Germany is one of the regions with the greatest water losses in the world. In the past 20 years, the Federal Republic of Germany has lost water in the area of Lake Constance. Even experts find that shocking.
If you are reading this text, another heat record is being broken somewhere on this planet. The year 2022 is hotter and sunnier than most of its predecessors. Once again.
With an average temperature of 19.2 degrees, July was 2.3 degrees Celsius above the value of the reference period 1961 to 1990, says the German Weather Service. Compared to the period 1991 to 2020, July was 0.9 degrees warmer.
After the heat of the century in 2021, in which 38 degrees were reached even in Arctic Siberia, records are tumbling again this year, such as the 51 degrees in India in April.
The highs are not something special, but rather the accumulation, says the Swiss geographer and climate researcher Heinz Wanner, professor at the Institute for Climate and Climate Impact Research at the University of Bern.
He predicts: In Central Europe, people will have to expect summer temperatures of 43 degrees instead of 35 degrees in the future. Tropical climate in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. “This is the new reality now. We have entered a new climate regime.”
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A study that was published in the journal Nature Geoscience in 2021 and caused a stir among experts came to the explosive conclusion: Europe is drying up. An international team of experts did not use the temperature as a criterion, but examined the tree rings of 147 European oak trees, some of which date back to 75 BC. dating back.
For the first time, calendar-accurate information about hydro-climatic changes could be collected over long periods of time. This puts the focus on the most valuable raw material of the future, the “principle of all things”, as the Greek philosopher Thales von Milet already knew: water.
Because although 70 percent of the earth’s surface is covered by water, water as a usable commodity is scarce. The world is running out of water. And that has biological, but above all social and economic effects of unknown proportions.
More than a billion people drink contaminated water, and another 2.3 billion suffer from water shortages. The UN’s promise that access to water is a human right is being broken every day.
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Heat and drought cause rivers and reservoirs to dry up and make entire regions uninhabitable. The low water level, as is currently the case in the Rhine, is slowing down globalization. Routes are blocked, containers have to reduce their freight.
At the same time, water consumption in industrialized countries is wasteful. The sealing of the mega-cities makes moors and wetlands disappear, the overexploitation in the Amazon and other forest areas robs the most important water reservoir of its space.
The consequences are dramatic in all parts of the world. Example California: The Golden State experiences an extreme dry period. The ground beneath the 40 million inhabitants has been sinking dangerously for years because hundreds of thousands of farmers and private households have to dig deeper and deeper for groundwater to get water. At the same time, there are more than 43,000 swimming pools in Los Angeles alone.
The volume of the swimming pools is roughly equivalent to the water consumed each month – at two liters per day – by all residents of California. Now a team of scientists in California is calling for state regulation of water abstraction for the first time.
Example Brazil: In São Paulo, with 12 million inhabitants the largest city in South America, there is a drought like it has not been in 85 years. Rivers dry up, leaving behind a foul-smelling mixture of chemicals and sewage.
Reservoirs such as the Itaipú power plant, which generates most of Brazil’s energy, are only 31 percent full because of the lack of rain, reports the broadcaster “Jornal Nacional”. The average over the past 20 years was 64 percent. At 29 percent, Brazil experienced a blackout in 2001.
Example Spain: According to the UN, the Iberian Peninsula is threatened with desertification. The number of forest fires is increasing. Intensive agriculture is leaching the soil. Hundreds of thousands of farmers are illegally digging wells to save their wine and olive crops or to water their strawberry plantations. The water table has dropped to 500 meters below zero in some places.
“If this continues, southern Spain will turn into a desert landscape by the middle of the century,” says climate researcher Jonathan Gómez Cantero from Madrid, who advises the European Parliament.
In Germany, actually a country with plenty of water, the topic comes into focus. 74 percent of the water in our pipes comes from groundwater. According to the German Weather Service, in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg/Berlin only a good 40 percent of the average total precipitation for the year has fallen after seven months of the year.
Ergo: The drinking water networks are reaching their limits. The first ideas are circulating: Berlin’s Greens want to ban lawn sprinkling if there is a persistent water shortage.
The trend is worrying: Germany is one of the regions with the greatest water losses in the world. “Satellite data show that Germany has lost water around Lake Constance over the past 20 years,” says Jay Famiglietti of the Global Institute for Water Security in Canada. That was a “shocking surprise” even for experts.
The federal government has now developed a national water strategy with which Germany is to determine its water footprint – direct and indirect water consumption – and to identify opportunities for savings.
Conclusion: The wars of the future will no longer be fought over oil, gas or land, but over water. One of the founding fathers of the USA, the natural scientist Benjamin Franklin, had already guessed: “Only when the well has dried up do we recognize the value of the water.”
Michael Bröcker is editor-in-chief of Media Pioneer. The free morning briefing can be found here: www.gaborsteingart.com
