Over at Circle of Blue WaterNews, we’re reporting today on another ingredient to consider in the context of the China-Tibet conflict. Keith Schneider and C.T. Pope write that the Tibetan Plateau’s vast reserves of glacial freshwater, which supply Asia’s most populous regions, are both at risk and are emerging as an issue in the increasingly tense political and cultural strife between China and Tibet.

“At least 500 million people in Asia and 250 million people in China are at risk from declining glacial flows on the Tibetan Plateau,” Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, told me last week. “This is one of the great concerns — a staggering number of people will be affected in the near future. There aren’t too many researchers who have looked at this water situation and its far-reaching impacts.”

As we’ve heard many times, the UN estimates that two-thirds of the world’s population will live in areas of water stress within the next 20 years. By the numbers, much of that population is in buy Good Charlottle albumsAsia.

With more than a quarter of its land classified as desert, China has long sought Tibet’s water resources. Yet the IPCC and others warn that the Himalayan glaciers are receding faster than anywhere in the world and could vanish within three decades.

Said Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., “Nearly two billion people are in some way dependent on water originating on the Tibetan Plateau. By definition, that makes it high politics and critically important in a politically strategic sense.”

Hear the full interview with Dr. Dabelko on Huffington Post, as well as excerpts from the latest Journal of International Affairs, which illuminates water’s role in transboundary cooperation and conflict resolution.

On the Tibetan Plateau, where a whim of nature created the highest points on Earth, many of the world’s major rivers are born. Each day their flows bring life to more than a billion people downstream in Asia, the planet’s most populous region.

As we watch the headlines in an age of shifting water supplies, we may see a future filled with conflict and war over water resources, flows and quality.

Prayer flags and khatags, Tibetan ceremonial silk scarves, fly over the wide Yarlung Tsangpo River in central Tibet’s U-Tsang region. It is the highest major river in the world. Photo: Alison Domzalski

For example, we report today at Circle of Blue’s WaterNews the water-strategic importance of the Tibetan Plateau. It doesn’t take much to imagine the stress and potential for conflict downstream, particularly with China’s propensity for hydrological engineering.

However, flip the perspective 180 degrees and we may have seeds for some of the greatest collaborations and cooperative opportunities in history. This according to an essay by Karin Bencala and Dr. Geoffrey Dabelko published Tuesday in the Journal of International Affairs.

In the Middle East, for example, “Water and sanitation investments are pitched as providing peace dividends,” according to the essay, Water Wars: Obscuring Opportunities. Dabelko directs the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Environmental Change and Security Program; Bencala is program assistant.

True, the planet’s water challenges are great, the situation grim. As Circle of Blue reported last year, drought and poor water management are spurring immigration to the United States from Mexican agrarian communities. Similarly, Inner Mongolian herders face desertification and relocation, and as glaciers retreat, Peruvian pastoralists are forced to move to the city with few urban survival skills. The health statistics are even more numbing: nearly 2 million children die each year from water-related diseases.

Write Bencala and Dabelko:

“Scholars from a variety of disciplines would likely argue the world is entering a level of water stress it has never previously experienced, driven by population growth, increased consumption of goods and resources and climate change. But it is less the absolute scarcity of water and more the rate of change in water availability that should raise concerns about future transboundary water conflict. Water stress alone is unlikely to lead to an international conflict, as all conflicts have multiple origins. Instead, most disputes occur when a unilateral action is taken, such as building a dam or diverting water, and when there is not sufficient institutional support or flexibility for conflict resolution or mitigation. Abrupt climate change or the sudden creation of new countries without developed patterns of water relations could also similarly occur at a rapid rate to which institutions cannot adapt.”

…

“While increased scarcity could lead to conflict, this scarcity also provides opportunities to shape a cooperative future. If addressed early on, issues of water scarcity and water use can bring parties together to jointly manage resources for purposes as diverse as water quality and hydroelectricity.”

In parallel, Bencala and Dabelko point out, water supplies and meteorological patterns can be indicators for potential conflict, and offer opportunities to generate proactive peacemaking.

According to analysis conducted in 2005 by Marc Levy, Charles Vorosmarty and Nils Petter Gleditsch: “…at the global scale, there is a highly significant relationship between rainfall deviations and the likelihood of outbreak of a high-intensity internal war. When rainfall is significantly below normal, the likelihood of conflict outbreak is significantly elevated.”

Dr. Vorosmarty and I co-presented the session on water at the Aspen Environment Forum in March. During our session, he noted with irony that as we face these great challenges, we are in many cases allowing our global water monitoring capabilities to decline. This becomes particularly notable as comprehensive monitoring and research could offer indicators — a kind of early warning system — for proactive response to potential hot spots, and turn them into peacemaking opportunities.

It’s precisely water’s unpredictablity — combined with the speed of political and environmental change, and the prevalence of bombastic commentary — that encourage quick judgments and poor investments, explain Bencala and Dabelko.

“Growing water scarcity and climate change-derived unpredictability may motivate countries to fight over water. Yet the world community would be wise to resist the dramatic headlines of water wars. Conditions are dire, but this disproportionate focus on states fighting over water gets in the way of understanding the complexities of conflict over water. It also obscures the positive opportunities presented by cooperation over water. Academic inquiries, policies and program designs that ignore these differentiations misdiagnose causes of conflicts, skew risk assessments and prescribe inappropriate means to address the problems.”

Is there hope? Bencala and Dabelko propose that we take proactive, collaborative approaches that avoid the pitfalls of bad policy and the 24-7 news cycle, which so often ignore long-term, slow-to-develop solutions.

“To move in a positive direction, politicians, advocates and the media need to stop predicting water wars and instead begin to call for water cooperation. International policy will follow, affecting how money is spent on the ground. As (U.N. Secretary General) Ban Ki-moon counseled at (the World Economic Forum in) Davos, “We need to adapt to this reality just as we do to climate change. There is still enough water for all of us, but only so long as we keep it clean, use it wisely, and share it fairly.”

That’s the rub. Politicians, advocates and the media — and most of us — are driven by crises, not slow fuses. China and Tibet may be in the hot seat, and most don’t predict an easy resolution to tension and strife anytime soon. Yet water management decisions on the Tibetan Plateau will affect billions of people for generations. China and Tibet are are not alone: any number of regions, from Israel to Mexico to the United States to Peru to Sub-Saharan Africa, are struggling with water scarcity. In each case, perhaps those dark clouds can bring a gentle rain and nurture the seeds of peace.

ASPEN - Are we in an endgame struggle for survival or do we face the greatest opportunities in the history of civilization?

Both.

Granted, the messages remain grim, perhaps even darker than I had expected here under the blue skies at the Aspen Environment Forum. But of all the gatherings I’ve attended this year, I’ve never felt such a tipping point of camaraderie and conviction that unify business, environmentalists, investors and the public.

Perhaps it’s just the crisp air and the informal, collegial atmosphere nurtured by the Aspen Institute’s tradition of convening diverse groups to tackle complicated, timely issues. Maybe it’s the powerful imagery we’ve seen presented by National Geographic photographers such as Jim Richardson who gave us an appreciation for soil, Paul Nicklen who took us to the melting poles, Jim Balog who shared the majesty of ice and Nick Nichols who tortures himself to make the most captivating wildlife pictures in the most remote parts of the world.

But unlike some conferences, there isn’t an air of back-room negotiations or tag-teams of special interests working the coffee bar. Surely, some participants and speakers wear their convictions and contentions on their sleeves, and some are resolute skeptics or doomsayers. But as Amy Coen told me last night, “This just feels different.” She’s president of Population Action International and is here to speak on the human footprint and climate issues related to population. “We all need to learn to listen better and this is a good place to do that.”

Just before the forum, organizers asked me to be one of six speakers to help open the forum with a “big idea.” But how could I give these big thinkers an even bigger idea?

I turned to the biggest thinkers I could find.

First, I went to our 7-year-old daughter for inspiration. Just before I left home to come to Aspen, we listened to Jack and the Beanstalk together. It’s all about magic beans. But in water, climate and energy we know there are no magic beans, no matter how hard we try to find them. Solving these issues requires commitment, innovation and mass collaboration.

Second, I found Pulitzer-winning biologist E.O. Wilson at breakfast Thursday morning and he enthusiastically described his latest book, a venture into fact-inspired fiction that’s a present day version of Orwell’s Animal Farm. “Anthill,” which he just completed and sent to his agent, is a story about an ant colony’s struggle for survival in the expansive world of a picnic area. Story is the realm in which we can explore new worlds and shape powerful drama, he said.

“We’ve done the science,” Professor Wilson added. “The human mind is based on scenarios, so now it’s time to tell the stories.”

Throughout the evolution of human culture - and Professor Wilson knows a lot about evolution - we’ve shared our stories, our histories. So that’s the other part of my Big Idea: We need to tell better stories.

Better stories, no magic beans. Simple, yes? As old as history and fairy tales.

The “Big Idea.”

The forum wraps up today with a panoply of sessions, ranging from “Living with Coal,” which is sure to generate vigorous discussion, to “Journalism and Coverage of the Environment.”

The forum certainly has sparked discussion and debate that will carry on long after we go back to our offices, whether in the headquarters of a major corporation wrestling with the “now what” of sustainability or a research camp upon the Greenland ice. Unfortunately, no one will leave the forum with a magic bean to fix the world’s woes. But we leave inspired by our colleagues and their passions to creating a better world. We all agree that at every tick of the clock there are the expansive, personal stories of drama, tragedy, hope and inspiration unfolding in our own backyards and around the world.

How we tell those stories - and how we respond - will define whether we’re writing our prologue or final chapter.

I’ll post a wrap up of our water session shortly - meanwhile, watch video selections from the forum here

Related links

Water: Aspen Environment Forum - Circle of Blue
PlumTV - interview
PlumTV - Aspen Environment Forum conversation
Grist - Big Ideas at the Aspen Environment Forum

On March 22 we observed another World Water Day, and this week we marked the fifth anniversary of the military conflict in Iraq. Water and war are bound together by more than the coincidence of time — they are related by blood. Drought and Deluge are the weary parents of Desperation, Destruction and Despair.

Five years ago Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, put his heart forward on the podium as he addressed the media at the World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan. Impassioned, he pleaded for the world to awaken from apathetic stupor and respond to one of the world’s greatest unfolding tragedies. The simple lack of safe drinking water, he said, condemned thousands of children to die each day — a needless, inexcusable tragedy. The drama of this appeal, coming from a man whose iron nation had rusted from within, spoke to the classic theme of the rise and fall of man. Only this man was determined to get up again and carry future generations on his shoulders.

I had a chance to interview Mr. Gorbachev at the forum, and I felt optimistic that his message was at last going to get some attention. The press corps seemed tuned in to a good story. But as he talked to me, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that the video monitors in the halls were being tuned away from forum coverage and into CNN. The Iraq war had begun, and the flames of conflict drew all eyes away from the ticking time bomb of water. Mr. Gorbachev was whisked away to do commentary on the war, his attempt to save the world’s resources evaporating behind him.

I cannot know what was on his mind just then. I wonder, if like me, he suffered a deep pang of irony. We drop our gaze from water when violence burns us. And yet, if we are to conquer war, we must court water.

Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on the Millennium Development Goals, was a guest on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show this past Thursday. She asked him about water, which, she said, many have called the gold of the 21st century.

“If you look at where the violence in the world is right now” Professor Sachs said, “in the worst cases — places like Darfur, Sudan, like Somalia, like the Middle East, like Pakistan, Afganistan — these are all water-stressed regions. We call them Islamic fundamentalist regions. We should call them water-stressed regions. We should understand that these are places that are hungry, where livelihoods have been put in grave danger, where old, traditional ways of living such as pastoralist communities are under life and death threat. And we then blame religion or we blame militarism or we blame terrorism without understanding those are symptoms of a much deeper challenge, and water is at the center of it…And we’re already, in my opinion, seeing the resulting violence that can come from it. We send the army in response — we solve nothing. We spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. We need to send engineers, not the army. And it’s until we understand that the fundamental problems need to be addressed — not the symptoms — we’re going to continue to get it wrong, waste lives, waste our money and not find solutions.”

I think the engineers should have company. As Peter Gleick, founder of the Pacific Institute and a central advisor to our own journalism project, Circle of Blue, asserts, we have the technology. What we’re missing is the political will.

Political will comes from engaged citizens, and engaged citizens require information, motivation and inspiration. That’s where journalists come in, and we have real heroes when it comes to covering the world’s conflicts. The Iraq war, for example, has become the most dangerous war for reporters in history, according to Andrew Marshall, former Iraq Bureau Chief at Reuters.

“Covering the news in hostile places is a worthwhile thing,” Marshall says. “It can bring about change, it can inform the world. And it is worth us risking our lives.”

Marshall’s commentary introduces the new multimedia presentation, “Bearing Witness,” produced by Reuters and MediaStorm, the Emmy-winning online production company in New York. In “Bearing Witness,” we see, hear and feel the intensity of the conflict and horror of war. A father clutching his young, dead son, soldiers leaping from a burning military vehicle, mothers in gut-wrenching despair for their lost families.

Words alone can’t put the war and its reverberations into perspective. But MediaStorm and Reuters have pulled together, in one package, one of the most comprehensive, iconic multimedia and photojournalism presentations about the Iraq war. Its timeline is richly illustrated with captivating imagery that creates a visceral historical context. This is the kind of coverage that has brought scrutiny to the premise and practices of modern war.

This is the kind of coverage we need to focus on water and our other great challenges. And not just on the drama of tragedy, but also on the promise of opportunity. We have to bear witness and give water the global stage that eluded Mr. Gorbachev at that ill-fated forum. We have to connect water issues to our world affairs and, more crucially, our daily existence. If I might take a turn from Mr. Marshall, I am convinced that covering water extensively and deeply is a also worthwhile thing. It can bring about change. And it is worth us investing our lives.

I believe it can be done, starting with the courage and talent of journalists, and extending into the arts, sciences, education, culture and all the ways we as a society speak amongst ourselves. We can look farther and deeper into the roots of violence and show how very often water lies there. We can make the subtleties and complexities of a fundamental subject compelling, personal and comprehensible. We have the technology. We as communicators must summon the will.

The world water crisis is tapping on the world’s front door. Drought and Deluge’s children are already at home in so many places. Let us remember Mr. Gorbachev’s plea, and turn our conflicts into collaborations. And let us turn our attention to the young citizens of the world. Their future is ours to write.

See Related:
Water and Conflict Chronology

Last week at Circle of Blue we launched WaterNews, a daily update from the front lines of the world’s water crisis. This coverage is expanding to include additional comprehensive journalistic and scientific reports of this complicated, yet crucial story that’s touching everyone.

Let me indulge in some timely self promotion for my colleagues at Circle of Blue, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars China Environment Forum and the Pacific Institute. The Circle of Blue team, which I direct, publishes today its compelling multimedia report, “Reign of Sand,” about the water crisis in Inner Mongolia, China. The multimedia package comes as China’s spring dust storms approach. Scientists say the severity and frequency of the dust storms reflect worsening conditions, including: dryer climate, stronger winds, water shortages, over-grazing, population growth, and a clash between nomadic herders and the government over range and farmland management.

We’ve said before in this space that it will take powerful narratives and an informed public to respond to these unfolding crises. Take a look and be sure to click to suggest your story ideas, where we should send a team of reporters and why.

By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue Senior Editor
(posted from Modeshift.org)

The era of global climate change has produced such rainy and warm conditions in northern Michigan that a winter’s worth of snow and ice melted completely here over the last two days. Meanwhile it’s dry, desperately so, in several huge and significant regions of the country.

The striking contrasts are putting strains on the culture and economy in ways we’re only starting to understand. Yesterday I stood in a driving January rain talking to Jim MacInnes, the chief executive of Crystal Mountain, our local ski resort. He was interested in new economic data he’d read online. I was watching the deep gullies forming at the bottom of Buck, the resort’s steepest slope.

The signs of changing climate and an economy that has been slow to respond, are everywhere.

Judging by the thickening white sashes of salt lining Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the largest reservoirs in the United States, the drought on the Colorado Plateau is not only deepening, it is pushing water supply conditions for roughly 25 million people from serious toward dire. The moment of reckoning over water supplies, anticipated since the 1960s, appears to have arrived.

Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and southern California form the fastest growing region in the country. All are served by the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and hundreds of smaller communities. Lake Powell, north of the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, which lies just south, are less than half full and dropping steadily. Both are 105 feet lower than their full pools, and dropping about eight to ten feet a year.

The ring around the reservoirs is beginning to be seen as a noose around the neck of the region. Not surprisingly it’s become politically palatable to consider changes in water management and use once deemed impractical. Conservation measures were put into effect in Phoenix, and in Las Vegas the water district is paying homeowners $1 a square foot to tear up their lawns and install desert plantings.

The Colorado Plateau states and California last month finished an agreement that provides both more flexibility and certainty in who has the right to what’s left in both reservoirs, and sets triggers for declaring emergencies that dramatically cut use. The Metropolitan Water District, southern California’s major water provider, announced in November that they will buy 65 billion gallons of water annually from Central Valley farmers north of Sacramento.

Orange County is preparing to turn on a new waste treatment plant that will pump “highly treated wastewater from their new purification plant to percolation ponds in Anaheim. Eventually, the recycled water will be delivered to about 2.3 million people.” And all the desert states are more intensely eyeing the Great Lakes.

Hot Atlanta
The other region of the United States where water demand is outrunning supply is the Southeast. There’s been more rain there this week; Nevertheless, for the first time in the lives of most of the 10-county Atlanta region’s 4 million residents, turning on the tap is an invitation to consider the limits of growth. The U.S. drought map continues to show that precipitation, soil moisture, and lake and river levels are in “extreme” dry condition.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a nice piece on the region’s inability to plan and invest in water supply infrastructure. And Atlanta Water Shortage keeps a near-daily update of conditions.

Texas Too
Water authorities in the Texas Panhandle late last month said they were cutting the water supply from Lake Meredith to 11 cities, including Amarillo, Plainview, Lubbock, and Brownfield. The reason, according to the Houston Chronicle: “brutal drought conditions in two of the past three years.”

At the opening reception last week for Water Stories at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, we talked about iconic images that define and punctuate eras. Matthew Brady’s plates of the Civil War that captured the still, anonymity of death. Eddie Adams and Nick Ut’s black and white photographs from Vietnam that etched war’s horrors on our collective mind’s eye. And the first self portrait of Earth taken from the Moon. Moments that engage, involve, inform, defy, horrify, inspire.

While Atlanta suffers severe drought and the Great Lakes levels are dropping, I’m reminded of the iconic imagery produced during the Great Depression. Few are as engrossing as Dorothea Lange’s image of a migrant mother and her family. When I hear scholars speak of water refugees, I think of Florence Owens Thompson and her hardships (see below). And I think of the faces captured by today’s photojournalists, chroniclers of our time such as Brent Stirton. One of these faces of the modern water crisis is Francisca Rosas Valencia, whose tears belie the deep sorrow for her family as they leave their drought-stricken farmland near Tehuacan, Mexico.

Photograph by Brent Stirton/Getty Images for Circle of Blue
TEHUACAN, MEXICO — Francisca Rosas Valencia dabs away tears while praying for her son, Florentine, who left this drought-stricken valley to work in Los Angeles. (Read her story from Circle of Blue’s coverage in Tehuacan: Divining Destiny).

In this era of digital media, there are bound to be many iconic images from the front lines of the water crisis. Will it be the stranded polar bear looking at us with longing eyes? Or perhaps the hands of a Bangladeshi farmer, crippled by arsenic poisoning? Or the precipitous drop in a river’s flow to its delta? Or the overwhelming beauty of rainfall in the desert? These images will call to us with a duty to see. To see that so many of the world’s struggles are about water.

Migrant Mother