H2O ≠ CO2: framing and responding to the global water crisis | |
|---|---|
| type | Journal Article |
| author | Derek Vollmer; Ian J Harrison |
| abstract | "Climate change will likely exacerbate water crises and further threaten human security, particularly in developing countries (UNESCO/UN-Water 2020). Indeed, there are numerous overlaps between climate change and water insecurity, arguably the two most important environmental crises the world must face in the coming decades. However, we argue that borrowing from the climate change mitigation playbook will not work for water and may distract from more effective solutions. The water crisis is multi-dimensional—the same place can suffer from too much or too little water in the same year, and scarcity is a function of not just physical water quantity, but also quality, timing, and access. Threats to freshwater biodiversity are more complex and in some places are being exacerbated by attempts to improve human water security. Therefore, applications of concepts such as planetary boundaries, footprints, and offsets in the water context can bias actions and investment into proposed solutions that are poorly matched with the actual problems on the ground. We explore these mismatches and propose an alternate framing that puts context-based freshwater health at the center of water security." |
| keywords | water security, climate change, freshwater health, water footprint, offsets, planetary boundaries |
| url | https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abd6aa/pdf |
| date | 2021 |
| journal | Environmental Research Letters |
| publisher | IOP Publishing |
H2O ≠ CO2: framing and responding to the global water crisis
