The water wars are coming. This finite resource will define the century.
By Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Worcester College, Oxford.
It is no coincidence that the world’s first cities were built where water was abundant. From the Nile and the Yangtze to the Thames, reliable access to freshwater allowed settlements to grow into cities. Water not only mattered for drinking, but for hygiene, waste removal, agriculture and transport. Rivers were arteries of commerce as much as sources of life: where water flowed, cities prospered; where it failed, they declined. Anyone who saw the Nile, wrote Herodotus 2,500 years ago, needed only the most “basic powers of observation” to realise that Egypt was “the gift of the river”.
Today, we are already in the midst of a deep and deepening crisis of water availability. Though more than 70% of the world’s surface is covered by the stuff, almost all of it is seawater. In fact, on average, only around one in every 10,000 drops is accessible freshwater that humans can easily use. Demand for it has surged as global populations have grown, diets have changed and cities have expanded into arid regions from Riyadh to Mexico City.
