Examiner.com offered a list of 25 reasons why water wars are likely to arise in the near future. Between climate change, and more importantly, human disregard for water, it’s quite likely conflict will erupt. In countries such as China and India, industry pollution and overpopulation are devastating the fresh water supplies. But the U.S. is not immune either as you can see from the list below.

Consider some of these water facts from the Examiner:

• According to the U.S. government, 36 U.S. states already face water shortages or will be within the next few years.
• According to U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. interior west is driest that it has been in 500 years
• The Ogallala Aquifer, a massive underground lake stretching from South Dakota to Texas, is rapidly drying up.  The aquifer is believed to be the largest body of fresh water in the world, and right now, it is being drained at a rate of approximately 800 gallons per minute.
• An estimated 75 percent of surface water in India is now contaminated by human and agricultural waste.
• Every 8 seconds, somewhere in the world, a child dies from drinking dirty water.
• Worldwide demand for fresh water tripled during the last century, and is now doubling every 21 years.

Sadly, the Examiner’s water facts list isn’t complete. We’d like to add a few more water facts to the list:

• The Aral Sea, the world’s fourth largest lake, has nearly dried up due to cotton farming in the desert.
• In Texas this summer, the “exceptional” drought left cotton farmers with no choice but to let non-irrigated crops fail. You can see the drastic effects of the drought in the photo above by Jeff Attaway.
• In China, over 70 percent of the fresh water is polluted.

In last year’s Quadrennial Defense Review, the U.S. military sited water scarcity as a major concern. So, it’s not just environmentalists that are concerned about the declining access to fresh water. But, war is not inevitable, much of the problem is caused by corporate and governmental disregard for water as a precious resource. And we can influence companies and administrations to be better stewards of the world’s fresh water supplies.

Every day we read about drought, industrial pollution, and overpopulation taking a toll on the less than one percent of the fresh water available for human use on the planet. So, this list could be much longer. Which water facts would you add to this list? Feel free to post them in the comments below.

photo credit: Jeff Attaway Creative Commons

As we all know, the planet is covered with water. But, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem says, “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.” The fact is that less than .5 percent of the water is fresh, clean, and accessible to people. But even then, it’s not equally distributed amongst population centers.

Here in the U.S., most of us just turn on the tap and out flows lots of clean, fresh (and sometimes free) water. But it may not stay that way for long. If you’re a regular reader, you’re aware of the ongoing and devastating droughts in California, Texas and elsewhere in the country. On top of erratic weather, we’re also dumping a myriad of chemicals into our water. This has already been proven to cause mutations in animals, and is likely to effect people too.

In Alex Prud’homme new book The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century, he delves into the likelihood of armed conflict, privatization of water supplies, and how water is an essential element of everything–not just for drinking, bathing, and sanitation. In an interview in Rolling Stone, Julian Brookes asks about how, 30 years after the Clean Water Act, U.S. water is actually dirtier than it was. Alex says:

The environmental laws that were instituted in the ’70s–the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the founding of the EPA–were largely the result of water issues, and we tend to say, “Okay, we’ve dealt with that, let’s move on.” But the EPA has been under-funded and weakened even as the stresses on the system have grown and new kinds of pollutants have come on to the marketplace.

In fact, right now, the Republican-controlled House is working on passing a bill that would continue to cut EPA funding and weaken water regulations.

Read the rest of the interview at RollingStone.com.

Last year we were talking about the stubborn droughts in Texas and water problems in China; sadly, this year the climate hasn’t gotten any friendlier. In fact, Texas is still thirsty, experiencing the worst drought on record–and that goes back 116 years. The persistant drought is causing cotton shortages, which causes price increases for the raw material, and eventually to higher clothing prices at the mall.

Yesterday, a Bloomberg article said that, “About 55 percent of the Texas cotton fields were in poor or very poor condition on June 26, matching the record low in 2006, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said. More than 70 percent of the state was experiencing “exceptional” drought as of June 21, and non-irrigated crops in the Panhandle and South Plains regions have all failed, a Texas A&M research unit said.” (emphasis added)

The lack of water is resulting in Texas cotton farmers abandoning their crops in the field. As much as 50 percent of the cotton fields in one high-producing area may be left to rot, according to the same Bloomberg article.

The U.S. grows about 18 percent of cotton world-wide. And Texas is responsible for some 44 percent of that. With no rain clouds in sight, cotton production is sure to decline further. This combined with drought in China (the world’s number one producer of cotton), the price of our favorite tees, jeans, and sheets is sure to rise.

photo credit: Pro-Soil AG Solutions (Prosoil) / Flickr

Intel is using its new 3D gaming system as a way to see what people in the Rio Grande area of New Mexico might do during times of prolonged water scarcity. The game, Water Wars, was created with the help of Sandia National Labs.

Water Wars is not intended to go toe-to-toe with Call of Duty; instead Intel is asking farmers, developers, environmentalists, policy makers and others who will need to address water shortages to play the game.

The goal is to educate the users about water consumption and hopes they will all work together to create water policy that benefits everyone.

In the game, when faced with water shortages a farmer, for example, can decide to grow fewer crops, collaborate with others, buy more water, or choose to steal it. But we do wonder if people will let their true nature come out in order to see how their choices have real and lasting effects on the area’s water supply.

What’s your feeling, do you think this will help form better policy? What do you think is the best way to get people with widely varying views on the subject to work collaboratively for real solutions?

More on the game over at Treehugger.

photo credit: Intel