Some 1 billion people in Asia could be
without water by 2050, according to new
research.
A group of researchers at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology says
there is a "high risk of severe water
stress" across large patches of Asia, home
to a big chunk of the world's population.
Reuters
A man fetches water from a partially
dried-up reservoir in Taizhou, Zhejiang
province, China. (File photo).
The primary driver of this water stress
will not necessarily be climate change,
according to the study published Wednesday
in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS One.
"We find that water needs related to
socioeconomic changes, which are currently
small, are likely to increase considerably
in the future, often overshadowing the
effect of climate change on levels of water
stress," the researchers wrote in their
study.
Without mitigating the effects of
industrialization and population growth, an
additional 1 billion people across Asia
could face critical shortages of water by
2050, the study said.
The team focused on densely populated
river basin regions in China, India and
Southeast Asia. The region they examined is,
in whole, home to roughly half of the
world's population, two of the world's
largest (and still growing) economies, and
several smaller nations at various levels of
development and population growth.
Different needs will drive stresses in
different regions, according to the study.
Industrial demand for water will likely
dominate in China, with lesser needs in
India and Vietnam. India, on the other hand
will see household use rise, as its
population grows.
"We simply cannot ignore the fact that
growth in population and the economies can
play just as or more important a role in
risk" as climate change, said study
co-author C. Adam Schlosser.
That does not mean climate change does
not matter, he added. In some cases, climate
change will magnify the effects of growth,
while in others, it may have less of an
effect.
So what will this water stress look like?
It will not be an entirely new type of
event, Schlosser said. "The events are going
to be similar to what we are seeing today,"
he said, only they will be more intense,
more frequent and will have more severe
effects on people.
That includes such things as deep,
multiyear droughts, in the vein of what's
been occurring in California and the
southwestern U.S; deliberate overdrawing of
surface water supplies, such as the Aral
Sea; or overdrawing groundwater, which in
some areas has already caused land to sink.
The team relied on previous data sets and
models, such as the Integrated Global System
Modeling framework, a data analysis tool
developed by MIT researchers for studying
human activity and the climate system; the
MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis
model for economic projection; and data sets
detailing water use in different regions in
Asia, among others.
They clustered the simulations into three
groups — one looking only at the effects of
climate change, another at the effects of
growth and a third combining the two.
Combined, the team ran hundreds of possible
scenarios.
Schlosser cautioned that future
projections are always uncertain, and the
model the team developed is asking what
would happen if growth and climate change
continue their current course unabated.
He added that the research concluded that
"there is a 1 in 3 chance, that if we do
nothing, China and India will be in an
unsustainable water condition."
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