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Warming Will Exacerbate Global Water Conflicts    [

    Scientists Seek New Ways to Feed the World Amid Global Warming
    Agency France-Presse

    Friday 17 August 2007

On an agricultural research station south of Manila a group of scientists are battling against time to breed new varieties of rice as global warming threatens one of the world's major sources of food.

    According to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) more than half the world's 6.6 billion people depend on rice for nourishment.

    "Parts of the world will become drier and apparently that's already happening, and some parts will become even wetter," said Moroccan crop physiologist Rachid Serraj.

    "But most importantly it's going to shift the rainfall distribution. It's going to become more unpredictable, and that is the problem for rice cultivation," he said.

    Chinese scientist Peng Shaobing wraps his paddy fields with tarp and blasts them with cold air from air conditioners.

    His colleague Indian plant geneticist Kumar Singh grows 2,000 rice varieties inside giant metal cabinets, the seedlings sprouting above styrofoam trays soaked with varying degrees of brine to simulate the seawaters that threaten to engulf rice-growing areas over the next century.

    The three IRRI scientists are entrusted with ensuring that the half of mankind who depend on rice will not go hungry as rising temperatures and ocean levels threaten one of the world's most important crops.

    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects the globe will warm by 0.2 degrees Celsius every 10 years, far higher than the 0.6-degree Celsius rise in the past century, with serious consequences for food production.

    IRRI, based in this university town south of the Philippine capital and a vital part of the "Green Revolution" that dramatically raised cereal yields in the 1970s, has gathered top experts to work on "new frontier projects" to meet the threat.

    This is apart from more conventional research to further boost yields, make the plants more resistant to pests and disease, and make the grain more palatable.

    Rice yields would fall by 10 percent for each one-degree rise in the minimum temperature at night, time spent by the plant for growth processes, said crop physiologist Peng, a pioneer researcher in this field.

    Between 1978 and 2003 minimum mean nighttime temperatures rose by 1.5 degrees Celsius, suggesting a 15 percent production decline over 28 years, Peng told AFP.

    Higher nighttime temperatures shorten the growing time for rice. "The yield is reduced because the plant doesn't have enough time to grow," Peng said. "Higher night temperatures also leads to poorer grain quality."

    Drought and salinity are already a major problems. Twenty-three million hectares (57 million acres), or 18 percent of the world's rice farms are considered "drought-prone", Serraj said.

    A dry spell in hot spots such as eastern India can push up to 15 million rain-fed rice farmers into poverty in a single year, he said. Even in China, demand for water from industry and elsewhere is putting pressure on high-yield irrigated rice grown there, he added.

    The two countries account for nearly half the world's rice growing areas.

    Next to drought, the influx of saltwater not only in coastal but also inland farms through careless irrigation practices is the number-two problem, said Singh.

    Some 6.3 percent of the world's soil surface is already considered saline, and global warming or not, the problem affects most of the rice fields of South Asia and Southeast Asia, he told AFP.

    Global warming is projected to cause sea levels to rise by between 10 and 85 centimetres (four and 34 inches) over the next century, which would threaten key rice-growing areas in Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and India among others.

    For the IRRI scientists, the challenge is to produce new breeds and innovate crop management techniques to help farmers meet the triple threat of drought, higher temperatures, and soil salinity, along with the new pests and diseases that will crop up as rice is grown in radically new environments.

    Peng said high-yield varieties developed by IRRI seem to have higher tolerance for warmer nighttime temperatures. His experiments seek to determine their yields in simulated cooler night temperatures.

    Breeding improved varieties, a process that begins at IRRI and other laboratories and involves crossing the desirable genes of the 110,000 varieties at the IRRI gene bank here, ends with their dispersal to the farmer end-users.

    The process used to take about 15 years, but Singh said it can now be done as fast as six years.

    It now takes between 3,000 and 5,000 litres (780 and 1300 US gallons) of water to produce one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of rice, but IRRI is trying to breed maize qualities into rice so farmers could also grow them on a dry field.

    So which side is winning the race so far, climate change or the scientists? The research is being hampered by a funding crunch that has hit IRRI.

    "At this stage, I think it is equal, but if we're not going to increase our support, we're going to lose the battle," Peng said.

 

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    Warming Will Exacerbate Global Water Conflicts
    By Doug Struck
    The Washington Post

    Monday 20 August 2007

    Fresno, California - Steve Johnson scans the hot, translucent sky. He wants to make rain - needs to make rain for the parched farms and desperate hydro companies in this California valley. But first, he must have clouds. The listless sky offers no hint of clouds.

    Inside a darkened room near the Fresno airport, Johnson's colleagues study an array of radar screens. If a promising thunderstorm appears, Johnson will send his pilots into it in sturdy but ice-battered single-engine planes, burning flares of silver iodide to try to coax rain from the clouds.

    This year, there have been few promising clouds, to the dismay of the farmers, ranchers and power companies who hire Johnson's cloud seeders.

    "We can increase the rainfall by 10 percent. But Mother Nature has to cooperate. Ten percent of zero is zero," says Johnson, a meteorologist and director of Atmospherics Inc.

    A few miles south of Fresno, Steve Arthur is looking the other way for water. His company is working around the clock drilling wells to irrigate fields in California's 400-mile-long Central Valley, one of the most productive food-growing areas in the world.

    "People are really starting to panic for water," said Arthur, whose father started drilling wells in 1959. They must drill ever deeper to tap the sinking water table. "Eventually, the water will be so deep the farmers won't be able to afford to pump it," he said. "There's only so much water to go around."

    As global warming heats the planet, there will be more desperate measures. The climate will be wetter in some places, drier in others. Changing weather patterns will leave millions of people without dependable supplies of water for drinking, irrigation and power, a growing stack of studies conclude.

    At Stanford University, 170 miles away, Stephen Schneider, editor of the journal Climatic Change and a lead author for the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), pours himself a cup of tea and says the future is clear.

    "As the air gets warmer, there will be more water in the atmosphere. That's settled science," he said. But where, and when, it comes down is the big uncertainty.

    "You are going to intensify the hydrologic cycle. Where the atmosphere is configured to have high pressure and droughts, global warming will mean long, dry periods. Where the atmosphere is configured to be wet, you will get more rain, more gully washers.

    "Global warming will intensify drought," he says. "And it will intensify floods."

    According to the IPCC, that means a drying out of areas such as southern Europe, the Mideast, North Africa, South Australia, Patagonia and the U.S. Southwest.

    These will not be small droughts. Richard Seager, a senior researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, looked at 19 computer models of the future under current global warming trends. He found remarkable consistency: Sometime before 2050, the models predicted, the Southwest will be gripped in a dry spell akin to the Great Dust Bowl drought that lasted through most of the 1930s.

    The spacing of tree rings suggests there have been numerous periods of drought going back to A.D. 800, he said. But, "mechanistically, this is different. These projections clearly come from a warming forced by rising greenhouse gases."

    Farmers in the Central Valley, where a quilt of lush, green orchards on brown hills displays the alchemy of irrigation, want to believe this is a passing dry spell. They thought a wet 2006 ended a seven-year drought, but this year is one of the driest on record. For the first time, state water authorities shut off irrigation pumps to large parts of the valley, forcing farmers to dig wells.

    Farther south and east, the once-mighty Colorado River is looking sickly, siphoned by seven states before dribbling into Mexico. Its reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are drying, leaving accusatory rings on the shorelines and imperiling river-rafting companies.

    Seager predicts that drought will prompt dislocations similar to those of the Dust Bowl. "It will certainly cause movements of people. For example, as Mexico dries out, there will be migration from rural areas to cities and then the U.S.," he said. "There is an emerging situation of climate refugees."

    Global warming threatens water supplies in other ways. Much of the world's fresh water is in glaciers atop mountains. They act as mammoth storehouses. In wet or cold seasons, the glaciers grow with snow. In dry and hot seasons, the edges slowly melt, gently feeding streams and rivers. Farms below are dependent on that meltwater; huge cities have grown up on the belief the mountains will always give them drinking water; hydroelectric dams rely on the flow to generate power.

    But the atmosphere's temperature is rising fastest at high altitudes. The glaciers are melting, initially increasing the runoff, but gradually getting smaller and smaller. Soon, many will disappear.

    At the edge of the Quelccaya Glacier, the largest ice cap in the Peruvian Andes, Ohio State University researcher Lonnie Thompson sat in a cold tent at a rarified 17,000 feet. He has spent more time in the oxygen-thin "death zone" atop mountains than any other scientist, drilling ice cores and measuring glaciers. He has watched the Quelccaya Glacier shrink by 30 percent in 33 years.

    Down the mountain, a multitude of rivulets seep from the edge of Quelccaya to irrigate crops of maize, the water flowing through irrigation canals built by the Incas. Even farther downstream, the runoff helps feed the giant capital, Lima, another city built in a desert.

    "What do you think is going to happen when this stops?" Thompson mused of the water. "Do you think all the people below will just sit there? No. It's crazy to think they won't go anywhere. And what do you think will happen when they go to places where people already live?"

    The potential for conflict is more than theoretical. Turkey, Syria and Iraq bristle over the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt trade threats over the Nile. The United Nations has said water scarcity is behind the bloody wars in Sudan's Darfur region. In Somalia, drought has spawned warlords and armies.

    Already, the World Health Organization says, 1 billion people lack access to potable water. In northern China, retreating glaciers and shrinking wetlands that feed the Yangtze River prompted researchers to warn that water supplies for hundreds of millions of people may be at risk.

    "The government is talking about harmony between man and nature. But we still haven't seen the turning point," Ma Jun, author of "China's Water Crisis," said in a phone interview from Beijing. Even where global warming brings more precipitation, it may come at the wrong time. If precipitation that traditionally feeds a glacier comes too early, as rain instead of snow, the result is a quick torrent followed by months of meager trickle. And if the rain comes in torrents, it brings scenes like those this summer from Texas and India.

    Humans have long attempted to reconcile nature's inconstancies with giant plumbing: reservoirs and dams that hold back floodwaters for more gradual release; dikes and other barriers to protect developed areas; canals and pipelines to take water from wet areas to dry.

    But that kind of infrastructure is expensive, especially for Third World governments. Environmentalists decry the impact on wildlife. And building dams in earthquake zones tempts disaster.

    Even in rich California, "there's been no significant reservoir construction for many years," said Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the state Farm Bureau. "Reservoir construction is terribly expensive. It's easier to block a reservoir than to build one."

    Researcher Seager suggests that humans ought to bend more to nature than trying to bend nature.

    "We're not going to be able to carry on like we are," he said. "Do we really want to keep growing irrigated alfalfa in the high desert, in New Mexico and Arizona? It really makes no sense."

    But Mark McKean, a Fresno Valley farmer, had to leave some of his fields of cotton unwatered when the flow in the irrigation canals stopped this summer. But he chafes at Seager's suggestion.

    "Sure, my tomatoes can be grown in other parts of the world," he said. "But do we want to give up the economic base that supports small, rural towns? Do we want to ignore child labor growing our food somewhere else? Do we want to know if pesticides are being used? What are we willing to pay for all that?"