‘Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic’

During the summer months in the Oxfordshire town where I live, I go swimming in the nearby 50-metre lido. With my inelegantly slow breaststroke, from time to time I accidentally gulp some of the pool’s opulent, chlorine-clean 5.9m litres of water. Sometimes, I swim while it’s raining, when fewer people brave it, alone in my lane with the strangely comforting feeling of having water above and below me. I stand a bottle of water at the end of the lane, to drink from halfway through my swim. I normally have a shower afterwards, even if I’ve showered that morning. I live a wet, drenched, quenched existence. But, as I discovered, this won’t last. I am living on borrowed time and borrowed water.

Water stolen from nature, drained from rivers and lakes and returned polluted, allows me to live this way. It will have to stop – not through some altruistic hand-wringing desire to do better, but because even in England this amount of water will soon be unavailable. Like many parts of the world, we are now using more water than we can sustainably supply. As surface water and groundwater levels dwindle year by year, a crisis awaits. It’s simple maths. Demand is outstripping supply.

Little old England manages to encompass many global water problems – scarcity, overabstraction, pollution, underinvestment, government and regulatory failings, environmental degradation and corporate misconduct – all within the confines of one small country in the far west of Europe.

The UK’s average annual rainfall is about 1,100mm, compared with less than 300mm in Pakistan or double figures in Egypt. However, despite our winter storms, significant parts of the UK are staring down the barrel of empty water butts. Much of that four-figure rainfall average is propped up by the rainy Highlands of Scotland, Wales and northern England. In south-east England, where I live, the average annual rainfall lingers about 600 mm – comparable with Lebanon or Kenya, and drier than Sydney, Australia. This also happens to be the UK’s most populated area, with about 18 million inhabitants packed into just 19,000 sq km, including London’s 1,500 sq km. And it’s drying up, fast. Government figures show that, in England, 28% of groundwater aquifers, the layers of porous sand and rock that hold water underground, and up to 18% of rivers and reservoirs, have more water taken out than is put back in. This is clearly unsustainable.

Not a single one of England’s rivers is classified as being in good ecological health – this includes chalk streams, a delicate habitat almost entirely unique to England. However, much of the public remains oblivious to a problem that we are all, at least in part, responsible for causing. More than half of the freshwater abstracted in the UK is for household use. The average British resident happily uses 153l of water a day, through showers, toilets, dishwashers, washing machines and garden hoses. Yet climate-change projections show that dry summers in England will increase by up to 50%, with the amount of water available reduced by at least 10-15%.

Freshwater shortages, once considered a local issue, are increasingly a global risk. In every annual risk report since 2012, the World Economic Forum has included water crisis as one of the top-five risks to the global economy. Half of the global population – almost 4 billion people – live in areas with severe water scarcity for at least one month of the year, while half a billion people face severe water scarcity all year round.

There’s only ever the same, finite amount of water churning around in our water cycle. Every drop of water on Earth has been here since the beginning of time, constantly recycled. Up to 60% of the adult human body is water (even bone is a surprisingly splashy 31%). When you die and are cremated or buried, that water will be released again, to the atmosphere or the earth. We are as intimately connected to the water cycle as rivers and lakes are.

Yet, from the Yellow River in China to the Colorado River in the United States, many rivers no longer reach the sea. Often artificially straightened and dammed, water is sucked out and channelled off to supply farms, industries and households. Great lakes, from the Aral Sea in central Asia to Lake Urmia in Iran, have nearly disappeared. Groundwater aquifers, from the Ogallala and Central Valley in the US to India’s Upper Ganges and Pakistan’s Lower Indus, are being depleted faster than they can refill. The remaining freshwater is increasingly polluted with sewage and fertilisers, causing algal blooms that smother and choke ecosystems.

According to Torgny Holmgren, executive director at the Stockholm International Water Institute, “If these trends continue, we will need 50% more water in 2050 compared with 20 years ago. And, of course, that is impossible, because water is a finite resource … This will impact all of us.”

Covid brought water issues into sharper focus. “It’s not like Covid woke us up to the need for water for hygiene; we already knew that,” Gary White, CEO of Water.org, told me. “But I certainly think we hadn’t seen the lack of access to water and sanitation as a global crisis before. When somebody [being unable to] wash their hands in one country becomes the critical link to the spread of disease, then suddenly water and hygiene becomes a global risk.” In June 2021, Mami Mizutori, the UN secretary general’s special representative for disaster risk reduction, said: “Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic, and there is no vaccine to cure it.”

The good and bad news is that water crises are usually caused by human mismanagement, not climate. But, as climate breakdown bites, precipitation patterns change and climate refugees are forced to move, the timeframe to get our act together is becoming ever shorter. We are currently using up the water sources on which our very existence relies. We can continue doing that until the very last drop. Or we can decide to change our approach before it’s too late. The world isn’t running out of water – people are.