The video explores the critical issue of water scarcity, focusing on the dire circumstances in northern Kenya where climate change, water mismanagement, and growing populations create immense challenges. nomadic tribes in regions like the Rift Valley face severe drought, which has transformed once fertile lands into deserts. This battle for water is occurring globally, as projections indicate that by 2025, half of the world’s population might face water scarcity, intensifying global tensions.

The discussion shifts to solutions being implemented to combat these issues, highlighting how some communities have adapted to recover and thrive. An example is in Kenya, where using technologies like solar-powered aquifers is transforming nomadic lifestyles to a more stable, agriculture-based economy. Advances in water purification and conservation practices, such as Singapore's innovative water recycling methods, demonstrate how societies can secure water supplies amidst increasing threats.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. scarcity [ˈskɛr·sɪ·ti] - (noun) - The state of being in short supply; shortage. - Synonyms: (paucity, insufficiency, deficit)

Growing populations, water mismanagement, and climate change mean that by 2025, half of the world, the world's population, will face water scarcity, and global tensions are rising.

2. aquifers [ˈæk·wɪ·fər] - (noun) - Underground layers of water-bearing rock from which groundwater can be extracted. - Synonyms: (water table, reservoir, groundwater)

When rain falls, it goes into rivers and lakes, but it also seeps into sediments and cracks, forming these vast underground aquifers.

3. pastoralism [ˈpæs·tər·əˌlɪz·əm] - (noun) - A form of animal husbandry where domesticated animals, known as livestock, are released onto large vegetative areas. - Synonyms: (livestock farming, grazing, animal husbandry)

The men practice pastoralism, a tradition of roaming across grasslands, raising livestock to keep their families fed.

4. leverage [ˈlɛv·ər·ɪdʒ] - (noun / verb) - To use a factor to gain an advantage or influence. - Synonyms: (influence, advantage, power)

It can be used as leverage, it can be the very cause, the root cause of conflict.

5. desalination [diːˌsælɪˈneɪʃən] - (noun) - The process of removing salt from seawater to make it suitable for drinking and irrigation. - Synonyms: (purification, filtration, distillation)

Not directly used in the text; relevant for solutions mentioned like Singapore's water technology.

6. sovereign [ˈsɑv·rən] - (adjective) - Possessing supreme or ultimate power. - Synonyms: (autonomous, independent, supreme)

Different countries have different ideas around how they want to use water, and it becomes a sovereign matter, understandably a sovereign matter, on a resource that's not how many, who owns it.

7. nomadic [nəʊˈmæd·ɪk] - (adjective) - Pertaining to a community that moves from place to place instead of staying and living permanently in one place. - Synonyms: (migrant, itinerant, wandering)

And the people who still live here, they have a very nomadic lifestyle.

8. rotational axis [roʊˈteɪ·ʃən·əl ˈæk·sɪs] - (noun) - An imaginary line through a planet's pole around which it rotates. - Synonyms: (axial tilt, axis, spin axis)

And we have extracted so much water now from deep underground that we've managed to shift the earth's rotational axis by about 80.

9. infrastructure [ˈɪn·frəˌstrʌk·tʃər] - (noun) - The fundamental facilities and systems serving a country, city, or area, including transportation, communication, power, and water. - Synonyms: (framework, foundation, base)

Doctor Anna Miich is an expert in water infrastructure systems.

10. artificial [ˌɑr·təˈfɪʃ·əl] - (adjective) - Made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, typically as a copy of something natural. - Synonyms: (synthetic, man-made, manufactured)

But here, treated wastewater is also pumped to new water factories, where it is purified and then sent back to feed water hungry industries and top up reservoirs, creating an artificial water cycle.

The Surprising Solutions to the World's Water Crisis | The Future With Hannah Fry

These expansive lands in northern Kenya have been home to nomadic tribes for thousands of years. If we go to the culture traffic, we might have a chance to see the livestock done this way. But as recently as 60 years ago, this place was a dense, flourishing forest. Now it has dried into a resource poor, parched desert.

The area is really suffering the impact of drought. The people of Takana and their livestock are on the front line of a battle beginning to play out all over the world. A battle to secure water. Growing populations, water mismanagement, and climate change mean that by 2025, half of the world, the world's population, will face water scarcity, and global tensions are rising.

I'm Professor Hannah Fry, mathematician and writer. I want to explore why the world is toying with catastrophe over dwindling access to water, and whether technology can help secure our future needs.

This here is part of the rift valley, sometimes known as the cradle of humanity, because this is where the earliest human like fossils have been found, or some of them, at least. And the people who still live here, they have a very nomadic lifestyle. They move around looking for pasture in search of water.

Searching for a supply of fresh water used to be the ultimate priority of our ancestors. But today, over half of us live in towns and cities where we expect the water to come to us instead. And while it might seem like an unquenchable resource, every drop that we use is taken from an interconnected cycle that's responsible for all life on Earth. Earth, remember, is a giant, rocky, wet blob floating in space. All of the water that we have ever had and ever will have is already here, cycling endlessly around our planet.

When rain falls, it goes into rivers and lakes, but it also seeps into sediments and cracks, forming these vast underground aquifers. Out at sea, water evaporates, becoming clouds that drift back over land to fall again, becoming a new store of fresh water. This cycle has been happily stable for thousands of years. But now, 8 billion humans are interfering. We are sucking up water from the rivers. We are damming them, blocking off the supply downstream. And we have extracted so much water now from deep underground that we've managed to shift the earth's rotational axis by about 80.

On top of all of that is climate change. We have got more intense raints, more erratic weather patterns, and prolonged spells of drought. The amount of water on earth that hasn't changed, but where the water is and when and how it moves is becoming more and more unpredictable.

The people here were never strangers to drought, but now it is a constant, unrelenting concern. Joelle and June work for Practical Action, an international development group that is responding to the crisis in the region. We identify areas with serious challenges in terms of access to water, access to food. We chose this place because of the problems that the community was experiencing here.

The men practice pastoralism, a tradition of roaming across grasslands, raising livestock to keep their families fed. But this is a way of life reliant on rain for pasture to grow. And that has left these people among the first victims of the effects of climate change. Can you remember what it was like when he was a boy? How have the rains changed since then? Grujiknaram Talibutunyama guru. The pressure on the pasture. Does that ever result in conflict? But Alamana raging. The Ayaka Kadungi, Alamana Katini. Is he angry about this? About how things have changed?

There are now routinely violent clashes over livestock, water points and pasture. Hundreds lose their lives each year. The strain is not only felt by the men responsible for herding the livestock, but also by the women and girls of the community.

Water is a function that is culturally left for the women. They used to go to the river, which is more than 10 km from this place. When the rivers run dry, women and girls have to dig what's called a scoop hole to extract the water saturated in the riverbed. How deep are we talking? 10 meters. Test where you are having three people from one person to the other, handing over the buckets of water. You take from me. You take from me up to this harvest.

Wow. And most of the time, it collapses on them. Collapses in. Is it only sand? Yes. We have heard incidences where the scopoles do collapse, and we have fatalities as a result around here.

Getting hold of water means accepting these unthinkable risks. Something practical action have been trying to change. These storage tanks are full of water drawn up from deep underground aquifers using solar power. It's enough of a supply of water to mean it can be used to grow crops in the rich soil. Laying down roots, in the most literal sense, means that these women are no longer nomadic water carriers. They are farmers. And these allotments have become the center of an astonishing shift in this community's livelihood.

Susan is one of these women who grows and tends to her crops in the allotments. The harvest gives enough to feed the community. With leftover produce, the farmers can sell, earning money to pay for school for their daughters and your children. Could they go to school before? And how about for you? How has your life changed?

They used to face malnutrition problems a lot as women. So her life has changed greatly, if you can see from how she's looking, because that's how she has said it. She's glowing. I mean, there is quite a lot of work now for the women, though, right? I mean, if you're taking care of the water, but now also the food, has it changed the power dynamic slightly between the women and the men here?

The people who live here, their lifestyle is having to change, it's having to adapt to the changing climate. But I think there's something amazingly positive about what can happen when you give a community access to a sustainable supply of water. I think the only question mark that I'm left with is how long term this solution can be. I mean, the borehole could run dry, the solar panels could break, there could be all kinds of things that happen that are totally outside of anybody's control. And I do wonder what happens to people who live in places like this, in that kind of a future.

Today, over 2 billion people live with some degree of water scarcity, and this could cause 700 million people to be forced from their homes by 2030. But in the regions most affected, access to water is now more than a humanitarian issue. It's a threat to national security. Darnish Massoud Alavi is a peace and security technologist interested in how water deprivation is impacting different regions.

Water is this resource that we all need, of course, and it's the kind of thing that can easily become a source of contestation. It can be used as leverage, it can be the very cause, the root cause of conflict. So in the context, for example, of the Tigris Euphrates basin, Turkey is damming the river upstream. But that's having downstream consequences. In a place like Iraq, where now, with the absence of water, you're having significant social unrest because temperatures are rising quickly and the water flow is not the same.

In a way, then, I mean, I think that the idea of, say, oil being a source of conflict, I think that that makes sense to a lot of people. But the way you're describing it is that water is this absolutely critical pinch point. Almost nothing works without water. Nothing at all. To predict where water scarcity could lead to conflict, darnish is using data collected from space.

NASA's grace mission has two sister satellites which orbit the Earth precisely, tracking their distance to one another. But this distance is affected by gravity. So as water saturates the ground, the density and hence gravitational pull changes, causing the satellites to move closer together or further apart. Tracking this over time means that scientists can construct maps of where water is moving around the planet.

So if we look at Iraq here, this is how things look in 2007. Now, when we look at it nine years later in 2016, it's a sea of red. We're able to look at how quickly water is being depleted in a particular country, and we take all that information that's freely available to us as raw data and compare it to all kinds of other information. So, for example, one of the things we're interested in is social unrest, and in particular, how social unrest correlates with how quickly water is being diminished. And what do you find?

We find that there is a correlation in many instances, in a situation that's already stressed, already difficult. You add in issues around water and it makes things worse. Dianash's aim is to provide governments and authorities with data to better equip them for where conflict may arise in the future.

So when you're able to have these kind of empirical ways of measuring how much water is there, you can have a conversation that's grounded in a set of facts. Different countries have different ideas around how they want to use water, and it becomes a sovereign matter, understandably a sovereign matter, on a resource that's not how many, who owns it. Exactly. And we're going to see more and more of these challenges as climate change begins to affect us more.

When you look at the Amazon rainforest, 20% of the evaporant from the Amazon rainforest falls on us agricultural land. Whose is it? Right. The food security of the United States is directly tied to the Amazon rainforest. If someone comes along and says, well, I'm going to chop down all the trees, that has a direct consequence on us food security. The level of water stress is only increasing, and the need for sharing resources is becoming more and more acute when you're using water, as we all are, without necessarily seeing the much bigger picture, I think it's quite easy to forget this view that danish suffering there, right?

This very stark image of us from space with this limited and finite resource that will move around whether we want it to or not. It isn't just water scarce conflict zones that are suffering. Even here in London, a city built on a river trying to control this wild natural resource is becoming a problem.

Doctor Anna Miich is an expert in water infrastructure systems. If I turn on a tap in London, where does that water actually come from? Around 80% of the water in London is coming from the River Thames, and then we have around 20% of water coming from the subsurface, from the groundwater resources. London's water system is fed by rainfall, groundwater and rivers that supply a network of reservoirs. From here, water is sent to treatment plants before being pumped into the taps across the city. The sewage is then treated and made safe before being discharged back into the environment.

The entire cycle relies on rainfall to replenish the supply so that London can continue to operate. But this is a system that was originally built for a very different time. The reservoirs date from the beginning of 20th century. The sewer system has been built victorian era. Yeah, exactly. 1860s. And we are now dealing with different weather patterns which bring different amount of water at different times, and bigger extremes. And bigger extremes with very different city. I mean, if we look around us, I mean, just see how many construction sites are around us.

One of the biggest dangers is flash flooding. The aging infrastructure cannot cope with the more extreme rainfall that's feeding into the already overburdened sewage system. And while too much water is a big problem for the city now, not having enough is a growing danger for the future. I guess we're quite lucky in London that it rains all the time.

Well, it rains, but it's actually relatively dry. Parts of the UK, southeast of England, you know, London, are at quite high risk of droughts. Surprisingly, south east England has a lower average rainfall than Perth and South Sudan. Combining those twin issues of growing demand and longer periods without rain mean that even here, in 25 years, the reservoirs risk running dry.

One thing that really struck me about what Anna was saying is that drought and flooding are two sides of the same coin. It's essentially the same problem that you're dealing with. The stresses that this water system is under and the way that that's only going to get worse. I can't help but wonder whether that would be much higher on the political agenda if it was the other side of the coin that we were worrying about. If we were concerned that one day you would turn on the tap at home and there wouldn't be any water there at all.

Day zero, the day the taps run dry. Mexico City, Bengaluru and Cape Town have all been pushed to the brink as the city's reservoirs and wells fell to critical levels, forcing emergency action to be taken to save lives. But it was over 60 years ago that Singapore fell victim to day zero. Its residents no longer had access to a single drop of clean water. And ever since, securing the country's water has been a national priority.

Where do you rank in the world in terms of how water stressed you are? We are as dry as the Middle East. Harry Sier is an engineer for Singapore's national water agency and has been solving the country's water problem for nearly three decades. People say, hey, we are in the tropics. You are blessed with a lot of rain, right?

And surrounded by water. Yeah, plenty of water. It rains every few days, and you should feel ample water. The issue in Singapore, because we are so small, is a land constraint issue without luxury, like countries like UK or us, where you can afford to have huge lakes and reservoirs, you know, ours is a tiny place.

This lack of space led Singapore to develop new water, a project Harry has been working on since its inception. Every drop of water is precious to us. We collect every drop of water after it has been used, clean it, and return back into the system. Like London, Singapore gets some of its drinking water from reservoirs, and sewage is collected, treated, and released back into the environment.

But here, treated wastewater is also pumped to new water factories, where it is purified and then sent back to feed water hungry industries and top up reservoirs, creating an artificial water cycle. This is high level magic. Come on and tell me the high level magic.

Okay. A magician doesn't usually reveal his secrets, but. Okay, fine. So this is the first stage microfiltration. Just imagine a filter. The water molecules can pass through, but the larger contaminants cannot. Does bacteria get caught at this stage? Yes. Yeah, bacteria gets caught at this stage. Microfiltration is the first step of the three stage purifying process.

The second step, reverse osmosis. Forces water molecules through tiny pores in a membrane, filtering out larger contaminants. And finally, a blast of uv radiation kills any remaining microbes that might have squeezed through, and it's ready to drink. I think I sort of imagine that you'd be, like, chemically treating it. You'd be, like, adding stuff to the water, but you're really just doing fancy sieving.

Summarizes it perfectly. Fancy filtration. Yeah. And you're left, presumably, with water that doesn't taste like sewage in the end. Spot on. Well, there's only one thing left to do. How long ago was this sewage?

24 hours ago, this was probably still in the sewers. How's that? It tastes like water. It is just water. That is amazing.

Currently, the National Water Agency say that reclaimed new water supplies Singapore with about 40% of its water needs, and they hope to provide over half of it by 2060. In the decades since Singapore hit day zero, it has learned the importance of self sufficiency. They're no longer beholden to the. The unpredictable movement of water.

I have to be honest with you. I was a little bit squeamish before coming here, but. But it's very persuasive. How quickly did people get on board if in the UK suddenly the government says, by the way, we're going to put sewage water back into the taps? What happened there?

I think in the element of trust, although it's high, it's something that's easy to lose. One mistake overnight is that does really strike me as something that you've sort of cracked, though, that people here do see the value of water. The principle is that water is not only for drinking, it's for life. Right? If you value water, then things will change.

Your philosophy, your thinking, your approach, all will change. The future of the world's water supply is uncertainty. We will continue to be faced with too little, too much, and battles over who owns it. Technology can help us to find it and hold onto it. But the most powerful change we can make in our relationship with water might just be the way we think about it.

I think for a lot of people, saving water feels like a bit of a wishy wash environmental concern, you know, like not using plastic straws. And I don't think we've realized, certainly not in the way that Singapore has, that water is this issue of national security concern. And here they had to go right to rock bottom before they changed their ideas about the value of water as a resource. And now the only thing I'm hoping for is that the rest of the world learns that lesson before we get that far.

Global, Climate Change, Technology, Water Scarcity, Sustainable Solutions, Nomadic Tribes, Bloomberg Originals