The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change

by Al Gore

  All of the large source countries for refugees are mired in violent conflicts, including Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Colombia, and Sudan. The two largest source countries for refugees are Afghanistan and Iraq. The ill-fated decision by the United States in 2002 to invade Iraq—thus prolonging the conflict in Afghanistan as well, by prematurely removing troops that had encircled Osama bin Laden—has had a cascading impact on the entire region, flooding neighboring countries with refugees.

  The three million Afghans displaced by the war in their home country have fled mostly to Pakistan (1.9 million) and Iran (one million). The 1.7 million refugees from Iraq have also gone mostly to neighboring countries. Indeed, according to the World Development Report, more than three quarters of refugees worldwide are hosted in nations neighboring their country of origin. The largest number are now living in Asia and the Pacific (2 million—most of them in South Asia), Sub-Saharan Africa (2.2 million—403,000 of them in one country, Kenya!), and the Middle East and North Africa (another 1.9 million).

  However, more than 1.6 million refugees, the vast majority of them Muslim, have found their way to Europe, further exacerbating xenophobic tensions and increasing fears of radicalization of poorly assimilated young Muslim populations living in Europe; Muslims already make up 5 percent of Europe’s population. The surge of international migrants from North Africa and South Asia into Europe has also triggered a renewal of xenophobia, even in countries previously known for their commitment to tolerance. In several European countries, the combination of economic stress and the growing numbers of immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants, has disrupted the political balance as extreme right-wing and nativist groups exploit the public’s uneasiness.

  THE FASTEST GROWING new category of refugees is climate refugees. Although they are not legally classified as refugees (because the definition in the Refugee Protocol requires that the source of their motivating fear be violence or persecution from other people), they are nevertheless routinely described as refugees because their migration is not voluntary. In the U.N.’s State of the World’s Refugees report from June 2012, U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon noted that the traditional causes of forced displacement, “conflict and human rights abuses,” are now “increasingly intertwined with and compounded by other factors,” many of them related “to the relentless advance of climate change.”

  Israel announced a major national plan last May on climate change that included a recommendation to build “sea fences” near its maritime borders on the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, linked with impassable barriers on its land borders, in order to protect against a predicted wave of climate refugees. “Climate change is already here and requires comprehensive preparations,” said Israeli environmental protection minister Gilad Erdan. “The lack of water, warming and sea level rise, even if it will occur on a different schedule, will bring migration movements from all impoverished regions to every place where it is possible to escape this,” the study noted.

  One of the two leaders of the team authoring the report, Professor Arnon Soffer of the University of Haifa’s Geography Department, added, “The migration wave is not a problem for the future. It is today, it is going on now.… It will just increase from day to day.” Noting that European navies prevent most boats with migrants from reaching Europe, he said they are forced to go elsewhere, but “in India they shoot, in Nepal they shoot, in Japan they shoot.” The team noted that climate refugees are expected from Africa, where approximately 800 lakes have dried up completely in the last decade, including the former largest lake in Africa, Lake Chad, which mobilized many climate refugees eastward into the Darfur region.

  Persistent droughts and desertification in Somalia have also contributed to the violent conflict there. Other climate refugees attempting to migrate to Israel are expected from Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Syria, and the Nile Delta in Egypt. In addition, still more internal climate refugees are expected from the Negev, from which many Bedouins have already moved to cities in the center of Israel. Soffer added, “If we want to keep Israel a Jewish state, we will have to defend ourselves from what I call ‘climate refugees,’ exactly as Europe is doing now.”

  U.S. assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell recently wrote that the impact of climate change on Africa and South Asia, including “the expected decline in food production and fresh drinking water, combined with the increased conflict sparked by resource scarcity,” is likely to produce “a surge in the number of Muslim immigrants to the European Union (EU),” doubling Europe’s Muslim population within the next twelve years, “and it will be much larger if, as we expect, the effects of climate change spur additional migration from Africa and South Asia.”

  A few years ago, I visited the southernmost extremity of the European Union, Spain’s Canary Islands, just off the coast of West Africa. I found many conversations dominated by concerns of residents about the surge of refugees attempting to migrate by boat from Africa to their most convenient point of entry into the European Union. In some years, more than 20,000 Africans have attempted the dangerous journey across to the Canaries.

  Over the next century, the global community can expect millions of climate refugees. Almost 150 million people now live in low-lying areas only one meter or less higher than the current sea level. For each additional meter of sea level rise, roughly 100 million more people will be forced to abandon the places they call home. And this number, of course, does not include refugees from desertifying dryland areas.

  The dimensions of the climate crisis are described in Chapter 6, along with the difficult but cost-effective and necessary responses. What is clear now, however, is that even with global warming in its early stages, the growth of human civilization is already pressing hard against limitations that are complicating our ability to provide the essentials of life for billions of people.

  ENDANGERED GROUNDWATER AND TOPSOIL

  For example, where topsoil and groundwater are concerned, there is a disconnect between the frenzied rate of exploitation of both these resources on the one hand, and the extremely slow rate with which either resource can be regenerated on the other. Renewable groundwater aquifers fill back up, on average, at the rate of less than one half of one percent per year. Similarly, topsoil regenerates naturally—but at the agonizingly slow rate of approximately 2.5 centimeters every 500 years.

  In just the last forty years, the overexploitation of topsoil has led to the loss of a significant amount of productivity on almost one third of the arable land on Earth. Without urgent action, the majority of the Earth’s topsoil could be severely degraded or lost before the end of this century. In China, topsoil is being lost fifty-seven times faster than this natural replacement process; in Europe seventeen times faster. According to the National Academy of Sciences, it is being lost in the United States ten times faster than it can be replenished. Ethiopia is now losing almost two billion tons of topsoil every year to rain washing the erodible soils down the steep slopes of its terrain.

  In the case of groundwater, the nearly total depletion of some important aquifers and the sharply dropping levels of others have now focused the attention of experts in many countries on the future of this resource. The doubling of the global withdrawal rate over the last half century—and the projection that withdrawals will continue to increase at an even faster pace—have many experts beginning to get very worried. In many areas, the withdrawals from aquifers now far exceed the rate of replenishment; many aquifers are now falling several meters per year.

  IT IS AS if we are willfully blind to the basic underlying reality of our relationship to the Earth’s limited resources. But this seeming blindness is reinforced by the world’s principal method of accounting for natural resources, which treats their use as income rather than withdrawals from capital. This is, in the words of economist Herman Daly, “a colossal accounting error.… At least we should put the costs and the benefits in separate accounts for comparison.”

  The
basic distinction between operating income and withdrawals from capital is crucial, whether one is accounting for a company or a nation. In the words of a classic accounting text, if this distinction is misunderstood and improperly made, it leads to “practical confusion between income and capital.” Another seminal accounting text notes that “net income of an entity for any period is the maximum amount that can be distributed to its owners during the period and still allow the entity to have the same net worth at the end of the period as at the beginning.… In other words, capital must be maintained before an entity can earn income.” This same principle holds true for nations and for the world as a whole. In recognition of this principle, the U.N. Statistical Commission in 2012 adopted a “system of environmental-economic accounts” as a step toward integrating environmental externalities. In 2007, the European Union launched its “beyond GDP” initiative, and is due to release an assessment by all member states of their “natural capital” in 2014.

  When Simon Kuznets warned in 1937 that misuse of GDP would make us vulnerable to such accounting errors and could lead to a form of willful blindness, he noted that conflicts over resources might well exacerbate the risk inherent in the admittedly flawed design of his elaborate accounting system:

  The valuable capacity of the human mind to simplify a complex situation in a compact characterization becomes dangerous when not controlled in terms of definitely stated criteria. With quantitative measurements especially, the definiteness of the result suggests, often misleadingly, a precision and simplicity in the outlines of the object measured. Measurements of national income are subject to this type of illusion … especially since they deal with matters that are the center of conflict of opposing social groups where the effectiveness of an argument is often contingent on oversimplification.

  In an example of the precise problem Kuznets was anticipating, today—all around the world—calculations about the impact of groundwater withdrawals are often at “the center of conflict of opposing social groups.” Often, officials in regions where water supplies are shared with other regions or countries—and whose farms and businesses would be disrupted by any change in water allocations—have strong incentives to minimize the seriousness of the problem—putting off for the future a problem they would rather not deal with in the near term. It’s an all too familiar challenge for anyone who works on global warming.

  In just one of many examples of this particular variety of denial, when an expert from the University of Oklahoma, Luo Yiqi, visited Inner Mongolia in northern China a few years ago to study desertification, he was astonished to see fields of rice (one of the most water-intensive crops) grown with water that authorities allowed to be pumped at grossly unsustainable rates from deep aquifers. “Apparently,” he noted dryly, “farmers did not get enough scientific guidance.”

  The regrettable decision to ignore the depreciation of natural resources, while accounting precisely for the depreciation of capital goods, may have been subtly influenced by the state of the world when this formula was created in the 1930s. We were still in the last stages of the colonial era, when limitations on supplies of natural resources seemed irrelevant; industrialized countries could simply obtain more in their colonial possessions, where the supply seemed, for all intents and purposes, limitless. Global population has tripled since the national accounts were adopted, and the dangerous illusion that Kuznets warned about is now at the heart of the world’s failure to recognize the twin dangers of unsustainable depletion of both topsoil and groundwater.

  Since the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution, these two strategic resources have both been essential for the production of food. The irrigation of crops emerged roughly 7,000 years ago and the Green Revolution of the twentieth century increased agriculture’s dependence on irrigation—particularly in China, where 80 percent of the harvest depends on irrigation, and India, where 60 percent depends on irrigation. (The U.S. depends far less on irrigation.)

  Large dams for water storage gained popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are now 45,000 large dams in the world, including on all twenty-one of the world’s longest rivers. FDR’s economic stimulus program in the 1930s resulted in large-scale dam construction by the Tennessee Valley Authority in my home region, and the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest—and of course, the majestic Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, which was the tallest in the U.S. when it was built seventy years ago.

  Prior to the Industrial Revolution and the explosion of urban populations, more than 90 percent of global freshwater was used for agriculture. In more recent decades, the competition for water between agriculture, manufacturing, and fast-growing thirsty cities has led to growing disputes over water allocation—disputes that agriculture often loses. Today, more than 70 percent of the world’s freshwater is used to grow food, even though 780 million people in the world still lack access to safe drinking water. As noted earlier, the world has made significant progress in reducing the number of people who lack access to improved water resources (though little progress has been made in preventing the contamination of freshwater sources—both surface and groundwater resources—from human and animal waste and other pollutants).

  Some deep aquifers have long been sealed from surface water. A recently tapped aquifer in the Northeastern United States, Patapsco (under the state of Maryland) has water found to be one million years old. Similarly, the Nubian Aquifer (underneath the Sahara), the Great Artesian Basin (underneath northeastern Australia), and the Alberta Basin (underneath western Canada) all also have water more than one million years old. But although these “fossil” aquifers are nonreplenishable, most scientists believe they are limited in their supply of water; the vast majority of aquifers are replenished slowly as rainwater filters down to them.

  Until recently, the amount of information about groundwater depletion rates was spotty at best, and according to one expert, the threat to the resource is a classic case of “out of sight, out of mind.” Indeed, so much water is now being withdrawn from underground aquifers that it is believed by experts to account for 20 percent of the sea level rise in recent decades (although scientists forecast that the accelerating ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica will dramatically increase sea level rise later in this century).

  The highest rates of groundwater depletion are in northwest India and northeast Pakistan, the Central Valley of California, and northeastern China. One Chinese groundwater specialist found that an aquifer in northern China with water 30,000 years old was being used unsustainably to irrigate crops in dryland areas. China has embarked upon the largest water project in history—the South–North Water Transfer Project that has been under construction for decades, intended to remedy water shortages in northern China. Asia, which has 29 percent of the world’s freshwater resources, is now using more than 50 percent of the world’s water. According to the United Nations, “In 2000, about 57% of the world’s freshwater withdrawal, and 70% of its consumption, took place in Asia, where the world’s major irrigated lands are located.”

  Africa has only 9 percent of the world’s freshwater, but is using 13 percent, and is expected by U.N. experts to have the most intensive increases in water withdrawal in the coming decades. Europe is consuming only a slightly larger percentage than its own supply. The Americas are fortunate in having more water than they use, but large regions—particularly Mexico and the Southwestern U.S.—are already experiencing severe shortages. In 2011, more than one million head of cattle were herded north from Texas to wetter, cooler pastures. Few expect them ever to return.

  According to a study by the Scripps Institute, there is a “50-50 chance” that Lake Mead—the largest man-made lake in the western hemisphere, the one formed by Hoover Dam—will run completely dry before the end of this decade. In addition, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the water table beneath three of the largest grain-producing states—Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma—has dropped more than 100 feet, forcing
many farmers to abandon irrigation. Reservoirs in the state of Georgia have also been running at dangerously low levels for several years.

  Improving the efficiency of water use is a cost-effective option for ameliorating shortages in some areas. Many aging water distribution systems leak extraordinary amounts of water. In the U.S., for example, an important urban water line bursts every two minutes on average, twenty-four hours a day. Some portions of older urban water systems were built over 160 years ago, and since then, have been—like groundwater resources—“out of sight, out of mind.” Repairing municipal water pipes is expensive, but some cities are belatedly recognizing the necessity of undertaking this task.

  According to ecologist Peter Gleick, we should view efficiency as a giant wellspring that could provide vast new quantities of needed freshwater. Unfortunately, this wellspring, like many of the aquifers now being recklessly depleted, also seems to be out of sight, out of mind. The majority of agricultural irrigation practices are still extremely wasteful. Switching to scientifically precise drip irrigation techniques is cost-effective in most agricultural operations, but many farmers have been slow to make the change. Another benefit of switching to more efficient and precise methods of irrigation is that wasteful and excessive irrigation of crops increases the salinity of soils—because the irrigation water usually contains small amounts of salt that build up with continued use.

  The recycling of water is growing in popularity. Some communities already require the use of greywater—used water that is not suitable for drinking but is safe for watering plants. The more controversial recycling proposals take sewage water and remove all of the contaminants, purify it, and put it into drinking water systems. There is still a great deal of consumer resistance to these plans, but some communities have successfully implemented the approach.