May 11 2012
In his Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) blog "The Internationalist," Stewart Patrick, senior fellow and director of the CFR Program on International Institutions and Global Governance, writes about the first U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment of Global Water Security (.pdf), which "predicts that by 2030 humanity's 'annual global water requirements' will exceed 'current sustainable water supplies' by 40 percent." According to Patrick, the document says "[a]bsent major policy interventions, water insecurity will generate widespread social and political instability and could even contribute to state failure in regions important to U.S. national security." He describes several factors that are pushing a "combination of surging global demand for increasingly scarce fresh water in certain volatile regions of poor governance." Though "the intelligence community has performed a great service" with this report, "the policy response to date has been just a drop in the bucket," Patrick concludes (5/8).
This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente. |