USA: Wall Street: Why US investors are now betting on water

Municipal companies and utilities could also stand to profit from water futures, the CME argues. In California where water is scarce, water prices often soar overnight because of wildfires or droughts.

Costs for the next six months can be estimated only roughly, as Nasdaq Senior Manager Patrick Wolf told Bloomberg. He's in charge of the futures in California, the United States' largest water market.

Read more at: Why US investors are now betting on water | Business| Economy and finance news from a German perspective | DW | 21.01.2021

The Environment: Water Is the Climate Challenge, Says World Bank - by Schuyler Null

The Suriname River

How will climate change affect you? Probably through water.

That’s the major message of a new World Bank report that finds the way governments treat water can have a profound effect on the economy.

Good water management could lead to a six percent increase in global GDP by 2050, while bad management – or simply business as usual in some places – could reduce GDP by as much as 14 percent in the Middle East, 12 percent in the Sahel, and 11 percent in Central Asia. Poor water policy could even lead to sustained declines in GDP in some places, via losses in agriculture, health, income, and property.

The basic problem is that demand is ever increasing while supply remains finite. In addition, supply  is becoming harder to predict as climate change shifts rainfall patterns. Without major improvements in water efficiency, global demand could exceed supplies by 40 percent over the next 15 years.

To assess how climate change will affect water supply, the authors modeled water runoff in 235 river basins under different conditions and emission scenarios. They then compared those changes to current conditions to identify the most vulnerable regions. For example, Colombia is expected to see a considerable decline in runoff, but the current level of rainfall is already so high, the risks are considered minimal. For arid countries like Iraq, the same decline could have much more severe consequences.

A broad belt stretching from West Africa through the Middle East and South Asia to Japan encompasses the most vulnerable countries. Many of these countries’ river basins, home to 60 percent of the world’s population, already exist in a “state of near-permanent water stress.”

The report makes clear connections between the physical processes of climate change and hydrology and socio-economic results, including economic growth, poverty alleviation, and inequality. These links are especially compelling coming from an organization that plays a leading role in international trade, investment, and financing for developing countries.

One place where the report’s arguments are a little loose is the small section on migration and conflict. Civil conflict and instability are invoked throughout the report as potential consequences of ignoring water concerns. Violent conflict and migration can result from food price spikes, drought, floods, and income inequality, according to the report.

There are indeed legitimate concerns around these kinds of risks (see the New Climate for Peace report for a comprehensive breakdown of seven), but there are also many open questions about how exactly climate change affects stability and human mobility. Oversimplifying these complex interactions can lead to poor policy and unintended consequences.

In one case, the report also seems to misstate one of its supporting pieces of evidences, citing a study that found democratic institutions improved after rainfall declines to argue that rainfall shocks, “by straining government budgets,” make “regime change more likely” and “ignite conflicts.”

In their Climate Change Action Plan, released early last month, the World Bank committed to producing a “flagship analytical report” on climate change, migration, and conflict next year, so perhaps we will see a fuller treatment of these dynamics then.

Read more: Water Is the Climate Challenge, Says World Bank | New Security Beat

Space Exploration: NASA reveals clues to Mars’ watery past

“What happened to the Mars atmosphere? I’ll quote Bob Dylan – ‘The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind’,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist at the Mars Exploration Program, said in Washington DC on Thursday.

The findings suggest a solar storm blasted away Mars’ atmosphere around three and a half billion years ago. Unlike Earth, Mars did not have a global magnetic field to protect its atmosphere.
NASA’s Mars-orbiting MAVEN spacecraft caught such a storm stripping away the planet’s atmosphere, scientists said.

“Up until about 3.7 billion years ago, water seemed to be very abundant and active. So the stripping of the solar wind, the stripping by the solar wind, of the atmosphere, would have occurred in that same time-frame,” said MAVEN lead researcher Bruce Jakosky.

“Mars appears to meet all of the conditions required for life or to have met them at the surface in the past. And that begs the question of whether was ever any life there, and if there was, whether it was genetically related to terrestrial life or would represent an independent origin.

“So as we go into the future, I think these questions about life and climate and the history of the planet as a whole are really at the centre of the exploration,” Jakosky continued.

Read more: NASA reveals clues to Mars’ watery past | euronews, world news

The Media Line: Turkey to Cyprus: Water is in the Pipeline - by Jasper Mortimer

For the complete report from The Media Line click on this link

Turkey to Cyprus: Water is in the Pipeline - by Jasper Mortimer

It should be straightforward: the Turks have an abundance of water, the Cypriots have a sustained drought, the answer is to lay a pipeline across the seabed and pump fresh water from southern Turkey to north Cyprus. But nothing is straightforward between two states that have been at loggerheads for decades.On the north side of Cyprus, Turkish Cypriots want the pipeline to be built, but don’t have the money. They look to Turkey to finance it, and would like to sell the surplus water to Greek Cypriots. On the south side of Cyprus, a Greek Cypriot entrepreneur believes the money can be raised, but his government refuses to buy water from Turkey until it withdraws the 40,000 troops that have occupied northern Cyprus since 1974.

A consultant and former senior planning officer in the Cypriot Planning Bureau, Vassiliou has been waging a campaign for the pipeline to be built, writing letters to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2005 and 2008, and discussing the project with Turkish Cypriot leader Talat last month. He is the front man for a group of Greek and Turkish Cypriots who aspire to build the pipeline as a joint venture with public subscription from both sides of the island. Vassiliou admits he does not know all the figures involved, but working from a capital cost of 350 million euros ($463 million) for the pipeline -- a figure about 10 percent higher than that given by the Turkish Cypriot environment ministry -- he has calculated that Turkish water could be pumped to Cyprus at a price which is less than half that of desalinated water and almost one fifteenth of the cost of water shipped from Greece.

EU-Digest - World potable water drying up

For the complete report see the UN-sponsored Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

World potable water drying up

Sustained economic growth, human security and political stability over the next two decades depend on how water is managed, warned the World Economic Forum in a report urging governments and businesses to address consistent under-charging, waste and overuse of water. Referring to a UN-sponsored 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the report underlines that 70 of the world's major rivers, including the Colorado, Ganges, Jordan, Nile and Tigris-Euphrates, are "near [their] maximum extraction levels to supply water for irrigation systems and for reservoirs".Many of the "regional water bubbles" are already bursting in parts of China, the Middle East, the southwestern US and India, and "more will follow", with serious consequences for regional economic and political stability, the report continues. Climate change further adds to the urgent need to manage water efficiently, the report notes. In many parts of the world, glaciers act as "water banks". For example, melting glaciers in the Himalayas and Tibet alone will cause serious water supply problems for more than two billion people, it predicts.