As the planet heats up, what happens to our water is a matter of life and death

Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief

This week we published an extraordinary feature from Spain, where parched villages are forced to buy water in plastic containers from multinational companies that are extracting millions of litres of water from the very same land. “This isn’t just a Spanish issue,” wrote Grace Livingstone. “Across the world, from Uruguay to Mexico, Canada to the UK, many have begun to question whether private corporations should be allowed to siphon off a vital public resource, then sell it back to citizens as bottled water.”

The life-changing damage of living in drought was also brought home in this piece from our This is climate breakdown series by Isabella Visagie, a South African sheep farmer forced to watch in horror as the land on her farm slowly, and fatally for her animals, dried up.

Water, and how we manage it, is a crucial element in global politics. Now that we live on a heating planet, as columnist George Monbiot wrote earlier this year, Earth simply doesn’t have enough water to keep up with the demand for global food production.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather, is affecting our access to water in other ways. Jasmin Pittman reported from Asheville in North Carolina, a city left without clean water for 52 days after the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in September.

It’s not only the water we consume that needs to be managed in an age of climate disaster. This week in the UK there has been fury, particularly in Wales, at the level of warning and lack of protection ahead of flooding caused by the impact of Storm Bert last weekend. Nimo Omer, in our First Edition daily briefing, looked at why Britain is seemingly so unprepared for the extreme weather events taking place with increasing frequency. This was a similar, if smaller-scale, version of the bitter fallout in Spain after the recent extreme flooding in the Valencia region, which killed at least 224 people.

In addition to the human impact, the role of global heating is absolutely central to how we cover extreme weather. As global environment correspondent Jonathan Watts wrote in the aftermath of the Spanish floods and ahead of the Cop29 climate summit, these kinds of everyday apocalypses should spur governments to take dramatic action. Unfortunately, this year’s Cop finished on Sunday with bitter disappointment and, as Fiona Harvey chronicled in a definitive piece, a $300bn deal that left almost no one happy.

The Guardian - Saturday Edition