For eons, the earth has had the same amount of water—no more, no less. What the ancient Romans used for crops and Nefertiti drank? It’s the same stuff we bathe with. Yet with more than seven billion people on the planet, experts now worry we’re running out of usable water. The symptoms are here: multiyear […]
Residents of this coastal city of 4 million have begun stockpiling bottled water and lining up at natural springs. The reason? Cape Town, a global tourist destination and South Africa’s second-largest city, may soon switch off its taps. Dams are running low in the midst of an extreme three-year drought, one that has been compounded […]
Beijing is fashioning water into a political weapon by denying India flood-related hydrological data since May, even as major flooding has hit the region from Assam to Uttar Pradesh. Data on upstream river flows is essential for flood forecasting and warning in order to save lives and reduce material losses. China’s data denial crimps flash […]
By 2030 one in five people will be African. Combine the continent’s soaring population with technology, improvements in infrastructure, health and education, and Africa could be the next century’s economic growth powerhouse. Read Here – World Economic Forum
By bringing its position on Tibet into alignment with China’s claim, India has not won Chinese gratitude; rather, it has boosted Beijing’s clout and encouraged Chinese re-engineering of transboundary river flows, on which India is critically dependent. Read Here – Nikkei Asian Review
The Thar desert in Sindh province contains 175 billion tonnes of lignite coal – one of the largest untapped coal deposits in the world. It is also one of the most populated deserts in the world – home to world heritages sites and endangered species. Most of the 1.6 million people who live in the Thar […]
From the San Francisco Bay area to Sao Paulo to Riyadh, water shortages increasingly cloud economic forecasts. But nowhere is the risk greater than in South Asia, where India, the largest economy and most important regional power, faces crippling shortages and a lack of consensus on what to do about them. Read Here – Foreign […]
This year’s World Water Day, on March 22, provides an opportunity to highlight what in many countries has become a grim reality: The availability of fresh water is increasingly a defining strategic factor in regional and global affairs. Unless water resources are managed with extraordinary care, the consequences could be devastating. Read Here – Project […]
When identifying threats to Himalayan ecosystems, China stands out. For years, the People’s Republic has been engaged in frenzied damming of rivers and unbridled exploitation of mineral wealth on the resource-rich Tibetan Plateau. Now it is ramping up efforts to spur its bottled-water industry – the world’s largest and fastest-growing – to siphon off glacier […]
China’s new leaders, including President Xi Jinping, haven’t embraced environmental protection by choice. They’ve been compelled by a new political reality: an informed Chinese public. Read Here – Businessweek
looking beyond borders 