We can survive for weeks without food – but without water? That’s a different story. Yet all over the world, people and wildlife alike are having to cope without it. We take a look at the devastating impact of drought.

Somalia

Nowhere in the world is the lack of water being more keenly felt at the moment than in Somalia. No water to drink or to grow food and nothing to give their ailing livestock – drought has the Horn of Africa region in its deathly grip. More than 110 people died within a single 48-hour period earlier this month, according to Somalia’s prime minister, but millions more are at risk.

Somalia usually has two seasons of rainfall: Deyr from October to December, and Gu, which begins in March. But for two years, there has been significantly less rainfall than normal – a disaster for agriculture dependent on rain water rather than irrigation. Read more

The Real Challenges Are Not Technical, but Political

Few people would argue with the idea that the world has a serious problem with water. For the past several years, water has consistently been named as a leading risk in the World Economic Forum’s annual survey of global leaders, and newspapers worldwide are awash with stories warning of a water crisis. But a funny thing happens between the headlines: surprisingly little. Even in the case of Cape Town, which earlier this year proclaimed a water supply crisis that experts believed could literally cause taps to run dry, city officials blithely announced earlier this month that no emergency was imminent after all. So, is the world really facing a water crisis? The answer is yes—but not in the way most people think. The truth is, most of the world’s water woes can be solved with enough money and willpower. The real challenges are not technical or hydrological but political and ethical. The world’s water crisis, as it turns out, is really more of an existential one. But it’s one that poses plenty of real-world foreign policy challenges.  Read more

How Water Scarcity and Middle Eastern Influence Are Reshaping Northeast Africa

In Ethiopia, Africa’s largest-ever dam and hydroelectric power plant is inching closer to completion. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Nile River has the potential to transform Ethiopia’s economy and revolutionize the agricultural sector of its northwestern neighbor Sudan. But further downstream in Egypt, where 95 percent of the population live on the Nile’s shores or along its delta, many object to the dam, which they see as a fundamental threat to their way of life.

As Ethiopia prepares to operationalize the dam and divert Nile waters to fill its massive reservoir, the international dispute over the river has reached a make-or-break moment. In the coming year, Egypt and Ethiopia will either set their differences aside and forge a cooperative path forward together—an outcome that is technically feasible but politically fraught—or face a diplomatic downward spiral.  Read more

An astounding photo is, once again, making the rounds on the internet. People can’t seem to get enough of the shocking picture, which was originally captured in Svalbard, Norway, in 2010.

While the original image, which was shared on Flickr by user ‘buen viaje,’ is no longer available, it continues to pop up in various corners of the web.

The photo depicts a group of travelers who came across a startlingly-large spinal column just beneath the surface of the Arctic Ocean. According to HuffPost, the carcass belonged to a fin whale. The photographer claims that polar bears had been feeding on the vast remains for well over a year.  Read more

The amount of moisture on Earth has not changed. The water the dinosaurs drank millions of years ago is the same water that falls as rain today. But will there be enough for a more crowded world?

WE KEEP AN eye out for wonders, my daughter and I, every morning as we walk down our farm lane to meet the school bus. And wherever we find them, they reflect the magic of water: a spider web drooping with dew like a rhinestone necklace. A rain-colored heron rising from the creek bank. One astonishing morning, we had a visitation of frogs.

Dozens of them hurtled up from the grass ahead of our feet, launching themselves, white-bellied, in bouncing arcs, as if we’d been caught in a downpour of amphibians. It seemed to mark the dawning of some new aqueous age. On another day we met a snapping turtle in his primordial olive drab armor. Normally this is a pond-locked creature, but some murky ambition had moved him onto our gravel lane, using the rainy week as a passport from our farm to somewhere else. Read more