Global update

Workers carrying water across a dried-out reservoir in Chennai. Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty

The wars of tomorrow will be fought for water

Most people assume the wars of the 21st century will be fought over rare earth metals, says Peter Frankopan in UnHerd. In fact, civilisation's most important resource is its oldest: water. And the signs are bad. A landmark report published by the UN last month concluded that we have entered a period of "global water bankruptcy", in which societies live beyond their hydrological means. Three quarters of the world's population live in countries classed as "water-insecure", 3.5 billion people experience "severe water stress" at least one month a year, and half the world's 100 biggest cities are in areas of "high water stress". Urban planners increasingly fret about "day zero": the moment the taps simply run dry.

In recent years, Cape Town, Tehran, São Paulo and Istanbul have all experienced "genuine crisis". In 2019, the nine million residents of Chennai in India had to queue for a small daily ration of water brought in by trucks. Less far-flung places – Los Angeles, New York, London – aren't immune. Last year, Environment Secretary Steve Reed warned that without a "major infrastructure overhaul" Britain could run out of clean drinking water by 2035. The reasons are obvious: the global population has doubled since 1970, over which time the world has rapidly urbanised. And a single data centre can gobble up millions of litres a day, equivalent to the needs of tens of thousands of households a year. There's also geopolitics: the Chinese have built a dam a day since 1949, utterly transforming Asia's rivers; dams in the Indus Valley and in northeast Africa are creating tension, sometimes violence, between upriver and downriver nations. Technology and better water pricing may help, but this is ultimately a problem that cannot be solved. There is nothing so foundational to civilisation as water.

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