How Addressing Water Challenges Could Reshape Immigration.
As climate change accelerates, water scarcity fuels unrest, reshapes rural economies, and pushes people to migrate.
When Americans think about water, we often think about daily uses: drinking, cooking, cleaning, and swimming. But around the globe, many people understand water differently. It is a shrinking resource, a cause for conflict and violence, or a reason to lose their livelihoods and leave their homes.
As of 2016, four billion people annually face extreme water scarcity for at least one month of the year. By 2050, water demand is expected to quadruple, placing an additional one billion people in areas of high-water stress.
The scale of this problem is immense, threatening national security and economic stability. For security practitioners and the public alike, water stress and scarcity is no longer a distant environmental concern; it is a defining challenge of contemporary global stability.
