it, so sheep could graze, turn flatter bits into field etc. This was a justifyiable response to the U-boat menace that tried to starve Britain out of the war. The sponge was destroyed
There is now a greater understanding that the sponge is good. There have been small projects to block drains and reflood bits, that then start to sponge again.
But greater roll out meets innevitable resistance. The hill may have a nominal landowner, but it may also have many smaller surrounding properties that have grazing rights on the hill. Now some environmentalists turn up offering to flood their grazing, on a farm that is already marginally profitable... and so we each an impasse.
Downstream are millions of people who want drinking water but don't want flooding. The solution of them paying the 'commoners' to use their grazing as sponge never comes up.
In the lowlands are small rivers that were 'canalised' in the same era. A little stream was dug 6 feet deeper and straightened. This dried the fields for grazing and cultivation. Now people want to restore these streams for both habitat and flood control reasons. Often this is simply by inaction from the people meant to maintain the canal. There is zero talk of ongoing payments to the people who lose fields through this! They are supposed to just put up with it!
I suspect this story has analogues in many other places.
> Chronic overuse of groundwater, forest destruction, land degradation, and pollution have caused irreversible freshwater loss in many parts of the world
I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months.
Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost.
I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.
> I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
I'm curious. You complain about "profits," but do you know how much money private investors put into the water companies to begin with? Because the alternative to privatization was the government issuing bonds to get that money. Are these profits more or less than the interest to bondholders you'd otherwise be paying?
Here in the U.S., almost all water utilities are operated by the government. We have a more than trillion dollar investment shortfall that taxpayers will have to cover: https://nawc.org/water-industry/infrastructure-investment/. It's not a problem with our government either. Both countries just have a lot of infrastructure built in the post-war era that is nearing end-of-life. And it just costs a lot more to replace that infrastructure than people think it should cost.
Our subdivision had a community-owned water/sewer system built in the early 20th century that was failing. The county government came in and tore it all out and connected everyone to the public system back in 2014. The county imposed a charge of $32,000 per house, which was added to everyone's county tax bill to be paid over 20 years (with interest). That was just the cost of hooking one subdivision up to the existing water/sewer plants. The existing public system ended less than half a mile away.
The BBC said (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw4478wnjdpo) that in 30 years, private water and sewerage companies in England and Wales have extracted over 86 billion pounds (~USD $115 billion), while investing very little.
Meanwhile, consumer water rates in those areas increased by as much as 50% in the past year alone.
What is the number? It is a huge red flag if you see an article that cites a profits number without citing a number for capital invested. You literally cannot reach a conclusion either way without comparing the two numbers.
Are you sure that's the big lesson? That wolves don't exist?
To me the big lesson was that wolves do actually exist, and if you repeatedly claim that they are here when they are not, then nobody will believe you when they actually are here.
We have a tremendous opportunity to use our food choices to push towards a more water-abundant world. 70% of all freshwater withdrawals go to agriculture, and 80% of agricultural land on Earth is used to feed animals. Animal-based foods are ENORMOUSLY less water efficient than plant foods, accounting for equivalent nutrition. 3oz of cheese is like leaving your shower on full blast for 30 minutes. Nearly half (46%) of all water diverted from the Colorado River is used to feed cows and the food they eat. We could cut down dramatically by eating plants directly.
https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stresshttps://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milkshttps://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-...
I know there's no single answer to this. But, if we wanted to mitigate this, do we have the geoengineering ability to execute on it?
I know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work.
What would it look like?
I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down.
Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
would it destroy the great lakes?
i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me
Not an expert, but a more-than-casual-observer as someone who has lived on the water (literally and figuratively).
A core part of the problem is things like the farming in California that uses excessive amounts of water, which is already brought in from very distant regions.
I don't think there is a way to distribute the fresh water supply equitably if you have various regions and industries that insist on being highly inefficient and wasteful. California is certainly not the only example, there are lots of places trying to grow crops in illogical places, water supplies being polluted by industries, etc.
The problem isn’t just farming in the desert. The problem is all those people living in the desert in the first place. There is a reason the Spanish then the Mexicans did almost nothing to settle and develop California. It was massive water projects by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that made modern California possible.
How much has the infrastructure improved since then? I see on TV that some of California has snow and flash flooding. Are there attempts being made to capture that, or soak it into the ground? Or is it cheaper to keep using the old projects?
I see on YouTube that there are parts of Texas you can buy for peanuts because ranching doesn't work there any more. I gather that the cows eat so much of the ancient grassland away that the soil washed away and now we have flash flooding? Then I see terrible flooding in the main rivers. I wonder if it is because governments are (or were) good at big centralised water projects, but spending for thousands upon thousands of swales and check dams to be built is harder, and less sexy?
The Great Lakes states have an agreement surrounding how much water you can remove from the lakes. That would be your first regulatory hurdle.
In addition I suspect the loss associated with an aqueduct of that scale would make desalinization more efficient, which is generally cost prohibitive at current water levels.
Desalination plants with extensive water transportation pipe systems like we have for natural gas. We would need to solve the salt water dumping problem but that could just be accepting loss of natural diversity in the area around desalination plants or dumping further out in the open sea.
People don't know how to be efficient at scale. Large complex problems could in principle be understood by a few experts, but they always become political problems. (ie, people must be socially, politically, or religiously attached to the right ideas rather than strictly convinced by detailed facts) Worse, people don't know how to maintain excess. People are a gas, and expand to fill the space they're in. If we had an abundance of water, all people would do is expand their water usage until that abundance is gone.
We've been moving cities and municipalities since the dawn of civilization. That's just how life worked.
Yes water works continue to improve but the age old solution is simply to stop city growth at its sustainable level and start moving people to other, newer, better areas to live.
-------
Alternatively, you can boom bust with feast and famine economics and have tons of people die due to poor planning. That's also part of the age old deal and it's evidence is written in the many mismanaged cities across history.
> Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
Why would the midwestern states consent to that? The southwest is structurally unsustainable. If we can’t develop sufficient renewable energy to power desalination, we’ll probably have to abandon much of California.
My prediction is that if we ever have another civil war, it will be states going to war over access to water.
Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
Good luck with that: “we mismanaged our water supply, and now we are coming for yours.” That, and the number of agreements and treaties with Canada concerning the Great Lakes.
And that’s before we figure out how to efficiently pump water over two mountain ranges.
Perhaps it isn't possible because of economics. If you build an aquaduct to a somewhere sunny so that water is plentiful there, then farms, cities, parks, and so on will grow as long as the water is cheap, reaching the capacity of your infrastructure, and the causing a crisis whenever there's a droubt.
Talk to a civil engineer about the lead times, length, flow rate, and elevation changes you'd need - nope, zero chance of any project that expensive and long-duration ever becoming operational.
Talk to a political scientist about the voters and leaders at the water intake end - nope, "over our dead bodies".
Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue. Yet, economic downturn creates a vicious circle: governments avoid infra spend because of low funds, then agriculture and other economic output gets hit because of water shortage. Lower resource lower will for infra spend. Until you hit the very low: stopping the grid because day zero. At that point, both the grid and city hygiene becomes a mess anyway. Costs build up so much that most governments cannot cope up with it properly.
and this is why you need sane people at the top earliest
> Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue.
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't that mean the water is returned back to the environment? It's not made unusable, nor does it disappear permanently.
In many places water is pumped from deep underground aquifers but leaks go to surface ground waters and could quickly end-up in the Ocean so aquifers are still depleted.
We're talking about accessible fresh water. If it evaporates and then rains over the ocean then it's lost, or as the article mentions, if it becomes contaminated then it's not longer usable as fresh water
My comment then: UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
Not n Switzerland... water is practically free. they don't even bother with putting water meters on individual apartments and instead just split the bill up by all of the apartments at the end of the year. Hot water is metered though.
I've lived all over the USA and I remember wondering why I was stuck with a shitty shower with California-standard shower head even though water was cheap and plentiful where I lived.
This is weird to me, in the places I've lived in the US each apartment has its own hot water heater. You don't get hot water delivered, you get cold water and heat it yourself (you pay for it indirectly via the gas / electric bill.)
A lot of countries have city wide hot water plants, especially in Northern Europe and Asia, I think you will find them in northern Canada as well . Some places have building wide hot water, not in the USA though.
Let's concentrate on couple of countries to simplify the discussion: Iran, Egypt, Algeria. Water scarcity there is dominated by explosive population growth there in the last 70 years.
Water is not scarce in general, just yet. It scarce where population is exploding.
I think it's both. Local populations adapt to whatever the local reservoirs can sustain but as soon as an unexpected climate event occurs (such as unusually low rainfall in a given season), the water reserves can no longer sustain the population. See Cape Town (2015-2018), Chennai (2019), São Paulo (2014-2015), California (2012–2016 & 2020–2022), etc.
If the local reservoirs were not already at capacity, or had much more redundancy, these events would have been much easier to manage. Fewer people in high risk areas would in fact reduce the risks of water scarcity.
The world has more than enough water, food, and energy to sustain a much, much higher population. The issue is that people in the areas with a lot of resources don't want to share - that's more of an observation than a criticism. People don't have to share.
This is a commonly stated aphorism which betrays a deep ignorance of the issue. Namely the logistics. If we had Star Trek transporter technology we could in fact solve world hunger. We could take the excess bananas grown in Colombia and drop them outside the doors of hungry people in Nigeria. But we don't. It is very expensive and difficult to transport food and water from one place to another. The world has sent Africa $1.5T over the last 50 years, and yet the number of undernourished people has almost tripled in that time, from 100M to 282M as of 2022. Why?
1. Corruption. I saw this first hand. For every $1M sent into Africa, a very large proportion is confiscated by tribes, gangs, militia, and the government. You can send all the excess food in the world, but there are thousands of people between production and the hungry person who is eager to violently steal it.
2. Africa's population is booming. Thanks, in part, to food aid. Half of Nigeria doesn't have access to toilets. 40% doesn't have electricity. 25% doesn't have running water. Their fertility rate is 5.2 children per woman. We are unintentionally propping up a future catastrophe.
3. Food aid has destroyed local farming and food production. Locals cannot compete with free.
4. Equitable allocation is impossible. There is no hunger score above each person's head. Even if there were, there is no supply chain anywhere in the world which can reliably and repeatedly deliver the necessary food aid to each person in the deepest African jungles. We rely on distribution hubs which are sparse, poorly run, intermittent, and subject to temperature and humidity extremes. This means food perishes fast unless it is ultra processed and packed for durability. Basically army rations. Even those expire after some time. Meaning we can't just take the Colombian bananas and send them around the world. Only certain foods work, and they need to undergo expensive and specialised processing. This entire supply chain is far more expensive than you can imagine.
I will close with my own opinion. While the world could sustain a higher population, it is clear to me that it will result in diminishing quality of life for everyone. Crowded conditions and increasing scarcity are not aspirational goals for humanity.
I understand the logistics very well. I'm not suggesting we move the food and water to the people. I'm suggesting we move the people to the food and water. Cities like New York have a population density of 50k/mile^2. We can build lots more cities at that scale much closer to where resources are easily available.
I'm choosing to ignore a lot of the problems with people from disparate backgrounds living together, people not actually wanting to leave where they live, people not wanting to share freely available resources, etc. Those are very hard to solve problems.
I'm only saying that over-population is not the cause of resource problems. If we can solve the other problems then a lack of resources stops being a problem, which proves population size is not the root cause.
Water available in Nunavut, Canada is no help to Algeria's water crisis.
And the opposite, natural gas available in Algeria is no help to Nunavut energy situation.
This perspective dates to at least 1940, when the population was a fraction of the current size. The fantastic Charles C. Mann wrote an excellent book, The Wizard and the Prophet, about it.
Regarding water specifically, we now have multiple desalination projects of 1MM m^3/day, enough to support a city of 4MM people. They are expensive, but getting cheaper, and real (rich) polities in the Middle East are relying on them.
Why would you leave the question of whether it's true or not aside? If it's false, isn't it a good thing that not many people are ready to admit something false?
Based on what metric you declare my statement as false?
For example for Algeria:
"available resources dropping from 1500 \(m^{3}\)/capita/year in 1962 to 500 \(m^{3}\)/capita/year by 2016, far below the 1000 \(m^{3}\) threshold set by the World Bank"
Hate to see this downvoted. The definition of “overpopulated” shifts as technology improves our ability to produce and distribute resources, but we’re arguably approaching that threshold for current technology. As it stands, we’re only getting by because a small fraction of the world consumes at American levels.
In my bit of the UK there is a fairly common bit of geography, which is hilly peat bog ground. This is natures sponge, it absorbed rain to reduce flooding, and then kept the rivers higher in times of drought.
In WW2 and the decade or so after, the owners were forced to 'improve' the land or have it confiscated by WARAG. The solution was to drain it, so sheep could graze, turn flatter bits into field etc. This was a justifyiable response to the U-boat menace that tried to starve Britain out of the war. The sponge was destroyed
There is now a greater understanding that the sponge is good. There have been small projects to block drains and reflood bits, that then start to sponge again.
But greater roll out meets innevitable resistance. The hill may have a nominal landowner, but it may also have many smaller surrounding properties that have grazing rights on the hill. Now some environmentalists turn up offering to flood their grazing, on a farm that is already marginally profitable... and so we each an impasse.
Downstream are millions of people who want drinking water but don't want flooding. The solution of them paying the 'commoners' to use their grazing as sponge never comes up.
In the lowlands are small rivers that were 'canalised' in the same era. A little stream was dug 6 feet deeper and straightened. This dried the fields for grazing and cultivation. Now people want to restore these streams for both habitat and flood control reasons. Often this is simply by inaction from the people meant to maintain the canal. There is zero talk of ongoing payments to the people who lose fields through this! They are supposed to just put up with it!
I suspect this story has analogues in many other places.
> Chronic overuse of groundwater, forest destruction, land degradation, and pollution have caused irreversible freshwater loss in many parts of the world
I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months.
Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost.
I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.
> I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
The water supply in a town near me is permanently contaminated by PFAS after the foam that the fire department used for training ran into the well: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/investigations/how-officials...
I'm curious. You complain about "profits," but do you know how much money private investors put into the water companies to begin with? Because the alternative to privatization was the government issuing bonds to get that money. Are these profits more or less than the interest to bondholders you'd otherwise be paying?
Here in the U.S., almost all water utilities are operated by the government. We have a more than trillion dollar investment shortfall that taxpayers will have to cover: https://nawc.org/water-industry/infrastructure-investment/. It's not a problem with our government either. Both countries just have a lot of infrastructure built in the post-war era that is nearing end-of-life. And it just costs a lot more to replace that infrastructure than people think it should cost.
Our subdivision had a community-owned water/sewer system built in the early 20th century that was failing. The county government came in and tore it all out and connected everyone to the public system back in 2014. The county imposed a charge of $32,000 per house, which was added to everyone's county tax bill to be paid over 20 years (with interest). That was just the cost of hooking one subdivision up to the existing water/sewer plants. The existing public system ended less than half a mile away.
The BBC said (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw4478wnjdpo) that in 30 years, private water and sewerage companies in England and Wales have extracted over 86 billion pounds (~USD $115 billion), while investing very little.
Meanwhile, consumer water rates in those areas increased by as much as 50% in the past year alone.
What is the number? It is a huge red flag if you see an article that cites a profits number without citing a number for capital invested. You literally cannot reach a conclusion either way without comparing the two numbers.
EDIT: The UK water regulator has the capital investment data here: https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/publication/long-term-data-series-o.... What does it say?
Even the Economist and FT are underwhelmed by the performance of many of England's privatized water utilities:
https://www.ft.com/content/bda390bc-8cc4-4fa4-9a90-36af08651...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/07/05/the-real-proble...
The big lesson in The Boy Who Cried Wolf is, after all, that wolves don't exist.
I don't see how anything you've written is relevant to the question of whether the listed behaviors are causing water supply problems.
Are you sure that's the big lesson? That wolves don't exist?
To me the big lesson was that wolves do actually exist, and if you repeatedly claim that they are here when they are not, then nobody will believe you when they actually are here.
Sarcasm.
We have a tremendous opportunity to use our food choices to push towards a more water-abundant world. 70% of all freshwater withdrawals go to agriculture, and 80% of agricultural land on Earth is used to feed animals. Animal-based foods are ENORMOUSLY less water efficient than plant foods, accounting for equivalent nutrition. 3oz of cheese is like leaving your shower on full blast for 30 minutes. Nearly half (46%) of all water diverted from the Colorado River is used to feed cows and the food they eat. We could cut down dramatically by eating plants directly. https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stress https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks https://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-...
I know there's no single answer to this. But, if we wanted to mitigate this, do we have the geoengineering ability to execute on it?
I know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work.
What would it look like?
I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down.
Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
would it destroy the great lakes?
i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me
Not an expert, but a more-than-casual-observer as someone who has lived on the water (literally and figuratively).
A core part of the problem is things like the farming in California that uses excessive amounts of water, which is already brought in from very distant regions.
I don't think there is a way to distribute the fresh water supply equitably if you have various regions and industries that insist on being highly inefficient and wasteful. California is certainly not the only example, there are lots of places trying to grow crops in illogical places, water supplies being polluted by industries, etc.
The problem isn’t just farming in the desert. The problem is all those people living in the desert in the first place. There is a reason the Spanish then the Mexicans did almost nothing to settle and develop California. It was massive water projects by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that made modern California possible.
How much has the infrastructure improved since then? I see on TV that some of California has snow and flash flooding. Are there attempts being made to capture that, or soak it into the ground? Or is it cheaper to keep using the old projects?
I see on YouTube that there are parts of Texas you can buy for peanuts because ranching doesn't work there any more. I gather that the cows eat so much of the ancient grassland away that the soil washed away and now we have flash flooding? Then I see terrible flooding in the main rivers. I wonder if it is because governments are (or were) good at big centralised water projects, but spending for thousands upon thousands of swales and check dams to be built is harder, and less sexy?
I'm no fan of cities in deserts, but farming is by far the much, much, much larger problem.
The Great Lakes states have an agreement surrounding how much water you can remove from the lakes. That would be your first regulatory hurdle. In addition I suspect the loss associated with an aqueduct of that scale would make desalinization more efficient, which is generally cost prohibitive at current water levels.
We also have a treaty with Canada about the usage of water from the Great Lakes.
We Canadians have seen how much value the US administration places on treaties.
Desalination plants with extensive water transportation pipe systems like we have for natural gas. We would need to solve the salt water dumping problem but that could just be accepting loss of natural diversity in the area around desalination plants or dumping further out in the open sea.
People don't know how to be efficient at scale. Large complex problems could in principle be understood by a few experts, but they always become political problems. (ie, people must be socially, politically, or religiously attached to the right ideas rather than strictly convinced by detailed facts) Worse, people don't know how to maintain excess. People are a gas, and expand to fill the space they're in. If we had an abundance of water, all people would do is expand their water usage until that abundance is gone.
Is it cheaper to reroute a lake to a desert and build a new underground river?
Or is it cheaper to just move the city itself to a closer source of good clean water?
Unfortunate probably cheaper to reroute the lake.
On the contrary.
We've been moving cities and municipalities since the dawn of civilization. That's just how life worked.
Yes water works continue to improve but the age old solution is simply to stop city growth at its sustainable level and start moving people to other, newer, better areas to live.
-------
Alternatively, you can boom bust with feast and famine economics and have tons of people die due to poor planning. That's also part of the age old deal and it's evidence is written in the many mismanaged cities across history.
> Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
Why would the midwestern states consent to that? The southwest is structurally unsustainable. If we can’t develop sufficient renewable energy to power desalination, we’ll probably have to abandon much of California.
My prediction is that if we ever have another civil war, it will be states going to war over access to water.
Los Angeles already gets its water from 500km away. No need to exacerbate the situation.
it's hypothetical remember, its just a fantasy solution
Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
Good luck with that: “we mismanaged our water supply, and now we are coming for yours.” That, and the number of agreements and treaties with Canada concerning the Great Lakes.
And that’s before we figure out how to efficiently pump water over two mountain ranges.
Perhaps it isn't possible because of economics. If you build an aquaduct to a somewhere sunny so that water is plentiful there, then farms, cities, parks, and so on will grow as long as the water is cheap, reaching the capacity of your infrastructure, and the causing a crisis whenever there's a droubt.
> aqueduct from the great lakes to california?
Talk to a civil engineer about the lead times, length, flow rate, and elevation changes you'd need - nope, zero chance of any project that expensive and long-duration ever becoming operational.
Talk to a political scientist about the voters and leaders at the water intake end - nope, "over our dead bodies".
There are abandoned ancient cities all over India and SE Asia because the city ran out of water. Tehran is not a new phenomenon.
Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue. Yet, economic downturn creates a vicious circle: governments avoid infra spend because of low funds, then agriculture and other economic output gets hit because of water shortage. Lower resource lower will for infra spend. Until you hit the very low: stopping the grid because day zero. At that point, both the grid and city hygiene becomes a mess anyway. Costs build up so much that most governments cannot cope up with it properly.
and this is why you need sane people at the top earliest
> Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue.
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't that mean the water is returned back to the environment? It's not made unusable, nor does it disappear permanently.
Groundwater recharge from surface to an aquifer where it "rests" can take up to 1000 years.
In many places water is pumped from deep underground aquifers but leaks go to surface ground waters and could quickly end-up in the Ocean so aquifers are still depleted.
We're talking about accessible fresh water. If it evaporates and then rains over the ocean then it's lost, or as the article mentions, if it becomes contaminated then it's not longer usable as fresh water
Previous discussion 21hs ago 124 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600
My comment then: UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
https://archive.ph/XpRIS
Here is the paper on which the article is based: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11269-025-04484-0
Not n Switzerland... water is practically free. they don't even bother with putting water meters on individual apartments and instead just split the bill up by all of the apartments at the end of the year. Hot water is metered though.
I've lived all over the USA and I remember wondering why I was stuck with a shitty shower with California-standard shower head even though water was cheap and plentiful where I lived.
> Hot water is metered though
This is weird to me, in the places I've lived in the US each apartment has its own hot water heater. You don't get hot water delivered, you get cold water and heat it yourself (you pay for it indirectly via the gas / electric bill.)
A lot of countries have city wide hot water plants, especially in Northern Europe and Asia, I think you will find them in northern Canada as well . Some places have building wide hot water, not in the USA though.
In Finland even the hot water bill is split, per-apartment water meters are only now getting common in new buildings.
same in Austria. The mountains giveth
Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696347
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600
Governments are not ready to admit the fact of the Earth's overpopulation.
The good news is they don't have to. Populations of all species regulate themselves in response to availability of resources.
Water scarcity is mostly caused by factors other than overpopulation.
Let's concentrate on couple of countries to simplify the discussion: Iran, Egypt, Algeria. Water scarcity there is dominated by explosive population growth there in the last 70 years.
Water is not scarce in general, just yet. It scarce where population is exploding.
High birth rates in low-resource localities seems like a poor survival strategy.
Unless the new people are used as an army to take the needed resources from others...
I think it's both. Local populations adapt to whatever the local reservoirs can sustain but as soon as an unexpected climate event occurs (such as unusually low rainfall in a given season), the water reserves can no longer sustain the population. See Cape Town (2015-2018), Chennai (2019), São Paulo (2014-2015), California (2012–2016 & 2020–2022), etc.
If the local reservoirs were not already at capacity, or had much more redundancy, these events would have been much easier to manage. Fewer people in high risk areas would in fact reduce the risks of water scarcity.
The world has more than enough water, food, and energy to sustain a much, much higher population. The issue is that people in the areas with a lot of resources don't want to share - that's more of an observation than a criticism. People don't have to share.
This is a commonly stated aphorism which betrays a deep ignorance of the issue. Namely the logistics. If we had Star Trek transporter technology we could in fact solve world hunger. We could take the excess bananas grown in Colombia and drop them outside the doors of hungry people in Nigeria. But we don't. It is very expensive and difficult to transport food and water from one place to another. The world has sent Africa $1.5T over the last 50 years, and yet the number of undernourished people has almost tripled in that time, from 100M to 282M as of 2022. Why?
1. Corruption. I saw this first hand. For every $1M sent into Africa, a very large proportion is confiscated by tribes, gangs, militia, and the government. You can send all the excess food in the world, but there are thousands of people between production and the hungry person who is eager to violently steal it.
2. Africa's population is booming. Thanks, in part, to food aid. Half of Nigeria doesn't have access to toilets. 40% doesn't have electricity. 25% doesn't have running water. Their fertility rate is 5.2 children per woman. We are unintentionally propping up a future catastrophe.
3. Food aid has destroyed local farming and food production. Locals cannot compete with free.
4. Equitable allocation is impossible. There is no hunger score above each person's head. Even if there were, there is no supply chain anywhere in the world which can reliably and repeatedly deliver the necessary food aid to each person in the deepest African jungles. We rely on distribution hubs which are sparse, poorly run, intermittent, and subject to temperature and humidity extremes. This means food perishes fast unless it is ultra processed and packed for durability. Basically army rations. Even those expire after some time. Meaning we can't just take the Colombian bananas and send them around the world. Only certain foods work, and they need to undergo expensive and specialised processing. This entire supply chain is far more expensive than you can imagine.
I will close with my own opinion. While the world could sustain a higher population, it is clear to me that it will result in diminishing quality of life for everyone. Crowded conditions and increasing scarcity are not aspirational goals for humanity.
I understand the logistics very well. I'm not suggesting we move the food and water to the people. I'm suggesting we move the people to the food and water. Cities like New York have a population density of 50k/mile^2. We can build lots more cities at that scale much closer to where resources are easily available.
I'm choosing to ignore a lot of the problems with people from disparate backgrounds living together, people not actually wanting to leave where they live, people not wanting to share freely available resources, etc. Those are very hard to solve problems.
I'm only saying that over-population is not the cause of resource problems. If we can solve the other problems then a lack of resources stops being a problem, which proves population size is not the root cause.
Water available in Nunavut, Canada is no help to Algeria's water crisis. And the opposite, natural gas available in Algeria is no help to Nunavut energy situation.
This perspective dates to at least 1940, when the population was a fraction of the current size. The fantastic Charles C. Mann wrote an excellent book, The Wizard and the Prophet, about it.
Regarding water specifically, we now have multiple desalination projects of 1MM m^3/day, enough to support a city of 4MM people. They are expensive, but getting cheaper, and real (rich) polities in the Middle East are relying on them.
Leaving the question of whether the statement is true or not aside, I doubt many people are ready to admit it.
Why would you leave the question of whether it's true or not aside? If it's false, isn't it a good thing that not many people are ready to admit something false?
Based on what metric you declare my statement as false?
For example for Algeria: "available resources dropping from 1500 \(m^{3}\)/capita/year in 1962 to 500 \(m^{3}\)/capita/year by 2016, far below the 1000 \(m^{3}\) threshold set by the World Bank"
the main factor is a region overpopulation.
Hate to see this downvoted. The definition of “overpopulated” shifts as technology improves our ability to produce and distribute resources, but we’re arguably approaching that threshold for current technology. As it stands, we’re only getting by because a small fraction of the world consumes at American levels.