Excerpt

Last summer, it was hard to miss news about California’s drought, caused by the four driest years in the state’s history. Its impact on California’s economy in 2015 alone was estimated at $2.7 billion dollars and 21,000 jobs lost. Thanks to El Niño, this drought has eased some, but 42 percent of the state is still in a condition of extreme drought.

In 2007, there was a drought that didn’t garner quite the same national attention: Atlanta, Georgia, was in a state of exceptional drought from September to December and came within a few months of running out of water. A large American metropolitan area running out of water almost certainly would have required driving in massive trucks of water every day just so that people could wash their hands, drink, and use the bathroom.

To address the impending disaster, Georgia’s governor led several hundred people in prayer, without leading an official effort to reduce water demand or increase supply.

Unlike California’s drought, Atlanta’s was not unprecedented. Droughts of equivalent severity occur about once a decade, but the region’s population had grown by 25 percent in the previous decade, and an increase in water-intensive agriculture was putting stress on the system even before dry weather limited Atlanta’s supply.

Growing urban populations and increasing demand are likely to make water scarcity much more common, not just in Atlanta and California but across the US and in most arid parts of the world. What’s worse is that these expectations do not take into account the effects of continuing climate change, which will put additional stress on water supplies in many regions.

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