Given the upward population trends and the corresponding downward trends in the health of the global ecosystem, it is not hard to see that if we simply continue doing business as usual, some very serious problems we already have will only get worse. Even now, about 80 per cent of the world’s population (5.6 billion people) live below poverty level. A third (2.6 billion people) of us lack basic sanitation services. Over a billion have inadequate access to water. One out of every eight (870 million people) lack enough food. A billion have no access to even basic health care, at the same time that increased global travel and commerce are fostering and spreading new diseases that affect us and the plants and animals on which we depend.
That’s where we are today. What happens if population pressures finally hit a threshold that tumbles the dominoes of food, water, energy, climate, pollution and biodiversity, which in turn break up the intricate workings of the global society? That would be a global tipping point, which would change the world from what is now one of relative comfort, to one where those machete fights in the Himalayas, or the Road Warrior-style gun battles at Egyptian petrol queues, rapidly spread throughout the planet. Lack of access to resources creates instability.
Those scenarios aren’t way off in the future. They’re already here, in many communities, in both developed and developing nations. Conflicts over water, for example, are already brewing all over the world, both within and across national boundaries, including in the western United States; between the United States and Mexico; between Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Guinea; within China; between Syria and Israel; and between Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The terrorist group Islamic State has captured dams and other infrastructure in Iraq in order to control access to water and electricity and to use catastrophic dam failure by bombing as a weapon of coercion over those downriver. In modernised Bangalore – known as the Silicon Valley of India – people have to lock up their water-storage tanks to guard against theft, and water is delivered to the taps so infrequently and irregularly that entrepreneurs are developing mobile phone apps to alert people when it is on the way, so they can rush home in time to fill their containers. Power there fails frequently, especially when the reservoirs that generate electricity run dry. Pakistan has long walked a tightrope of delivering enough water to its farms and people while still holding enough in reservoirs to provide the hydroelectric power it largely relies on to generate electricity. The situation often comes down to choosing between a drink of water and turning on the lights. In 2012 the sweltering summer – unusually hot and dry even by Pakistan desert standards – brought the situation to a head. Water had to be diverted from power generation to keep people alive, leading to a shortfall of nearly 45 per cent of the national demand for electricity, and eighteen to twenty hours per day of power outages.
The results were massive violent demonstrations and riots, and as a US National Research Council report on the social stresses of climate change put it, ‘burned trains, damaged banks and gas stations, looted shops, blocked roads, and, in some instances, targeted [attacks] on homes of members of the National Assembly and provincial assemblies’ (John D. Steinbruner et al., Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis, National Academies Press, Washington DC, 2012). The drought and hot weather had been going on since 2010, and caused international tensions as well as unrest within Pakistan’s borders. The Pakistani Foreign Minister blamed India for illegally diverting water from the Indus River system before it could reach Pakistan, while the Pakistan Commissioner of the Indus River System Authority put the blame on climate change, primarily caused by the developed countries of the West.
The same US National Research Council report pointed out that Egypt could easily erupt into violence and social unrest within a decade, posing a huge security concern for the rest of the world, as increasing drought from climate change begins to dry up the Nile. Water from the Nile is now required to irrigate fields that provide half of the wheat that is essential to feeding eighty million Egyptians (the other half is imported). The problem is that the river flows through Sudan and Ethiopia before it gets to Egypt, accumulating nearly half of its volume upstream of Egypt’s borders, and there are no international agreements about apportioning water between the three countries.
What happens if Egypt’s wheat fields turn into parched ground? Millions of people, already living on the edge and ready to erupt into violence – as the Arab Spring and the 2013 petrol-station gunfights in Egypt showed – get hungry and mad. Food prices rise and the economy goes downhill as more Egyptian pounds are diverted towards importing food. Unemployed, hungry people take to the streets, and leaders become powerless in the face of angry mobs. Meanwhile, border tensions with Sudan escalate, and the terrorist groups that have long called Sudan home take advantage of the social unrest to expand their influence. Egypt, desperate for water to irrigate its fields, attacks Sudan. In response, terrorists get their hands on a nuclear device. Suddenly the Middle East is at war, and the flow of oil from Saudi Arabia – the biggest oil producer in the world – is disrupted. The United States, still reliant on the Middle East for about 13 per cent of its oil, jumps into the fray to protect its national interests. And so it escalates further. The world is plunged into a crisis so all-consuming that any efforts to mitigate the longer-term global pressures – climate change, pollution, environmental contamination – go out the window, and our global die is cast for the future. The world becomes no longer as good as it is now. Instead, it becomes a world where the survivalists would rightly say, ‘I told you so.’
Similar scenarios could play out in many parts of the world. The specific triggers differ from place to place – in New York, for instance, the straw that breaks the camel’s back could be another inch of sea-level rise due to melting glaciers combined with more frequent superstorm Sandy-type deluges, whereas in Paris or Rome it could be environmental refugees who further strain already over-stressed societal support systems. But the common thread everywhere is basic human needs meeting diminishing resources. That’s when a final push – which in times of plenty might have little impact – can cascade into crisis that sends the world over the edge, and that’s where fear for the future can begin to look very genuine. How palpable that fear should really be is what the rest of this book is about. And since the chief driver is how many of us there are on the planet, let’s start with that.
2
Liz, Tony, Emma and Clara, on the road to Kurnool, India, February 2007
It was late afternoon, the sun getting low in a hazy sky, and our car was the only one on a narrow ribbon of asphalt stretching off into the distance, dusty brown fields on either side. Our Indian driver’s response to seeing the line of bandits blocking the road – stringy-muscled, sun-browned men in all manner of well-worn baggy pants and ill-fitting, mismatched shirts, kids in raggedy shorts and T-shirts, even a few women in their saris – was born more out of the last couple of days’ frustrations than out of any ill will. His eyes darkened and narrowed