Apr
23
Water Resources Challenges in the Next Decade and Beyond: Global Change
April 23, 2008 | Posted by admin
Gerald Sehlke
Series: Water Resources in the Next Decade
I believe that the most pressing issue is “Global Change” and its impacts on humans and the environment. Changes on earth are always a mixture of natural and anthropogenic changes. “Global Change” research focuses on the anthropogenic aspects of climate change, land use change, water resources development, and urbanization.
Arguably, much of the success associated with human survival and prosperity has been related to our ability to control and utilize water resources to our benefit. We have developed reliable water supplies that provide water in sufficient quality and quantity, when and where it is needed to support basic human needs and economic development. We have protected humans and human development (e.g., crops and infrastructure) from destructive natural phenomena, such as hurricanes and floods. We have improved basic sanitation, controlled pollutants, and developed reliable irrigation, navigation, and energy systems. Energy production and use has also been a major factor relative to human survival and prosperity. However, while extending human longevity, health, and prosperity, our activities have altered the earth’s climate, and in many areas drastically affected the way we live (e.g., urbanization), how much land and water we utilize, and the extent to which we have polluted the environment.
Global change, at its root, is driven by two major factors; first, the overall size and growth of the human population; and second, by a combination of our life styles, our economies and technology development, which drives our utilization of and impacts on natural resources and increases the wastes/pollutants we generate and discharge to the environment. Humans have been incredibly successful organisms; unlike other species, we have been able to modify our environment on the large scale, allowing us to successfully reproduce greatly and survive by adapting and expanding into virtually every niche on earth. Hence, the human population that was relatively stable at a few millions to a few hundreds of millions until 1 A.D., began expanding rapidly to approximately one billion in the early 1800s to our present population of 6.4 billion people today. That number is expected to grow to 8–12 billion people by 2050. Like all biological organisms, our mere presence impacts the earth’s environment. Unlike other organisms, humans have been able to impact the environment on the global scale.
The hydrological and biological capacity of the earth must be shared by all living creatures. In early human history, there were few humans and little human technology, so humans could be as destructive as they were capable of being and have minimal immediate impact to regional or global environments; and they caused a minimal if not an unperceivable footprint on future generations. However, as human populations expanded drastically, we migrated and established significant populations in most niches on earth and our capability to impact the local environments also expanded, allowing us to impact regional and then the global environment. In addition, our technological capacity expanded allowing us to modify the amount, quality, timing, and location of water in most of the world’s major river basins; to extract, harvest, and utilize large quantities of earth’s biomass; to produce such large quantities of pollutants and wastes as to change the very chemistry of our atmosphere, and to degrade a large percentage of the land and water resources on earth.
Historically, humans have not been gentle to the environment or our fellow inhabitants and even though modern environmental and sustainability philosophies tout that we will be better stewards in the future, our environmental record is spotty. However, even if we succeed in living in harmony with the environment to the greatest extent possible, the likely impacts of having 12 billion people on earth in the future could very well prove to be catastrophic to both our fellow earth-inhabitants and to ourselves.
The challenges for the next decade and beyond are to limit our population growth, to moderate our life styles, and to develop technologies that will provide for our human needs, yet protect and maintain the earth’s environment for all current and future inhabitants.
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