PEAK WATER!

The single most important of all resources is water...and the world is running out. We not only use our surface water...ponds, lakes, streams and rivers... but we tap our renewable and non-renewable resources as well. And with population growth at 200,000 a day we have an ever increasing demand for water. A demand that we are unable to satisfy indefinitely.

Perhaps the best example of our situation is Saudi Arabia. After the Oil embargo of the 1980s... not the only one...but a critical one) Saudi Arabia decided to grow their own wheat. After all, they realized that if they cut off oil to the world...the world might cut off wheat to them. So they began a program of growing wheat at home. The source of this water was a complex problem. The Arabian Penninsula does not have a ready supply of surface water, so they had to drill deep below the desert floor for a Fossil Aquifer...a non-renewable water resource from below. Whereas most aquifers are naturally replenished by infiltration of water from precipitation, fossil aquifers get very little, if any recharge.

The extraction of water from such non-replenishing groundwater reserves (known as low safe-yield reserves) at a withdrawal rate that exceeds the natural recharge rate (which is very low or zero for a fossil aquifer) causes the water table to drop, forming a depression in the water levels around the well.

Setting aside the impact of this process to the the whole-Earth system, the Saudis began to irrigate their farms with fossil water and have been growing wheat now for decades...but that is about to end because they have emptied their fossil aquifers...and their 7million tons of wheat will no longer be grown at home.

Instead they have leased land in depressed African regions...and will use those lands to produce food for their nation by using the land and water of Ethiopia and Sudan. Problem solved...not in the least. The water is now free from its entrapment...and no longer available for controlled use by that population.

Pakistan, India and China all have water issues... as does the United States (lesser, but still..) which impact the ability to grow food for the world's reserves, let alone clean water to drink. Water is the key...and we need to wake up to this fact and act now.

One organization helping to raise the issues is Earth Policy Institute (http://www.earth-policy.org/).