India’s ominous future: too little water, or far too much

The monsoon is central to Indian life and lore. It shapes the fortunes of millions of farmers who rely on the rains to nourish their fields. It governs what you eat. 

• Climate change is now messing with the monsoon, making seasonal rains more intense and less predictable. Decades of short-sighted government policies are leaving millions of Indians defenseless in the age of climate disruptions, especially the poor.
• The lakes that once held the rains in the bursting city of Bangalore are clogged with plastic and sewage. 
• The rains are more erratic today. Extreme rainfall is more common and more extreme. The number of days with very heavy rains has increased, with longer dry spells in between. Less common are the sure and steady rains that can reliably penetrate the soil. This is ruinous for a country that gets the vast share of its water from the clouds.
• Global warming has destroyed the concept of the monsoon. 
• India’s insurance policy against droughts, the Himalayas, is at risk, too. The majestic mountains are projected to lose a third of their ice by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at their current pace.
• Climate change isn’t the only culprit to blame for India’s water woes. Decades of greed and mismanagement are far more culpable. The lush forests that help to hold the rains continue to be cleared. Developers are given the green light to pave over creeks and lakes. Government subsidies encourage the over-extraction of groundwater. Groundwater is drawn faster than nature can replenish it.
• By 2050, the World Bank estimates, erratic rainfall, combined with rising temperatures, stand to “depress the living standards of nearly half the country’s population.”
• Since 1950, annual rainfall has declined by 15% in Marathwada. In that same period, cloudbursts have shot up threefold. But during that same period, Marathwada, along with the rest of India, has seen a boom in the production of one of thirstiest crops on earth: sugar cane.
• In India, one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, the government subsidizes electricity, encouraging farmers to pump groundwater for their fields, as well as fertilizers, which are used in vast quantities. State-owned banks offer cheap loans, which are sometimes written off.

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Disaster and human history

Case Studies in Nature, Society and Catastrophe
By Benjamin Reilly

• The present rate of technological advance is unprecedented in human history.
• Modern college students believe that the study of our historical past has little meaning to their present lives.
• World population has doubled between 1960's and early years of 21st century. Population density have also reached unseen levels. 
• The percentage of world's surface covered by urban areas jumped from 0.1% to 1.0% between 1900 and 1990 and if the trend continues more people will be living in urban than rural areas.
• Human beings are increasingly concentrated in "megacities", sprawling urban areas with millions of residents. The trend has slowed down in developed world but continues unchecked in the developing world. 
• The parallel explosion of technological and demographic growth in the modern age is not accidental but are intimately linked. These two are complimentary processes and unfortunately linked to unprecedented natural resource depletion. The planet is now losing 120,000 sq.km. of forest every year to logging, herding and agriculture. As a result of human intrusion into forest ecosystems, deadly epidemics may just be a taste of things to come.
• Deforestation is linked to soil erosion. Soil is created very slowly by nature but can quickly be destroyed by human agriculturists employing unsustainable farming practices.
• Modern farmers are "skinning our planet" reducing earth's soil deposits by 4 tons per head due to increasing exploitation of hillsides and prairies by land hungry farmers in developing nations. 
• Mechanized farming renders soil susceptible to erosion. Although soil erosion is not a new problem in human history, the present rate of global soil loss is unprecedented. Mankind is currently stripping soil at 20 times the natural erosion rate, a process that is likely to have catastrophic impact in future.
• The current rate of technological and demographic advance has also endangered world supply of water, which is the most vita natural resource. Human population pressure - large parts of the world are now in real danger of exceeding available water sources not only in low rainfall years but also during normal years. 
• As of 2008, 35% of the world's renewable freshwater is already diverted from ecosystem for human use, mostly in agriculture which requires enormous water inputs. In arid countries like Egypt & Israel this statistic is 100% further undermining stability of already volatile region. 
• Qatar is "mining" their water sources, withdrawing more water from the ecosystem than is replaced by natural sources, 6 times as much as is replenished by natural processes. In UAE it is 17 times annual replenishment.
• So far, human being had some successes in staving off looming water crisis, through technology, tapping underground aquifers, piped transportation of river water etc. Water poor countries have sustained by importing "virtual water" in the form of food. [Production of one kg rice requires as much as 2,000 liters of irrigation water.] World's largest exporter of "virtual water" is USA which ships out billions of liters in the form of grain allowing importing nations to support higher populations than they could with limited domestic water supplies. None of these techniques will cope with increasing global population in long run.  Desalinization is expensive, rivers have limited capacity, and aquifers that are drained faster will disappear. Already some of the world's great rivers some times run dry before reaching the sea due to escalating demands on their water.
• Virtual water in inextricably tied to the prices of petroleum, another finite source. The price of virtual water is tied to transportation fuel costs. Food and fuel are increasingly becoming interchangeable commodities, and nations depending on "virtual water" for their water needs, therefore are courting disaster.
• Deforestation and road building has reduced the soils ability to absorb rainfall, lowering replenishment rate of aquifers. Industrial pollutants have made some of the fresh water sources unusable by humans. 
• Global warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions will likely wreck havoc with the world's water supply. When the already retreading glaciers vanish, many rivers will flow more intermittently. 
• Global warming will likely result less "average" rainfall and more extreme weather conditions, such as downpours leading to floods & soil erosion, dry spells and drought. Higher temperatures will increase evaporation rates, reduce agriculture production even if local rainfall is technically higher. Scientific understanding of global warming remains incomplete. 
• The fossil fuels consumed between 1751-1998 were equivalent to the amount of sunlight that the world's plants captured in preceding 13,300 years. This energy fueled mankind's advancement from agriculture to industrial and then to technological age. but released thousands of years buried carbon dioxide into atmosphere.
• The result is the certainty of environmental change in next few hundred years. But human species is not well suited to rapid environmental fluctuations.
• It remains to be seen if the rapid medical advances the humans achieved in the 20th century will be able to keep up with new epidemic diseases that arise during 21st century.
• The disasters of the future might look different from the disasters of the past.
• Earthquakes and volcanoes will occur like in the past but human population growth in general and megacities in particular will magnify their effects. Other disasters will change more dramatically in future.
• Population pressure, changing climate will produce unprecedented levels of deforestation, desertification, soil erosion and consequent famine. In the age of soaring food prices, declining water availability famine may become endemic in some parts of the world,  no longer checked by cheap transportation of large food supplies that curbed famines in the late 20th century.
• Tropical cyclones may become more violent in future, though science is uncertain. 
• Finally, unprecedented population density, near instantaneous modern transportation and rapidly changing environment will create host of new opportunities for infectious diseases.
• Advances in technology might ameliorate these supercharged modern disasters. But will certainly create new disasters in future.
• As mankind's need for more energy continues to increase, fossil fuel reserves continue to dwindle and CO2 continues to accumulate in the atmosphere pressure will build on humanity to exploit nuclear power for its energy needs. Nuclear power has worst reputation as a safe, clean energy source.
• It is somewhat disquieting to note that a seemingly technological advance could have led to an environmental nightmare.
• It is clear that different types of natural disasters are intimately linked and are created or badly exacerbated by human agency. In particular, global warming may play the role as "master disaster" of the post 20th century influencing almost every other type of natural disaster.
• Rising global temperatures may lead to tropical cyclone activity and more frequent El Nino events and spread of tropical diseases. Rising sea levels will swallow coastal agricultural land and concentrate more people in squalid megacities heightening vulnerability to diseases.
• Poverty bred by global warming worsen even terrestrial disasters since poverty plays a crucial role in determining the vulnerability of human beings to natural disasters. Global warming may precipitate worst famine as rising human population run headlong into declining agricultural activity. The result may be a new Malthusian crisis on a regional or even a global scale.
• Human beings, especially those living in capitalist economies tend to make choices favoring short term gains and comforts rather than long term sustainability and stability thus making disastrous choices. We continue to build suburbs on fault lines, construct vacation homes on storm swept coastlines or volcano slopes, inundate poorly drained fields with river water leading to soil salinization. 
• In an age, where population control provides surest means of mitigating future disasters, the worlds wealthiest refuses to fund programs that offer birth control for fear of offending certain social groups. Most damaging of all, human beings are still slow to make sacrifices in short term that might mitigate the environmental damage of global warming in the long run.
• As a society, we have faith that the technologies of tomorrow will diffuse future disasters that we are creating by our actions today.

Development could be defined as the essence of general transformation and 

destruction of the natural environment and of social relations in order to 

increase the production of commodities (goods and services) geared, 

by means of market exchange, to effective demand. 

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The technological progress has been bringing us with environmental issues and problems of pollution and global warming along with advancements that made our lives easier, more efficient and our bodies healthier. There is no alternative to reduce population, preserve ecological assets, minimize emissions & pollutants,  reduce water wastage and start living closer to nature. Plastics and fossil fuel usage must be brought down 10% every year. Nothing should be allowed at the expense of environment. The so-called sustainable practices etc only postpones doomsday.