Block’s Indicator of Sustainable Growth

By Ray Block

 Climate deniers aside, who see sinister things at the University of East Anglia in the belief of climate data manipulation should go to a corner, and let the rest of us worry about what is bleedingly obvious. Not only is the climate getting warmer, the seas rising, but freshwater is getting more scarce.

The Wall Street Journal’s environmental capital blog (December 3) reports on “Boiling Point :What to do about looming water shortages?” It quotes a recent McKinsey report, that if the world doesn’t change the way it uses water, there will be a major water shortfall by 2030.

 Maude Barlow in her 2007 book Blue Covenant puts up three scenarios:

 ü     Scenario 1 is the growing shortage of fresh water, particularly in the water-stressed regions where two billion live, the polluting, diverting and depleting the Earth’s finite water resources is at a “dangerous and steadily increasing rate.”

ü      Scenario 2 is that more and more people are living without access to clean water. Apart from the poor health outcomes, the growing inequality is a fertile symbol for extreme religious and tribal warfare.

ü      Scenario 3 is that a “powerful corporate water cartel has emerged to seize control of every aspect of water for its own profit.” 

 I suspect that the answer is a combination of all three scenarios, but Maude Barlow is overplaying her response to scenario 3.

 The distress of acute water shortages is illustrated in East Africa, with a disastrous drought in 2009, the worst since 2000, and possibly since 1991. The Economist (September 24 2009) pointed out “famine stalks the land.” A NASA image showed the severity of the drought impacting Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, with northwest Kenya hit the hardest.

 39 years of weather data in the horn of Africa suggests that rain usually comes in two months of the year- April and May, with the other months dry, as evaporation exceeds precipitation. Compounding this weather trend, the occurrence of June winds, strongly linked to the La Nina climatic pattern, causes over 95 per cent yield losses in the staple corn crop, creating famine conditions.

 The drought cycle is getting shorter and shorter, once every nine or ten years, now every two or three years.  November 2009 completed the worsening outlook with floods in East Africa.

 The Mongabay news wire reports a link between a warming Indian Ocean and reduced rainfall in eastern and southern Africa. The combination of global warming and rising sea temperatures augurs badly for Africa’s most prone famine regions.