“Water shortages,” warns South Asia scholar Anatol Lieven, “present the greatest future threat to the viability of Pakistan as a state and a society.

This warning may be overstated, but Pakistan’s water situation is deeply troubling, as described in a new report from the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program, Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis.

Water availability has plummeted from about 5,000 m3 per capita in the early 1950s to less than 1,500 m3 per capita today. As Simi Kamal reports in the first chapter of Running on Empty, Pakistan is expected to become “water-scarce” (below 1,000 m3 per capita) by 2035—though some experts project this could happen in 2020, if not earlier.

In an unstable nation like Pakistan, water shortages can easily become security threats. In April 2009, alarm bells sounded when the Taliban pushed southeast of Swat into the Buner district of the Northwest Frontier Province. Not only is Buner close to Islamabad, it lies just 60 kilometers from the prized Tarbela Dam, which provides Pakistan with billions of cubic meters of precious water for irrigation each year.

Soaked, Salty, Dirty, and Dry

According to Kamal, Pakistan faces significant and widespread water challenges:

• Inefficient irrigation.
• Abysmal urban sanitation.
• Catastrophic environmental degradation.
• Lack of water laws to define water rights.
• Lack of a sound policy on large dams.

An arid country dependent on agriculture, Pakistan allocates more than 90 percent of its water resources to irrigation and other agricultural needs. Unfortunately, intensive irrigation and poor drainage practices have waterlogged and salinized the soil.

Women and Water in Rural Pakistan

Rural women and small farmers are particularly affected by Pakistan’s water crisis. Women bear the primary responsibility for obtaining water, but have been traditionally been shut out of government water-planning and decision-making processes. However, government and media initiatives, described by Sarah Halvorson in Running on Empty’s chapter on water and gender, are increasingly highlighting the importance of women’s participation.

Meanwhile, Adrien Couton reports that Islamabad’s water projects mainly benefit large and wealthy farmers—even though Pakistan has approximately four million farms smaller than two hectares.

Pakistan’s Thirsty Cities

With most of Pakistan’s water dedicated to agriculture, less than 10 percent is left for drinking water and sanitation. A quarter of Pakistanis lack access to safe drinking water—and many of them reside in the country’s teeming cities.

Worse, the drinking water that does exist is quickly disappearing. Lahore, which relies on groundwater, faces water table declines of up to 65 feet, as described by Anita Chaudhry and Rabia M. Chaudhry in their chapter on the city.

The scarcity of clean water in the cities—exacerbated by a lack of wastewater treatment—is a leading cause of deadly epidemics. At least 30,000 Karachiites (of whom 20,000 are children) perish each year from unsafe water.

Pakistan Must Act Now To Solve the Water Crisis

Pakistan arguably has the technological and financial resources to provide clean water. So what’s the hold-up? In her chapter on public health, Samia Altaf argues that the problem is the absence of a strong political lobby to advocate for water—and that no one holds Islamabad accountable for fixing the problem.

The report offers more recommendations for addressing Pakistan’s water:

• Invest in existing infrastructure and in modest, indigenous technology.
• Strike appropriate balances between centralized and decentralized management.
• Devote more attention to water allocation and distribution on local/individual levels.
• Understand the links between agricultural and urban water pressures.
• Embrace the role of the private sector.
• Conserve by favoring water-saving technology; less water-intensive crops; and water-conserving urban building design.
• Address structural obstacles like systemic inequality and gender discrimination.
• Take immediate action. Tremendous population growth and rapidly melting glaciers in the Himalayas ensure that the crisis will deepen before it eases.

The need for immediate action cannot be overstated. While Pakistan’s water crisis may not threaten its viability, it is undeniable that so long as the crisis rages on, essential components of the nation—such as the vital agricultural economy, the health of the population, and political and economic stability—lie very much in the balance.

Michael Kugelman is the Wilson Center’s South Asia specialist. He is co-editor, with Robert M. Hathaway, of the recently published Wilson Center book Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis, on which this post is based. Much of his work has focused on resource shortages in Pakistan and India.

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Two articles in the Sunday New York Times revealed that some residents of Mexico City and Charleston, West Virginia, share a common bond: lack of clean water. While drought and leaks have drained Mexico City’s reservoirs, pollution and run-off from coal plants has befouled water supplies in West Virginia’s small towns. But in both cases, the less powerful are the ones stuck up the creek without a paddle.

The growing concentration of atmospheric carbon has punctured Earth’s climate equilibrium, said Dr. Paul Epstein, pushing the planet toward rapid transitions with serious implications for human and ecological health. Epstein, associate director of Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, spoke with Amanda Staudt, a climate scientist from the National Wildlife Federation, at an event hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program on June 16, 2009.

Climate Change Is Accelerating

Global warming appears to be advancing more quickly than predicted, Staudt cautioned, because “the developed world isn’t reducing their emissions as quickly as anticipated…there are more and more emissions from the developing world, and they’re increasing faster than expected…[and] some of our natural sinks are less efficient than what we had thought.” Epstein cited a 2000 NOAA study showing that “the oceans have warmed 20 times as much as has the atmosphere” over the past half-century, altering Earth’s hydrological cycle and thus accelerating climate change.

No matter how drastically greenhouse gas emissions are cut, both experts warned, a litany of irreversible changes—including an increase in global average temperature and extreme weather events, desertification, sea-level rise, and species extinction—will continue.

Infectious Disease Increases

A warming climate will increase the range of many diseases, Epstein explained. “The clearest signal we have in terms of infectious disease is in the mountains of Africa, Asia, and Latin America,” he said. “What we’re seeing in Kilimanjaro, in the Tibetan Plateau, in the Andes, is that glaciers are retreating, plant communities are upwardly migrating, and mosquitoes that cause malaria, dengue fever, and so on are circulating at higher altitudes” and latitudes further from the equator. For example, malaria has appeared in Nairobi, a mile-high city, and chikungunya fever—previously confined to Indian Ocean littoral states—induced panic and warranted a front-page New York Times article when several residents of a small Italian town contracted it in 2007.

Extreme weather events help diseases proliferate. Heavy rainfall drives sanitation into clean water supplies, spreading E. coli, cryptosporidium, and other waterborne pathogens. Drought, meanwhile, has facilitated meningitis epidemics in Africa’s Sahel region and the spread of disease-bearing mosquitoes that breed in buckets of water stored during periods of water scarcity.

Assault on Forests, Agriculture

Climate shifts have important consequences for the health of forests and agriculture. The “absence of killing frosts means that [mountain pine] beetles are overwintering, moving to higher altitudes, moving to higher latitudes, even getting in more generations each year,” Epstein said. Drought “dries the resin that drowns the beetles as they try to drive through the bark,” leaving pines trees in the Rocky Mountain Range vulnerable and posing acute economic and ecological challenges to dependent communities.

The higher frequency of droughts, floods, and heat waves, coupled with the spread of weeds, pests, and pathogens, could reduce agricultural production. In addition, studies have shown that many food crops (including cassava) contain higher levels of cyanide at earlier stages of growth as carbon concentrations rise, putting people who ingest them at risk.

Healthy Solutions to Climate Change

To address these challenges, several “stabilization wedges” with inherently healthy characteristics—forest conservation and restoration; agriculture reform; energy efficiency; and wind, solar, and geothermal power production—should be prioritized, Epstein advised. Other, less healthy options—including biofuels, nuclear power, and fossil fuel-based technologies—should undergo thorough lifecycle analyses before winning endorsement, he said.

The design and construction of healthy cities—“green roofs, green buildings, tree-lined streets, biking lanes, walking paths, open space, smart growth, public transport”—as well as a smart energy grid is an essential part of the solution, said Epstein. Countries should also move away from deregulation, privatization, and liberalization of the economy in favor of a system that contains sufficient regulation, public-private partnerships, and appropriate constraints.

“If we do this right,” Epstein concluded, “it can be good for public health, good for security, good for the economy, and we certainly hope it’ll stabilize the climate.”

Top Photo: Red, dying trees signal the spread of beetle infestations in the pine forests of Manning Park, British Columbia. Courtesy Flickr user Tim Gage.

Photos of Amanda Staudt and Dr. Paul Epstein courtesy Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

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“[F]or global trade, global food security, and global energy security, the Indian Ocean is critical,” says Amit Pandya in The Indian Ocean: Resource and Governance Challenges, the most recent addition to the Stimson Center’s Regional Voices: Transnational Challenges report series. “And it remains a stage for the pursuit of the global strategic and regional military interests of all world and regional powers.”

During a launch event on May 21, Pandya—the project director behind the series—sat with Stimson Director Ellen Laipson, Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, USN (Ret.), and East-West Center in Washington Director Satu Limaye to reflect on the report and discuss the myriad challenges facing Indian Ocean states in the maritime resources and governance sectors.

The 21st Century’s “Center Stage”

The Indian Ocean’s international profile has been bolstered by the region’s rising economic prowess and political clout, significant resource wealth, and critical shipping routes—which transport the vast majority of oil leaving the Persian Gulf. Journalist Robert Kaplan recently labeled the region “center stage for the 21st century” because of its importance to global trade and energy, as well as the fact that it hosts the “dynamic great-power rivalry” between India and China.

The Stimson report is divided into two sections: the first comprises several articles written by authors from Indian Ocean littoral states, while the second includes pieces from Pandya and Laipson that analyze and interpret general trends in regional ocean governance.

Ocean Resources, Maritime Security

“In the last half-century, the production of fish and fish products in the Indian Ocean (IO) region has increased tremendously as a result of improvements in fish capture technology and rising demand caused by a growing global population,” write Edward N. Kimani et al. in their article in the report, which examines southwest Indian Ocean fisheries. These trends have precipitated conflict between small-scale artisanal fishers and industrial fishers, in addition to placing enormous pressure on ocean ecosystems. Effective management mechanisms must be implemented in order to address overfishing and its consequences for global food security and ecosystems. (A forthcoming documentary, The End of the Line, takes an in-depth look at overfishing.)

In a similar vein, Mak Joon Num’s contribution, “Pirates, Barter Traders, and Fishers: Whose Rights, Whose Security?”—roundly praised by speakers at the report launch—considers the diverse range of stakeholders operating in the Straits of Malacca and the Sulu Sea. Malaysian trawler fishers, Acehnese pirates, and Filipino barter traders compete to glean their livelihoods from the ocean. All are victims and predators in their own right, Mak Joon Num argues, and climate change, poverty, and a lack of coordinated ocean governance policies exacerbate the present problems of resource scarcity, disputed sovereignty, and unsustainability.

Shifting to the northwestern littoral states of the Indian Ocean, Mustafa Alani presses the case for a comprehensive maritime security compact in the Persian Gulf, which holds more than 30 percent of the world’s known oil deposits. The Gulf Cooperation Council provides the foundational structure for such an agreement, which would likely comprise several levels of cooperation, ranging from “soft security”—managing fishing and environmental degradation, search-and-rescue coordination, and marine transport—to “strategic security”—coordinating naval exercises and anti-terrorism operations.

Questions of Governance

In order to address these challenges, concerned states must put forth “more effort at the national level to integrate civilian and military aspects of maritime policy,” Laipson concludes in the report’s final lines. “We also need a fresh look at the regional and international levels to ensure that governance of the maritime realm strives to manage the complex interplay of human and natural activity and to maintain the Indian Ocean as a sustainable zone for commerce, energy, security, and peace.”

Population: A Missing Factor?

While the report does an excellent job of illuminating the resource and governance challenges in the Indian Ocean, it fails to substantively consider one factor that will have a profound influence on all others: population growth. Burgeoning populations in Indian Ocean states will have considerable consequences for resource management, governance, poverty, and security in the region, particularly in relation to migration, human trafficking, overfishing, and ecosystem health.

Photo: Artisanal fishers off the Malabar coast of India. Courtesy Flickr user mckaysavage.

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Last Friday, China announced plans to become the world’s largest producer of electric cars. The Chinese government will invest $1.46 billion in consumer subsidies for electric cars, just as Washington is plowing $25 billion into flagging Detroit automakers. With doubts looming about China’s enthusiasm for the tough upcoming Copenhagen climate negotiations, and with China set to displace the United States as the country with the largest auto fleet by 2025, this commitment to electric cars has vast implications for climate change, energy, and global geopolitics.

China is already the third-largest car producer and the second-largest car market in the world. If China could electrify its entire auto fleet by 2020, it could cut annual oil consumption by 130 million tons, reducing dependence on foreign oil by 20-30 percent more than if it were to adopt high-efficiency combustion vehicles. This would go a long way toward easing global competition for oil. It would also effectively eliminate the number-one source of air pollution in major Chinese cities, relieving a huge environmental health burden. Reports indicate that residents of at least 400 Chinese cities will face significant health hazards—including brain damage, respiratory problems and infections, lung cancer, and emphysema—from airborne sulfur by 2010 if auto pollution is not brought under control.

As these subsidies and other policies (including next year’s nation-wide adoption of EURO IV emissions standards) demonstrate, the Chinese government is committed to reducing cars’ impact in China, and the country is poised to be a global leader in electric cars. China’s battery-company-turned-automaker BYD (which Warren Buffet is apparently investing in) will release the first zero-emission vehicle, the F3e, in late 2009. The plug-in, dual-fuel F3 was the top-selling car in China last year, selling for $22,000. In a report released last month, McKinsey & Company found electric vehicles the best option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from China’s transportation sector. China’s low labor costs, fast-growing auto market, and successful battery manufacturers make it a candidate for world leadership in electric-vehicle production, especially as no clear leader already exists.

The greatest obstacles to electric vehicles taking off in China are the costs—both to the government and the consumer—and the current lack of support infrastructure, including battery-charging and replacement stations. Installing support infrastructure could cost 5–10 billion RMB by 2020, not to mention the costs of further research and development to improve the safety and speed of batteries and cars, as well as the cost of consumer subsidies.

However, the China Environment Forum reports that many new car owners in China display a surprising indifference to the price of a prospective vehicle, preferring to save longer in order to afford a better car rather than settling for the first car they can afford or buying a used car. An interesting cost-effective alternative is the electric bike, which China vehicle emissions expert Vance Wagner notes “should be given high priority as an urban sustainable transportation solution [as they] provide much greater urban mobility than buses, with comparable environmental impact.”

Further research on the health and environmental impacts of electric vehicles is needed before large-scale adoption. There are many concerns, for example, about how to safely recycle car batteries without causing lead pollution. Additionally, having cars run on electricity will reduce air pollution, but will also place a huge burden on China’s already-strained power sector, which experiences energy shortfalls every year. Making the entire vehicle fleet dependent on the power sector would require a major expansion of regulatory and generating capacity. It could also raise questions of environmental justice, as rural communities with little access to health care—but in close proximity to coal-fired power plants, from which China derives 80 percent of its electricity—would bear the pollution burden of city driving. Although most experts and officials agree that electrifying China’s vehicle fleet is the best option in terms of environmental health, energy security, and climate change, additional research into the cumulative impacts of electric vehicles is necessary.

Photo: Smog blankets the eastern Chinese city of Jinan. Courtesy of Flickr user Sam_BB.

By China Environment Forum Program Assistant Linden Ellis.

Startling new research in the peer-reviewed Environmental Science & Technology shows that fossil groundwater in southern Jordan is radioactive at levels up to 2000% higher than the international drinking water standard. That the radioactivity is naturally occurring is little consolation for Jordanians—and perhaps for residents of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Libya, who sit atop the same sandstone Nubian aquifer system.

The shocking findings in “High Naturally Occurring Radioactivity in Fossil Groundwater from the Middle East” by Duke University’s Avner Vengosh and colleagues should be cause for major concern. As Vengosh, a geo-chemistry professor with long-standing research collaborations with Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian colleagues, wrote in an email: “Most of the Jordanian population is not using the fossil water for drinking—for now. Only few thousand people in Aqaba and Karak might be currently exposed to this water. However, Jordan has launched a huge water project to transfer the water from the aquifer in the south to the capital Amman, which would expose a large population to this water.”

According to Vengosh, although these specific findings are limited to the water groundwater under in Jordan, Saudi Arabia is using groundwater from the same aquifer (the Saq) extensively, mostly for agriculture but also for drinking. In this arid part of the world, countries have turned to nonrenewable fossil groundwater as one of the few remaining options. As stated in the article’s abstract, “These findings raise concerns about the safety of this and similar nonrenewable groundwater reservoirs, exacerbating the already severe water crisis in the Middle East.”

Vengosh shared the findings with Jordanian authorities ahead of publication. While it is hard to predict the social, economic, and political reactions to this news, it is easier to anticipate the effects of sustained consumption of water contaminated with radium isotopes. Vengosh says exposure to much lower levels of radium resulted in higher frequencies of bone cancer in a New Jersey community.

Photo: Avner Vengosh. Copyright Duke University Photography.

I’m a little over halfway through my brief stay here at the Wilson Center. This fellowship was made possible by CNN: They laid me off, along with my entire science, tech, and environment news team, in December.

We’re not alone: Many reporters and producers like us have found new meaning to the phrase “working journalist.” Non-working journalists now represent a significant piece of the pie.

Rightly or wrongly, many top news executives view beats like science and environment as peripheral to the journalistic mission, or at least to the business plan, of their organizations. Attention to these topics in the general media has a hard time competing with things viewed as more central, whether it’s politics or Paris Hilton.

On Thursday, February 12, in the Wilson Center’s Flom Auditorium, we’ll celebrate Lincoln’s 200th birthday by discussing how to make sure science and environment reporting doesn’t perish from this earth.

Two of the most accomplished science and environment reporters in Washington will join us: Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press and Elizabeth Shogren (not yet confirmed) of NPR. Seth and Elizabeth were among the best chroniclers of the environmental controversies that marked the Bush era, and are closely tracking the promised “change” that may (or may not) be underway in the Obama administration. Both are alumni of news organizations that have recently seen traumatic change: Seth as a correspondent for the Washington Bureau of Knight-Ridder, and Elizabeth for the Los Angeles Times.

Also on the agenda is the future of journalism itself: Newspapers as we now know them may be terminally ill; TV broadcast news as we know it may be five or 10 years behind. Panelist Jan Schaffer, director of J-Lab at American University, will bring her expertise on new- and community-based media. J-Lab is a journalism R&D; center, focusing on providing both guidance and financial support to citizen journalism projects. Jan, a former Philadelphia Inquirer editor and Pulitzer Prize winner, will help us see the way to what journalism will look like 10 and 20 years from now.

Space is limited, so RSVP to the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program soon. If you can’t make it to D.C., you can watch the webcast live.

Photo: Peter Dykstra. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Peter Dykstra is the former executive producer for science, technology, environment, and weather at CNN, and a current public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He also writes for www.mnn.com.

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“There are no winners when elephants and humans compete for the same resources,” writes Amirtharaj Christy Williams, a biologist with the World Wildlife Federation (WWF), in the BBC’s Green Room. As urban sprawl and deforestation across Southeast Asia shrink elephants’ natural habitat, they are increasingly forced to compete with humans for access to freshwater and vegetation. And when elephants and humans compete for natural resources, elephants are no match for the “destructive power of humans.”

According to Williams, elephants need roughly 200 square kilometers of forest to roam. When their habitats become fragmented by roads, canals, dams, and mines—as in Nepal, India, and Bangladesh—or are destroyed to create palm oil, coffee, tea, and other plantations—as in Indonesia—they cross roads and trample through fields with awesome destructive power, sometimes taking human lives in their search for food and water. Angered and frightened, the villagers, “lacking technical help and access to effective and humane mitigation methods, retaliate by throwing burning tyres, shooting at the beasts with sharpened nails, even by laying out foods laced with killer pesticides,” Williams writes.

But it would be too easy to blame people for their destructive reaction to the elephants. “Imagine the psychological impact of elephant raids on villagers living in fragile mud and bamboo huts,” and the subsequent loss of a loved one, and you can begin to understand the human side of this conflict, Williams observes.

To be sure, those in illegal settlements and plantations in protected parks are partly to blame for encroaching on elephant habitat with little regard for the consequences. According to an October 2007 WWF report, Gone in an Instant, Indonesia’s illegal Sumatran coffee plantations were responsible for a decline in the elephant population in the Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park (BBSNP) between 2000 and 2004. The report found that 45 “problem” elephants were killed in the BBSNP during that time as a result of human-elephant conflict. Most alarmingly, the report discovered that the conflict between illegal coffee farmers and wildlife was not limited to elephants, but that the Sumatran rhino and tiger—both listed as critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature—were also victims of human displacement and poaching.

At the same time, “more wholesale damage is caused by sanctioned habitat clearing at the hands of short-sighted government officials who encourage large areas to be set aside for monoculture cash-crop plantations or infrastructural and development projects” than by the retaliatory acts of villagers and farmers, Williams argues. Environmental impact assessments written by corrupt officials and narrow-minded politicians with their own interests in mind often neglect elephants (and other species) altogether. The sad truth is that “elephants are virtually led to the slaughter by the very governments mandated to protect them.”

Yet solutions to human-wildlife conflict do exist. “Sharing the Forest: Protecting Gorillas and Helping Families in Uganda,” outlines how a holistic approach—encompassing environmental conservation, family planning, basic health care, and support for alternative livelihoods—can lessen human-wildlife conflict. It is possible to reduce the rate of human-wildlife conflict—while boosting endangered species’ populations and helping communities escape poverty—but it takes creativity, patience, and a comprehensive approach.

Photo: Elephants in the wild near Habarana, Sri Lanka. Across East and Southeast Asia, urban sprawl and deforestation threaten wild elephants by displacing them from their natural habitats, forcing them to compete with humans for access to vital natural resources. Courtesy of flickr user Jungle Boy.