  High levels of bacteria, fluoride and cancer-causing hydroxybenzene have polluted the water in the village of Liu Kuai Zhuang, China, where Ji Shaolian, with her daughter, weeps over the death of her husband. He died of lung cancer at age 58. Villagers say that even after government crackdowns and factory closings, smaller operations continue to pollute secretly as local officials turn a blind eye.  
Natalie Behring, WPN
Developing countries with access to improved water and sanitation enjoy average annual growth rates more than 30 times countries without such access.
Two Chinese soldiers check bottled water in Harbin after the city’s 3.8 million residents lost access to drinking water for five days due to a chemical plant explosion in 2005. The initial announcement of water stoppages led to panic buying of water and food, sending prices soaring. Authorities said there was no sign that the city’s water supply had been contaminated, but the Beijing News showed pictures of dead fish washed up on the banks of the Songhua River near the city of Jilin. Chen Nan, epa, Corbis
Lago de Chapala , in the Mexican state of Jalisco, has shrunk to a quarter of its original size and has DDT levels 3,400 times higher than regulations allow. Sewage and fertilizer runoff have fed huge algae blooms, and at certain times of the year it becomes difficult for indigenous people to navigate the lake in their small fishing boats.
Anders Hansson, WPN
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It will cost up to $1 trillion in the next 30 years to clean up contaminated groundwater at some 300,000 sites in the United States.
The world’s major cities could save more than 40 percent of their annual water supplies by fixing leaks in water mains and pipes.
Foul smelling water mixed with coal had been running from Kenny Stroud’s faucet for more than a decade before clean tap water was finally provided by the city of Rawl, West Virginia, last March. For years, residents of the Appalachian coal-mining town had to rely on water trucks and bottled deliveries, a reality unknown to most citizens in the developed world. Their fight still continues in the courts against Massey Energy, a mountaintop coal-mining corporation, who they blame for pollution and illnesses disrupting their community.
Melissa Farlow
Even in prosperous cities in India like New Delhi and Mumbai, city dwellers often have water access for only a few hours a day. The public water distribution system is under so much stress that residents must rise at 3 or 4 a.m. to pump water into rooftop storage tanks. Here Vineela Bhardwaj vents her frustration to water authorities about frequent service failures. Battles over the water supply have become so common that Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, the Minister of Water Resources, sometimes describes himself as the “Minister of Water Conflicts.” Stuart Freedman
Allison Cole says the water in her well in Sheridan, Wyoming, turned into slurry after gas drilling operations began nearby. The rolling plains of the Powder River Basin have been transformed by the drilling. Forty thousand wells and hundreds of miles of roads, pipelines and power lines now cover the landscape. To access the methane, companies pump millions of gallons of salty groundwater out from deep coal seams. Area residents have said the process pollutes their surface water and groundwater.
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Joel Sartore
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Since 2000, floods, droughts and other water disasters have killed nearly half a million people and affected 1.5 billion people.
Despite population growth in the United States, total water use today is lower than it was in 1980, and per capita use has dropped 25 percent in the last 30 years.
When severe monsoons hit Bangladesh in 2004, only water pumped from wells was safe in the district of Munshiganj, about an hour from the capital of Dhaka. The worst flooding in 15 years killed 700 people and left 10 million homeless. And an estimated 76,000 became ill with symptoms of diarrhea from drinking contaminated surface water.
Dieter Telemans, Panos Pictures
Beverly Landrey’s well in Gillette, Wyoming, went dry after decades of regular use, so she has to depend on bottled water from her neighbors. Landrey and other homeowners believe the water supply disappeared because of nearby coal bed methane operations. Kevin Moloney, Aurora Photos
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Freshwater wetlands, though threatened by human activity, are vital habitat to more plant and animal species than any other terrestrial ecosystem except rainforests.
The dry season in Kenya puts animals on the move in search of water. Elephants arrive from the arid surrounding plains to the green grasses at Lake Amboseli in Amboseli National Reserve, Kenya. An elephant will never stray far from a water supply because it needs to drink about 40 gallons a day. Over the course of a year, an elephant can drink more than 15,000 gallons of water. African elephants can detect water flowing underground and when desperate will dig down to find water in a riverbed that has run dry. George Steinmetz
Nilawati Shelake balances precariously as she retrieves water from one of the 200 wells dug in the village of Sindhi Kalegoan, near Aurangabad, India. She, like many women in the developing world, is the primary water gatherer in her family. On any given day, she may make five to seven trips to her well to meet the needs of her farm and family of five.
Atul Loke
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In the developing world, when a water source is farther than half a mile away, per capita daily consumption drops from 5 gallons to approximately 1 gallon.
The Blue Planet Run Foundation has found that it can provide one person with safe drinking water for a lifetime for just $30.
India is digging more wells in a desperate search for fresh water. There were just 2 million wells in India 30 years ago; today there are 23 million. But as more water is taken from aquifers beneath villages like Dudu, Rajasthan, the country is running through its groundwater supplies faster than they can be replenished.
Ruth Fremson, The New York Times, Redux
The daily ritual of collecting water has worn a pattern into the Bandiagara escarpment of the legendary cliffside village of the Dogon Valley in Mali. Less than half of Mali’s 12 million people and only a third of its rural inhabitants have access to safe water. Dieter Telemans, Panos Pictures
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At any given time, approximately half of all people in the developing world are suffering from a waterborne disease.
Simply washing hands with soap and water can help reduce the 2 million deaths attributed to diarrhea every year by more than 40 percent.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the West Bengal area of
India have been affected by high levels of arsenic in the groundwater. Hafiza Begam warns the villagers of Chandalati, outside Calcutta, about using the tainted water for drinking and cooking. As India has had to sink its wells ever deeper in the search for water, the danger of arsenic contamination has increased. Thousands of people are suffering skin lesions caused by arseniccontaminated water.
Sucheta Das, Reuters, Corbis
When Bangladeshis were advised by UNICEF in the 1970s to dig wells rather than use dirty surface water, the results were unintentionally catastrophic. Millions of people were exposed to toxic levels of arsenic, and 40,000 developed internal and external cancers, pulmonary diseases, neurological disorders and arsenicosis, a painful combination of skin lesions. UNICEF has since tested half of the country’s wells for arsenic.
Michael Rubenstein, WPN
Abul Hassam grew up in Bangladesh learning firsthand about the need for inexpensive water filters that remove arsenic. Now, as a member of the faculty at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., he has designed a filter that uses recycled materials, including sand, charcoal, bits of brick and shards of porous iron. For his innovation, he was awarded a $1 million Grainger Challange Award, 70 percent of which he has pledged to spend on making the filters more widely available in Bangladesh. More than 30,000 filters have been distributed so far, and about 200 filtration systems are being made each week. 110 Blue Planet Run
Shahidul Alam We're All Downstream 111
Liu Tianheng looks at his X-ray at the Shenqiu County Hospital. Liu has stomach cancer and brought his X-ray along with his medical records to meet with the head of the cancer unit at the hospital, Dr. Wang Yong Zeng.
Stephen Voss
Population in Peril The cancer ward of Shenqiu County Hospital is busy on this
weekday morning. Bicycles and motorbikes are scattered around the dusty brick courtyard, and a doctor’s jacket hangs from a tree to dry. People stand in a line outside a small one-story concrete building, patiently waiting their turn for a few minutes with Dr. Wang Yong Zeng, the chief oncologist. Most carry a life’s worth of medical records with them, clutching the thick folders full of X-rays and documents tightly to their chest. Shenqiu County, in the eastern part of Henan Province, has seen occurrences of stomach, liver, esophageal and intestinal cancer rise dramatically in the past 15 years. Houses sit empty where whole families have died, villagers are bedridden with sicknesses they are too poor to have diagnosed, and many continue to drink the polluted water because there is no other option. The majority of the 150 million people who live along the Huai River Basin are farmers and depend on the river water to irrigate their crops. Unfortunately, the Huai is one of the most polluted stretches of water in the country. “Many people come here after it’s too late,” says Dr. Yong Zeng as he holds an X-ray up to the window light to examine it. Poor farmers suffer for months and even years before they go to the hospital, knowing that if they are diagnosed with cancer, they won’t be able to afford any treatment. In many villages, entire families go into debt for medical bills they will never be able to pay. China’s handling of the environment has been nothing if not consistent over the past 2,000 years. It is difficult to find a time in China’s history when anything but environmental devastation occurred in the name of
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economic and social progress. As far back as 202 B.C., the Han Dynasty dealt with the growing population by urging its people to cut down forests to make way for more farmland. More recently, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward sought to combat the Industrial Revolution of the West by forcing people throughout the country to build steel smelters. From 1958 to 1959, an estimated 10 percent of China’s forests were cut down to fuel these backyard furnaces. Over China’s long history, the lack of environmental regulation has led to the growing desertification of China’s grasslands, massive flooding that has devastated its farmlands, famine that has killed tens of millions of people and industrial pollution that has poisoned the river. “People don’t live here anymore,” explains Wang Zi Qing, pointing to a rundown house in Dong Cun Lou Village in the Henan Province. Like most houses in the village, the floor is made of dirt, and steel bars in the windows do little to block the cold wind. A faded red bed frame sits in a corner of the main room, and dusty ceramic dishes are neatly stacked in a row on a woven
Xue Huaqi is prepared for radiation treatment at Shenqiu County Hospital. Xue, 64, has lung cancer that has spread to his brain. His
records indicate the areas that will be targeted in the treatment.
Stephen Voss
mat by the door. This house, however, is empty, left behind by an entire family that died of cancer. Zi Qing lifts his shirt to reveal a thick red scar on his stomach from a recent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor. His older brother and his younger brother died of cancer within a month of each other. He has been a fisherman for most of his 60 years, but he is no longer able to make a living or even feed himself from the river. Dong Cun Lou Village is similar to many of the villages in rural Shenqiu County. Muddy dirt roads run through it, and chickens and stray dogs roam freely. None of the one-story brick houses have running water, and only the Party official in town can afford electricity. Its population of 1,500 used to rely on the Shaying River, a major tributary of the Huai that runs by the town. They fished, washed their clothes and even drank directly from the river. The fish are mostly dead now, and contact with the water can bring on itchy rashes and peeling skin.
Debris lies at the base of a pipe that releases black water from the Lianhua Gourmet Powder Company, which manufactures MSG, among other products. It was only after villagers blamed their stomach and intestinal ailments on the dumping that Lianhua provided them with clean tap water. However, the factory continues to pollute the water that runs through the village.
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Stephen Voss
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Huo Daishan grew up near the Huai River and worked as a newspaper photographer before he began hearing stories about the river pollution and cancer cases. After seeing two of his friends die from cancer, he decided to devote his life to cleaning up the river. Lianhua Gourmet Powder Company is surrounded in every direction by farmland. Daishan climbs the metal staircase to the top of the factory’s massive wastewater treatment tanks during a recent and unexpected tour of the factory, and they roar to life. The still, black water begins to swirl and foam, turning a silty brown, while an acrid odor like rotting meat fills the air. According to company executives, the treatment plant cost $430,000 to build, and it appears to sit unused except when tours are given to outspoken environmental activists. During a long lunch at the company hotel, executives toasted to each other’s health with numerous glasses of sake. They talked at length about the workings of the factory and the pollution, seemingly oblivious to the illness and death occurring downstream. This openness was clearly precipitated by their knowledge that as a state-owned business, as well as the top taxpayer and top employer in the area, they are untouchable. A mile away from the factory, steaming black water pours steadily into the river from a large metal pipe. Young children play near the banks of the river, and a noxious odor hangs in the air. While there are few stories of cancer in this village, there is a history of birth defects, infertility and skin ailments that began in the early 1990s. According to Daishan, this secret dumping site is one of many that Lianhua has, ensuring that it will be a long time before it has to answer any hard questions about what it does with its wastewater. And at the cancer ward, a man is carefully helped into a metal trailer lined with a canvas vegetable sack and attached to a motorbike. He has just finished his radiation therapy for the day, and his family presses close to him, draping blankets over his legs to make him comfortable for the long ride home. As he is slowly driven away he looks up at no one in particular, saying, “Too many diseases, too many diseases.” — Stephen Voss
Jia Jiale has lotion applied to her face by her grandmother to treat rashes that have recently appeared. She has lived in other villages and never had any health problems, but soon after she moved with her family to Sunying in Shenqiu County, she began developing itchy rashes all over her body.
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A fisherman examines his net for fish after casting it into the polluted waters of a river in Shenqiu County. After an hour’s work, he had caught only 10 small bait fish that had blisters on their bodies.
Stephen Voss
Huo Daishan carries a slight smile on his face, almost beatific at times. The smile is the same whether he’s meeting with factory owners who dump their wastewater into the river or singing an old folk song about the Huai. Daishan was a former newspaper photographer before he converted his small apartment into the headquarters for the Guardians of the Huai River, a nonprofit group he formed to clean up the river and bring attention to the situation. He has become a tireless advocate for environmental reform. “It is the mess that gives me the energy,” says Daishan. Stephen Voss
1,374 square miles of land turns to desert every year, an environmental crisis that affects 200 million people and threatens the lives of many more.
Irrigation systems synchronized with satellite weather data can save nearly 24 billion gallons a year in the United States.
The Hadramaut Valley, one of the most productive agricultural areas in Yemen, is a neighbor to one of the hottest and driest places
on Earth, the Rub’ al Khali, or Empty Quarter. Temperatures rise to 131° F in the valley, which has an area the size of the Netherlands, Belgium and France combined. As a result, it remains under persistent threat of desertification. To meet irrigation demands and hold off the desert, water is being pulled out of the ground faster than it can be replenished, by a rate of almost 400 percent.
George Steinmetz
Mohammed Ali Zein uses trucked-in water to nourish a lone Balanites Aegyptiaca tree in Yemen, making a stand against the advance of the desert. Global warming, overgrazing and poor irrigation threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, as increasingly large regions of the world become incapable of producing food. Desertification doesn’t just mean that there is more sand; it means that the land has become incapable of supporting life.
Gerd Ludwig
Drought is a farmer’s nightmare. In New South Wales, Australia, where drought has persisted for the last five years, sacrifice has become a way of life. Water restrictions limit consumption to 40 gallons per person per day, less than a quarter of normal usage levels. Sheep are sold by the herds at deflated prices by farmers who are unable to support them and desperately need money to pay off crushing debt. But most troubling is the staggering number of farmers turning to suicide — one every four days, according to the BBC. 120 Blue Planet Run
Paul Blackmore We're All Downstream 121
 Everything about the Three Gorges Dam is
huge: Engineering feats, financial costs, social consequences and environmental impacts all loom large. When completed in 2009, it will be the largest hydroelectric dam ever built, nearly five times the size of the Hoover Dam, with an electrical capacity of up to 22.5 gigawatts. It will displace more than 1 million people from their home and will cost China about $25 billion.
Edward Burtynsky
Indian dam protesters and local homeowners stand prepared to drown themselves as waters rise from monsoon rains, flooding homes on the banks of the Narmada River in 1997. The government plans to build 30 large dams and thousands of smaller ones to provide water and electricity for the booming nation. But the Save the Narmada Movement, which has campaigned against the dams for 20 years, says the government is choosing to ignore the interests of thousands of poor people whose homes will be flooded in the state of Madhya Pradesh without proper compensation.
Karen Robinson, Panos Pictures
An Issue on the Rise Woody Guthrie once sang an anthem to the Grand Coulee
dam, calling it “the greatest wonder in Uncle Sam’s fair land.” Half a century ago, great dams like the Grand Coulee and the Hoover Dam in the United States and the Aswan Dam on the Nile were symbols of a brave new world, bringing electricity to the rural poor and economic development to the world. Environmentalists praised them as a clean source of renewable power. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, called his country’s dams “the new temples of India, where I worship.” During the 20th century, 45,000 large dams were built in 140 countries. Today, virtually none of the world’s major rivers is without a dam. Many have been successes: Dams generate a fifth of the world’s electricity and irrigate a quarter of the world’s crops. Despite their contributions to humanity, many dams became mired in corruption, engineering failures, cost overruns and social conflicts even before they were finished. And, in operation, most have huge and unintended environmental consequences. Dams have flooded tens of millions of people from their land — 2 million from China’s Three Gorges Dam alone. They have inundated fertile river valleys, destroyed fisheries, dried up wetlands and caused the very floods and droughts that they were supposed to prevent. Many reservoirs are now gradually clogging with silt brought down from the hills.
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Although dams were built to capture and harness water, it turns out they also lose it — especially to evaporation. More water evaporates from the surface of Lake Nasser behind Egypt’s Aswan Dam than the people of Britain use in an entire year. A tenth of the flow of the Colorado River evaporates from the reservoir of Lake Powell. Other dams swarm with malarial mosquitoes, and in some locations rotting vegetation in reservoirs can emit as much greenhouse gas as a coalfired power station. Today the relative value of dams is subject to widespread debate around the world. Controversies range from environmental destruction to water scarcity, the effect on indigenous people, loss of biodiversity and inequality of water access between the poor and the rich. How the dam debate is resolved will affect the lives of millions of people in every corner of the globe. — fred pearce
Chinese boat trackers pull a vessel upstream along a tributary of the Yangtze River, just as their ancestors have done for thousands of years. Starting in 2010, China plans to divert water from the Yangtze and other central rivers to Beijing and the arid northern plain. Opponents fear that the project, which includes three 700-mile channels, could dry up the river in 30 years. They say the $60 billion proposed cost doesn’t take into account the environmental toll or the 500,000 people who will need to find new homes. 126 Blue Planet Run
Reuters We're All Downstream 127
The primary purpose of Iceland’s Karahnjukar Hydroelectric Project, meant to harness two of the nation’s great glacial rivers, is not water supply, but power supply. It is Iceland’s largest-ever construction project, and it will provide electricity to a new Alcoa aluminum smelter. The site has been a frequent target of environmentalists, as the area under construction is also is the second-largest unspoiled David Maisel wilderness in Europe.
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Yu Xiaogang founded the environmental group Green Watershed in 2002 as he worked to rebuild the area around Lashi Lake in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province. A dam had destroyed the local ecosystem, putting both fishermen and farmers out of business. Today, Lashi Lake is a model of sustainable development, with a community fishery, women’s schools and micro-credit loan programs. Yu, who won a Goldman Environmental Prize, is fighting plans to build a dam at Tiger Leaping Gorge on the Yangtze River. It is one of more than a dozen dams he is helping locals oppose throughout Tom Dusenbery China.
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Engineers are dwarfed by the turbines in one of the generators. When the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River is completed in 2009, the project will generate 22.5 gigawatts, making it the world’s most powerful hydroelectric station. That’s enough electricity to meet the needs of Shanghai’s 20 million people.
Reuters
Syria, Iraq and Turkey almost went to war over control of the Euphrates River during the construction of the Keban Dam in southeastern
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between New York and Washington, D.C. It will displace more than 1 million people, submerging their homes and businesses beneath 262 cubic miles of reservoir water. Worldwide, dams have displaced an estimated 40 million to 80 million people.
Turkey. It was the first of 22 dams proposed to expand agricultural production and double hydroelectic power capacity. The World Bank refused to fund the $32 billion project because of its potential impact on other countries dependent on the river.
Upon completion, the Three Gorges Dam will span one mile wide and will flood a reservoir 230 miles back upstream, roughly the distance
Roberto Caccuri, contrasto
Fritz Hoffmann
The dam at Grimsel Pass, high in the Swiss Alps, is a popular site for ecotourism. Switzerland is able to make great use of dams because of its mountainous geography and its ample supply of water. Overall, the developed world can store as many as 175,000 cubic feet of water per person, but in some nations that figure can sink as low as 7,000 cubic feet, as it does in India.
Chlaus Lotscher, Peter Arnold, Inc. We're All Downstream 131
Arundhati Roy, center, walks with Medha Patkar during a protest against the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River in India. Roy, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel “The God of Small Things,” is a leading anti-globalization activist. She has lent her support to India’s anti-dam movement, even donating her entire prize purse to Patkar’s organizations. “I suddenly realized,” Roy said, “I command the space to raise a dissenting voice, and if I don’t do it, it’s as political an act as doing it. …To stay quiet is as political an act as speaking out.”
Joerg Boethling, Peter Arnold, Inc.
Medha Patkar is the founder of the Save Narmada Movement, and she is one of the most prominent civil-rights activists in modern India. In March 2006, she began what ultimately became a 20-day hunger strike against the construction of dams on the Narmada River, a fight that resulted in an emergency hospital stay and a case with the Supreme Court. News about her hunger strike became so popular that the government could not ignore it. A commission was established to hear claims from people displaced by the rising dam waters. The team found that the families were being urged to accept cash settlements, but no long-term arrangements were being made for their well-being. The Supreme Court eventually decided that construction could continue, but careful monitoring was needed to prevent further injustices.
Joerg Boethling/Peter Arnold, Inc.
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In region after region around the globe, water — or put another way, control over
rapidly diminishing supplies of clean water — is at the heart of many of the world’s most raw geopolitical disputes, some of which have already rippled into dangerously destabilizing conflicts. Not surprisingly, among the hottest flashpoints is the Middle East, where water is at a premium and disagreements are in abundance. Virtually every political, social and military strategy undertaken by Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and other nations in the area is driven by its impact on access to water. Consider the Golan Heights, captured by Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967. Formerly southwest Syria, this rugged plateau is home to headwaters of the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee, two of Israel’s most essential sources of water. Despite Syria’s saber rattling and widespread international condemnation for its occupation of this territory, Israel refuses to retreat from the Golan Heights because it fears that Syria would divert the water supply, as had been threatened in the early 1960s. Similarly, the 2006 Lebanon-Israeli war was fought primarily in southern Lebanon, where tributaries of the Jordan River lie. Hezbollah has vowed to control the water resources for Lebanon, even if Israel has to do with less. Meanwhile, in a mirror image of these disputes, the Palestinian rejection of peace accords in the late 1990s grew in large part out of concern that these pacts ensured that Israel could determine how much water Palestinian areas receive. The Palestinians claim that Israel has capped their per capita water consumption at about 18 gallons of water per day, compared to about 92 gallons for the typical Israeli. It’s no wonder that soon after signing peace treaties with Israel, the late King Hussein of Jordan and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt pointedly noted that only a quarrel over water could bring them back to war with Israel. In large or small ways, similar brinksmanship occurs with disturbing regularity in regions already tense with enmity that has evolved over generations: In Southern Africa, the waters of the Okavango River basin are pulled in four directions by Angola, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe, with hardly a cordial word spoken; In the Indian-controlled territories of Kashmir, where headwaters of the Indus River basin reside, Pakistan has threatened to use nuclear weapons against India if any of its water supply is interrupted; An armed guide walks on a cliff above the Nile River near Amarna, Egypt. The Nile flows through 10 countries in eastern Africa, but by force of a nearly 80-year-old treaty, Egypt commands most of its waters, a source of dispute and strained relations for decades. Upstream countries, such as Ethiopia and Sudan, have proposed dams on the river to aid their own development. But these plans have been condemned by Egypt as it anticipates its population doubling over the next 50 years. 134 Blue Planet Run
Kenneth Garrett, National Geographic, Getty Images
In Sri Lanka, violent conflicts have broken out between government armies and a rebel group, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who closed a provincial sluice gate in protest over government delays in improving the nation’s water system; In Kenya, dozens were killed and thousands fled their homes when youths from the Maasai and Kikuyu tribal communities fought with machetes, spears, bows and arrows and clubs over water in the Rift Valley. The behavior is irrational, yet the motivation has an undeniable logic. Decades of poorly designed irrigation techniques, the construction of massive dams, toxic dumping, wetlands and forest destruction, industrial pollution, residential sprawl, lack of conservation and misuse have taken a dire toll on global water resources, and clean fresh water is becoming scarcer in every corner of the planet. The worst conditions are in places like Haiti, Gambia, Cambodia and Mali, where residents subsist on an average of less than 2 gallons of water per day — fewer than three large bottles of bottled water and well below the 13 gallons per day considered the amount of water needed to meet a minimum quality of life. With less and less water to go around, the idea that people would begin to fight over what’s left — and over who determines who gets what remains — is anything but outlandish. And while richer countries like the United States have been hiding water shortages with engineering sleights of hand, this strategy is now backfiring. Southeast Florida, southern California, Atlanta and parts of Texas are all likely to be dry within 20 years if their growth patterns and management of water aren’t sharply altered. In the United States, the water wars are more often waged in court. For example, after 30 years and no end to the amount of money being spent on attorney fees, three states in the southeast are still feuding over the Chattahoochee River. Rising north of Atlanta, the Chattahoochee is the sole water supply for the sprawling city’s metropolitan area as well as a source of downstream water for two neighbor states, Alabama and Florida. Providing water for Atlanta’s uncontrolled population boom — the city has grown from 2.2 million people in 1980 to 3.7 million people in 2000 — severely taxes the Chattahoochee. The city’s largest treatment plant tapped 3.8 billion gallons a year of the river’s water when it opened in 1991; now it pumps nearly 20 billion gallons annually. If, as expected, Atlanta’s population reaches 5 million by 2025, the Chattahoochee won’t be able to handle the load. But that isn’t slowing Atlanta down. Instead, the city is aggressively making plans to squeeze more water out of the Chattahoochee by building a dozen additional dams and reservoirs on the river. This, in turn, has raised the ire of Alabama and Florida, which claim that Georgia is
Kibbutz Hatzerim gained a territorial foothold in Israel’s Negev Desert and kicked off a global revolution in agriculture when it partnered with water engineer Simcha Blass in 1965 to develop and mass-produce drip irrigation.
stealing the river for itself. Farmers in southern Georgia are siding with Alabama and Florida
Netafim, the kibbutz’s irrigation business, now controls a large portion of the
against Atlanta, as their irrigation allotment falls. Depending on the outcome of the many
drip market, with $400 million in sales last year. Manager Naty Barak checks the kibbutz drip lines, which feed corn, cotton and tomato crops in an area that receives less than 8 inches of rain annually.
Alexandra Boulat
Armed members of the rebel group MEND (Movement for Emancipation of the Niger Delta) have destroyed oil facilities and forced the closure of a significant percentage of the area’s oil operations. They have turned to violence to protest the pollution of their country’s waterways and alleged degradation of the natural environment by foreign multinational corporations. On May 1, 2007 MEND caused Chevron to shut down some oil production when it reportedly attacked the company’s Oloibiri floating production, storage and offloading vessel off southern Bayelsa state. Michael Kamber
lawsuits and negotiations over water in the U.S. southeast, new residents of Atlanta may one day
more economical — and perhaps temper the water disputes — as the supply of water continues
soon turn on the tap to find it empty, southern Georgia farmlands could become permanently
to diminish and the price of water inexorably rises.
parched, or economic growth in Florida and Alabama could be significantly stunted.
Other solutions that could minimize the inevitable water wars require viewing water in a
While the global water crisis is growing ever more dangerous, there are nonetheless a few
different light — that is, as a shared resource that demands global cooperation to manage
potential winners — namely, those nations or individuals who have a surfeit of the precious
correctly. To that end, international funding agencies like the World Bank should use their
commodity or who develop new ways to produce and distribute it. With a population of only 30
financial leverage to direct that water development projects be initiated solely under regional
million and vast amounts of territory containing more than 20 percent of the world’s fresh water,
umbrellas, jointly controlled by all of the nations in the area. And water mediation groups, such as
Canada stands to become the leader of an OPEC-like cartel as water takes its place next to oil
Green Cross International, founded by former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev, should
as a depleted essential resource. To ship this water from Canada, as well as places like Russia,
be backed by a United Nations mandate to fulfill the charter of, as GCI describes it, “preventing
Greenland and the northern reaches of China, barges with massive liquid-holding bladders and
and resolving conflicts arising from environmental degradation.”
streamlined piping systems for bulk water transfers are already on the drawing boards, while new, less expensive and more efficient desalination techniques to make saltwater fresh are close to completion. All of these inventions and new ones beyond our imagination will become more and
None of this will be easy. Ultimately, conflict is less difficult than cooperation. But we really have no choice: The way we respond to the water crisis will determine whether we survive. – Jeffrey Rothfeder
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There is less potable water per capita in the Gaza Strip than almost anywhere else on Earth. Gaza inhabitants must make do with less than 22 gallons per day, while the average American or Canadian uses almost four times as much. Palestinian parents send their children to gather bottles of drinking water from the nearest source: mini-desalination plants, such as this one in Khan Yunis. The small stations treat Gaza’s groundwater, which has grown increasingly polluted due to overpumping and contamination by sewage and pesticides.
Alexandra Boulat
Holy Water In the resource-scarce Middle East, water is a constant source
of economic and political tension. In Israel and Palestinian territories the struggle over water involves not only economic and distribution issues but central political, legal and territorial claims as well. Water, essential to all parties, has emerged as a powerful bargaining chip and a politicized commodity. Since the beginning of the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, land adjoining the Lower Jordan River has been declared a “closed military zone.” Water needs of both Israelis and of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem are rising, and current extraction levels are unsustainable. Access to clean and consistent sources of water is imperative to meet the present needs and future demands of both parties. Palestinians claim the Israeli policy of restricted water allocation has exacerbated health and nutrition problems and has adversely affected agricultural output and domestic, commercial and industrial development. The continuation of current extraction rates poses hydrological and ecological challenges for Israel and Palestinian territories. Current water use in Israel and in Israeli settlements inside the West Bank, coupled with the increasing Palestinian population, exceeds the replenishment rate. As a shared resource, water could actually provide the impetus for cooperation toward renewed peace negotiations. Because Israeli and Palestinian water needs are so interdependent, joint water management and cooperation have great potential to serve as a stepping-stone to bring both societies together. — Maher Bitar , The Foundation for Middle East Peace
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The security fence around the West Bank has isolated many Palestinian villages from the wells they rely on for drinking and irrigation water. Israel controls 90 percent of the freshwater supply in the region, including the Jordan River and the large groundwater aquifer under the West Bank. Israel recognized Palestinians’ right to West Bank water in the 1995 Oslo Accords, but Palestinians say their use is limited to insufficient amounts or is altogether prohibited. Dieter Telemans, Panos Pictures
For hundreds of years rural communities have been collecting rainwater where it falls: in the fields, in open tanks and in open wells. Now rainwater harvesting is commonplace in water-stressed cities as well. In Jerusalem, water tanks take their place among rooftop antennae. For many residents, these tanks are the only water source during the summer months when public service is frequently interrupted by shortages. Dieter Telemans, Panos Pictures
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By 2025, two thirds of the world’s people are likely to be living in areas of acute water stress.
By 2025, two thirds of the world’s people are likely to be living in areas of acute water stress.
A Palestinian bedouin complains about the sewage flowing into a stream running through the West Bank region of Salfeet from the settlement of Ariel. The herder claims the wells feeding this valley of olive trees have been contaminated and that the stream is no longer fit for his goats.
Alexandra Boulat
Giving 3-year-old Ibrahim a bath in Mawasi, Gaza Strip, is not a simple task for his mother, Naime Derbas. Piped water can be cut off for days due to electricity shortages throughout the Gaza Strip. Tap water is also highly saline, a result of seawater intrusion caused by the overpumping of its coastal aquifer. Here, Ibrahim’s bath is a mix of tap and potable water. Alexandra Boulat
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