In WW2 and the decade or so after, the owners were forced to 'improve' the land or have it confiscated by WARAG. The solution was to drain it, so sheep could graze, turn flatter bits into field etc. This was a justifyiable response to the U-boat menace that tried to starve Britain out of the war. The sponge was destroyed
There is now a greater understanding that the sponge is good. There have been small projects to block drains and reflood bits, that then start to sponge again.
But greater roll out meets innevitable resistance. The hill may have a nominal landowner, but it may also have many smaller surrounding properties that have grazing rights on the hill. Now some environmentalists turn up offering to flood their grazing, on a farm that is already marginally profitable... and so we each an impasse.
Downstream are millions of people who want drinking water but don't want flooding. The solution of them paying the 'commoners' to use their grazing as sponge never comes up.
In the lowlands are small rivers that were 'canalised' in the same era. A little stream was dug 6 feet deeper and straightened. This dried the fields for grazing and cultivation. Now people want to restore these streams for both habitat and flood control reasons. Often this is simply by inaction from the people meant to maintain the canal. There is zero talk of ongoing payments to the people who lose fields through this! They are supposed to just put up with it!
I suspect this story has analogues in many other places.
I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.
In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months.
Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost.
I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.
The water supply in a town near me is permanently contaminated by PFAS after the foam that the fire department used for training ran into the well: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/investigations/how-officials...
Here in the U.S., almost all water utilities are operated by the government. We have a more than trillion dollar investment shortfall that taxpayers will have to cover: https://nawc.org/water-industry/infrastructure-investment/. It's not a problem with our government either. Both countries just have a lot of infrastructure built in the post-war era that is nearing end-of-life. And it just costs a lot more to replace that infrastructure than people think it should cost.
Our subdivision had a community-owned water/sewer system built in the early 20th century that was failing. The county government came in and tore it all out and connected everyone to the public system back in 2014. The county imposed a charge of $32,000 per house, which was added to everyone's county tax bill to be paid over 20 years (with interest). That was just the cost of hooking one subdivision up to the existing water/sewer plants. The existing public system ended less than half a mile away.
Meanwhile, consumer water rates in those areas increased by as much as 50% in the past year alone.
EDIT: The UK water regulator has the capital investment data here: https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/publication/long-term-data-series-o.... What does it say?
https://www.ft.com/content/bda390bc-8cc4-4fa4-9a90-36af08651...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/07/05/the-real-proble...
I don't see how anything you've written is relevant to the question of whether the listed behaviors are causing water supply problems.
To me the big lesson was that wolves do actually exist, and if you repeatedly claim that they are here when they are not, then nobody will believe you when they actually are here.
I know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work.
What would it look like?
I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down.
Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?
would it destroy the great lakes?
i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me
A core part of the problem is things like the farming in California that uses excessive amounts of water, which is already brought in from very distant regions.
I don't think there is a way to distribute the fresh water supply equitably if you have various regions and industries that insist on being highly inefficient and wasteful. California is certainly not the only example, there are lots of places trying to grow crops in illogical places, water supplies being polluted by industries, etc.
I see on YouTube that there are parts of Texas you can buy for peanuts because ranching doesn't work there any more. I gather that the cows eat so much of the ancient grassland away that the soil washed away and now we have flash flooding? Then I see terrible flooding in the main rivers. I wonder if it is because governments are (or were) good at big centralised water projects, but spending for thousands upon thousands of swales and check dams to be built is harder, and less sexy?
Or is it cheaper to just move the city itself to a closer source of good clean water?
We've been moving cities and municipalities since the dawn of civilization. That's just how life worked.
Yes water works continue to improve but the age old solution is simply to stop city growth at its sustainable level and start moving people to other, newer, better areas to live.
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Alternatively, you can boom bust with feast and famine economics and have tons of people die due to poor planning. That's also part of the age old deal and it's evidence is written in the many mismanaged cities across history.
Why would the midwestern states consent to that? The southwest is structurally unsustainable. If we can’t develop sufficient renewable energy to power desalination, we’ll probably have to abandon much of California.
My prediction is that if we ever have another civil war, it will be states going to war over access to water.
Good luck with that: “we mismanaged our water supply, and now we are coming for yours.” That, and the number of agreements and treaties with Canada concerning the Great Lakes.
And that’s before we figure out how to efficiently pump water over two mountain ranges.
Talk to a civil engineer about the lead times, length, flow rate, and elevation changes you'd need - nope, zero chance of any project that expensive and long-duration ever becoming operational.
Talk to a political scientist about the voters and leaders at the water intake end - nope, "over our dead bodies".
and this is why you need sane people at the top earliest
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't that mean the water is returned back to the environment? It's not made unusable, nor does it disappear permanently.
My comment then: UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
I've lived all over the USA and I remember wondering why I was stuck with a shitty shower with California-standard shower head even though water was cheap and plentiful where I lived.
This is weird to me, in the places I've lived in the US each apartment has its own hot water heater. You don't get hot water delivered, you get cold water and heat it yourself (you pay for it indirectly via the gas / electric bill.)
Water is not scarce in general, just yet. It scarce where population is exploding.
Unless the new people are used as an army to take the needed resources from others...
If the local reservoirs were not already at capacity, or had much more redundancy, these events would have been much easier to manage. Fewer people in high risk areas would in fact reduce the risks of water scarcity.
1. Corruption. I saw this first hand. For every $1M sent into Africa, a very large proportion is confiscated by tribes, gangs, militia, and the government. You can send all the excess food in the world, but there are thousands of people between production and the hungry person who is eager to violently steal it.
2. Africa's population is booming. Thanks, in part, to food aid. Half of Nigeria doesn't have access to toilets. 40% doesn't have electricity. 25% doesn't have running water. Their fertility rate is 5.2 children per woman. We are unintentionally propping up a future catastrophe.
3. Food aid has destroyed local farming and food production. Locals cannot compete with free.
4. Equitable allocation is impossible. There is no hunger score above each person's head. Even if there were, there is no supply chain anywhere in the world which can reliably and repeatedly deliver the necessary food aid to each person in the deepest African jungles. We rely on distribution hubs which are sparse, poorly run, intermittent, and subject to temperature and humidity extremes. This means food perishes fast unless it is ultra processed and packed for durability. Basically army rations. Even those expire after some time. Meaning we can't just take the Colombian bananas and send them around the world. Only certain foods work, and they need to undergo expensive and specialised processing. This entire supply chain is far more expensive than you can imagine.
I will close with my own opinion. While the world could sustain a higher population, it is clear to me that it will result in diminishing quality of life for everyone. Crowded conditions and increasing scarcity are not aspirational goals for humanity.
I'm choosing to ignore a lot of the problems with people from disparate backgrounds living together, people not actually wanting to leave where they live, people not wanting to share freely available resources, etc. Those are very hard to solve problems.
I'm only saying that over-population is not the cause of resource problems. If we can solve the other problems then a lack of resources stops being a problem, which proves population size is not the root cause.
Regarding water specifically, we now have multiple desalination projects of 1MM m^3/day, enough to support a city of 4MM people. They are expensive, but getting cheaper, and real (rich) polities in the Middle East are relying on them.
For example for Algeria: "available resources dropping from 1500 \(m^{3}\)/capita/year in 1962 to 500 \(m^{3}\)/capita/year by 2016, far below the 1000 \(m^{3}\) threshold set by the World Bank"
the main factor is a region overpopulation.