The world’s water crisis is coming to Pittsburgh
Preparing for a world without water
The climate refugees will come. They will come from the Global South first, as places like Mexico, India and Africa’s Saharan nations begin to dry up. Each family will face a brutal decision — to slowly watch the land around them turn to dust as their futures die of thirst, or to pack up their belongings and risk their lives to find water.
They will move north and south, closer to the poles and the melting ice, away from the newlyformed deserts and into places where water flows from faucets, where long queues to fill a bucket or two exist only on the news. They will come, because they want to live, because they will imagine their grandchildren and do anything to sate their parched throats.
The inevitable crisis
They will come from the southern and western United States, internally displaced by exposed riverbeds as much as flash flooding, hitching up their SUVs in a reversal of the covered-wagons of the 19th century.
They will come to places like Pittsburgh, where a combination of proximity to the Great Lakes and being on the western edge of the mountains encourages the rain to fall, on average, 161 days a year. They will come here from all over, marveling at our healthy cattle, still able to produce milk, at our produce, bursting with juice. They will be grateful.
They will keep coming, speaking in new accents, with new traditions. They will fill our empty homes. There will be too many of them. We will worry. We will fret. Until we drink beyond the fill, and the water crises reach us too.
It may be decades before we feel the impact, but for millions of people around the United States and the rest of the world, the water crises have already begun.
Mexico City is running out of water. Severe droughts and high temperatures will deplete the city’s water reserves by June.
Millions of people are already rationing, doing their best to keep their necessities met while conserving as much as possible. Tourists have been warned to use as little water as possible. Even private water deliveries are beginning to slow. Demand has been too great.
Part of it is an aging infrastructure. The city’s water system leaks about 40% of its water.
A problem almost everywhere
Mexico City was not designed to have 22 million people. But the people keep coming to the city, as climate change and drying farmlands have driven people to look for work elsewhere. In a few months, unless a torrential downpour is summoned by the Mexican rain god Tlaloc, those 22 million people will have to go elsewhere to survive.
Some will stay in Mexico. But many of them will begin to look north.
And Mexico is not alone. According to “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” a study released by global health nonprofit Wellcome, “more than half of the world’s population faces water scarcity for at least one month a year.”
There are droughts in Spain and water rights are a huge source of the conflict between India and Pakistan. Farmers along the southern Caribbean have spent the last two months invoking any diviners and dancers that could entice the clouds to break.
The U.S. Geological Survey says that most of the United States is fine for now, despite places like National Geographic noting that an American water crisis is looming. In USGS’s estimation, “despite regional maldistribution of water, United States supplies are adequate, given rational management.”
There are a lot of caveats in that estimation, because the American West — specifically the Colorado River basin and Cascadia — and parts of the American South are not prepared for what happens when the snowmelt and river levels cannot support the millions of people and acres of agriculture that depend on them.
Our aquifers are dying. Our reserves are depleted. Here we might be fine, but in some parts of the country, people and fields are quite thirsty.
USGS notes that there is a “shortage of water development and management facilities, not a shortage of water.” Most of the
world will have to stop depending on nature and rely instead on human efforts. That means more desalination plants, more wastewater recycling, more storm-gathering and fewer green lawns. We need to give the rivers and snowpack time to refill.
Rethinking everything
We’ll have to rethink how we plan cities. We’ll have to rethink immigration, and our complicity in worsening things for Mexicans, as American companies use up Mexican water resources to grow the avocados we want to eat year-round. We’ll have to rethink what pollutants and chemicals we allow into our water systems.
We’ll have to rethink our relationship to the water that falls from the sky and that we bring up from underground. We’ll have to change.
Before the water crisis come to our door.