This academic paper puts it pretty simply:
lower precipitation increases the probability that Roman troops, who relied on local food supplies, starve. This pushes soldiers to mutiny, hence weakening the emperor’s support, and increasing the probability he is assassinated.
The modern lesson might be that if ecological change starts to hurt your society, it might be better (for the ruler) to keep the military well funded and let everyone else suffer.
This paper is about incorporating local government and utility policies/actions in measures of water risk, which in the past have tended to focus on physical measurements. This makes sense because there are some very water scarce places that have managed their limited resources well, and there are some moderately water scarce places where political and bureaucratic mismanagement of resources have led to crises. This probably makes some sense because when the lack of water is starkly obvious (if your country is a desert for example), it is impossible to ignore whereas when the problem is only going to crop up under extreme conditions, local politicians and less competent bureaucrats can ignore it the vast majority of time and nobody will raise the alarm. Better data might help make these crises more predictable and preventable, rather than seeming to sneak up out of nowhere.
Mapping Public Water Management by Harmonizing and Sharing Corporate Water Risk Information
by , , and –In response to water crises across the globe, data on biophysical conditions associated with water risk have increasingly been collected and understood. However, a complete assessment of water risk also requires an understanding of public water management. Currently there is a lack of global comparable data on public water management, leading to incomplete assessments of risk and suboptimal risk mitigation activities. To fill in that gap in data, this Technical Note proposes the creation of a global comparable geodatabase of public water management indicators to spur tangible improvements in water management. The geodatabase will be populated by crowdsourcing data through the risk assessments of multinational companies that are incentivized to share anonymized public water management as an innovative risk reduction practice.
According to NBC, Cyprus is reducing water allocations to farmers in favor of public water supply, partly to protect the tourism industry. Cyprus has desalination, and some farmers have wells, but these have begun to experience saltwater intrusion.
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Arizona water managers are being accused of finding a way to gain the system as climate change takes hold and there may not be enough water to fill both Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Under a formula set by the state and the U.S. Interior Department, Lake Powell will send 9 million acre-feet to Lake Mead this year to prevent shortage, rather than the 8.23 million acre-feet it would send under normal river conditions. Each acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons and is enough to serve about two households for a year.
Conserving enough to prevent a shortage but not so much as to slow the flow from Lake Powell represents a “sweet spot,” CAP argued, in language that has now alarmed upstream water officials…
CAP’s “manipulation of demands in order to take advantage of the supposed ‘sweet spot’ in Lake Powell water releases undermines (regional conservation), and is unacceptable,” Denver Water CEO James Lochhead wrote.
Phoenix wasn’t on the recent list I posted about the cities most likely to experience a serious water crisis, but maybe it should have been. According to The Guardian:
Phoenix gets less than eight inches of rainfall each year; most of the water supply for central and southern Arizona is pumped from Lake Mead, fed by the Colorado river over 300 miles away…
That river is drying up. This winter, snow in the Rocky Mountains, which feeds the Colorado, was 70% lower than average. Last month, the US government calculated that two thirds of Arizona is currently facing severe to extreme drought…
The Phoenix area draws from groundwater, from small rivers to the east, and from the mighty Colorado. The Hoover Dam holds much of the Colorado’s flow in the vast Lake Mead reservoir, but the river itself is sorely depleted. That water has now dropped to within a few feet of levels that California, Nevada and Arizona, which all rely on it, count as official shortages. Lake Powell, the reservoir at the other end of the Grand Canyon, similarly averages half its historic levels.
Let’s review – snowmelt, rainfall, and groundwater all disappearing, and the city continues to grow.
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Apparently Cape Town, South Africa will run out of water if it doesn’t rain before April. If that happens, the plan is to make people line up and ration out drinking water.
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I’ll keep this on the short side. Here are a few trends I see:
Risk of War. I think I said about a year ago that if we could through the next four years without a world war or nuclear detonation, we will be doing well. Well, one year down and three to go. That’s the bright side. The dark side is that it is time to acknowledge there is a regional war going on in the Middle East. It could escalate, it could go nuclear, and it could result in military confrontation between the United States and Russia. Likewise, the situation in North Korea could turn into a regional conflict, could go nuclear, and could lead to military confrontation between the United States and China.
Decline…and Fall? A question on my mind is whether the United States is a nation in decline, and I think the surprisingly obvious answer is yes. The more important question is whether it is a temporary dip, or the beginning of a decline and fall.
Risk of Financial Crisis. The risk of another serious financial crisis is even scarier that war in some ways, at least a limited, non-nuclear war. Surprisingly, the economic effects can be more severe, more widespread and longer lasting. We are seeing the continued weakening of regulations attempting to limit systemic risk-taking for short-term gain. Without a pickup in long-term productivity growth and with the demographic and ecological headwinds that we face, another crisis equal to or worse than the 2007 one could be the one that we don’t recover from.
Ecological Collapse? The story about vanishing insects was eye-opening to me. Could global ecosystems go into a freefall? Could populous regions of the world face a catastrophic food shortage? It is hard to imagine these things coming to a head in the near term, but the world needs to take these risks seriously since the consequences would be so great.
Technology. With everything else going on, technology just marches forward, of course. One technology I find particularly interesting is new approaches to research that mine and attempt to synthesize large bodies of scientific research.
Can the human species implement good ideas? Solutions exist. I would love to end on a positive note, but at the moment I find myself questioning whether our particular species of hairless ape can implement them.
But – how’s this for ending on a positive note – like I said at the beginning, the one thing about 2017 that definitely didn’t suck was that we didn’t get blown up!