The St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes after Peak Oil

As we progress beyond peak oil and the world finds itself having to reinvent and adapt to a low energy existence once again, one of the key focal points is going to have to be rethinking community. At the moment we, at least we in the developed world, have the unrealistic and historically unique luxury, because of our energy-dependent technology, of not having to concern ourselves on a day-to-day basis about the source of the water we use. Once we pass peak oil, however, and readily-available, cheap energy becomes a thing of the past, all issues dealing with water will become critical to our very survival. They will also become increasingly and restrictively local.

The Great Lakes shared by the U.S. and Canada is the largest single depository of fresh water on the planet. It contains a full one fifth of the fresh surface water in the world. With the St Lawrence Seaway system ocean-going ships can navigate nearly 2500 miles inland to Thunder Bay at the middle of the continent. Both the US and Canada have built up their industrial and manufacturing heartland along the shores of the Great Lakes.

Managing flow levels
The water levels in both the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River are maintained by a significant amount of man-made technology and infrastructure. Principally Lake Ontario and St. Lawrence flow control is achieved through a series of three dams;
1) the international Moses-Saunders Hydro-Electric Dam at Cornwall Ontario and Messina New York,
2) the Long Sault Dam at Long Sault, Ontario which acts as a spillway when outflows are larger than the capacity of the power dam, and
3) the Iroquois Ice Dam at Iroquois, Ontario which is principally used to help form a stable ice cover and regulate water levels at the power dam.
There are also a number of additional dikes, levies and flood control channels and canals such as the 17km Beauharnois Canal which bypasses the Soulanges rapids and carries 84% of the water flow of the river to the Beauharnois power station.

The focus in and objective of all of this technology and infrastructure, however, has been to maintain the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes as a viable shipping route between the Atlantic Ocean and the lake head. This is to facilitate and speed the outbound distribution to the world's customers of crops, particularly grains, from North America's agricultural heartland, and for outflow of manufactured goods from the industrial and manufacturing heartland built up along the shores of the Great Lakes.

Great Lakes as a source of potable water
The importance of the Great Lakes as a source of clean, fresh water has largely been ignored. Not because it isn't important. It has been ignored because of the vastness of the lakes themselves. We have cavalierly acted as though the lakes are so huge that we could not possibly pollute them to the point that they were unusable as a source of potable water. Only recently have we woken up not only to that possibility but that reality.

International Joint Commission
The International Joint Commission (IJC) established by the governments of the United States and Canada is charged with oversight responsibility for boundary waters shared by the two nations, most importantly including the Great Lakes/St Lawrence basin. It is arguably a model for international water rights agreements and control mechanisms. Part of their mandate is to, through controlling the flow through these various facilities, "regulate Lake Ontario within a target range from 74.2 to 75.4 metres (243.3 to 247.3 feet) above sea level." This involves, unfortunately, a number of variables over which the IJC has no control;
* Global warming is already causing a slight rise in global sea levels and is expected to cause significant rises in sea levels over the coming century, particularly with the anticipated partial or complete melt of the Greenland ice cap and the Antarctic ice cap. Does the IJC then continue to maintain Lake Ontario water levels relative to rising sea levels or does it "fix" the sea level relative to which Lake Ontario levels are maintained?
* Global warming could, additionally, have serious impact over rainfall and snow levels over the Great Lakes basin and the full area that drains into the basin. In this past decade alone precipitation levels in the region have changed significantly. Although the IJC charter allows for significant changes in future weather patterns and inflows, the specifics of how the IJC will respond have not been spelled out.
* The Great Lakes basin drains nearly half a continent. The IJC has no jurisdiction over rivers and tributaries feeding the Great Lakes basin which are wholly contained within either the U.S.A. or Canada, a significant shortcoming of the existing IJC mandate. These waterways, and any infrastructure on them that could affect Great Lakes inflow, fall under the jurisdiction of a hodge-podge of state, provincial, federal, county and municipal governments and their agencies.
* Controlling the levels of Lake Ontario does not automatically control the flow through the St. Lawrence. That is dependent on inflows to the Great Lakes. But St. Lawrence river levels are also affected by other major inflows downstream from the control infrastructure, such as the Ottawa River and Richelieu River.

Post-Peak Infrastructure maintenance
Worrisome from a post Peak oil perspective is the long-term viability and maintenance of this massive water-control infrastructure. This concern has been expressed by the IJC itself. In a recent IJC report entitled Unsafe Dams? the IJC stated "In recent years, the Commission has reviewed the terms of some of its Orders of Approval for the construction of such structures. It has become aware that some of its Regulated Facilities are in need of repair and that some existing programs have not ensured that these repairs were made. ..... Existing legislation, regulations, practices and government oversight are insufficient to ensure that Regulated Facilities are safe." Specifically included in this concern are the three dams through which Lake Ontario and St. Lawrence River water levels are managed.

These facilities have now been in existence for several decades. This presents an obvious concern which the IJC have echoed, "Some Regulated Facilities were built early in the century. With aging facilities, maintenance programs are an absolute necessity. Continuing maintenance programs are being implemented in some cases. Monies that owners budget for maintenance work are, however, sometimes not spent." In the case of the U.S. portion of the Moses/Saunders hydroelectric facility, much of the electricity generated is sold off to two key industries; the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) and General Motors Corporation (GM Powertrain). Most of the rest is sold off at cost to electric supply utilities across New York State. Should either or both of ALCOA or GM fail (GM's survival is even now in serious question again as a consequence of the 2008 global recession), considering that maintenance and inspection are even now questionable, where will the economic motivation be to maintain the facility?

It is important to note that, at this time, the Canadian Federal government and the Ontario Provincial government have no established Dam Safety Program, though the Ontario Government is said to be working on one. Many of the major river systems feeding into Lake Ontario and the rest of the Great Lakes are controlled by a series of dams. The Trent River system feeding into Lake Ontario at Belleville/Trenton is a good example. In the lower reaches of the Trent River alone, from Frankford down to the Bay of Quinte, there are more than half a dozen major dams. Each of these dams holds back from 30 feet of water or more. Should any one of these dams fail, especially a dam further upstream, the volume of water released would simply inundate any dams further downstream, possibly leading to a domino/cascade collapse of dam after dam (see my article; Cascade Failure in River Systems with Multiple Dams). The impact on Belleville, Trenton and all of the low-lying areas of Prince Edward County would be devastated.

Whether the Ontario Government is working on establishing a Dam Safety Program is, of course, a moot point in the face of a pending peak in global oil production and the potential severe impact on the global, American and Canadian economies. All dams, especially as they age, require significant ongoing maintenance and regular inspection. This is particularly so in a cold climate such as that in the Great Lakes basin with its severe seasonal variations and stresses on infrastructure, particularly dams. Whether the funds for inspecting and maintaining such infrastructure will be available in a collapsing economy is a reasonable question. Whether what funds are available will be spent on the appropriate inspection and maintenance is just as fair a question. Maintenance is always one of the first things to suffer when budgets get tight. There's no profit in maintenance.

In my article The myth of permanence: post-peak infrastructure maintenance, I explored the potential of future infrastructure maintenance problems on a broad range of societal infrastructure. Nowhere, in my opinion, is this more critical than with regard to dams and other water management infrastructure. The Great Lakes contain a full 18% of the total surface freshwater on the planet. All of that water is kept in check by hundreds of dams controlling both outflow and inflow. That is a tremendous amount of aging infrastructure that will need increasing amounts of energy-intensive maintenance to remain viable. The energy that was available during the era when all that infrastructure was built won't be available when it all has to be replaced or decommissioned. The results could be catastrophic.

Post-Peak use of the Great Lakes as a source of Drinking Water
As we progress beyond peak oil the importance of the St. Lawrence Seaway as an inland route for ocean-going ships will diminish drastically and, eventually, disappear. Ocean shipping is critically dependent on oil and other fossil fuels. Even recently, with the 2006-2008 rapid escalation in the price of oil the amount of trans-oceanic shipping declined dramatically. Once we start down the serious downslope in global fossil fuel supply trans-oceanic shipping will decline to a very expensive trickle. Traffic on the Great Lakes will become increasingly local and alternatively powered. We might even see the re-emergence of the freight canoe.

The importance of the Great Lakes as a source of fresh water for drinking and agricultural irrigation will, however, increase at the same time as life becomes more localized. It is probable the population growth along the shores of the Great Lakes will continue with an increased inflow of people wanting to be near a large, strong, reliable source of fresh water.

But the continued reliability of the Great Lakes as a source of fresh water should not be an assumption but rather a responsibility of those placing their reliance on it. The massive mechanical pumping systems that deliver that water from the lakes to nearby communities will either cease to function or have to be converted to an alternative power source. The massive sewage and water treatment plants that clean the waste from the massive communities along the Great Lakes shores before the cleansed water is released back into the lakes will either cease to function or have to be converted to some sustainable alternate power source. And the massive infrastructure that manages the inflow to and outflow from the Great Lakes will have to continue to be maintained or gradually and carefully decommissioned. Doing all of this without the cheap, abundant energy that we have come to take for granted will be a tremendous post-peak undertaking.

The inflow of toxins to the Great Lakes system will, fortunately, decline with the decline of fossil-fuel-driven industrialization. Over time the Great Lakes will cleanse themselves of those toxins. Until that time, however, continued care will have to be taken in the use of water from the lakes for sustenance and irrigation. The need to maintain lake levels for shipping may diminish but allowing lake levels to drop significantly increases the dangerous concentration of the built up toxins in the water used. The technologies and energy required to adequately filter and clean the water before it is used will, at best, be scarce and expensive.

Delivering that water any distance from the shores of the lakes is going to be a growing problem as energy supplies diminish. Great Lakes water is today often delivered by pump and pipeline hundreds of miles away from the lakes themselves. There is little likelihood of being able to continue this practice for very long into the future. Gravity is the low-energy system for moving water from one place to another. Gravity won't move water uphill. How will we move water to the top of 30, 40, 50 storey buildings with energy-dependent mechanical pumps?

Taken for Granted
Once we pass peak oil - realistically it should be the case today - we can no longer take for granted the availability and delivery of water, no matter the source of that water. It is not uncommon in dry, third-world countries for people to have to walk 5, 10 or more miles each day and carry home the water they need for their daily usage. You develop strategies, under such circumstances, to minimize your water usage.

As a boy I had to carry the family's daily water from a hand pump two blocks away on a neighbour's property. Two blocks was close enough I often made multiple trips per day, carrying two large buckets, one in each hand. Baths were taken in a galvanized tub on the kitchen floor with water from the rain barrels (melted snow in winter) heated on the large, kitchen wood stove. Believe me, I learned not to take water for granted and I can still connect to those feelings today of the importance and preciousness of water. It is a lesson that, as we pass peak oil and industrialized water systems become increasingly unreliable, that we are all going to learn. It will be a very difficult lesson for most.

The Amazon: ICU Patient or Environmental Casualty?

It is difficult not to think of the Amazon in human physiological terms. The Amazon rainforest, the largest in the world by far (if it were a country it would be the ninth largest in the world) is often called the lungs of the world, the world's respiratory system. And the Amazon River is the rainforest's circulatory system, if not the key to the circulatory system of the entire world. The Amazon releases one fifth of all the river discharge into the world's oceans (up to 300,000 m³ per second in the rainy season), a discharge greater than the next 8-10 largest rivers in the world combined. The Amazon is also arguably the world's longest river, a claim that is, to many experts, negated by the Nile River. Both are, nonetheless, well over 4000 miles in length.

But the Amazon, like most of the world's other major rivers, may soon have to be put on life support!

Most of the Amazon river's rapidly increasing problems are due to the intensive, government-encouraged and government-supported deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Each year an area up to the size of Texas is denuded of its old-growth forest cover. The Amazon rainforest has become an involuntary heavy smoker and the lungs of the planet are struggling. The trees cut down in the deforestation effort are not converted to lumber to satisfy the world's increasingly desperate need for that commodity. They are burned in the field, the massive smoke plumes clearly visible from space.

.........click below for video..........
Deforestation of the Amazon River basin has followed a pattern
of cutting, burning, farming, and grazing.

Remaking Amazonia

Most of the deforested land in Amazonia is converted to pasture for cattle for Brazil's still-expanding beef industry. A lot of it, however, is used to grow high-income corn, soy and sugar cane, most destined for the skyrocketing biofuel industry (Brazil has become a world leader in biofuel production and usage). Much of the deforestation is carried out, often illegally, by indigenous, subsistence farmers escaping the ghettos surrounding Rio de Janiero, Sao Paolo and other major Brazilian cities.

But all of these efforts run into the same problem: the poor quality of the Amazon rainforest soil. The heart of the Amazon rainforest is in the forest canopy. The soil on the forest floor serves little purpose beyond holding the roots of trees. Even the incredibly complex and vibrant animal life of Amazonia (more than one third of all species in the world live in the Amazon rainforest) is predominantly made up of canopy dwellers, dwarfing the number of ground-dwelling species.

When the forest is cleared and the canopy opened up that nutrient-poor soil on the forest floor is exposed to the relentless onslaught of the tropical sun (the mouth of the Amazon is on the equator). The sun dries it up and it becomes an impermeable surface hardpan that plants can't penetrate with their roots. When the rainy season comes the dried, weak, unconsolidated soil is washed away by the torrential rains. The nutrient-poor and biologically-deprived soil does not hold water, most of which runs off into the nearest river, all of which lead to the Amazon.

Silting up the Amazon

Despite its massive water volume and the high volume of silt the Amazon river carries, at it's mouth the Amazon is not even in the top five of the world's rivers in terms of silt by volume of water. And that is a very telling symptom of the Amazon's present and growing problem. Over the course of its travels to the Atlantic Ocean the Amazon may carry as much or more silt than any other river on the planet. But a very large volume of that silt never makes it to the sea.

The lower reaches of the Amazon are navigable up to Iquitos, Peru, 2300 miles from the Atlantic. In that 2300 miles the Amazon drops only 106 meters (348 feet), an extremely gradual rise. In that 2300 miles the Amazon meanders and twists and turns through a wide flood plain which, during the rainy season, can see the river swell to over thirty miles in width. The river itself is widening by up to several meters per year. This is, in part, being caused by the breakdown of the soft river banks by the wakes from boats and ships able to navigate the river up to Iquitos.

The constant twisting and turning, the gradual gradient and the tremendous length of the river all combine to cause the majority of the silt the river carries to be deposited during its journey, rather than carrying it to the sea. The upper reaches of the Amazon have some of the best and most extensive river beaches in the world. This in-transit deposition of silt is why, despite its massive volume, the Amazon does not have a delta at it's mouth. Most of the silt that would build up into a delta has been deposited further up river. It has at its mouth, however, created over geological time the largest river island in the world, Marajo Island, which is roughly the size of Switzerland.

The problem worsens

This depositing of such massive amounts of silt along the whole 2300-mile length of the lower Amazon means that, over time, much of the river will eventually silt up from the increased run-off from deforested rainforest. The river become unnavigable except during the rainy season. Many of the over 1100 tributaries could eventually be blocked by silt build-up, all of which could eventually reduce the volume in the Amazon. The greater the silt build-up the more the Amazon will spread out during the rainy season, possibly destroying large tracts of forest not evolved to surviving much of the year in flood conditions. Already many tributaries of the Amazon are, for the first time in memory, drying up during the dry season because of silt build-up.

.........click below for video..........
Amazon dries up


As well as silt, the Amazon carries significant volumes of toxins from mining operations on its upper reaches and of untreated sewage from the numerous growing communities along its bank (Iquitos has a population of over 370,000). These toxins, like the silt, settle out long before the Amazon reaches the sea, causing a toxic build-up in the river bottom and in the soil along the shores of the river. These toxins are having an increasing impact on the freshwater species in the river and its tributaries and on the land species that live along its shores.

The changes being inflicted by man on the Amazon river and rainforest are having an increasingly serious impact on the global biosphere. The rainforest is one of the major carbon sinks of the world and their destruction is; speeding the onset and severity of global warming; impeding the planetary hydro cycle and contributing to changing global weather patterns; decreasing the nutrient density of the Atlantic Ocean (the Amazon distributes nutrients hundreds of miles out to sea at its mouth) seriously affecting the survivability of ocean species in the Atlantic Ocean.

Physician, Heal Thyself

The Brazilians, of course, are doing nothing different with their rainforest than Europeans, North Americans, Africans, Australians and Asians haven't already done with their forests. What right, they can and do argue, does the rest of the world have to expect them to forego the benefits they arguably receive from its destruction? It is not unlike asking China to curtail its CO2 emissions, at serious economic cost, because of their impact on the global atmosphere.

Brazil's problem - And China's and Africa's - is a global problem. The cost of remedying it must be global as well. If we cannot establish a global outlook on environmental issues we are never going to stop the destruction of the global biosphere, because all such destruction is essentially local. For Brazil to halt its destruction of the Amazon rainforest has a global benefit but, at the moment, a strictly Brazilian cost. That is a basic disconnect.

Peak Water

(See previous article The Global Freshwater Crisis[10] in the blog.)

The real impact of the peaking of any finite resource is that long-established demand continues to rise while the supply goes into terminal decline. This is the nexus of a crisis. In our growth-addicted global society it means that growth of whatever sectors of the economy and society rely on that resource must cease. There is much discussion and debate about peak oil and the broad impact it will have on our energy-hungry global society. But we are facing another peak which will ultimately have even more devastating consequences.

Peak water!

There is a not unreasonable tendency to think of water as an infinite, renewable resource. Seventy-five percent of the earth's surface, after all, is covered with it. And the planet has a very efficient hydro-cycle where water is constantly recycled and recirculated. The rain that falls on a field of Kansas corn rose as water vapour from the vast warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean. But salt water is largely unusable and the surface freshwater contained in lakes and rivers is only a minuscule 0.3 percent of the water on the planet and about ten percent of the total freshwater which is only 2.5% of the planet's total water supply. Ninety percent of the world's freshwater is locked up in ice caps and glaciers or sequestered in deep underground aquifers. In fact, according to the Worldwatch Institute "Some 97 percent of the planet's liquid freshwater is stored in underground aquifers."[9]

Aquifer depletion
Over half the freshwater usage in the world (estimates are as high as 75% and growing) comes from these underground aquifers, water that is replenished, if at all, over slow geological time frames, not seasonal replenishment like surface water. "Water that enters an aquifer remains there for an average of 1,400 years, compared to only 16 days for rivers."[9] The average replenishment cycle for aquifers, in other words, is 1400 years. Many of the world's major aquifers that are heavily relied upon for agriculture, like the Ogallala Aquifer in the western U.S. (about 400-million cubic meters of drawdown per year)[1], the Arabian Aquifer and the deep aquifer under the North China Plain (the shallow aquifer is replenishable but has largely been sucked dry)[7], are non-replenishable, fossil aquifers mostly formed during and after various past ice ages. Once such an aquifer is depleted it is gone, forever. With replenishable aquifers there is generally at least the potential for aquifer recovery if the aquifer has not been contaminated and the rate of drawdown is reduced to below the replenishment rate, generally a small fraction of the aquifer's capacity per year. Coastal aquifers, however, can become increasingly contaminated, not surprisingly, from salt-water intrusion if the drawdown exceeds the natural replenishment rate. Once that happens, as is the case in much of the middle east and central Asia, the aquifer, though it may be full of water, is no longer suitable for human use, including agricultural irrigation.

But there is increasing concern that vital aquifers everywhere are becoming contaminated with toxins. A new study from the Worldwatch Institute reveals that "this first global survey of groundwater pollution shows that a toxic brew of pesticides, nitrogen fertilizers, industrial chemicals [plus radioactive material], and heavy metals is fouling groundwater everywhere, and that the damage is often worst in the very places where people most need water."[9] "Sixty percent of the most hazardous liquid waste in the United States-34 billion liters per year of solvents, heavy metals, and radioactive materials-is injected directly into deep groundwater via thousands of "injection wells." Although the EPA requires that these effluents be injected below the deepest source of drinking water, some have entered underground water supplies in Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Oklahoma."[9] This is often due to the fact that these injection wells were sunk before it was realized there was a deep fossil aquifer deep below the drill site.

The U.S. EPA estimates "that about 100,000 gasoline storage tanks are leaking chemicals into groundwater. In Santa Monica, California, wells supplying half the city's water have been closed because of dangerously high levels of the gasoline additive MTBE."[9] A close personal friend in Australia with a permaculture farm found that the groundwater below their property had been contaminated from just such a source, a petrol station just up the road with leaky storage tanks.

Freshwater use accelerating
Over the last century while the world population has tripled global freshwater usage has increased more than six-fold with the bulk of that increase being ground water from deep aquifers. And it is estimated that as much as 90% of the global population increase to the middle of this century will be in areas that are already facing critical freshwater supply constraints[5] either as a result of surface water contamination ("Some two million tons of waste per day are disposed of within receiving waters, including industrial wastes and chemicals, human waste and agricultural waste" according to the UN)[1], or aquifer depletion[9].

Where the minimum daily water availability per person established by the United Nations is ten gallons, these water-challenged areas have daily water availability now of less than three gallons per person, many of them 1.5 gallons or less. "Unless population growth can be slowed quickly by investing heavily in female literacy and family planning services, there may not be a humane solution to the emerging world water shortage," states the report Water Shortages May Cause Food Shortages.[5] Nearly 1.7 billion people do not have access to sufficient water for basic personal hygiene. "Infectious waterborne diseases such as diarrhea, typhoid, and cholera are responsible for 80 percent of illnesses and deaths in the developing world, many of them children. One child dies every eight seconds from a waterborne disease; 15 million children a year."[1]

On average agriculture is responsible for over seventy percent of the freshwater a nation consumes. It is reliably estimated that with current agricultural irrigation practices every ton of wheat or corn produced, for example, consumes 1000 tons of freshwater. About sixty percent of that usage, however, is wasted through losses from leaky irrigation ditches, run off and field evaporation.[1]

Importing water
When nations begin to run into serious water constraints they have to make up lost agricultural production with imports, particularly of grains. "This can be seen with Iran and Egypt, both of which now import more wheat than Japan, traditionally the world's leading importer. Imports supply 40 percent or more of the total consumption of grain--wheat, rice, and feedgrains--in both countries. Numerous other water-short countries also import much of their grain. Morocco brings in half of its grain. For Algeria and Saudi Arabia, the figure is over 70 percent. Yemen imports nearly 80 percent of its grain, and Israel, more than 90 percent."[5] As the report Water Shortages May Cause Food Shortages says, "Since a ton of grain equals 1,000 tons of water, importing grain is the most efficient way to import water. World grain futures will soon in effect become world water futures."[5]

But grain imports are already becoming increasingly problematic. The numbers involved are massive. According to the report, Aquifer Depletion, "Overall, China’s grain production has fallen from its historical peak of 392 million tons in 1998 to an estimated 358 million tons in 2005. For perspective, this drop of 34 million tons exceeds the annual Canadian wheat harvest."[7] With the combined impact of global warming, surface water pollution, aquifer depletion and continuing population increases the ability to make up agricultural shortfalls in the world market is diminishing. The global emergency food grain reserves, on which the poorest of the world's poor are dependant, have over these past several years fallen from a marginal 119-day supply to a critical 52-day supply and those reserves are still declining. In fact, with the increased demand for seed grains driven by the rush for biofuels that decline is accelerating.

Dependence grows, Availability declines
Agriculture, of course, is not the only use we make of fresh water. Industry consumes 20% and residential consumption accounts for ten percent. In the arid nations currently experiencing or facing near-term critical freshwater shortages, however, agriculture is responsible for ninety percent of all freshwater usage. With the combination of demand for agriculture and that of domestic and industrial use in growing cities, the aquifers - many of them non-replenishable - underlying the larger cities in many developing countries - on which those cities are totally dependant - are depleting at rates of 3-8 meters per year and may be totally exhausted within the next 20-25 years.[5] "Nearly one third of all humanity relies almost exclusively on groundwater for drinking, including the residents of some of the largest cities in the developing world, such as Jakarta, Dhaka, Lima, and Mexico City."[9]

As surface water in lakes and rivers becomes increasingly polluted and as surface water sources dry up under the impact of global warming future generations may have to increasingly rely on groundwater sources for their very survival. It is our responsibility to protect it for both those future generations and ourselves. Where a steadily flowing river may flush away toxins in days, sometimes hours, a replenishable aquifer (not a non-replenishable fossil aquifer) may take 2000 years or more to flush itself clean. "Groundwater contamination is an irreversible act that will deprive future generations of one of life's basic resources," said Payal Sampat, author of Deep Trouble: The Hidden Threat of Groundwater Pollution. "In the next 50 years, an additional 3 billion people are expected to inhabit the Earth, creating even more demand for water for drinking, irrigation, and industry. But we're polluting our cheapest and most easily accessible supply of water. Most groundwater is still pristine, but unless we take immediate action, clean groundwater will not be there when we need it."[9]

The following were important sources of material and research for this article.

1) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
2) A Global Water Crisis
3) Water Crisis - World Water Council
4) Water Deficits Growing In Many Countries
5) Water Shortages May Cause Food Shortages
6) The Ogallala Aquifer Depletion
7) Aquifer depletion
8) Report: Water crisis hits rich countries
9) The Hidden Freshwater Crisis
10) The Global Freshwater Crisis

Mining Water

(See also my article The Global Freshwater Crisis in this blog.)

The term "mining water" is increasingly used to refer to the extraction of groundwater, usually by mechanical or electric pumps, from underground aquifers. The term, I believe, was originally coined by Maude Barlow, chairwoman of the Council of Canadians, and recently appointed senior water adviser to the United Nations. Maude has been a tireless campaigner on water rights issues and is, herself, strongly concerned about global freshwater pollution and depletion and the impact global warming will have on freshwater resources.[7]

Get used to the term "mining water". At the rate we are polluting our surface water in lakes and rivers, and the rate at which freshwater sources are drying up under the assault of global warming and human development, it may soon be the only potential source of clean drinking water we or our children and grandchildren have left. It is an appropriate term in many ways.

Water is a finite resource that is constantly recycled, like the metal in beer cans. Many of the underground aquifers from which we extract it are, however, non-replenishable, called fossil water. Once the water in these fossil water aquifers is gone, like a vein of ore, it's time to shut off the pumps and go home or move on to another aqua-motherlode.

Changing aquifer replenishment rates
Even those aquifers that are replenishable, however, have a long-established, generally-low rate at which they will replenish. "Water that enters an aquifer remains there for an average of 1,400 years, compared to only 16 days for rivers." [5] Extract more water than the rate at which it will refill and you start the process of depleting, and possibly irreversibly damaging, the reservoir. The land over many aquifers that have been over-exploited shows clear signs of sinking and compression due to the collapse of the underground void left as the water is extracted.

Changing weather patterns generally, and the more pronounced changes being brought on by global warming, and the persistent human habit of draining marshes and wetlands for development, many of which are the source of replenishment for underground aquifers, are also changing the rate at which many aquifers replenish, usually negatively. Unless aquifer replenishment rates are tracked with changes in the climate and local development ("The Yellow river in China, Colorado River in North America, and the Murray River in Australia are amongst the Earth's major rivers that are regularly sucked dry." before reaching the sea)[1], those dependent on an aquifer for water may find their wells suddenly dried up even though they have not increased their own water extraction.

Water rights licenses
There is another aspect to the term "mining water" that is particularly worrisome for the future. Water rights to surface water in most areas today require a water rights license, even if the water runs through or touches your property. That license spells out what source of water you have access to and how much water from that source you are permitted to use. If the term and concept of "mining water" works its way into government bureaucratic lexicon you may also be required to obtain a license to access the groundwater beneath your own property - some jurisdictions already require it - a license that similarly specifies how much of that water you have a right to use. In many areas requiring water licenses for access to groundwater, such as some states in India, it is becoming increasingly common for farmers to be hauled into court for water theft by extracting above the limits of their water license.

In international trade agreements, and in the conditions attached to IMF, OECD and Worldbank loans to developing countries, water services and water rights are a commodity that is increasingly required to be open for commercial trade. It is possible, as clean surface water sources become increasingly scarce, that your groundwater may become an important tradeable commodity for which you are going to have to compete against the highest commercial bidder, even against some of the world's largest commercial water services companies. With the majority of aquifers already under pressure from over-exploitation governments everywhere may decide that growing demand for commercial groundwater access is exactly why there is a need for government control and private access restriction. In so doing, history very strongly suggests the reason for government control and restrictions will not be to protect your interests but rather those of the giant water service companies. Money talks.

My personal water mining story
For me, in addition, the term also has a strong personal meaning which, I believe, clearly illustrates a broader issue. The southeastern Ontario community I grew up in was a mining town. A mile southeast of home, the constantly-growing, flat-top mountain of slag clearly visible from anywhere in town and the surrounding area, there was a large, open-pit iron ore mine that was the town's main employer during my growing-up years. When they had tapped out the economically-recoverable iron - there was still plenty of iron but they would have had to go underground to get it - the mining company shut off the pumps that kept the pit from flooding and walked away. They even ripped up their rail line that once delivered tons of crude ore to Lake Ontario for shipping across the lake to a Pennsylvania processing facility. They left behind a massive hole in the ground over 600 feet deep and a mile across.

For the past forty years that "hole" has been filling up with clear, blue water, draining every aquifer in the area. Whether they are replenishable I don't know since no appropriate survey of local aquifers has ever been conducted, though they are currently being studied as part of a broader, provincial groundwater survey. There isn't a well within miles, nonetheless, that still has water in it. The community, fortunately, takes its municipal water from the river that runs through town but the water mains end at the town limits. The timing of the building of that municipal water system and the shutting off of the mine pumps has always been suspicious.

The farmers and other rural residents in the area over aquifers that are draining into the mine, being all those south and east of the town, have been left without a water supply. Perhaps, in another hundred years or so, when the water level in the "mine" comes up to the level of what was the local water table, those wells may produce water again, if they are replenishable and the flow characteristics of the aquifers haven't been irreversibly damaged. The periodic tremors in the area since the mine closure are a sign, unfortunately, that some such damage may be occurring as the aquifers drain, or may have occurred as a result of the tremendous blasts while the mine was in operation.

Growing global dependence on Groundwater
A full two thirds of the world's people already rely almost exclusively on underground aquifers for their drinking water. Over half of global agricultural irrigation now uses groundwater. But a third of the world's population lives in areas that are already seriously water-stressed. Where the UN established minimum daily requirement is 10 gallons of water per person these areas have an availability of only 1-3 gallons per day. Much of their daily challenge and activity revolves around how to acquire water. Water for sanitation and basic hygiene is one of the greatest challenges in these areas. Thousands die every day from infections and water-borne diseases. According to the UN, "One child dies every eight seconds from a waterborne disease; 15 million children a year."[4]

Overall as many as half the world's aquifers are already over-exploited. They are being drawn upon at a rate greater than they can be or are replenished. Too often a slowly-replenishing aquifer that has served the needs of local farmers and residents for centuries comes under pressure from high volume extraction for commercial use. This, for example, was the case for one aquifer in India where Coca Cola built a plant in the area and drew on the aquifer for the water to make their soft drinks and for their bottled-water product line. Hundreds of wells in the area went dry, wells that had been in continuous use for hundreds of years. The replenishment rate on the aquifer could not keep up with the traditional demand plus the high volume commercial extraction. Repeated law suits consistently came down on the side of the soft drink company. In fact, courts and the legal system in India have been so protective of commercial water rights that "The state government has booked nearly 2,000 farmers in drought-stricken Bundelkhand on a rare charge — that of stealing water."[6]

However, some sanity and humanity seems to be creeping back into the Indian legal system. A recent court decision forced a major multinational water company to close its operations in one Indian state because of their impact on water availability for local agriculture. As this was a non-replenishable fossil aquifer, however, the damage has already been done. If each of these battles has to be fought in the courts individually with poor peasant farmers going up against powerful, wealthy multinationals the prospects are not good at all. The rapidly growing global demand for clean bottled water is putting major pressure on many aquifers worldwide, most of them deep, pristine non-replenishable fossil aquifers.

Water in an aquifer, like oil in a reservoir, generally does not exist as a unified body like a vast underground lake. But it can. More commonly, it may saturate a layer of sand underground, like the oil in the Alberta tar sands, or it may trickle slowly through cracks and cavities in a rock formation. Look at the face of any rock cliff and you will generally see the telltale vertical dark streaks where water is oozing out of these cracks in the stone. Aquifers may be vast in terms of their overall size, like the Ogallala aquifer - a non-replenishable, fossil aquifer - which covers most of the U.S. midwest. Or they may cover only a few thousand square meters or less. And they may be just a few feet below the surface or a mile or more down.

Our romantic image of a water well is the picturesque round bricked well with the peaked roof and a pull-up rope wound round a hand-cranked pulley. The vast majority of wells, however, and most of those developed over the past half-century, are drilled wells with a pump, sometimes a hand pump, sometimes a windmill, but most often a mechanical pump run by electricity or a gasoline engine. It is these powerful electrical and gasoline-driven pumps that have allowed us to exploit ever deeper aquifers, some over a mile deep, in ever greater volumes (while global population has tripled in the past century global water usage has grown more than six-fold, most of that growth from underground aquifers).

China's growing water deficiency
Under China's arid north plain, where much of the country's vast quantities of wheat and other grains are grown, there is a shallow aquifer that has been relied upon for centuries to supply water to mostly hand-dug wells. The replenishment rate is slow, due to low rainfall, but for many centuries the amount of water being used from it was below that recharge rate. Now that aquifer has been seriously over-exploited and has been, effectively, sucked dry.

But there is also a deeper aquifer under the north plain that is now being tapped thanks to powerful new mechanical pumps. The problem is this deep reservoir is a non-replenishable aquifer. The fossil water in it has been sequestered there for thousands of years. With more and more wells sunk down to this deep aquifer it too may be sucked dry within just a few decades. This will leave China's breadbasket, that feeds much of her 1.6-billion people, without a source of much-needed irrigation. China's grain production, in fact, has already fallen - while half a billion people have been added to the population - from its "peak of 392 million tons in 1998 to an estimated 358 million tons in 2005. For perspective, this drop of 34 million tons exceeds the annual Canadian wheat harvest."[2]

An aquifer, like an oil reservoir, covers a large enough area that multiple wells can draw from it at the same time. In India, for example, the relatively few aquifers in the country are being tapped into by more than 22-million wells. And like oil, each additional well drilled into an aquifer increases the depletion rate and has the potential, and often does, decrease the water available to the other wells. This becomes seriously apparent when the extraction rate of all the wells exceeds the replenishment rate of the aquifer. This vast mining of aquifers in India, for example, is taking its toll and is "lowering water tables in most of the country. In North Gujarat, the water table is falling by 6 meters (20 feet) per year."[2]

There are literally thousands of legal agreements worldwide covering the right of use of surface water in lakes and rivers. But as much as 97% of the world's liquid freshwater is not in these lakes and rivers but rather in underground aquifers. There are essentially no existing agreements covering the use of groundwater, even though many aquifers cross national borders and their over-exploitation on one side of the border is a strong potential source of conflict and even war. Those few agreements that even mention groundwater cover it as an aside and something to be dealt with in the future. But that future is now, if there is to be a future for the world's aquifers and drinkable water for future human generations.

Our abuse of our water resources
We are taking our underground water sources for granted and treating them with the same reckless abandon that we treat our lakes, rivers and the oceans. "Toxic chemicals are contaminating groundwater on every inhabited continent, endangering the world's most valuable supplies of freshwater,"[3] reports a new study from the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based research organization. Just a few U.S. examples, which are similar to examples from other continents, will illustrate the depth and breadth of the problem.

* "Water utilities in the midwestern United States, a region that is highly dependent on groundwater, spend $400 million each year to treat water for just one chemical, the pesticide atrazine. According to the U.S. National Research Council, initial cleanup of contaminated groundwater at some 300,000 sites in the United States could cost up to $1 trillion over the next 30 years."[3]

* "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that about 100,000 gasoline storage tanks are leaking chemicals into groundwater. In Santa Monica, California, wells supplying half the city's water have been closed because of dangerously high levels of the gasoline additive MTBE."[3]

* "Sixty percent of the most hazardous liquid waste in the United States - 34 billion liters per year of solvents, heavy metals, and radioactive materials - is injected directly into deep groundwater via thousands of "injection wells." Although the EPA requires that these effluents be injected below the deepest source of drinking water, some have entered underground water supplies, especially in deep, fossil aquifers, in Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Oklahoma."[3]

Water is life
Man is the only species on this planet able to, and in the practice of, exploiting earth's sequestered resources like oil, natural gas, coal, minerals, and water. Apart from the fact we claim an exclusivity that shuts out other species with whom we reluctantly share this planet, we also, particularly in this past century, seem to have no sense of responsibility for sharing them with future generations of humans, our own children and grandchildren. The resources they will need for their very survival are being voraciously gobbled up and discarded as an assumed birthright in our greedy demands for support of our increasingly decadent lifestyle.

If this robbing from future generations were accidental, because we did not understand the long-term implications of over-exploitation, it would be bad enough. But it is not accidental. We do understand. Our governments and industrial organizations pump out reams of statistics every day detailing our crime. And yet we continue on, as if to say to our grandchildren, "To hell with you. I'm going to have a good time as long as I can and it's your problem to figure out how to survive on what's left when our party is over."

==============

Additional reading material:

1) A Global Water Crisis
2) Aquifer Depletion
3) The Hidden Freshwater Crisis
4) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
5) The Hidden Freshwater Crisis
6) Latest to be ‘stolen’: precious water- UP charges nearly 2,000 farmers with theft in drought zone
7) Water crusader Maude Barlow gets UN post

The Global Freshwater Crisis

Seventy percent of the earth's surface is covered with water. Yet more than one out of six people (1.1 billion) lack access to safe drinking water. And more than two out of six (2.6 billion) lack adequate sanitation.[16] And those numbers grow every year.

Today over half the world's population live in heavily energy-dependent cities whose aging water infrastructure, even now before peak oil, is beginning to crumble. Even in wealthy North America, the cost of renewing and modernizing water and wastewater infrastructure is enormous. And there is an urgent need for rational assessment and informed decision making about the need for new or expanded infrastructure and about potential impacts on, for example, Great Lakes waters.[12]

The water crisis is largely due, at this point, to global warming, surface water and groundwater pollution, marine pollution, rainforest destruction, and soil loss. But where will peak oil leave us when added to this long list of exacerbating factors? What are our prospects for long-term sustainability and survivability?



Earth. The water planet. Waterworld. Or, as Carl Sagan called it, the pale blue dot, Sagan's apt description of what earth looks like from the outer fringes of the solar system. Water, water everywhere. The oceans and lakes are full of it. The poles are covered with it. Rivers move it from place to place. Blocks of it measuring thousands of cubic kilometres float about the oceans near the poles. The atmosphere is full of it. All the plants and animals on the planet are made up mostly of it. It's in the soil, even in the rocks. It exists as a liquid, a solid, a gas. On a planetary basis it is a perpetually-recycled finite resource. It has been estimated that, in total, the earth contains about 1400 million cubic kilometers of it, give or take a few million.[15] But it's not always conveniently in the place and in the form we humans want it to be.

It's plentiful, but can you drink it?

Water scarcity amid plenty
Of all of the water on the planet only a paltry 2.5% or about 35 million cubic kilometers is fresh water. The rest is salt water. The usable portion of those freshwater resources is less than 1% (about 350,000 cubic kilometers), only 0.0025% of all the water on earth. The total global freshwater breaks down as; 0.3% contained in lakes and rivers (90% of that in lakes); 29.9% fresh groundwater (aquifers); 0.9% other (swamp, soil moisture, tundra and permafrost); 68.9% ice caps, glaciers and snow cover.[15] The atmosphere itself contains only about 0.001% (0.4% of all global fresh water) of the total water available on our planet.[17]

But fresh water is not evenly distributed throughout the planet. North America's Great Lakes contain about 18 percent of the world’s surface freshwater supplies, shared by only two nations. The Great Lakes have a combined surface area of over 325,000 km2. Overall, however, jurisdiction for the Great Lakes is shared by two federal governments (Canada and the United States), two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Quebec), eight US states (New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota), and hundreds of municipal governments.[12] Only about 25 million people (about one third of 1% of the global population) currently rely on the Great Lakes for their drinking water.[12]

At the other extreme, the 29 countries in the near east region account for 14% of the world’s land area and are home to 10% of the world’s human population. Yet the whole region has only about 2% of the world’s renewable freshwater resources.[15] While the global average availability is 7000 cubic meters of water per person per year, in these countries the average is about 1580 cubic meters of water per person per year.[15] In Jordan and the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) only 170-200 cubic meters of renewable water resources are available per person per year, less than 3% of the global average.[15]

From this limited availability of fresh water, however, global withdrawals for irrigation represent an average of 66% of the total withdrawals (up to 90% in arid regions like the middle east). The other 34% is used by: domestic households (10%) (representing only 17-20 cubic meters per person per year in the above-mentioned countries), industry (20%), or evaporated from reservoirs (4%).[16]

Managing our water usage
Population growth, economic development, and changing national and regional values have intensified competition over increasingly scarce freshwater resources worldwide. There is increasingly widespread concern and predictions of rising future conflicts over shared water supplies.[8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16] Of greatest concern is the potential for conflict within the world's 263 international freshwater basins (basins shared by two or more countries). However, since 1948, the historical record documents only 37 incidents of acute conflicts (i.e., those involving violence) over water. Over half of these have been between Israel and various of its neighbours. During that same period, approximately 295 international water agreements were negotiated and signed.[10] It is unlikely that that low ratio will hold over this century as water shortages become increasingly common and critical.

Europe has the largest number of international freshwater basins with 69, followed by Africa with 59, Asia with 57, North America with 40, and South America with 38. The world's 263 international freshwater basins account for nearly one-half of the earth's land surface, generate roughly 60% of global freshwater flow and are home to approximately 40% of the world's population. A total of 145 countries contribute territory to international basins, some albeit reluctantly. Thirty-three nations, including such sizable countries as Bolivia, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, and Zambia, have more than 95% of their territory within the hydrologic boundaries of one or more international freshwater basins. Needless to say such countries take their international water agreements very seriously.[10]

Many international freshwater basins involve a significant number of nation states. The Danube, for example, has seventeen riparian states. The Congo, Niger, Nile, Rhine, and Zambezi are each shared by more than nine countries. The Amazon, Aral Sea, Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Jordan, Kura-Araks, La Plata, Lake Chad, Mekong, Neman, Tarim, Tigris-Euphrates-Shatt al Arab, Vistula, and Volga basins each contain territory of at least five sovereign nations.

The potential for water wars
In all, and most worrisome from the perspective of potential future conflicts, 158 of the world's 263 international freshwater basins lack any type of multilateral cooperative management and conflict resolution framework. Of the 106 basins with water institutions, approximately two-thirds have three or more riparian states, yet less than 20 percent of the accompanying agreements are multilateral, most being bilateral between only two of those states. Many basins continue to experience significant disputes even after a treaty is negotiated and signed, often because of the exclusion from the treaties of one or more of the sharing states. Often, under such pressures, even the signed bilateral treaties begin to break down.[10]

An early and comparatively successful model of cooperative water management structures that can help avoid dispute and conflict was the establishment by the United States and Canada of the International Joint Committee (IJC) for the administration of the Great Lakes watershed and connecting and outflowing rivers.[12] Though somewhat unique because of its focus on shared lakes rather than the much more common shared rivers, it is, nonetheless, a model of the level of cooperation that is achievable. Certainly the relative lack of complexity in being only a bilateral agreement has helped considerably as well. It is fair to say, however, that a significant part of the strong and enduring relationship between the two countries is due, at least in part, to their mutual cooperation concerning, and national reliance on, the Great Lakes. Even so, at least one war (the war of 1812) has been fought between the two nations (Canada was a British colony at the time) partly, in fact, on the waters of these very shared lakes.

Water has always been an important component in the negotiations between states and nations. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has documented more than 3600 international water treaties - covering the surface water in lakes and rivers - dating from AD 805 to 1984.[10] Most of these have to do with rights of navigation, limits on diversion and pollution. The earliest recorded water treaty, however, dates back to 2500 BC, when the two Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma crafted an agreement ending a water dispute along the Tigris River.[10]

Since 1948 alone, 295 international water agreements were negotiated and signed dealing with surface freshwater.[10] Yet the surface water at issue represents only 0.3% of the total freshwater on the planet. As regards groundwater (the underground water in aquifers), which accounts for 29.9% of all the freshwater on the planet, "there are no known treaties dealing specifically with groundwater matters."[13] Some freshwater treaties dealing with surface water do casually mention groundwater - almost as an aside or a point for future consideration - but even these treaties do not pursue the issue with any detailed language, measures, agreements or definition.

Underground boundary disputes
Groundwater, of course, is considerably more difficult to map and define than is surface water. There are literally thousands of underground aquifers throughout the world. Most, fortunately, are contained within the boundaries of single sovereign nations. But hundreds of these aquifers run beneath and across the arbitrary human boundaries above them. And just as one state excessively drawing water from a shared lake or river affects the availability of that resource to other countries sharing it, the excessive drawing down of the water in an international aquifer by one state affects the availability of that water to the other states dependent on it

South Africa, for example, shares four rivers with its six neighbours – the Incomati, Orange, Limpopo and Maputo. The water in these rivers is, however, increasingly under pressure due to increased water demands in relatively affluent South Africa, the largest and most powerful of the seven nations sharing those resources.[11] This is not a trivial issue when it comes to groundwater resources. Groundwater systems are often the only source of fresh water in some regions of the world, particularly under arid and semi-arid climatic conditions - such as in the middle east and much of Africa - where freshwater demand is rapidly increasing.[13]

The structure and terminology of most international freshwater agreements tend to follow the pattern codified in the 1997 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses. [10] Attempts have been underway, through the International Shared Aquifer Resource Management (ISARM) efforts[13], to arrive at a similar codification of rules for treaties involving the treatment of international groundwater aquifers. The most recent attempt, The Seoul Rules, demonstrates special concern with international groundwater through the provision of specific articles that relate to “hydraulic interdependence”, “protection of groundwater” and “groundwater management & surface waters” (the latter addresses the issue of conjunctive use).[14]

It is still too early to tell what success these efforts will have or whether anything equivalent to the UN convention will result. The slow progress to date suggests that there is only a slight likelihood of having a framework in place in time to ward off serious future water conflicts. Issues of increasing water scarcity, degrading water quality, rapid population growth, unilateral water development, economic upheaval like the 2008 global financial crisis, and uneven levels of economic development are commonly cited as potentially disruptive factors in co-riparian water relations. The combination of these factors has led academics and policy-makers alike to warn of impending conflict over shared water resources.[10]

Middle East water deficiency
Even when nations equitably share these resources, however, the pressure on groundwater resources, both shared and sovereign, can be immense. Groundwater reserves in the Middle East, for example, are becoming increasingly brackish. More than 50% of groundwater in the region, it is estimated, is already contaminated from salt water intrusion and the proportion is increasing as the rate of extraction of water from aquifers exceeds recharge, in much of the region by three to one.

In Saudi Arabia water levels declined by more than 70 meters in the Umm Er Radhuma aquifer from 1978 to 1984 and this decline was accompanied by a salinity increase of more than 1000 milligrams of salt per liter. The aquifers of Bahrain, the Batenah Plains of Oman, and the United Arab Emirates are suffering severely from seawater intrusion. Groundwater salinity in most areas of the Syrian and Jordanian steppe has increased to several thousand milligrams per liter and over-exploitation of coastal aquifers in Lebanon has caused seawater intrusion with a subsequent rise from 340 to 22000 milligrams per liter in some wells near Beirut. With the countries in the Arabian peninsula using up their water resources three times as fast as they are being renewed it is estimated that available water resources will be exhausted within 20 years (or made completely unusable because of dangerously high salt levels) unless consumption of freshwater is reduced.[15]

The always volatile countries of the Middle East have become critically dependent on the income from their oil resources and accompanying natural gas (the extraction and processing of which also uses large volumes of water), essentially their only tradeable commodities. As world consumption of oil has grown over this past half century, the populations of these countries have literally exploded. In many of them over half the population is under twenty years of age. When those oil resources go into serious decline, if they are not on the front edge of that predicament already, the means of support for that tremendous population will disappear. Most of these nations have a policy of being as self sufficient in food production as possible, but water limitations, despite their draw down of aquifers at three times the renewal rate and considerable investment in desalination facilities, have kept them from achieving self-sufficiency.[15] Saudi Arabia, in fact, is doing significant promotion of the use of saline water and salt-tolerant species to increase food and feed production.[15] To date the lack of food self-sufficiency has not been a problem for these countries because they have had the income to trade for what they can't produce. As the oil revenues begin to disappear, however, the potential for revitalizing age-old conflicts in the region are of serious concern.

The disputable commercialization of water
Complicating all of the real issues involving water sharing is the fact that water has become the most commercial product of the century. Water is to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century.[8] Water has been put on the table as a tradeable commercial product in almost every bilateral and multilateral trade agreement negotiated during the rampant growth of commercial globalization. Many weaker countries are being pressured into putting their scarce water resources up for grabs in order to achieve other gains in these trade agreements, or as collateral for IMF and World bank loans. Even Canada is under considerable and constant pressure from the U.S. to put the country's "abundant" freshwater resources at the disposal of commercial interests. It was also, unfortunately, included in the proportionality section of the NAFTA agreement. Canadian water and the shared water resources of the Great Lakes basin are consistently viewed in Washington and many U.S. state capitals as the solution to growing water scarcity in that country's heartland. Once the tap is opened the proportionality clause in the NAFTA agreement will ensure that it stays open as long as NAFTA is in force.

The impact of climate change on the global redistribution of water resources further adds to the complications that threaten to contribute to future conflict. In some areas longstanding water resources, like many of the lakes in Africa, are drying up while other areas, such as much of Europe, are experiencing unprecedented flooding. Areas like the U.S. midwest, one of the world's foodbaskets, are drying up with perpetual crop losses driving more and more producers into bankruptcy. Australia, another global breadbasket, is in the midst of a serious national drought which may, in fact, not be temporary but signal a long-term climatic shift due to global warming. Extreme weather events are on the increase everywhere as the planet warms. All of these things affect the amount of water available to agriculture. The global emergency food grain reserves over this past decade have shrunk from a marginal 119 day supply to a very critical 53 day supply as of 2006, and continues to decline by 2-4 days supply per year.

There is little question that the growing global water crisis has the potential to be one of the key sources of conflict between nations, and even within nations, over the balance of this century and beyond. Considering the political difficulties that have accompanied the drafting, writing and signing of existing international freshwater agreements (most not during times of critical water scarcities), and the frequency with which those agreements are broken by one party or another, future agreements will become increasingly difficult to finalize and consistently open to abuse by the signatories.

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The following were key sources of material for this article;

1) IJC Releases Statement on its Review of Lake Ontario and St. Lawrence River Regulation
2) United States & Canada International Joint Commission Public Interest Advisory Group Public Meeting
3) Long Sault to Beauharnois: the St. Lawrence River restructured
4) Robert H Saunders Dam (before 9/11) and Dwight D Eisenhower Lock in Massena, N.Y.
5) The Lost Villages
6) Lake Ontario St. Lawrence River Regulation
7) Lake Ontario–St. Lawrence River Framework Data Project examines ups and downs of water levels
8) Water crisis looms in countrywide
9) Atlas of International Freshwater Agreements
10) The World.s International Freshwater Agreements: Historical Developments and Future Opportunities[PDF]
11) A Compilation of All The International Freshwater Agreements Entered Into by South Africa With Other States
12) The International Joint Commission and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement
13) International Shared Aquifer Resource Management (ISARM)
14) Internationally Shared Aquifer Resource Management: ISARM AMERICAS
15) Role of Biosaline Agriculture in Managing Freshwater Shortages and Improving Water Security
16) World Water Council: Water Crisis
17) Water in the Earth's atmosphere
18) Why is the Ocean Salty?