I keep reading about these future "water wars" and can't help but wonder how much of the prediction is realistic and how much is coloured by Silicon Valley types extrapolating globally from what they see locally.
I live in northern Britain and, even at the height of summer, it's rare for a week to go by, without at least one day of heavy rainfall.
Maybe it's me who's extrapolating globally from what I'm seeing locally. But I don't get any sense at all that the world is getting drier.
Still, if the 'water wars' predictions do turn out to be true, maybe we'll have an interesting reversal of fortunes in the future, where damp, wet, soggy countries become fabulously wealthy, like the OPEC nations today --through exporting tankers full of their spare rainwater.
Let's see how the Arabs like queuing up at the pumps to fill their drinking vessels at £2/litre!
The Met Office says England has had its dryest July since 1935, and some parts of England the dryest on record [1]
Whilst we havent had wars, there have certainly been water conflicts even _within_ the UK. Consider Treweryn [2]. This was a town rich with Welsh culture and the Welsh language. It was flooded to become a reservoir to supply water to Liverpool in 1965. The decision to flood the town was made by UK Parliament, without gaining consent from Wales. The plans triggered mass opposition and protests, but they were ignored and the plan went ahead. The story of Treweryn acts as a beacon for the Welsh independence movement to this day [3]
Interestingly, the remains of the town became visible for the first time in decades a few years ago. Possibly a further sign of things getting dryer.
Just because water is nearby doesn't mean you have infrastructure to make use of it. For example the great lakes region has had droughts before that affected agriculture. This might surprise you because on a map, there is a huge body of freshwater to draw from nearby. However, to draw from that body, one needs to build pumping infrastructure sufficient to draw from it and to have this infrastructure go to where it needs to be, likely inland uphill from the great lakes requiring more pumping and reservoirs and other infrastructure. Reservoirs in particular are often dependent on having good natural conditions. It also needs to be overbuilt such to work in a drought, and therefore most of its costs will be wasted in times when its not needed. All of this costs money and political will to improve things, both of which the great lakes region is short of in recent history.
