Water crisis: Risks will increase with every degree of global warming

MILAN— The increasingly critical condition of global ecosystems is also causing a serious water crisis that the whole world is now facing. Approximately 1.4 million people die each year from diseases related to unsafe and preventable water, while approximately half of the world’s population lives in water shortage for at least part of the year . Globally the demand for water is increasing by almost 1% per year and will continue to grow. This situation must necessarily translate into a significant response from companies and governments.

Queto tema è al centro dello studio “Nature-Based Solutions to the Water Crisis” by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and WWF, which identified natural systems-based (NBS) solutions to mitigate water security pressures as having great potential. These are actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural or modified ecosystems, while delivering benefits for human well-being and biodiversity. These actions also help protect against increasingly extreme floods and droughts, improve coastal protection against storm surges and sea level rise, enhance water supply and quality, and promote biodiversity and to regenerate freshwater ecosystems.

“This year’s United Nations Water Conference underlined the urgent need to find bold solutions to the global water crisis.” said Fabio Favorido, Principal of BCG . “It’s time to stop looking at the problem from afar: we must necessarily move from a risk-based approach, now obsolete with respect to water management, to one that provides for the implementation and scalability of resilient and natural solutions to address the problems increasingly challenging.Drastically increasing investments in the protection and restoration of freshwater ecosystems will be the key to guaranteeing access to water and the vital sources associated with it, in a world where this resource is increasingly exploited.

Actions to prevent a planetary crisis

For more than a decade, water-related risks have led the World Economic Forum’s global risk assessment in terms of likelihood and severity of impact, on both people and businesses. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that water-related risks will increase with every degree increase in global warming . The cost of flood damage was approximately $82 billion in 2021, nearly double the average losses recorded between 2011 and 2020, and is expected to rise in the years to come.

Without early action, access to water, food security and ecosystem quality will decline, while economic risk will continue to rise. If nothing is done, the study estimates that 1.6 billion people could suffer from a lack of safely managed drinking water by 2030 and 2.8 billion people could find themselves without compliant sanitation . By 2050, 23% of the area used for rice production and 42% of the area used for wheat production will face high risks of water scarcity. Finally, by 2070, a 26% increase in harmful pollutants in river basins and a 6% reduction in areas with high aquatic biodiversity are expected.

The global water crisis orientation must shift from risk to resilience. While the risk-based approach focuses on the short-term, exclusively minimizing economic costs and damaging parallel ecosystem services, the resilience-based approach integrates social and environmental (as well as economic) metrics, providing an adaptive long-term strategy for managing waters, at the same time, offers co-benefits such as biodiversity and water filtration.

BCG and WWF have developed a four-step plan to drive real progress on water security by dramatically increasing investment in Nature-Based Solutions (NBS):

1. Prioritize water as a key lever to adapt to climate change, building its resilience on natural systems.
2. Innovate locally using natural systems throughout the water value chain.
3. Implement more NBS systems for water security as part of future infrastructure projects.
4. Scale investments in natural solutions to increase water security and create resilient ecosystems.