Published on Sunday, November 2, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
It's the world's most precious commodity, yet many of us take it for granted. But that's all about to change.
by Juliette Jowit
It's hard to imagine why humans would have chosen the achingly arid stone desert of Wadi Faynan for their first settlement. But water would have been one important reason, says archaeologist Steven Mithen. When Neolithic men and women arrived 11,500 years ago, things were very different: the climate was cooler and wetter; the landscape was covered in vegetation including wild figs, legumes and cereals, and there would have been wild goats and ibex for meat.

Wadi Faynan, Jordan: This Palestinian Beduin Family of 11 live in the desert. They collect their water from the waterpipes and manage to get 15 litres of water each per day. (Photo: Matilde Gattoni/ArabianEye) Initially WF16, as it's now called, would have been a seasonal camp. But Mithen, professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading, and his fellow archaeologist Bill Finlayson believe that, gradually, people stayed longer. Sifting evidence from so long ago, the archaeologists can't be sure, but remains of food from different seasons and the scale of 'rubbish' piles suggest that about 10,000 years ago the inhabitants stopped moving altogether. If they are right, it would make this one of the oldest sites ever found where humans made a permanent settlement, learned to farm, and changed the course of human civilisation. But the tiny community drawn to water, which attracted successive waves of settlements, would eventually all but destroy the resource which made life possible. It is a pattern that's been repeated for millennia, around the world, and it now threatens us on a global scale.

First people cut trees for shelter and fuel, until rains swept away the soil instead of seeping into shallow aquifers, and the springs dried up. At least as long ago as the Bronze Age, farmers began mankind's obsession with diverting water for crops to feed the growing population. Meanwhile, the moist, cool climate which encouraged the first settlement was naturally becoming drier and hotter.

At least twice, historians believe, Wadi Faynan was abandoned. The first time possibly because of a sharp change in the climate, and later because it became too polluted. Today, Bedouin who survive in the valley have laid pipes down the dry stream bed to suck what is left of the spring in order to irrigate fields of tomatoes they have scratched out of the dry soil. But it's getting harder. According to local water lore, good rains now come in less than every other year.

The farmers in Wadi Faynan are not alone. Like communities around the world, they are paying the price for thousands of years of exploitation of our environment. Already, 1bn people do not have enough clean water to drink, and at least 2bn cannot rely on adequate water to drink, clean and eat - let alone have enough left for nature. Lack of water is blamed for many of the world's most distressing crises: millions of deaths each year from disease and malnutrition, chronic hunger, keeping children away from schools which offer hope of a better life. Mostly it is the poor who suffer, but increasingly rich nations are struggling, too. Australia has endured so many dry years that a leading climatologist has said it's time to stop saying 'gripped by drought' and accept that the lack of rain is permanent.

In parts of the US supplies are so vulnerable that last autumn the Red Cross delivered water parcels to the town of Orme in Tennessee. 'I thought, "That can't be the Red Cross. We're Americans!"' resident Susan Anderson told a reporter. In California, some farmers abandoned their crops this year as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared the first state-wide drought for 17 years. Meanwhile Barcelona was so desperate that it began importing tankers of water from cities along the coast. Even in the notoriously wet UK, water has become such a problem in the crowded southeast that one company plans to build a desalination plant, the sort of desperate measure associated with oil-rich desert states.

The Stockholm International Water Institute talks about 'an acute and devastating humanitarian crisis'; the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, warns of a 'perfect storm'; Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary General, has raised the spectre of 'water wars'. And, as the population keeps growing and getting richer, and global warming changes the climate, experts are warning that unless something is done, billions more will suffer lack of water - precipitating hunger, disease, migration and ultimately conflict.

In a bid to avert this catastrophe, politicians, economists and engineers are pressing for dramatic changes to the way water is managed, from tree planting and simple storage wells, to multibillion dollar schemes to replumb the planet with dams and pipes, or manufacture freshwater from sewers and the sea.

The water crisis is an expression of the environmental catastrophe of human over-exploitation. This is the age the Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen has called 'the Anthropocene', because the natural system has been so fundamentally altered by human activity. And it all began when people settled down and began to chop wood and farm.

'The start of sedentary communities is the start of the need to manage fresh water supplies,' says Steven Mithen. 'This is a starting point for our whole modern dilemma. It's gone from the concerns of individual settlements, to cities, to nations, and it's now a global issue.'

There is, in theory, plenty of water on the earth to sustain its 6.5bn people. More than 97 per cent of all the water on the planet is salt water, and most of the freshwater is locked up in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. But that still leaves 10m cubic kilometres (km3) of usable water, circulating in cycles of evaporation and precipitation between the atmosphere and earth, where it appears in underground aquifers, lakes and rivers, glaciers, snowpacks, wetlands, permafrost and soil. Each km3 is equivalent to 1,000bn litres, or 1bn tonnes, of water - about the remaining annual flow of the River Nile.

On the other side of the equation, the UN says individuals need five litres of water a day simply to survive in a moderate climate, and at least 50 litres a day for drinking and cooking, bathing and sanitation. Industry accounts for about double the average domestic use. But agriculture needs much, much more - in fact, 90 per cent of all water used by humans. The water is not 'lost' from earth, but over-abstraction by irrigators means it is often moved from where it is needed. Tony Allan, of King's College London, estimates that, together, 6.5bn people need 8,000km3 of water each year - a fraction of what is theoretically available. 'There's certainly enough water for every person on the planet, but too often it's in the wrong places at the wrong times in the wrong amounts,' says Marq de Villiers, author of the 2001 book Water Wars

Three hours north of Wadi Faynan is the much greener Wadi Esseir, where Salah Al-Mherat and his family are one of millions of households in Jordan who feel the daily effects of inhabiting one of the driest countries on earth. Once a week, Al-Mherat gets water from the local irrigation co-operative for his fig, lemon, olive and grenadine trees and vegetables. For the rest he relies on rain. But since the Nineties the springs have been drying, sapped by demand from the nearby capital, Amman, and rain has been declining.

On a hot morning in April, Al-Mherat comes in from picking petits-pois, hitches up his smock and settles on to a pile of cushions. Fidgeting with a pot of scented tea he explains that the crops now barely cover their costs; he has to work as a security guard to supplement his income. 'When I started it was very good compared to now,' he says. 'The first impact was that the size of the irrigated area became reduced. People also changed what they irrigated, so the water now goes mainly to the trees - some farmers stopped completely from doing vegetables.' Al-Mherat says he keeps hoping things will improve, because he will pass the land to his sons. 'It's my life,' he says. 'But even if I'm positive, the reality is it's like the wish of the devil to go to paradise.'

Global population, economic development and a growing appetite for meat, dairy and fish protein have raised human water demand sixfold in 50 years. Meanwhile, supplies have been diminished in several ways: an estimated 845,000 dams block most of the world's rivers, depriving downstream communities of water and sediment, and increasing evaporation; up to half of water is lost in leakage; another 1bn people simply have no proper infrastructure; and the water left is often polluted by chemicals and heavy metals from farms and industry, blamed by the UN for poisoning more than 100m people. And still the rains are getting less reliable in many areas.

Underlying these problems is a paradox. Because water, and the movement of water, is essential for life, and central to many religions, it is traditionally regarded as a 'common' good. But no individuals are responsible for it. From Wadi Esseir to the arid American Midwest, farmers either do not pay for water or pay a fraction of what homeowners pay, so they have less incentive to conserve it and might deprive suppliers of funds to improve infrastructure.

The UN defines 'water scarcity' as fewer than 1,000m3 of renewable clean water for each person every year to drink, clean, grow food and run industry. By this measure half the world's population lives in countries suffering water scarcity. Jordan is one of the most water-scarce countries on earth, averaging just 160m3 of renewable water per person per year.

The result is that it is not just farmers who are rationed. The Al-Mherat family, like the rest of greater Amman, only get water to their house one day a week. A city of more than 2m people runs to the rhythm of 'water day', says Dr Khadija Darmame, who is part of a £1.25m project organised by Mithen and sponsored by Britain's Leverhulme Trust to study links between 'water, life and civilisation' in Jordan, from the earliest settlements to modern day.

Poor supplies and stagnant tanks occasionally lead to infections. But for most, the problem is drudgery. 'The first thing is to do the maximum laundry and then clean the house,' says Darmame. Children and men take a shower, 'and the last thing is for the women to take a shower, and then you need a few hours to fill the tanks,' stacked on every roof.

For millions of others, bad supplies are a question of life and death. Lack of clean drinking water and sanitation are largely blamed for the death of 11m children under five each year from disease and malnutrition; for nearly 1bn people who are chronically hungry; for 2bn who suffer what the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization calls 'food insecurity', because they do not have adequate food and nutrition for an 'active and healthy life'; and for keeping more than 60m girls out of school. These people then get caught in a water and poverty trap: two-thirds of the people who lack enough water for even the most basic needs live on less than $2 a day. 'Variability of water availability is strongly and negatively related to per capita income,' says Professor Jeffrey Sachs, author of Common Wealth: Economics For a Crowded Planet, and a special adviser to the UN Secretary General. Poor health, lack of education and hunger make it hard to escape.

Ultimately, lack of water is seen as a threat to peace. From genocide in Darfur to rows between states in India and the US, Ban Ki-Moon is one of several global leaders who have warned of further legal and armed disputes over water. Intuitively it is obvious people will fight over their most precious resou