The Demographics of Water Scarcity

Many thanks to the folks at Population Matters for pointing to a report detailing the impact of water scarcity on youth unemployment and migration. The story comes from the International Institute for Sustainable Development and refers to analyses recently undertaken by UNESCO's World Water Assessment Program.

It finds close links between the impacts of water scarcity and migration patterns in regional hotspots including in the African, Mediterranean, South Asian and East Asian regions. The report also shows that water availability and quality impacts both youth employment and social stability.

The publication finds that growing climate variability affects water resources and the availability of jobs for youth, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. While the jobs most affected by water scarcity are in agriculture, other affected sectors include animal husbandry and fisheries. Populations migrate as a way of adapting to the lack of both water and employment opportunities.

The story has a link to a downloadable version of the report, which seems well-researched and referenced. Although it is not emphasized in the report, we know that the underlying problem here is population growth. With respect to Northern Africa, for example, the report highlights the propensity for conflict in places like MENA (see the map below) where water scarcity is combined with rapid population growth:

The figure also shows the hotspots of water-related disputes in the Mediterranean and North Africa (MENA) region, e.g. Jordan River, the control of the water resources of the Golan Heights or of the Litany River (Chazournes et al., 2013). Other conflicts among riparian countries are related to the allocation of the water from the Nile (Veilleux, 2015) and the downstream impacts of the Turkish Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) (Hommes et al., 2016). Often, these conflicts are caused by the high and intensive use of water in agriculture (in 2000, amounting to 63-79% of total water usage in North Africa) in a context of endemic water scarcity, which leaves other sectors and household water scarce. Notwithstanding, food security is in peril as population growth – coupled with constantly decreasing water flows since the 1960s – has in fact required an ever growing water usage in agriculture. The current situation is symptomatic of a low-adaptive capacity to climate change (Brauch, 2011).

Keep in mind that people have been thinking about these connections for a long time. In particular, I have mentioned in Chapter 1 of my book, as well as in blog posts, that Thomas Friedman of the NYTimes has linked water scarcity and population growth to the civil war still going on in Syria.