Will your kids fight in the ‘water wars’?

In today’s Big Story podcast, a recent report found that by 2030 demand for water will outstrip the world’s supply by 40 per cent. In the United States, the Colorado River and other major sources of water are drying up. The number of droughts worldwide is skyrocketing. And Canada has a lot of water that other nations will someday soon not just want but badly need. Does this mean that wars over water are inevitable? Maybe not.

The Big Story is joined today by Dr. Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist, Global Futures Professor at Arizona State University, former Executive Director Emeritus of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan and the host of the What About Water podcast. He joins us to discuss all the things that make him feel anxious and optimistic about the future supply of potable on Earth.

“Every nation wants to have its own food security and its own water security,” he said, “those political boundaries create a whole new set of constraints that we have to deal with.”

Increasing scarcity of a resource necessary to life is how conflicts are born. So where does water fit into our current geopolitical tensions? What can we do now to avoid fights later? And can we science out way out of this somehow?

You can subscribe to The Big Story podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google and Spotify.

You can also find it at thebigstorypodcast.ca.