Global water crisis leaves half of world food production at risk in next 25 years

Landmark review says urgent action needed to conserve resources and save ecosystems that supply fresh water

More than half the world’s food production will be at risk of failure within the next 25 years as a rapidly accelerating water crisis grips the planet, unless urgent action is taken to conserve water resources and end the destruction of the ecosystems on which our fresh water depends, experts have warned in a landmark review.

Half the world’s population already faces water scarcity, and that number is set to rise as the climate crisis worsens, according to a report from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water published on Thursday.

Demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by 40% by the end of the decade, because the world’s water systems are being put under “unprecedented stress”, the report found.

The commission found that governments and experts have vastly underestimated the amount of water needed for people to have decent lives. While 50 to 100 litres a day are required for each person’s health and hygiene, in fact people require about 4,000 litres a day in order to have adequate nutrition and a dignified life. For most regions, that volume cannot be achieved locally, so people are dependent on trade – in food, clothing and consumer goods – to meet their needs.

Some countries benefit more than others from “green water”, which is soil moisture that is necessary for food production, as opposed to “blue water” from rivers and lakes. The report found that water moves around the world in “atmospheric rivers” which transport moisture from one region to another.

About half the world’s rainfall over land comes from healthy vegetation in ecosystems that transpires water back into the atmosphere and generates clouds that then move downwind. China and Russia are the main beneficiaries of these “atmospheric river” systems, while India and Brazil are the major exporters, as their landmass supports the flow of green water to other regions. Between 40% and 60% of the source of fresh water rainfall is generated from neighbouring land use.

“The Chinese economy depends on sustainable forest management in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Baltic region,” said Prof Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the co-chairs of the commission. “You can make the same case for Brazil supplying fresh water to Argentina. This interconnectedness just shows that we have to place fresh water in the global economy as a global common good.”

Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the president of Singapore and a co-chair of the commission, said countries must start cooperating on the management of water resources before it was too late.

“We have to think radically about how we are going to preserve the sources of fresh water, how we are going to use it far more efficiently, and how we are going to be able to have access to fresh water available to every community, including the vulnerable – in other words, how we preserve equity [between rich and poor],” Shanmugaratnam said.

Global fresh water demand will outstrip supply by 40% by 2030, say experts

The Global Commission on the Economics of Water was set up by the Netherlands in 2022, drawing on the work of dozens of leading scientists and economists, to form a comprehensive view of the state of global hydrological systems and how they are managed. Its 194-page report is the biggest global study to examine all aspects of the water crisis and suggest remedies for policymakers.

The findings were surprisingly stark, said Rockström. “Water is victim number one of the [climate crisis], the environmental changes we see now aggregating at the global level, putting the entire stability of earth’s systems at risk,” he told the Guardian. “[The climate crisis] manifests itself first and foremost in droughts and floods. When you think of heatwaves and fires, the really hard impacts are via moisture – in the case of fires, [global heating] first dries out landscapes so that they burn.”

Every 1C increase in global temperatures adds another 7% of moisture to the atmosphere, which has the effect of “powering up” the hydrological cycle far more than would happen under normal variations. The destruction of nature is also further fuelling the crisis, because cutting down forests and draining wetlands disrupts the hydrological cycle that depends on transpiration from trees and the storage of water in soils.

Harmful subsidies are also distorting the world’s water systems, and must be addressed as a priority, the experts found. More than $700bn (£540bn) of subsidies each year go to agriculture, and a high proportion of these are misdirected, encouraging farmers to use more water than they need for irrigation or in wasteful practices. Industry also benefits – about 80% of the wastewater used by industries around the world is not recycled.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, also a co-chair of the commission, said countries must redirect the subsidies, axing harmful ones while ensuring poor people were not disadvantaged. “We must have a basket of policy tools working together if we are to get the three Es – efficiency, equity and environmental sustainability and justice. Therefore we have to couple the pricing of water with appropriate subsidies,” she said.

At present, subsidies mainly benefit those who are better off, Okonjo-Iweala added. “Industry is getting a lot of the subsidy, and richer people. So what we need are better targeted subsidies. We need to identify the poor people who really need this,” she said.

The water crisis has an outsized impact on women, one of the commission’s co-chairs said. Photograph: Anjum Naveed/AP

Developing countries must also be given access to the finance they need to overhaul their water systems, provide safe water and sanitation, and halt the destruction of the natural environment, the report found.

Mariana Mazzucato, professor of economics at University College London, and a co-chair of the commission, said loans made by public sector banks to developing countries should be made conditional on water reforms. “These could be improving water conservation and the efficiency of water use, or direct investment for water-intensive industries,” she said. “[We must ensure] profits are reinvested in productive activity such as research and development around water issues.”

Water problems also had an outsized impact on women and girls, Mazzucato added. “One of our commissioners is Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the mayor of Freetown in Sierra Leone. She says most of the rapes and abuse of women actually happen when they’re going to fetch water,” Mazzucato said. “Child mortality, gender parity, the water collection burden, the food security burden – they’re all connected.”

Five main takeaways from the report

The world has a water crisis

More than 2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and 3.6 billion people – 44% of the population – lack access to safe sanitation. Every day, 1,000 children die from lack of access to safe water. Demand for fresh water is expected to outstrip its supply by 40% by the end of this decade. This crisis is worsening – without action, by 2050 water problems will shave about 8% off global GDP, with poor countries facing a 15% loss. Over half of the world’s food production comes from areas experiencing unstable trends in water availability.

There is no coordinated global effort to address this crisis

Despite the interconnectedness of global water systems there are no global governance structures for water. The UN has held only one water conference in the past 50 years, and only last month appointed a special envoy for water.

Climate breakdown is intensifying water scarcity

The impacts of the climate crisis are felt first on the world’s hydrological systems, and in some regions those systems are facing severe disruption or even collapse. Drought in the Amazon, floods across Europe and Asia, and glacier melt in mountains, which causes both flooding and droughts downstream, are all examples of the impacts of extreme weather that are likely to get worse in the near future. People’s overuse of water is also worsening the climate crisis – for instance, by draining carbon-rich peatlands and wetlands that then release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Water is artificially cheap for some and too expensive for others

Subsidies to agriculture around the world often have unintended consequences for water, providing perverse incentives for farmers to over-irrigate their crops or use water wastefully. Industries also have their water use subsidised, or their pollution ignored, in many countries. Meanwhile, poor people in developing countries frequently pay a high price for water, or can only access dirty sources. Realistic pricing for water that removes harmful subsidies but protects the poor must be a priority for governments.

Water is a common good

All of human life depends on water, but it is not recognised for the indispensable resource it is. The authors of the report urge a rethink of how water is regarded – not as an endlessly renewable resource, but as a global common good, with a global water pact by governments to ensure they protect water sources and create a “circular economy” for water in which it is reused and pollution cleaned up. Developing nations must be given access to finance to help them end the destruction of natural ecosystems that are a key part of the hydrological cycle.

Source: The Guardian

IMF retains Philippines growth outlook for 2024, 2025

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has retained its growth prospects for the Philippines for this year and next amid challenging private consumption expansion in the country.

Based on the World Economic Outlook (WEO) released yesterday, the Washington-based multilateral lender kept its gross domestic product (GDP) assumption for the Philippines at 5.8 percent.

This was the same forecast the IMF gave the Philippines during the 2024 IMF Article IV consultation earlier this month.

While this is an improvement from last year’s 5.5 percent expansion, it falls below the six to seven percent growth assumption set by the Cabinet-level Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC).

The IMF said private consumption is going to grow slightly with less momentum. The sector’s growth during the first semester was lower than expected due to more expensive food prices.

Private consumption rose by 4.6 percent in the second quarter, slower than the 5.5 percent growth in the same period last year.

IMF’s growth forecast for the Philippines remains one of the highest in the region, next to Vietnam’s 6.1 percent.

This year, the Philippines is expected to grow faster than Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and even China.

Likewise, the IMF retained its 6.1-percent GDP assumption for 2025, also way below the 6.5 to 7.5-percent target of the economic team.

For inflation, the IMF also did not change its inflation forecast for the Philippines, which would ease to 3.3 percent this year and further to three percent in 2025.

The latest data showed that the September inflation eased to an over four-year low of 1.9 percent, even falling below the expectation of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.

The sharp reduction was primarily due to slower increases in the prices of food and non-alcoholic beverages, as well as transport and housing water, electricity, gas and other fuels.

In its report, the IMF noted that the global battle against inflation has essentially been won, even though price pressures persist in some countries.

However, the IMF also warned that downside risks to inflation are rising, specifically with the escalation in regional conflicts, monetary policy remaining tight for too long, growth slowdown in China and continued protectionist policies of some countries.

World Economic Outlook 2024

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Source: Philstar

Shrinking Family Sizes May Change Our Experience with Aging

Throughout the world, the number of relatives that people have may dramatically shrink by 2095, which could change care for children and aging people

For many families, extended relatives are a core part of caregiving. Grandparents, aunts and uncles can help parents look after young children. In turn, siblings and cousins may help care for aging parents. But the availability of such support—which many cultures have depended on for millennia—is quickly dwindling: a new study predicts extended families around the world will keep getting smaller as people live longer and have fewer children.

Using international demographic data, researchers recently projected the structure of families in every country around the world. They estimated that, globally, a woman who is 65 years old in 2095 will have only 25 living relatives. That represents a nearly two-fifths reduction from an estimated total of 41 relatives in 1950—and a nearly 42 percent reduction from an estimated total of about 43 relatives in 2023, according to the researchers. These estimates suggest that more people, especially in lower-income countries, will face a steadily increasing burden of caring for older people and children as intergenerational support disappears. The findings, which also note a pressing need for more formal care systems or institutions, were published in December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Projections of Human Kinship for All Countries,” by Diego Alburez-Gutierrez et al., in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 120, No. 52; December 19, 2023

Understanding changing family structures is an urgent matter in many countries that lack effective social security or other institutional support systems, says Sha Jiang, a demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. Instead societies often have to rely on families to support the most vulnerable people in their population, such as older people. “So this raises an important issue,” Jiang says. “Will there be enough family members to take care of those [older people]? Or do we put too much burden at the family level?”

Researchers can analyze long-term data trends to answer these questions. Demographers look particularly at a phenomenon called the demographic transition: a shift away from high birth and death rates. Many analyses show this is currently causing the world’s population to skew older. But how this change specifically affects extended families and their composition has received less attention, says the new study’s lead author Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, a social scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany.

In their analysis, Alburez-Gutierrez and his colleagues made three major predictions about family structures, also called kinship networks. First, extended family size will likely decrease over time. Second, the composition of families will narrow: Alburez-Gutierrez explains that people will have fewer close-aged relatives in their own generation, such as siblings and cousins, and more ancestors, such as grandparents and great-grandparents. Third, age gaps between generations will grow as people increasingly have children later in life.

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Projections of Human Kinship for All Countries,” by Diego Alburez-Gutierrez et al., in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 120, No. 52; December 19, 2023

Forecasting patterns like this on a global scale “wouldn’t have been possible five years ago,” says Ashton Verdery, a Pennsylvania State University sociologist and demographer, who was not involved in the study. Many past demographic studies have focused on the nuclear family (defined as two parents and their children) because most readily available data measure changes within individual households. Methods that quantify changes in the number of cousins, aunts, uncles, niblings (a term for nieces and nephews) and other extended family greatly advanced in the past decade. “It’s a fantastic application of newly developed methods,” Verdery says.

The study foreshadows potentially drastic problems for health care. The findings suggest extended families may shrink very quickly in countries that are just beginning to see lower birth and death rates, such as those in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Most of these countries currently don’t have systems in place to care for a growing aging population and will likely struggle with the rapid change, Alburez-Gutierrez says. Much more of the medical, financial and emotional burden may fall on a single person instead of being spread out over multiple family members. This would put additional stress on those who are lower-income and stretched for time.

Some countries that already have low birth and death rates are facing these issues today. In China familial-based care is still considered the norm, Verdery says. But as the country undergoes mass aging, and the availability of caregivers dwindles there, people are often “sandwiched” between taking care of their kids, as well as their own parents and grandparents. Some face increasing financial stress as they pay for older adults’ care, in addition to supporting their own children. Others, notably many women, often drop out of the labor force to invest more time in caring for their family, Verdery says. Smaller extended families also mean some members may become increasingly isolated socially and could struggle with loneliness.

Alburez-Gutierrez notes that this new analysis does not include adoptive families and LGBTQ+ families. “People can make a family in many other ways,” he says. But current data and modeling tools are limited in their ability to quantify these family networks, as well as other sources of support, such as friends or other community members.

Strategies that address an aging population also may be useful when it comes to supporting smaller families, Alburez-Gutierrez adds. These might include extending health care coverage for aging adults, restructuring pension systems and investing in affordable child care infrastructure. Initiatives in some countries are also building more multigenerational housing to make it easier for older adults to live with their children, Verdery says. Other countries have found creative ways of using existing community structures to foster social connectedness. France, for example, launched a program a few years ago where postal workers can make check-ins on older residents as they deliver mail along their routes. Community support organizations can also help adults navigate difficult logistical, financial and emotional challenges of long-term care.

Families are very relevant when it comes to understanding population health, especially outside the Global North, Alburez-Gutierrez says. Societies have been built around the expectation that supportive family networks will always exist, he says, “but that is going to change in the near future.”

Source: Scientific American