Fox The Coming Storm

Why water will write the 21st Century
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78590-888-0
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

Following Russia's aggressive war in Ukraine, the world is suddenly gripped by concerns over energy security. And yet, there is an even greater threat ahead - one that is much more likely to shape the events of the twenty-first century than the competition for oil or gas. The combination of an ever-increasing global population, climate change, industrialisation, urbanisation and limited natural resources means that one difficulty, above all, will shape the political, economic and security environment in the years ahead: that is water. If people and nations will fight for fossil fuels, it is nothing compared to what they will do for the most vital natural resource of all. As both a citizen who has supported water charities and worked in the NHS and a politician who has dealt with security and economic issues, Liam Fox tells the story of water and the problems it presents in a more complete way than ever before. The Coming Storm unites a range of concerns that are often written about separately but seldom together and provides a comprehensible and compelling call for urgent action.

DR LIAM FOX practised as an NHS doctor for ten years before becoming the Member of Parliament for North Somerset. A former Defence Secretary and an International Trade Secretary, he is the author of Rising Tides: Facing the Challenges of a New Era.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fox, Liam

Leseproben

Introduction

When I told friends that I intended to write a book about water the reaction generally ranged from gently quizzical to frankly sceptical. When I then said I believe that water will write the history of the twenty-first century, with profound implications for both humanity and the planet, it is fair to say eyebrows were raised.

However, as I explained to them that only 3 per cent of the world’s total water is the freshwater we need to survive and that most of it is locked away in polar ice and glaciers they began to really listen. When I pointed out that this finite resource must serve 7.8 billion people today, compared to only 1.6 billion at the beginning of the twentieth century, and that competition for it could trigger global conflicts they started to pay attention. By the time we started to discuss how global climate change could affect the distribution of water, change the pattern of global disease and influence the potential for mass migration, they began to think that it was not such a crazy idea after all.

Water, and its properties, affects everything in our natural environment and many of the things we take for granted in the world around us. For example, while the longest day in the northern hemisphere is on 21 June, the warmest summer weather and the warmest sea temperatures are in July and August. By the same token, while the shortest day of the year is 21 December, the coldest weather is in January and February, and the coldest waters do not warm up till well after the spring equinox on 21 March. If our warmest and coldest periods were purely about the amount of energy we receive from the sun we should be at our hottest by Midsummer’s Day and our coldest by Christmas. Yet, we are not. We probably never stop to think that this phenomenon is driven entirely by the physical properties of water, namely that water warms up and cools down much more slowly than land. While water has the most profound influence on human existence, we often fail to recognise its impact.

There have been three main drivers behind this project. The first is my belief that our primary, and most basic, human right must be access to clean water, not just for health but for life itself. I have spent much of my life discussing access to freedom, democracy and human rights and how we should promote and expand them. They are all important ways in which we can improve the human condition but, when it comes down to it, you can survive, however imperfectly, without them. The same cannot be said about water.

The second driver is my disgust at the way we dirty and pollute our natural environment. The trigger for this was when I first watched, with horror, pictures of the giant patches of debris, mostly plastic, floating in our oceans. Considering the life-giving nature of our great blue spaces and their ability to influence our health and well-being through currents, weather and basic foodstuffs, what we have done in recent decades is an unparalleled act of environmental vandalism, the reversal of which we should all make our business.

The third element is the sheer number of potential conflicts developing around the world which have water as a potential trigger point. All things being equal, we might be able to negotiate our way through this increasing tension between upstream and downstream nations, but the changes in global climate are making this an uphill struggle as the mismatch between population and resources becomes ever greater. If we fail to recognise the warning signs, there is a real danger that we could be sleepwalking into a nightmare.

Of course, many people have written books about water that are more subject specific, more expert and that are more substantive, but I wanted to bring a slightly different, perhaps broader, perspective to the subject, to tell the tale of water in a more complete way. This is not a book for experts as virtually everything within it is in the public domain, but I wanted to be able to join the dots in a way that doesn’t always happen. It has been a source of frustration to me, not least in political life, that we tend to look at problems in isolation, in policy silos, rather than in the integrated way in which they exist in the real world.

Unless we can tell this most crucial story in a way that is comprehensible and compelling then we are unlikely to achieve the wider consensus, beyond the scientific community and subject specialists, that is crucial for wider change.

I have always had a strong interest in natural history, history and science. As an eight-year-old, I was given a book called Discovering Science, which awakened my interest in a whole range of subjects that eventually led me to study medicine. The net result of these interests has ultimately led to my addiction to natural history and ‘how the universe works’ programmes on TV. The initial wonder of how excess dust and debris turned into our beautiful world has given way to fears about the consequences of the self-destructive behaviour of our planet’s most successful species.

As a doctor, I learned early on that the physiology of water balance and circulation is a key determinant of both good health and disease processes. Most people know that we are made of 50 to 60 per cent water and can last for only a short time without it. Few people, however, understand that, in evolutionary terms, we are more water efficient and some of our kidney structure is closer to aquatic mammals than any other anthropoids. This raises some interesting questions about the traditional savannah theory of human development. In other words, the story of water in human evolution is itself evolving!

As a minister in the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, who answered for development and aid issues in the House of Commons, I was able to see for myself how much clean water and proper sewage meant to some of the world’s most deprived populations. It was while launching such a project in Calcutta that I first met and became friendly with Mother Teresa. I still have one of the last letters that she wrote to me before she died.

As Defence Secretary, I was concerned by the potential for water shortages to cause conflict around the world. The dramatic growth of the human population desperately scrambling to ensure adequate water supplies for agriculture, industry and human consumption is well understood, if underestimated as a security issue, but the speed at which tensions over shared water can explode into outright conflict and the potential for military escalation is not yet fully appreciated. If countries are willing to use some of the most dangerous weaponry available if their arterial water supplies are disrupted or diverted (as Pakistan has hinted over the potential disruption of the Indus), how can we create the mechanisms for conflict resolution, including in international law? How do we deal with the growing power imbalance between upstream nations and their downstream neighbours?

As International Trade Secretary, I began to understand the importance of water in the global trading system and how using it inappropriately could be economically and ecologically disastrous. It comes as a big surprise to most people to discover that the biggest dairy farm in the world sits in the Saudi desert and requires around 2,000 litres (L) of water to produce 1 litre of milk or that the amount of water required for the irrigation of global cotton crops alone is equivalent to twice the total annual water footprint for the entire United Kingdom.

This book is set out in four parts. The first establishes the context for the rest of the book. It looks at how we evolved from water, how earth became the blue planet and how water is distributed. Understanding that the water cycle most of us learned about in school means that we live in a closed system where water is neither created nor destroyed, brings into sharp focus the impact that an exploding population can have on fixed supply. If it seems a bit dry at times (excuse the pun) it is key to making sense of the later sections, especially those dealing with climate change. It also lays out new findings relating to the relationship between our own journey from primates in Africa to humans today. Why are we so different to other primates, how did we come to have much greater water efficiency and what did our interactions with other species, such as the Neanderthals, mean for our later development?

In Part 2 I look at the politics of water and the potential for future conflict.

It is predicted that by 2030 around 47 per cent of the world’s population will be living in areas of high water stress and there will be growing tensions between upstream nations, who control water supplies near their source, and downstream nations, who depend on plentiful and predictable supplies.

Tibet is home to the greatest store of freshwater outside the polar regions and the rivers arising from it supply water for drinking, agriculture and industry to over 40 per cent of the world’s population. As its glaciers start to shrink due to global warming, it does not take a genius to see where conflict for the world’s most basic resource might lead. China now controls the source of all Tibet’s major rivers with an ever-expanding dam-building programme to bolster its dominance. Those who believe that the Chinese obsession with Tibet is about identity, culture or the Dalai Lama should think again – this is largely about control of...