The Doomsday Handbook Read online

  When land has been compromised and becomes desertified, it can no longer support a wide array of plants and animals and it becomes virtually useless to life. Deserts destroy biodiversity and prevent the growth of crops, leading to starvation. In 2008, the degradation of available farmland led to global spikes of 130 percent in the cost of wheat over the previous year and a rise of more than 80 percent in the cost of soy.

  In Africa, almost 75 percent of the land is classed as dry and is affected by potential desertification due to the rise in farming—in 1950, the continent was home to 227 million people and 273 million livestock; just over half a century later, there are almost a billion people and more than 800 million livestock.

  But these days, the great frontier in unchecked desertification is in China. More than a quarter of the country’s land is either degraded or lost to sand and gravel—a combined result of the dry climate, hundreds of years of overcultivation, and excessive demand on water and soil as the economy has grown faster than any other in the world

  * * *

  ANNUAL DESERTIFICATIONIN CHINA

  1950–75 1,550 km2

  1975–2000 3,625 km2

  * * *

  The amount of livestock in China has increased rapidly, but the land available for grazing has decreased. Scientists there report that between 1950 and 1975, around 1,550 Km2 (600 sq miles) of land turned to desert every year. By the turn of the century, that had jumped to 3,625 Km2 (1,400 sq miles) per year. “Over the last half-century, some 24,000 villages in northern and western China have been entirely or partly abandoned as a result of being overrun by drifting sand,” says Lester Brown.

  Can we stop it?

  Stopping or slowing desertification and its impacts requires farmers to adopt better land management practices, and use their water more sustainably. They could also plant drought-resistant seeds in stressed areas—a good way to provide food and keep the soil together.

  Alternatively, physical boundaries could be employed. The Chinese authorities have planted a wall of trees, stretching more than 4,830 km (3,000 miles) in length, from outer Beijing to Mongolia, in an attempt to protect their cities from the dust storms of the Gobi. In 2011, the planting of an 8,000 km (5,000 mile) long, 14.5 km (9 mile) wide wall of trees from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa in the east to Dakar in Senegal was approved during a meeting of the UNCCD—it is hoped that this “pan-African Great Green Wall” will stem the desertification of the Sahel.

  Modern farming techniques might also help. Traditional farming involves plowing up land and then dropping seeds on to it. This has worked for generations, but it disrupts the structure of the soil and allows more of it to erode away during rain or wind storms. “No-till” agriculture has helped to address the problem somewhat: in this technique, farmers drill seeds straight into the ground. This method has taken off in many countries, including the US, Brazil, Argentina and Canada.

  Covering sand dunes with large boulders or petroleum can also disrupt the flow of winds and prevent the dust from moving. Placing straw grids on the surface can reduce the speed of the wind. “Shrubs and trees planted within the grids are protected by the straw until they take root,” says the USGS. “In areas where some water is available for irrigation, shrubs planted on the lower one-third of a dune’s windward side will stabilize the dune. This vegetation decreases the wind velocity near the base of the dune and prevents much of the sand from moving. Higher velocity winds at the top of the dune level it off and trees can be planted atop these flattened surfaces.”

  There are even more ambitious plans to re-green deserts. The Sahara Forest project would marry huge “seawater” greenhouses with concentrated solar power (CSP), which uses mirrors to focus the sun’s rays and generate heat and electricity. The installations would turn deserts into lush patches of vegetation, according to the project’s designers, without the need to dig wells for fresh water. The scheme works by using the solar power to run seawater evaporators and then pump the damp, cool air through the greenhouses. This reduces the temperature by about 15°C compared to that outside. The water vapor is condensed at the other end of the greenhouse from the evaporators. Some of this fresh water is then used to irrigate the crops, while the rest can be employed for the essential task of cleaning the solar mirrors. In test greenhouses, the crops sitting in these slightly steamy, humid conditions grew fantastically well.

  The Chinese authorities are planning to spend billions on anti-desertification measures—including tree-planting, the relocation of millions of people and restrictions on herding and farming—but they admit it could take 300 years to make a significant impact.

  We have the solutions to stop the degradation of the planet. There seems to be some political will too. The big question is whether we can hold our nerve for the generations it will take to fix the problem.

  Global Food Crisis

  * * *

  What happens when the price of bread goes up in London, or the availability of tortillas drops in Mexico? If food becomes so expensive that only the richest can eat, what will happen to the countries most in need of development? Will they starve? If agriculture failed us, would the world survive?

  * * *

  Agriculture is one of the things that makes civilization what it is today. And technological improvements have kept it relevant, feeding ever more people, ever more efficiently. But our demands on it will keep increasing as the number of people in the world goes up and our changing climate puts strain on the areas of the world available to be farmed for food. Can we keep up?

  We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

  Scenarios of food shortage have been around for centuries. In 1798, the English cleric Thomas Malthus warned of the perils of unchecked human reproduction—the challenge of feeding so many people, he said, would bring us to the limits of agriculture, and human lives would be lost as a result. His warnings never materialized, because of the industrialization of farming and the introduction of new technologies that used land more efficiently and moved food around the world more quickly. Fertilizer made crops grow bigger, irrigation transformed barren land into farmland, specially selected varieties of wheat grew ever more productively.

  Every time a dusty academic foretold the end of human civilization because of the increased pressure on the planet’s potential food resources, they were somehow proved wrong. So what is to say that current warnings have any merit?

  Lester Brown, arch-environmentalist and founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, sums up many of the concerns about 21st-century food shortages as a major threat to global stability.

  According to Brown, the “green revolution” in the 1960s and 1970s that used technology fixes to boost agricultural productivity has hit its limits, and the long-term rise in what we can grow on a piece of land is slowing down. “Between 1950 and 1990 the world’s farmers increased the grain yield per acre by more than 2% a year, exceeding the growth of population,” said Brown in an article for Scientific American in 2009. “But since then, the annual growth in yield has slowed to slightly more than 1%. In some countries the yields appear to be near their practical limits, including rice yields in Japan and China.”

  One set of factors concerns supply—our environment is coming close to the limit of what it can produce. Temperature rises thanks to climate change are a real threat to global crops: the US National Academy of Sciences reckons that for every 1°C rise in surface temperatures, wheat, rice and corn yields drop by ten percent. Add to that the world’s rapid overuse of fresh water, which has led some countries to mine fossil aquifers and other non-renewable sources to feed their crops. And topsoil is eroding too, faster than new soil can form. “This thin layer of essential plant nutrients, the very foundation of civilization, took long stretches of geologic time to build up, yet it is typically only about six inches deep,” says Brown. “Its loss from wind and water erosion doomed earlier civilizations.”

  On the other side, demand for grain is rising. This
is due partly to rising affluence. “People in low-income countries where grain supplies 60% of calories, such as India, directly consume a bit more than a pound of grain a day,” says Brown. “In affluent countries such as the US and Canada, grain consumption per person is nearly four times that much, though perhaps 90% of it is consumed indirectly as meat, milk and eggs from grain-fed animals.”

  * * *

  US GRAIN CROP USED FOR BIOFUELS

  107 million tons which could feed

  330 million people for a year

  * * *

  As increasing numbers of people in India and China start to consume meat, because more of them can afford something that was once too expensive, the demand for grain will become that much more urgent.

  Kenneth Cassman, an agronomist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, believes that humanity has enjoyed an unusual streak of food surplus since the green revolution began in the mid-1960s. “These trends sustained economic development and a significant reduction in global hunger and poverty,” he wrote. “A sharp reversal is now possible, however, given strong economic growth in the world’s most populous countries and loss of suitable cropland. People with rising incomes consume more meat and livestock products, which in turn requires more grain per unit of food produced. The rapid expansion of biofuel production only complicates the competition between food and fuel.”

  * * *

  The US is generating global food insecurity on a scale not seen before.

  * * *

  Around the world, governments are championing the production of biofuels to replace traditional fossil fuels for cars and lorries, part of their acknowledgment that we need to do something to prevent climate change. Farmers are being incentivized to grow maize, sugar cane, palm oil and oilseed rape, all of which can be turned into ethanol or other sustainable fuels.

  Figures from the US Department of Agriculture show that a quarter of the maize and other grain crops grown in that country in 2008 was used to create ethanol. At average world consumption levels, that 107 million tons of grain could instead have fed 330 million people for a year. And the problem is set to get worse—President George W. Bush challenged farmers to increase their production of biofuels by 500 percent by 2017, to 35 billion gallons per year, to help cut down on foreign oil imports. “The US, in a misguided effort to reduce its dependence on foreign oil by substituting grain-based fuels, is generating global food insecurity on a scale not seen before,” said Brown.

  Children at a feeding center run by Médecins Sans Frontièrs at Ajiep in southern Sudan, during the 1998 famine.

  As if to underline the point, a World Bank report in 2008 concluded that the drive for biofuels by American and European governments had pushed up food prices by 75 percent. Loaves of bread get more costly in England, tortillas become unaffordable in Mexico. Rising food prices sent thousands of demonstrators on to the streets across countries in the southern Mediterranean and north Africa.

  How food shortages bring about a failed state

  If costlier food was the only result of the looming shortage, it might stay as a development issue, one of many. But the crisis will have repercussions down the chain to wider society. “Food scarcity and the resulting higher food prices are pushing poor countries into chaos,” says Brown. “Such ‘failed states’ can export disease, terrorism, illicit drugs, weapons and refugees. Water shortages, soil losses and rising temperatures from global warming are placing severe limits on food production. Without massive and rapid intervention to address these three environmental factors ... a series of government collapses could threaten the world order.”

  In a failing state, the government can no longer provide personal security or basic social services such as education and health care. Food security is out of the window.

  “For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate probably seems preposterous,” wrote Brown. “Who would not find it hard to think seriously about such a complete departure from what we expect of ordinary life? For many years I have studied global agricultural, population, environmental and economic trends and their interactions. The combined effects of those trends and the political tensions they generate point to the breakdown of governments and societies. Yet I, too, have resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization. I can no longer ignore that risk. Our continuing failure to deal with the environmental declines that are undermining the world food economy—most important, falling water tables, eroding soils and rising temperatures—forces me to conclude that such a collapse is possible.”

  If you think a shortage of food will not affect affluent people in the West, think again. Failing states have global impacts as a source of terrorists, drugs, weapons and refugees. Citizens of these states can threaten political stability in their own region and much further afield too. Among the failing states identified by the United Nations, says Brown, Somalia has become a base for piracy, Iraq is a hotbed of terrorist training and Afghanistan is the world’s leading supplier of heroin.

  Rising food prices spread disorder. In Thailand, rice thieves have forced villagers to guard their crop at night with shotguns. Trucks carrying grain are hijacked in Sudan.

  If individual nation states start to break down, international finance becomes more difficult, and the global spread of disease is harder to manage. “If the system for controlling infectious diseases—such as polio, SARS or avian flu—breaks down, humanity will be in trouble,” says Brown. “If enough states disintegrate, their fall will threaten the stability of global civilization itself.”

  What can we do?

  There may be technological fixes on the horizon. Crops might be genetically modified to produce higher yields or to grow on land that has little water or nutrients in its soil. But no such crops have been tested on a large enough scale to call this idea anything but fantasy for now.

  Perhaps, though, the solutions are closer to home. Instead of relying on technology, we might think about altering our behavior. Conserve soils, for example, or grow and eat wheat rather than rice (the latter uses up far more water).

  A 2010 editorial in Nature was optimistic about our chances. Producing enough food for the world’s population would be easy, it said, though doing it sustainably would be difficult. “Clearing hundreds of millions of hectares of wildlands—most of the land that would be brought into use is in Latin America and Africa—while increasing today’s brand of resource-intensive, environmentally destructive agriculture is a poor option. Therein lies the real challenge in the coming decades: how to expand agricultural output massively without increasing by much the amount of land used.”

  * * *

  In Thailand, rice thieves have forced villagers to guard their crop at night with shotguns.

  * * *

  The journal advocated a new position: a second green revolution described by the UK’s Royal Society as the “sustainable intensification of global agriculture.” That means finding new crop varieties that use less water and are more resistant to pests and heat, as well as curbing waste everywhere in the system—up to a third of the food produced in the world is lost or spoiled.

  “Meeting these goals may be necessary to prevent the collapse of our civilization,” says Brown. “Yet the cost we project for saving civilization would amount to less than $200 billion a year, a sixth of current global military spending. In effect, [it] is the new security budget.”

  Water Wars

  * * *

  How on Earth could we run out of water? It sounds absurd to even think it, given how much of our planet is covered in the stuff. Water, that essential ingredient for life and all the things that go with it (including food, power generation and manufacturing), is everywhere. Right?

  * * *

  In total, there are some 33 million Km3 (8 million cubic miles) of fresh water in the world—many thousands of times the amount humans consume every year. Talking averages, people drink around a cubic meter of
water a year and use 100 times that amount for cleaning and washing. Growing the food we eat annually takes up another 1,000 cubic meters.

  So why is it that global governments and world bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations keep warning about a coming water apocalypse? Or potential skirmishes over access to water resources? Or billions of people who by the middle of this century will be without clean water?

  It seems counterintuitive, for sure, but there is no doubt that the wells are running dry. “Someday we might look back with a curious nostalgia at the days when profligate homeowners wastefully sprayed their lawns with liquid gold to make the grass grow, just so they could then burn black gold to cut it down on the weekends,” says Michael E. Webber, associate director of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. “Our children and grandchildren will wonder why we were so dumb.”

  Water, water everywhere ... or perhaps not

  In 2008, an editorial in Nature outlined the problems humans have when it comes to water. More than a billion people in developing nations lack access to safe drinking water, and more than two billion have no proper sanitation. In the near future, water shortages are likely to spread into other key sectors, notably agriculture and energy.