What I’ve learned from Al Gore — 4: on (drinking) water and health
It was a privilege to join the three day Climate Reality training by Al Gore in Berlin in the end of June. Today part 4 of what I learned from my personal highlight: an almost three hour long titillating, splashing presentation by Gore himself. It was not just interesting or fun. It was also worrying and scary. Luckily not all hope is lost if we step up our game.
Building on the first article of this series, I will describe the problem more in depth. In the next part of the series I will focus on solutions, and on what you can do yourself!
My previous blog post ended with the impact of climate change on the first of the three global systems affected by climate change: food. Today is about the impact on the other two, namely (drinking) water and health.
Of all the water we use globally just under 70% of water goes to agriculture. About 20% goes to industries and the energy sector. A little above 10% of our water is used domestically. Water usage increases the warmer it gets. Our crops and plants need more water, our animals and we drink more, as we use it for cooling. And so does the industry and energy sector. Agriculture, industry and the population have grown enormously in the 20th century. Our water consumption has risen six-fold as a result last century. Now, Al Gore explained, experts from the UN expect two-thirds of the world population to live in water-stressed countries by 2025.
Why do they expect more people to experience water-stress than today? Because our reserves are quickly running out. Whether it being Brazil, Iran, Argentina, Bolivia or Germany: man-made reservoirs, lakes, glaciers and forests are shrinking or used more heavily than replenished. Once these sources of (drinking) water disappear there is just no easy solution. While shrinking reservoirs, lakes and glaciers are caused by warming, forests are mostly cut down with a rate of one football field per second. One action locals took in Mitad del Mundo in Ecuador was to replant trees on May 16th 2015. More than forty thousand people planted almost 650,000 trees in one day of more than two hundred different species. This helps absorb the rain when it falls, generates clean air and increases the amount of rain in surrounding areas through evapotranspiration.
We also have too much water at times. Scientists are certain the sea level will rise with 70 to 120 centimeter before 2200, even if we meet all the goals we’ve set in the Paris Agreement. In Kolkata alone almost 14 million people risk being displaced by sea level rise in 2070. What Gore said and was both illuminating and worrying to me, is that in these calculations (of 70–120 centimeters) not all melting of our land glaciers and polar regions is taken into account because scientists are not certain how much that will contribute. Just after the training a new scientific article surfaced that describes we could see up to 6 meters of sea level rise by 2100. This means many more of the 2.4 billion people that live within a hundred kilometers of the coast are at risk, and much sooner than 2070.
The second system affected is health. For one, heat kills. As described in my previous blog post and my World Economic Forum article heat took about 70,000 lives during the August 2003 heatwave in Europe. Higher temperatures have impact on our food and water quality. Through food and water climate change impacts our health. It has consequences in many ways. More than two-thirds of waterborne disease outbreaks in the USA followed heavy rainfall events. Think of waterborne diseases like cholera, typhoid fever and hepatitis A and E.
The amount of pollen, which is terrible for people with hay fever, has been increasing from almost 8,500 pollen per cubic meter in 2000, and is projected to be at more than 21,500 pollen per cubic meter in 2040 because of higher CO2 levels.
One of the biggest problems is that air pollution kills however. Worldwide about 6.5 million people per year die because of this. In Poland, our almost-neighbor, about 50,000 people per year. It decreases life expectancy with about 5.5 years in north China. It has bad effects on the cognitive abilities of children as well as their mental health.
When pregnant women are exposed to air pollution it increases the risk for high blood pressure in their children. Mercury is dangerous for pregnant women as well, but its presence in the oceans has tripled — that is why you have to watch out with sea food when pregnant.
Climate change, with its warmer temperatures and flooding is making it easier for infectious diseases to spread. Mosquitoes that spread diseases like malaria and zika are able to expand their habitat ranges, just like ticks, fleas, tsetse flies, lice and algae. The tiger mosquito has been discovered in The Netherlands, for example.
Because of higher CO2 levels the acidity of the ocean changed from a pH of 8.2 to 8.1. This is a difference of over 25% — though your gut feeling is likely deceived because of the way the pH scale works. It bleaches coral, like in the Great Barrier Reef.
Warmer ocean water greatly impacts sea turtles as well. Temperature determines whether a sea turtle becomes male or female. Around the Great Barrier Reef, more than 99% of young green sea turtles are female.
In these first four blogposts, I think I have showed that climate change is very costly in terms of our wellbeing for ourselves and our future generations. Climate change affect us all, whether via our health, either due to pollution and our food and water intake or the infectious diseases. It puts people at risk from floods, mudslides, wildfires, droughts and more intense storms. It is causing political instability and contributes to conflict and refugees. I am convinced we cannot continue the way we do everything now: our way of life is affecting us all too much.
Must we change how we do things? I am absolutely certain. Can we change? Yes. In the next blogs I am going to describe what solutions we already have available. Will we change? I hope so. Let’s remember that all of you and me together form the ‘we’. I will. I hope you join in. If not us, then who?
