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June 3rd, 2008
As recently reported in The International Herald Tribune, southern Europe continues to face a worsening water situation. As the article notes:
“…Spurred on by global warming and poorly planned development, swaths of southeast Spain are steadily turning into desert.
This year in Murcia farmers are fighting developers over water rights. They are fighting each other over who gets to water their crops. And in a sign of their mounting desperation, they are buying and selling water like gold on a burgeoning black market.
“Water will be the environmental issue this year,” said Barbara Helferrich, spokeswoman for the European Union’s Environment Directorate. “The problem is urgent and immediate.”
“If you’re already having water shortages in spring, you know it’s going to be a really bad summer.”
Southern Spain has long been plagued by cyclical drought, but the current crisis reflects a permanent climate change brought on by global warming and it is a harbinger of a new kind of conflict, climate scientists say.
The battles of yesterday were fought over land, they warn. Those of the present center on oil. But those of the future, a future made hotter and dryer by climate change in much of the world, will focus on a much more basic resource: water.
Dozens of world leaders are meeting at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome starting Tuesday to address a global food crisis caused in part by water shortages – in Africa, Australia and here in southern Spain.
Climate change means that creeping deserts may eventually drive 135 million people off their land, the United Nations estimates. Most of them are in the developing world. But southern Europe is experiencing the problem now, its climate drying to the point that it is becoming more like Saharan Africa’s, scientists say.
…Facing a national crisis, Spain has become something of an unwitting laboratory, sponsoring a European conference on water issues this summer and announcing this year a national action plan to fight desertification. That plan includes a shift to more efficient methods of irrigation and an extensive program of desalinization plants to provide the fresh water than nature does not…”