Access to adequate fresh water supplies is a critically important societal challenge posed by climate change. With rising heat and shifting rainfall patterns, and reduced water storage resilience, fresh water supplies are already diminishing in the western United States, Mexico, the Middle East, and Mediterranean. Water shortages have been implicated in recent international conflict, and a recent Department of Defense study underscores the geopolitical importance of this problem.
Center for Climate and Life scientists focus on the future security of water resources, storage, and access, guided by an improved understanding of the forces that are changing water security at international to local scales. Their research results in informed policy and business decisions that ensure sufficient, reliable access to this basic human need.
Visit climateandlife.columbia.edu to learn more about the Center’s mission to understand how climate change impacts life’s essential resources — food, water, and shelter — and to develop sustainable energy resources.
the hyperlink in this article to the DoD water-conflict source is broken.
Not climate affects water resources, and changes in the state of water affect the climate.
It is known that more than 60% of water falling on land, a person deprived of its natural functions. Water from arable land, artificial reservoirs, landfills returns to the sky unchanged. Even more water evaporates in industrial and communal technologies. The natural link in the transformation of water is the passage through the food and plant organs. Artificial evaporation already prevails over the natural and create a new phenomenon of atmospheric phenomena. Hence the natural disasters and the approach of a global catastrophe. It is urgent to return natural evaporation to nature and reduce artificial ones.