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01 - Water Issue
01 - Water Issue
01 - Water Issue
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The water issue
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A
s we were closing this issue, I came across a video
on Twitter of a highway just outside Vancouver,
submerged in water. It wasn’t the only one. The
densely populated urban heart of British Columbia
was cut off from the rest of Canada by flooding and
mudslides after an atmospheric river barreled through. The coun-
try’s busiest port lost access to rail service, stranding containers.
Hundreds of motorists had to be rescued from slide-isolated
highways on military helicopters. The only way to get to the rest
of the country by road was to detour through the United States.
The deluge followed a hot, dry summer that saw the numerous
cities throughout the region blast through long-standing tem-
perature records as a heat dome blanketed much of the Pacific
Northwest. By the end of August, drought had settled in across
the province. Vancouver Island, home to old-growth temperate
rainforests, hit level 5 drought conditions, British Columbia’s
most severe categorization. Hundreds of wildfires left the region
covered in ash and the city itself choking in smoke. The charred
landscape left by the summer’s drought made the fall’s floods
that much worse. Watching that video of a highway covered Mat Honan
is editor in
in brown, muddy water, it occurred to me that I was viewing a chief of
sad microcosm of the premise of this issue: The way very many MIT Technology
Review
of us will initially experience climate change will be through
water—either too much of it or not enough. We will flood. Or
burn. Or both. This issue brings you stories of the way changes
to the water cycle are playing out all over the world as we begin they are experiencing change firsthand; she explains why it’s
to experience climate change. important for the scientific community to listen to those voices.
MIT Technology Review senior editor James Temple tackles It’s also why you’ll find stories from Cape Town, Mexico City,
the complexity and uncertainty of this change in his feature story the Volga River, Zimbabwe, and Karachi in this issue.
on how warming waters are disrupting the Atlantic currents, and From the outset, we didn’t want this issue to be a paean to
the scientists who are attempting to understand what may be doomerism. Erica Gies went to China to meet with Yu Kongjian,
coming next. It may not be The Day After Tomorrow—but, well, the influential landscape architect whose vision for “sponge cities”
it ain’t gonna be great. would restore the ebb and flow of the water cycle to urban areas.
Other stories look at a parched American West. Mark Arax Maria Gallucci takes us to space, where satellites are measur-
takes us on a beautiful if heartbreaking tour of California, where ing water in the Congo River basin. And Megan Tatum has the
people spent much of the past 150 years capturing water and details on Singapore’s ambitious plans for water independence.
piping it to support farms and cities, only to have the well run Finally, in this issue’s fiction, Robin Sloan takes on the ques-
dry. Casey Crownhart traveled to El Paso, Texas, the “drought- tion of how it’s all going to work out. I’ll leave it up to you to
proof city,” where she found burst pipes and empty reservoirs interpret his ending.
side by side with desalination plants. As always, I appreciate your feedback. You can reach me at
Changes to water and climate affect all of us, and some- mat.honan@technologyreview.com or on Twitter, where I am @mat.
times in surprising ways. Kendra Pierre-Louis exposes rising Thank you for reading.
groundwater, an often overlooked threat in coastal areas that’s
intricately linked to sea levels. It could have devastating con-
sequences for our infrastructure, from sewers and gas lines to
ROBYN KESSLER
seawalls themselves.
For her book on water and climate change, Devi Lockwood
spoke to more than 1,000 people in 20 countries about the ways
Introduction Report
8 17 22
California dry Dispatches Mexico City on the way down
How we remade the land and Singapore’s push for water Thanks to aquifer depletion, the
took the water until there was independence, the long shadow city sank some 12 meters in the
none to take. By Mark Arax of Day Zero in Cape Town, and last century and may sink another
efforts to help farmers in Karachi 30 before hitting rock bottom.
conserve water. By Lucas Laursen
Features
24 30 36 44
Making water work Our invisible groundwater Healing the mother river Bone dry
in the “drought-proof” city problem The Soviets turned Russia’s most Drought in Zimbabwe has forced
El Paso has long been know Rising sea levels are pushing up important river into a machine. tens of thousands of farmers to
for its water conservation. groundwater, often miles from Then the machine broke. Can it migrate to the country’s Eastern
Now climate change is pushing the coast. The result is an unseen be fixed? By Olga Dobrovidova Highlands. How many more can
adaptation to its limits. crisis that is rapidly getting the region support?
By Casey Crownhart worse. By Kendra Pierre-Louis By Andrew Mambondiyani
“ We’re gonna
have all these
wetlands in
urbanized areas
and around
48 58 68 roads, where
Making friends with The threat to the planet’s Mapping the world’s fresh we don’t really
flooding ocean currents water from space
Our attempts to control water New science suggests that the It’s surprisingly difficult to mea-
want them.”
—page 35
have been a disaster, says one Atlantic currents are even more sure fresh water up close. So
influential Chinese designer. His befuddling and unpredictable climate scientists are taking a
radical theory: we should work than expected. By James Temple step back. By Maria Gallucci
COVER ILLUSTRATION BY PETER CROWTHER ASSOCIATES
Essays Fiction
73 75 77 82
Water infrastructure needs Exporting water in a time The power of storytelling Elyse Flayme and the final flood
to change of record drought in the fight against climate By Robin Sloan
Conventional ways of supplying Fresh water can and will eventu- change
water and preventing floods will ally run out if we’re not careful. Stories may be the most over- The back page
be no match for climate change. Climate change is bringing that looked climate solution of all.
By Sandra Postel day along faster. By Alok Jha By Devi Lockwood 88
Come hell or high water
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CALI —
FORNIA
DRY
HOW WE REMADE THE LAND AND TOOK THE WATER UNTIL THERE WAS NO MORE TO TAKE
The wind finally blew the other way last night and kicked
out the smoke from the burning Sierra. Down here in the flatland
of California, we used to regard the granite mountain as a place
apart, our getaway. But the distance is no more. With all those
dead pine trees in thrall to wildfire, the Sierra, transmuted into
BY ash, is right outside our door.
MARK ARAX We have learned to watch the sky with an uncanny eye. We
measure its peril. Some days, we breathe the worst air in the
Photographs by Tomas Ovalle world. On those few days when we can walk outside without
risking harm to our lungs and brains, we greet each other with dry. This October morning, after a month holed up, I decided to
new benedictions. May the shift in winds prevail, I tell my neigh- leave my house in the suburbs and roam the middle of California,
bor. May there be only the dust clouds from the almond harvest the irrigated desert at its most supreme. Out in the country, I
to contend with. In the meantime, I don’t dare quiet the turbo smell fall in the air. To celebrate its arrival, I’m going to visit an
on my HEPA filters, hum of this new life. old friend, a farmer named Masumoto, who has 80 acres in Del
The most brutal of summers in the San Joaquin Valley has Rey and is putting the last of his raisins in a box.
come to a rest at last. Since June, the temperature has broken There is no way to make this drive out of Fresno at harvest’s
the 100° mark for 67 days, a new record. Drought won’t let go end, through the dog-tired fields of the most industrialized farm
its grip on the land. Eight of the past 10 years have been ugly belt in the world, without thinking about water: the idea of it,
the feel of it; the form as it falls from the sky as rain and snow, grains, vegetables, exotic fruits, and the 170-acre “Las Vina,”
that man captures with his invention and implementation, his mother vineyard.
magic and plunder, the dam, the ditch, the canal, the aqueduct, Next came the dons from Mexico, freed from Spain’s yoke,
the pump, the drip line; the water that gives rise to every animate whose dalliance with California lasted but a quarter-century,
and inanimate thing that now stretches before my eyes, the vine- from 1821 to 1848. Blending European, Mexican, and American
yard, orchard, cotton field, and housing tract; the water whose lineages, they called themselves Californios. Rather than tame
too much can destroy us, whose too little can destroy us, whose California’s many states of nature, they amassed millions of acres
perfect measure of our needs becomes our superstition and story. and tamed themselves. On far-flung rancherias, they slaugh-
You should know that I have written about the matter of tered a calf a day to feast on, drank vast quantities of wine and
California and water a few times before, and I’m not above brandy, and threw royal weddings in which daughters who’d been
borrowing from old refrains. In my hunt for new words, I have locked away in finishing schools all their lives finally came out
driven Highway 99 a thou- into the sun. In a moment
sand times through a val- of goodwill, they pledged
ley that geologists call the that the mission lands,
most-altered landscape by and their flow of water,
human hands in history. would be turned over to
I now see the gashes of the remaining natives,
fresh alterations. What but the pledge never
has been done here, by amounted to a thing.
any means necessary, has American settlers
been done for the want had been nosing around
of water. for decades—mountain
men, fur trappers, scouts
Gold, thus dug, would be put in circulation. That circulation down in winter holds the chill of hibernation close to the fruit
would give prosperity. We will therefore, with the same lan- and nut trees. The importance of these chilling hours was a les-
guage as the horseleech, cry, ‘Give, Give,’ but let the gift be son my father’s father, Aram Arax, a poet-farmer, thought I should
Water! Water! Water!” know: “The apricot is a picky thing. It has to feel the kiss of the
By the time the great deluge of 1862 rained down, Hutchings’s death in winter to hold on to its fruit in spring.” He would need
magazine was no more. It would be left to William Brewer, who to go back to the Mediterranean, he told me, to find a clime
studied at Yale and came west to survey California’s natural where all manner of vegetables, fruits, nuts, and grains grew
resources, to describe what the floodwaters had done. “Nearly with such ease.
every house and farm over this immense region is gone,” he wrote. The 49ers who had made their way down the hill knew what to
“America has never before seen such desolation by a flood as do with this fecundity. So did the cotton growers from the South
this has been.” Brewer had come to recognize the Californian’s who were chased off their plantations by the boll weevil. They
peculiar fortitude to outlast everything: “No people can so stand corralled the rivers with a lattice of ditches and made them run
calamity as this people. They are used to it.” backward. They drained dry the great inland marsh and Tulare
The people forgot about flood with the same nonchalance Lake, too, the largest freshwater body west of the Mississippi.
that they forgot about drought. Their failure of memory became They wiped out the last of the elk, antelope, and mustang and
a strange resilience. They went back to their digging with new- emptied the sky of geese. They flattened the hillock and hog
wallow with the Fresno
Scraper and turned 6 mil-
THE PEOPLE FORGOT ABOUT FLOOD
lion acres into tabletop.
WITH THE SAME NONCHALANCE THAT THEY FORGOT ABOUT DROUGHT. That’s how the water of
THEIR FAILURE OF MEMORY BECAME A STRANGE RESILIENCE. furrow irrigation glided.
Their seize of the
snowmelt—“first in line,
first in right”—had no
parallel in agriculture.
They did not take half
found lust. They erected 6,000 miles of ditches and built a dam the flow of the rivers. They did not take three-quarters. By the
100 feet tall. The flows of Northern California rivers were now time the farmers were done, they had taken nine out of every 10
dictated by a handful of industrialists. To reach the deeper veins drops. When their garden was ready for showing, their promo-
of gold, they invented hydraulic cannons that shot out water at tional brochures fairly boasted, “Fresno County: A Wonderfully
such force that it blew the walls off mountains. Into the rivers Prosperous District in California. The Land of Sunshine. Fruits
washed the tailings, more than a billion cubic yards of boulder, and Flowers. No Ice. No Snow. No Blizzards. No Cyclones.”
rock, pebble, and mud. Tens of thousands of acres of new crops It would be easy to dismiss the lure of such hype. But word
planted in the alluvial plain began to choke on the retch of the of their feat—“the first great experiment in irrigation by the
mines. Anglo-Saxon race”—reached all the way to Istanbul, to the attic
As to the future of California, the industrialists who lived atop where my grandfather Arax was hiding from the Turks in 1918.
San Francisco’s Nob Hill had a choice to make: gold or grain? His uncle, who had lost his wife and children in the massacres
Isaac Friedlander, six foot seven and 300 pounds, whose stride and had fled to Fresno, was writing him letters describing an
was said to be that of two men, who had made his fortune by Eden in a valley at the edge of the Sierra: “You must see it with
cornering the market on flour for the mining camps, snatched your own eyes to believe it.”
one million acres of valley soil for practically nothing. He became My grandfather was plotting his way to the Sorbonne, to
the Wheat King. study French literature and become a writer, but the letters
kept coming, each one more full of sadness and hope than the
As I approach the Kings River—emptied of river, nothing but water to the dying farms in the middle. This is how the state of
sand—I can hear the words he used to describe our last farm, the California, in the 1960s, built the State Water Project, installing
one embroidered with pomegranate trees that my father, Ara, and more pumps in the delta and a 444-mile-long aqueduct to move
his brother, Navo, to my grandfather’s regret, sold a few years more water to grow more farms in the middle and more houses
before I was born. I grew up in the suburbs not a dozen miles and swimming pools in Southern California.
removed from those 60 acres, but it might as well have been an This is how we’ve come to the point today, during the driest
ocean away, for who we were and what we had done to make decade in state history, that valley farmers haven’t diminished
the desert bloom wasn’t a topic we discussed. their footprint to meet water’s scarcity but have added a half-
We had the Cotton King, Grape King, Melon King, and million more acres of permanent crops—more almonds, pista-
Tomato King right in our midst, men who possessed the lion’s chios, mandarins. They’ve lowered their pumps by hundreds of
share of our water, but how this dominion had happened feet to chase the dwindling aquifer even as it dwindles further,
remained a civic mystery. Irrigation canals full of snowmelt sucking so many millions of acre-feet of water out of the earth
knifed through our neighborhoods, but it never occurred to me that the land is sinking. This subsidence is collapsing the canals
to ask where the water was coming from, to whom it was going, and ditches, reducing the flow of the very aqueduct that we built
and by what right. The canals were completely unfenced, and one to create the flow itself.
or more children of the Mexican farm workers, looking to cool How might a native account for such madness?
off in summer, drowned
in them every year. “Don’t
“I’M NOT SAYING WE DON’T FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE AS A SOCIETY.
go next to those canals,”
my grandmother Alma WE HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO.
warned. “If you fall in, BUT OUT HERE, IT’S FOLLY TRYING TO CONTROL NATURE.”
they won’t fish you out.
They won’t stop the flow
until the harvest is over.”
I hadn’t heard a farmer talk that way since my grandfather, He puts a couple in his mouth, feeling for that chewy. It’s not
and so I wrote a story about him in the Los Angeles Times, and there.
he handed me a young Sun Crest to plant in my own backyard, “Not a raisin yet? How do you figure?” I ask.
and it bore so many peaches next to the swimming pool that my He looks to the sky. “This summer was record hot. They
wife, after our divorce, declared the tree a “mess” and pulled it should have ripened right up. But the sun didn’t shine the same.”
out. Mas, on the other hand, had saved the peach. Chef Alice I don’t know what he means.
Waters, for one, read his book and started serving Sun Crests, “All that smoke and ash from the forest fires. It changed
all by themselves, as dessert at Chez Panisse. the rays, I figure. It bent them somehow. They didn’t come
He points to a spot in the orchard where they’re still stand- through the same.”
ing, more gnarled and weather-beaten but still producing. He I nod and keep listening. He is talking about nature’s cycle.
counts himself among the lucky. His father, Takashi, chose this Drought helped kill the trees in the forest. Desiccated by thirst,
land well. It sits inside they were whittled out by
an irrigation district bark beetles. Lightning lit
with an early call on the that kindling. Kindling
river. Even in low-runoff became smoke and ash.
years, his water table gets Smoke and ash occluded
recharged. the sky. This slowed the
“We’re irrigating right ripening of grapes on
.
now, matter of fact,” he the vine. This slowed
says. “The water table has the baking of grapes into
dropped some, but out raisins.
here that means we’re Thanks to the wind,
sitting at 70 feet [deep]. the sky is now clear, but
Up and down the valley, it’s too late. October has
it doesn’t get much better changed the angle of the
than that.” sun hitting the rows.
“How’d the harvest “We’ve lost our oven,”
go? he says. “I’ll likely be send-
“It’s the middle of ing these raisins to the
October, and it’s still mechanical dryer. That’s
going,” he says with never happened before.
disbelief. They won’t taste the same.”
Talking about the weather with a farmer isn’t like talking It was hard to find a sweeter spot on earth for farming. Mas
about the weather with anyone else. It’s prying into the soul of had the soil, he had the river, he had the aquifer, and he had
things. I venture the opinion that this long dry spell isn’t only the sunshine, or at least he thought he did. He did not have the
California returning to drought form. It’s climate change hitching science to explain it, but climate change had found him too.
onto drought, creating an altogether new havoc. Mas isn’t like “I think of our farm as being alive,” he says. “Nature is alive.
most farmers. He grows his fruit organically and drives a Prius. Climate is alive. Is the idea to try and kill it? I’m not saying we
“Climate” and “change” are words he speaks together. don’t fight climate change as a society. We have no choice but
“I’ve seen things this harvest I’ve never seen before,” he says. to. But out here, it’s folly trying to control nature.”
We finish our kebabs and walk the century-old rows. The We walk past the giant concrete standpipe, filling up with
Thompson seedless vines look ready to kiss winter and fall asleep. water that will give a last drink to the farm before winter. He
But the amber grapes laid out on paper trays in the terraced loam talks proudly about his daughter, Nikiko, and his son, Korio,
are only half baked. I know the rhythm, and the rhythm is off. who will take over these acres sooner rather than later.
Thompsons are put down in early September to avoid fall’s first “Out here, everything is going to take time,” he says.
rain. It takes but 12 days for the valley sun to wrinkle a grape We hug goodbye. I get into my little Chevy, turn on the
into a raisin. Mas’s raisins are a month late in drying. They’ve electrical engine, and drive home through the dust. The pome-
already been rained on once. granates are turning red, and I can’t help thinking: How much
“It’s a mystery,” he says. time do we have?
He bends down into the crouch that raisin farmers assume
when they are about to examine their crop. He sifts through Mark Arax is the author of several books, most recently
the bunches with his sunburned hands, feeling for that sticky. The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California.
The Blue
Technology
Barometer
The Blue Technology Barometer is a ranking of
66 coastal countries and territories on their prog-
ress and commitment toward protecting ocean
sustainability. It measures the degree to which econ-
omies are prioritizing the protection of ocean health.
KEY
The index ranks the “blue” performance of
countries and territories across four pillars: Blue technology leaders
Blue technology challengers
• Ocean environment • Technology innovation Blue technology strivers
• Marine activity • Policy and regulation
Overall top 10
Dispatch : Singapore
P O RT
Singapore’s push Books, grapple
Three cities
very day, the Linggiu spell in 2016 saw reservoir levels fall tiny land mass and lack of natural
gallons per day from the 123-kilometer- making every drop count.” to collect and store all the rainwater
long river, meeting more than half its Water security isn’t a new con- that falls within Singapore,” explains
national needs. But a prolonged dry cern for Singapore. The city-state’s Harry Seah, deputy chief executive
In Singapore, treated wastewater satisfies up to 40% of the country’s needs. The goal is to reach 55% by 2060 ... In late 201
for operations at the Public Utilities PUB has rallied households to adds, is just “part of the grand plan”
Board (PUB), Singapore’s national conserve water. By 2023, it plans to to make Singapore self-sufficient
water agency. In 2015, the World have installed some 300,000 smart We have when it comes to water.
Resources Institute ranked the water meters in homes; they will to be The other element is the coun-
country as among the most vul-
nerable to water stress, on a par with
use digital technologies to monitor
usage and flag leaks.
obsessed try’s massive wastewater recycling
campaign. Singapore already derives
the arid states of Bahrain, Qatar, But the country is also rapidly with 40% of its water from wastewater.
and Kuwait. accelerating efforts to expand on saving By 2060, it’s hoped, that contribu-
For decades, Singapore has its own water sources. PUB has water, tion will have risen to 55%.
satiated a significant amount of
its demand through agreements
committed to doubling the domes-
tic supply of clean drinking water
and The jewel in the crown of
this plan is the Changi Water
to import water from neighboring by 2060, a feat that would take making Reclamation Plant, which opened
Malaysia. One of those agreements Singapore close to self-sufficiency. every in 2009. Much of the facility sits
expired in 2011. The second—the Crucially, it aims to do so without drop underground (some parts 25 sto-
one that enables the country to draw
water from the Linggiu Reservoir—
increasing energy use.
T h e Ke p p e l M a r i n a E a s t
count.” ries deep), drawing in wastewater
through a 48-kilometer-long tunnel
is ongoing. Desalination Plant, which sits on linked to the country’s network of
But that source is vulnera- reclaimed land in the Marina East sewers. It’s capable of treating up
ble—not only to drought but to area of Singapore, is a sprawling to 900 million liters of wastewater
politics. “In the past, there were monument to that effort. Opened a day using membranes to filter out
multiple times when the relation- in June 2020, the plant is capable microscopic particles and bacte-
ship between the two countries of producing 30 million gallons of ria, reverse osmosis to remove tiny
[Malaysia and Singapore] had some clean water every day. The facility, contaminants, and finally UV dis-
friction, with water being a matter which was built with a government infection to destroy any viruses or
of dispute,” says Stuti Rawat, a post- contract estimated at S$500 mil- bacteria that remain. The reclama-
doctoral fellow in the Department lion (US$345 million), generates tion effort is “the key in helping us
of Asian and Policy Studies at the fresh water using significantly less to overcome our land constraint for
Education University of Hong Kong. energy than a typical desalination storage,” says Seah, referring to the
In 2018, Mahathir Mohamad, then plant. That is because the plant fact that space to stockpile water in
Malaysia’s prime minister, signaled operates in two modes, drawing Singapore is in short supply.
his plans to renegotiate the Linggiu in and treating rainfall that collects The next step for Singapore is
agreement, calling it too costly and in a nearby reservoir during wet to further slash energy use. At a
the current terms—which have periods and processing seawater research and development facility
Singapore paying just three sen only when the weather is dry. Both in the industrial area of Tuas, for
(less than one cent) per thousand sources are transformed into drink- instance, PUB is testing new desali-
gallons—“manifestly ridiculous.” ing water through a combination of nation technology that uses an elec-
“Because of that, it has been very ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, and tric field to pull dissolved salts from
important for Singapore to try to ultraviolet radiation. seawater, a less energy-intensive
carve out its own independent water The plant, one of the first in the process than reverse osmosis. Also
supply,” adds Rawat. world to use such a dual-mode sys- in development is a biomimetic
The rise in global temperatures tem, is an example of how Singapore membrane that uses natural pro-
has added new urgency to the situ- has continually “pushed the enve- teins found in cells to accomplish
ation. “With climate change, we are lope” on water management, says the same task.
expecting more extreme weather JianYuan Ling, energy industries Such energy-saving strategies
with more intense rain and longer division manager for Singapore at will be needed if Singapore hopes
dry spells, as experienced in the US, ABB, the company behind some of to achieve water independence. An
China, India, and many other parts the tech that underpins the plant. expanding population and indus-
of the world,” Seah says. In doing so, it has challenged sup- trial growth are set to double water
These volatile patterns mean pliers. “Efficiency is definitely their demand in the country by 2060.
that the country can no longer rely top priority,” Ling says. “This is a
Megan Tatum is a freelance
on rainfall to predictably fill up its national project, so the whole coun- features journalist based in
reservoirs. try is watching.” But Keppel, he Penang, Malaysia.
2017, a severe drought compounded by several years of subpar rainfall left Cape Town with freshwater dams below 25% of capacity.
drought, Cape Town was on the Four months later, the rains Town, South
shantytowns, at least 2 mil-
verge of becoming the world’s first returned, and dam levels rose. But Africa. lion residents (out of Cape
Three Cape Town desalination plants commissioned in 2017 are being dismantled ... Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous city, h
from Crop2X,
selves to address this in the future,” could help delivery trucks to supplement their than in Karachi, Pakistan’s most
he says. farmers use supply. Ultimately, his family chose populous city, which has a daily
less fer-
Joseph Dana is a writer based tilizer and
to dig an even deeper well, knowing water shortfall of hundreds of mil-
in Cape Town, South Africa. water. as they did so that if everyone lions of gallons. Despite that, water
But
included a solar-powered box and a that grew in the same incubator as
thumb-size soil meter, could monitor AquaAgro, is also working on data-
weather conditions like tempera- driven ways to help farmers mod-
ture, humidity, and pressure and ernize. The company uses sensors
wait,
measure the soil’s moisture con- and satellite imagery to help them
tent. The data was all uploaded to identify which parcels of land aren’t
a portal, and farmers then received operating at their maximum yield.
there’s
mobile alerts informing them when “We’ve been able to use the satellite
to water their crops. imagery to help identify pests and
At AquaAgro’s pilot farms, crop reduce the amount of fertilizer that’s
more.
yields increased by 35% and water being used,” says Laeeq Uz Zaman,
usage reduced by 50%. But when the founder and CEO. “Those are
Rehman and his colleagues reached things that are valuable for farmers.”
out to farmers about their product, Uz Zaman hopes he can pull off
they found few were interested. “It a bait-and-switch: if he convinces
wasn’t a viable financial model,” farmers to buy in to a product they
Rehman says. “Because the price of want—one that would help them Your subscription
water was so cheap, farmers weren’t reduce spending on fertilizer—per-
gets you more than
motivated in cutting down their haps they will eventually incorporate
just this magazine
water consumption.” water-reduction strategies as well. In
But water is no longer the abun- its weekly reports to clients, Crop2X
dant resource it used to be. Farms includes water prescriptions, in part
around the Karachi area that relied building on the data-based program You’re already a
on groundwater to grow their crops AquaAgro developed. subscriber. Register
now use everything from sewage The company’s general approach your account and
streams to water trucks to stolen sur- seems to be working for now. start enjoying:
face water. Karachi’s primary water Currently, it has more than 1,500
utility company complains that a acres of farmland using its services • Paywall-free web
large amount of the city’s water is and it’s targeting 4,000 acres by
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stolen from a 3,200-kilometer canal 2025. The startup has started rolling
system that distributes water from a out pilot programs at large corpo- • Exclusive digital
lake about two hours outside the city. rate farms, hoping owners will see stories
“There’s a general perception that the utility of its methods. Still, Uz
there is unauthorized use of water ... Zaman says, the major obstacle to
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says Farhan Anwar, a Karachi-based result in more crops.
urban planner. But, he adds, “docu-
Mariya Karimjee is a freelance
mentation is hard to find.” writer living and working in
Rehman hoped that AquaAgro Karachi, Pakistan. technologyreview.com/
could help with Karachi’s water cri- subonly
sis. If farms around the city used
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAURA CATTANEO / RAINFALL: IPCC WGI ATLAS; EXTRA WATER SPENDING: REPORTE ÍNDIGO AND THE NATIONAL AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF MEXICO (UNAM); CHINAMPAS: UNAM AND ORU OFICINA DE RESILINCIA URBANA.
Climate change is helping sink Mexico City but residents aren’t ready to give up.
The comings and goings of water define more water from the aquifer below it But residents are taking charge of
Mexico City, a mile-high metropolis than it replenishes: the city sank some 12 water—and their climate futures—in a
sprawled across three dry lake beds. The meters in the last century and may sink variety of ways that promise to buoy the
city floods in the wet season and thirsts another 30 meters before hitting rock city’s hydraulic balance and perhaps pro-
during regular droughts. CDMX, as the bottom. Scientists predict that climate mote equitable access to safe drinking
city of 21 million styles itself, pumps change will exacerbate these problems. water. —Lucas Laursen
SINKING FEELING
With less water in
it, Mexico City’s
aquifer no longer
holds up the city.
The drier land also
puts buildings at
greater risk for
earthquake damage.
National Autonomous
University of Mexico
researchers have estimated
REFORESTATION the risks Mexico City will
face from climate change.
The state of Mexico is refor-
High temperatures will
esting the slopes above the
affect all municipalities, but
city, which should help cap-
water will make its mark
ture rainwater and minimize
too: landslides in Gustavo
landslides
A. Madero and flooding in
during the
Iztapalapa drive their risk
more frequent
higher than their neighbors’.
and intense
Magdalena Contreras and
storms pow-
Milpa Alta enjoy the least
ered by cli-
risk, thanks to their low inci-
mate change.
dence of flooding.
INFILTRATION
ROOFTOP RAIN CAPTURE The city has built public
spaces such as the Parque
The nonprofit Isla Urbana Bicentenario, which boasts
has built more than 20,000 volcanic soil. Its porous
subsidized rooftop rain cap- ground directs rainfall to the
ture systems, focusing on aquifer, heading off flood-
neighborhoods with the least ing, reducing subsidence,
access to potable water. preventing damage to infra-
structure, and replenishing
the drinking water supply.
A
bout 20 miles outside El Paso, Texas, on a
warm afternoon just before the fall harvest,
Ramon Tirres Jr. turns his truck between two
fields covered in nothing but dirt. Both should be
lush with cotton by now, but these 70 acres—a frac-
tion of the nearly 1,000 that Tirres left unplanted this
year—are bare. All told, about two-thirds of his cotton
By fields lie empty.
CASEY Tirres has been farming here for 47 years. His pecan
CROWNHART trees love the heat, and the soil in the valley where
he farms is fertile. But without water, everything falls
apart. And the past few years have been especially dry.
THE “DROUGHT-PROOF”
CITY
Most of the water that Tirres and his neighbors
use on their crops arrives via the Rio Grande, a river
WATER
CONSERVATION.
Farmers like Tirres have been among those hit
hardest by water shortages affecting the region. Their
predicament may not seem surprising given where they
are: El Paso juts into the Chihuahuan Desert from the
western tip of Texas. While annual rainfall across the
US averages about 30 inches, El Paso gets under nine.
But El Paso has long been a model for water con-
NOW CLIMATE
servation. The city of 700,000 people has found a
CHANGE
IS PUSHING
way to exist, and even thrive, in the desert. Other
cities have for years looked to El Paso for solutions as
ADAPTATION population growth and climate change stress water
TO ITS
resources worldwide.
El Paso has done all the right things—it’s launched
programs to persuade residents to use less water and
L
ike a ring in a bathtub, a stripe in the rock
marks the history of water in the Elephant
Butte Reservoir, an artificial lake created by
the Elephant Butte Dam and tucked into the moun-
tains about two hours’ drive north of El Paso. Snowmelt
from mountains in Colorado flows here before being
released down the river. Portions are then distributed
by the US Bureau of Reclamation to different groups,
called irrigation districts, in New Mexico and Texas.
Eventually, some makes its way to fields like Tirres’s.
Today the water level is far below the stripe;
exposed rocks and the dam rise hundreds of feet on
every side. In October, the reservoir held only about
5% of its capacity.
Elephant Butte has provided the river basin to the
south with a mostly steady supply of water for over
100 years. But “you can have a really long stretch of
really bad years, like we’re having right now,” says Ben
Kalminson, the power plant supervisor at Elephant
Butte. When that happens, the reservoir empties out.
Between January 2020 and August 2021, the south-
west US endured a historic drought. Only about 17
inches of rain fell across the region; the 20-year aver-
age is 24 inches. According to climate models, there’s
about a 2% chance of having as little rain in any given
year as the amount that fell in 2020. In other words,
the 2020 drought was a one-in-50-years event, says
Isla Simpson, a climate researcher at the National
Center for Atmospheric Research. Wells scattered throughout Between June 1994 and July
She says there’s no evidence that climate change Ramon Tirres’s fields 2013, drought severely
supplement what he gets affected water levels
caused the lack of rainfall. Dry spells happen every
from the river. The water in the Elephant Butte
once in a while. Add heat into the mix, however, and is more expensive, but Reservoir, the results of
both the drought’s magnitude and the role of climate during a drought, it saves which are visible in these
both his crops and his before-and-after satellite
change become more obvious. livelihood. images.
Since hot air holds more moisture than cold air,
more water will evaporate if the temperature is higher.
One way to measure this effect is through vapor pres-
sure deficit, or VPD, which is the difference between become a one-in-10-years event in the Southwest by
how much water vapor the air could hold and how 2030. “We’re really at the point now where we can
much is actually there. A high VPD means the air is start to see these climate-change signals in the real
hungry for moisture, and a drought’s effects are likely world,” Simpson says.
to be worse: water evaporates more quickly from riv-
ers, lakes, soil, and even plants.
W
There’s only about a 0.4% chance in any given hile farmers rely on the Rio Grande for irri-
year of the VPD levels that struck the Southwest in gation, much of the water that El Paso’s res-
2020, according to climate models, making it about idents drink actually comes from aquifers
a one-in-200-years event. And it simply would not deep below ground. These critical water sources are
have happened when it did without climate change, also in jeopardy.
Simpson says. High VPDs will become more common In 1979, the Texas Water Development Board pro-
as temperatures rise—the levels seen in 2020 will jected that El Paso would run out of groundwater by
2031. At that time, each resident was using, on average, Tirres ducks back into his truck and pulls out the
over 200 gallons of water per day. Most of that water was lower half of a plastic water bottle he had fashioned
being pulled from the city’s two aquifers—the Hueco into a sampling cup, along with a device that looks
Bolson to the east and the Mesilla Bolson to the west. a little like an EpiPen. After letting the well run for
For the next two decades, the water utility launched a couple of minutes, he fills the cup and dunks one
a campaign encouraging residents to use less water end of the gadget into the water sample.
by, among other things, replacing their lawns with He shakes his head as he watches the small screen,
native plants. Today, average water use is down to where the numbers are ticking up. The meter, which
134 gallons per person per day. That’s still higher measures salt content by detecting how electricity moves
than the US national average of 82 gallons but lower through the water, reads nearly 2,400 parts per million,
than usage in some other places in the country with up from the 1,600 he measured two summers ago.
similarly dry climates, like Arizona (145 gallons) and Pecan trees, in particular, can be harmed by too
Utah (169 gallons). much salt, growing scraggly and producing less
The aquifers are in better shape as a result—some- fruit. Tirres has noticed a few trees on the edges of
what. “The water level is dropping, but it’s not drop- some of his groves looking a little worse for wear.
ping like a rock,” says Scott Reinert, the resources He’s worried—if the groundwater gets too salty, he
manager of El Paso Water. Still, more water is coming won’t be able to use it for his crops.
out of the aquifer than going back in. The Hueco Bolson holds about 10 million acre-
El Paso Water pumps between 40,000 and 50,000 feet of fresh water and about three times as much
acre-feet of water from the Hueco Bolson every year brackish, or semi-salty, water. Every time a pump
and replaces about 5,000 acre-feet annually. (An switches on to retrieve fresh water, saltier water
acre-foot is an unwieldy unit of measurement used moves closer to the city.
by water utilities—it’s enough water to cover an acre Pumping from El Paso has actually reversed the
of land, or just over half a soccer field, with a foot of area’s natural flow of groundwater, which used to
water.) There’s also some natural recharge from other move from north to south, following the Rio Grande.
groundwater and the river, but it’s likely not enough Groundwater moves slowly, on the scale of decades,
to keep up with pumping. but if farmers and larger water users in the city con-
El Paso Water plans to keep pumping from the tinue to pump as they have been doing, the brack-
aquifers for at least the next 50 years. But some ish water could eventually eclipse what’s left of the
researchers think the Hueco Bolson could be exhausted fresh water, leaving wells all over the area useless.
sooner, especially because El Paso isn’t the only city Before that happens, El Paso is trying to put some
depending on it. of that brackish water to use.
The city of Juarez, Mexico, hugs the Rio Grande
just to the south of El Paso. Juarez currently uses
about half as much water per capita as El Paso. But
because its population is rising and the city is almost
entirely dependent on the Hueco Bolson, it also has
a significant impact on the aquifer levels.
With both cities pumping and growing, some wells
could start to run dry in about 40 years, says Alex Mayer,
a civil engineer at the University of Texas at El Paso. But
there might be trouble even before then, because all the
pumping is changing the water quality underground.
SIMMON, USING LANDSAT DATA FROM THE U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY.
NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY IMAGE BY JESSE ALLEN AND ROBERT
T
irres hops out of his truck and walks over to
what looks like a utility pole. He opens the
door to a metal box and flips a switch. A
pump roars to life, and brown-tinged water starts “We’re really at the point now
spewing from a pipe into the concrete canals that
line the property.
where we can start to see
Wells like this one supplement what Tirres gets these climate-change signals
from the river. They’re scattered through his fields in the real world.”
and pull water from up to hundreds of feet under-
ground. This water is more expensive than what
Tirres can get from the river, but during a drought,
it saves both his crops and his livelihood.
U
sing salt water for much of anything used to needs, which range from 85 million to 145 million
be next to impossible. But reverse osmosis gallons per day.
and other filtration methods developed in the The system uses reverse osmosis: brackish water
20th century created new possibilities. is forced through a membrane with openings so small
Desalination, pulling salt out of water, accounts even salt can’t make it through. It’s an expensive pro-
for a small but growing fraction of human water use cess. While pumping fresh water out of the ground
worldwide. Global capacity tripled between 2005 and disinfecting it costs about $250 per acre-foot,
and 2018, and today nearly 300 million people get desalinating brackish groundwater blows the price
some of their water from desalination plants. Most up by nearly three times, to about $700.
are near the sea: about 60% of desalination is done Despite the cost, desalinated groundwater has
with seawater, and nearly half the world’s desalination become a critical part of the city’s water portfolio—
capacity is in the Middle East and North Africa. But and an important contingency plan for the future. The
in 2007, El Paso opened the world’s largest inland desalination plant is one of two major infrastructure
desalination plant to make use of the brackish water projects El Paso has undertaken to make its water
in the Hueco Bolson aquifer. supply more resilient to drought, and the second is
“We’re an on-demand plant,” says Art Ruiz, the arguably even more ambitious.
facility’s superintendent, as we walk into the control More water managers are looking at wastewater
room, where monitors display flows and pressures and seeing a valuable resource—once it’s cleaned up,
and pump speeds. Through windows on the far wall, anyway. New wastewater recycling plants are being
I can see the entire $90 million facility, housed in a developed across the American West, most notably
building not much larger than a high school gymna- a potential multibillion-dollar project in Southern
sium. Orderly pipes and pumps line one of the walls California planned for around 2030.
underneath an oversize American flag. A dull hum is El Paso has been treating and recycling some of
the only clue that the plant is running. its wastewater for decades, using it to water grass in
By on-demand, Ruiz means that the desalination parks and golf courses, or to cool machines at fac-
plant can increase its output to take the edge off during tories and power plants. Today, most gets injected
the highest-demand days, like summer scorchers, or back into the aquifers. But Gilbert Trejo, the chief
holidays like Christmas, when everyone is home and technical officer at El Paso Water, has an even
turning on the taps. If the facility were running full- grander vision.
out, it could produce over 27 million gallons per day Direct potable reuse, often referred to as toilet-to-
of fresh water. But most of the time it does much less, tap recycling, is the pinnacle of wastewater recycling.
accounting for about 5% of the city’s annual water Wastewater from showers and sink drains and, yes,
toilets is collected and treated as it normally would
be: after solids are separated out, the water is disin-
fected with chlorine. Then it goes through additional
processing, getting filtered and cleaned with chlorine
again and disinfected with UV light before being
piped back out to be used in kitchens, bathrooms,
and gardens across the city.
Most water recycling today passes water through a
natural source like a lake or river; few sites in the world
employ direct potable reuse. A site in Namibia is the
longest-running and largest. El Paso is now design-
ing a plant that would be the largest such facility in
the US. It should come online in 2025 and is likely
to cost about $100 million, Trejo says.
Trejo hopes the new plant will provide another
stable water source and help take the burden off
El Paso is unlikely to run out the aquifers when the river runs low. Residents are
of water in the coming decades. largely accepting of the idea—if they object, it’s often
not to the “ick” factor but to the cost. But the plan
Water may just keep getting isn’t infallible. In August, two pipes bringing waste-
harder to pull together, and more water to the city’s existing recycling plants broke in
western El Paso.
expensive as a result. The lines were supposed to be backups for each
other—so when both broke, wastewater backed up
into bathtubs and yards. With more breaks appearing
EL
Paso is unlikely to run out of water altogether can—it’s in his blood, he says. Farming in the des-
in the coming decades. But it will keep get- ert may be getting harder, but it’s never been easy.
ting harder, and thus more expensive, to pull “Farmers have always fought this battle, for-
together as much as it needs. Though technological ever,” he says. “You adjust to it. You have to adjust
solutions like desalination and wastewater recycling to it.”
can help, the solutions many people need will get Casey Crownhart is an editorial fellow at MIT
more complex as conditions continue to worsen. Technology Review.
BY Kendra Pierre-Louis
ILLUSTRATIONS BY Jon Han
F
Even under normal circumstances,
the cast iron pipes that make up roughly
a third of National Grid’s infrastructure
in Massachusetts are prone to rust and
corrosion. She thinks these pipes, which
once sat comfortably above the water
table, are finding themselves intermit-
tently swamped during seasonal high tides
that essentially push up the groundwater.
ae Saulenas does not want your sympathy.
And it’s that elevated groundwater that she
Saulenas, along with her 46-year-old daughter Lauren, spent last thinks seeped into the gas main, flooded
winter—their covid winter—in Saugus, Massachusetts, in a house out her gas meter, and eventually corroded
without a working furnace. Saulenas is in her 70s. Lauren, because her furnace.
of brain injuries she experienced in the womb, is quadriplegic, blind, Kristina Hill, an associate professor
and affected by a seizure disorder, among other disabilities. In winter, at the University of California, Berkeley,
whom Saulenas reached out to in pursuit
it’s not unusual for overnight temperatures in Saugus to dip into the
of answers, agrees. “She was asking me,
teens. The two could not long survive without heat, so absent a fur- is this something that comes from sea-
nace, they relied on a space heater. But the cost of electricity to power level rise? And obviously, the answer is
it was $750 in February alone, and it warmed only a single bedroom. yes,” says Hill.
Hill is one of a number of researchers
trying to get the public and policymakers
to take the risks of rising groundwater
seriously. Unlike rising seas, where the
dangers are obvious, groundwater rise has
remained under the radar. Hydrologists are
Saulenas doesn’t tell this story to engen- the Atlantic by the peninsula of Revere aware of the problem and it’s all over the
der sympathy but, rather, as a warning. Beach, is where Saulenas bought her house scholarly research, but it has yet to sur-
The water table, she says, is rising—seep- in 1975. face in a significant way outside of those
ing into gas lines and corroding furnaces Given the proximity to the ocean, the bubbles. Groundwater rise is only briefly
from the inside out. That’s what happened source of her recent woes would seem obvi- mentioned in the most recent edition of
to hers. And she wants you to know that ous: sea-level rise. Since 1950, sea level in the National Climate Assessment, released
if you live anywhere near a coast—even the region has risen by eight inches, and in 2018; it’s absent from many state and
one, two, three miles away—that water that change has not been linear. The sea regional climate adaptation plans, and
might be coming for you too. is rising faster now than it did a genera- even from flood maps.
For something you’ve probably never tion ago—about an inch every eight years. A 2021 study in the journal Cities found
heard about, rising groundwater presents But the water that left Saulenas out in the that when coastal cities conduct a climate
a real, and potentially catastrophic, threat cold did not come from the sea, at least vulnerability assessment, they rarely fac-
to our infrastructure. Roadways will be not directly. tor in groundwater rise. “They talk mostly
eroded from below; septic systems won’t Her problems began in 2018, when about sea-level rise, storm surges,” says
drain; seawalls will keep the ocean out but she lost gas—and thus heat—because of Daniel Rozell, an engineer and scientist
trap the water seeping up, leading to more water entering an underground main. It affiliated with Stony Brook University, who
flooding. Home foundations will crack; was a problem that would persist, inter- wrote the 2021 paper. “But there haven’t
sewers will backflow and potentially leak mittently, for several years. Water would been a lot of questions about what’s going
toxic gases into people’s homes. enter the gas main, and her utility, National to happen to the groundwater.”
Saugus is a small town roughly 10 miles Grid, would be forced to shut off the gas. Impacts on existing infrastructure and
northeast of Boston. On maps, water is National Grid would then try to find where planned climate adaptations could be cat-
one of its defining features, with the the water was coming from, patch the leak, astrophic. Remediation efforts that haven’t
Saugus River and its tributaries mean- and pump the water out. planned for groundwater rise will be ren-
dering through the town and heading Officially, National Grid has not named dered useless. Billions of dollars in infra-
through marshland to the Atlantic Ocean. the source of the problem. But Saulenas structure will need to be upgraded. And it
Among those salt marshes, blocked from thinks the culprit is groundwater. will likely affect an area much larger than
How water finds a way low-lying island nation, held the world’s The museum has taken a two-pronged
To protect themselves against rising seas, first underwater cabinet meeting to draw approach. The first element is educating
cities are turning to the same tools they attention to the harm big climate pol- the public. “One of the exciting things
have used for centuries: levees and seawalls. luters, like the United States, were per- that we’re gonna add is a kiosk that is
Boston has proposed a 175-mile seawall petuating through climate inaction. The attached to sensors that were placed in
called the Sea Gates Project. Miami has message was clear: You’re drowning us. the ground around the museum,” said
a proposal for a $6 billion, 20-foot-high These days, already dealing with the con- Rowland. “And they will track the move-
seawall. New York has proposed its own sequences of rising seas, the country is ment of the groundwater, [plus] salinity,
$119 billion, six-mile-long project called consolidating its outer island communi- temperature, water height. And so visitors
the New York Harbor Storm-Surge Barrier. ties onto a new island called Hulhumalé. will see that there’s water under their feet.”
Homeowners from Florida to California are It’s designed to withstand sea-level rise. But the museum also needs to preserve
erecting barriers to keep the ocean out. But But the project did not factor in rising the buildings. And that goal must now
the fundamental problem with all these water tables. be balanced with the fight against rising
interventions is the same: a seawall holds “They did not understand that the water water. In one of the houses, “we made the
back the sea, not groundwater. table will rise with sea-level rise,” says decision to take out what was called a sum-
In some areas, if the underlying ground Fletcher. If the sea rises only two more mer kitchen,” said Rowland. “There was
is relatively impermeable, it is possible to feet—which some estimates say will hap- a hearth down there where they cooked
build a seawall or levees that slow ground- pen as soon as 2040—most of this brand- in the summertime. We took it out, and
water rise. But then you’re left with other new island will be uninhabitable wetland. we put in a granite block.” They had to
problems. Recall that water moves toward When he explained this to the project’s do that because the old hearth was acting
the ocean. A barrier that stops groundwa- lead designer, “he just stared at me— like a candle wick, drawing water from the
ter from rising with sea level will also keep he was speechless. It’s like he couldn’t basement into the rest of the structure.
stormwater from, say, recent rainfall from comprehend what I was saying,” Fletcher “So now the rest of the chimneys are
flowing to the sea. says. “All the billions of dollars they had preserved,” he added. “The water can’t
“If you don’t let the water run out to the spent on this thing, and they didn’t build get through that. But we lost that piece of
ocean, then you have to basically pump it it high enough.” history. And this is going to be a constant
over the wall. And that’s essentially what battle with how much are we going to lose
the Netherlands has been doing for sev- Eroding away history to save what we can.”
eral centuries,” says Stony Brook’s Rozell. There is at least one place where you can In some ways Rowland is lucky. His
But this too can create problems, because see people reckoning with rising ground- state, New Hampshire, is at least aware of
so many of the places these seawalls are water in close to real time. Strawbery the risk of groundwater rise and is factor-
working so hard to save—much of Lower Banke Museum is in Portsmouth, New ing it into plans. But New Hampshire is an
Manhattan, large parts of San Francisco Hampshire, near the banks of the exception. Many other states, with more
and Boston—were built on wetlands, land- Piscataqua River, just a few miles from extensive coastlines, are going to have to
fill, or both. “If they pump, the land is going the Atlantic Ocean. The buildings were face the issue in the coming years as not
to sink,” says Hill. preserved to let us see three centuries only buildings but lives are threatened by
And even if cities were willing to pursue into the past, but they are also giving us a this unseen risk.
such a path, not every place can. “There glimpse into the future. Some of the struc- Less than 50 miles down the coast in
are lots of conditions where you can pump tures, including the city’s second-oldest Saugus, Fae Saulenas plans on leaving for
all day long and the water table won’t go house, are flooding from below. higher ground— but not without mak-
down,” says the University of Hawaii’s “We’re getting these super tides, king ing some noise. She’s written legislators,
Fletcher. tides, that elevate the water over two feet National Grid, and the press to try to draw
Recall that groundwater is water that higher than typical. And so we’re starting to attention to the issue. “Groundwater is
makes its way into the spaces, or pores, in see this water get into our basements,” said really important to me. And it’s important
sediment. In some places, like Miami, “the Rodney D. Rowland, Strawbery Banke’s to me not only because it has affected my
pores are so large that you’re just pulling director of facilities and environmental life profoundly, but because I think it has
in water from the estuary from the ocean,” sustainability, on a tour of the museum in the capacity to affect millions of people,”
says Fletcher. “You can pump as hard as late September. When you crouch down she says. “And nobody’s prepared, and
you want and it just keeps coming in from in basements with their ceilings too low nobody’s paying attention.”
an endless body of water”—the sea. for most adults to stand, it’s easy to see
Kendra Pierre-Louis is a senior cli-
Planners are often oblivious to the the water marks from past groundwater mate reporter with the Gimlet/Spotify
problem. In 2009, the Maldives, a incursions. podcast “How to Save a Planet.”
Volga and its largest tributary, the Kama, is responsible for about
Y
5% of the total electricity production in Russia. The Ivankovskoe
ou can find Dubna, a small town three hours away Reservoir is both the oldest part of the complex and the farthest
from Moscow by train, both on a map and in the upstream, situated almost at the Volga’s headwaters.
periodic table: dubnium, element number 105, About 2,300 miles long, the Volga—sometimes referred to
was discovered at a research center there, and as “Volga-matushka,” or “Mother Volga”—is the longest river in
named after the town. A hasteless town, Dubna is defined as much Europe and the biggest by water flow, arcing from northwest
by the surrounding forests as by the water: it sits on the banks of of Moscow around and down to the Caspian Sea. Some 60
the Ivankovskoe Reservoir, the first part of a massive hydropower million people—about 40% of Russia’s population—live in its
project called “Big Volga” whose construction spanned decades basin, which spans almost a tenth of the country’s vast territory.
during the Soviet era. The complex, consisting of 11 dams on the Moscow, with its 12 million people, gets most of its drinking
HEALING
T H E S O V I E T S T U R N E D R U S S I A’ S THEN CAN
M O ST I M P O R TA N T R I V E R T H E M AC H I N E IT BE
I N T O A M A C HINE. BROKE. REPAIRED?
water from the Volga via the Moscow Canal. About 1,500 miles energy on a massive scale. By the time the last station was built,
downstream, the strategic port city of Volgograd, formerly known in the 1980s, the Soviet Union, having just hosted the Olympics
as Stalingrad, was the site of World War II’s most decisive, and for the first time, was about to launch perestroika, a program of
arguably bloodiest, battle. As an artery of commerce, a source large-scale democratic reforms intended to end an era of stagna-
of energy and drinking water, and a conveyor of history, the tion and revitalize the flailing state. The history of the Big Volga
Volga touches nearly every aspect of life in Russia. It is what project is, in a sense, the history of Soviet industrialization. It
the Mississippi is to the United States or the Rhein to Germany. is also a history of rivalry with the US, which for decades raced
When the station in Dubna was designed, in the early 1930s, the Soviets to build bigger, more impressive dams.
the young Soviet state had just decided to catch up with the The project was one of the largest nature-transforming
capitalist states of the West by rapidly accelerating its indus- schemes in history: put together, the artificial reservoirs on the
trial development—but in order to do so, it needed to generate Volga are about as big as Lake Erie. It tried to harness the river
BY PORTFOLIO BY
O LG A STOYA N
DOBROVIDOV A VASSEV
About the artwork: The images accompanying this story are from
A former velodrome racer for the Russian his ongoing series No Fish, in which he docu-
National Cycling Federation, Stoyan Vassev ments the effects of environmental exploitation
quit his sports career and began making on life in Kirovsky, a small fishing village in the
photographs professionally in 2009. Volga Delta.
Beside the complex, there is a memorial hardly taller than I national government to build his station—and succeeded, only to
am. It looks like a random granite building block, tilted to the be declared a spy and an enemy of the revolution shortly afterward
side, seemingly thrown out by the mighty waters to the foot of and sent to a gulag camp in Siberia, where he eventually died.
the Lenin monument and behind its back. The stone was placed
there in 2013 to commemorate the more than 22,000 prisoners
“T
who died building the canal. Flowers and wreaths at the bottom
were still fresh from the annual ceremony, held on October 30, he important things to get from the Volga were
when Russians remember those persecuted and murdered by energy for industry and good conditions for
the state, usually by reading their names aloud in front of count- shipping to and from Moscow,” Burdin told
less similar memorials across the nation. me. The technocratic, goal-oriented thinking
A young boy in a yellow jacket asked his mother, who was put- of the time had no patience for polite objections from scientists
ting their things into the car parked near the memorial, “Mom, or anything that could interfere with industrial development.
what’s written on the stone?” In April 1941, about two months before the USSR was attacked
To the builders of the canal, she responded without looking. by Germany, bringing it fully into World War II, engineers started
This only made him ask her another question: “Why builders? to fill the Rybinskoe Reservoir, the third one in the cascade,
Isn’t the Volga a real river?” around 50 miles northeast of Dubna. (The second reservoir was
also being filled at the time, but it was about a 20th the size.)
The Rybinskoe Reservoir would become the largest artificial
I
body of water in the world at the time. More than 130,000 peo-
n a way it isn’t really a river anymore—it no ple had to relocate to make room for it, including some 6,000
longer flows naturally. It is now so mediated residents of Mologa, a settlement first mentioned in historical
by human intervention that it is better thought chronicles in the 12th century. Mologa’s churches, the tallest
of as a machine. buildings in town, had to be blown up. The dam and reservoir
Just two months after the first gulag prisoners had arrived at were also built by gulag prisoners, who worked through the war
the future dam site in Dubna, in November 1933, research big- to make sure the unfinished station could still power Moscow.
wigs at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union gathered The Rybinskoe Reservoir destroyed thousands of square miles
in Moscow to discuss the state of the Volga and the Caspian of arable land for a relatively small amount of electricity—after
Sea. Evgeny Burdin, a historian in the Volga town of Ulyanovsk, upgrades, the hydropower station now produces 376 megawatts,
some 900 miles downstream from Dubna, read to me from one less than a fifth of what America’s Hoover Dam puts out. By the
of the reports presented at the meeting. The report predicted 1980s, it began to look like a questionable bargain even for the
that reservoirs would cause “swamp formation due to flooding, USSR. Gosplan, the state planning agency, explored draining
poor conditions for soil self-restoration, flooding of cellars in it. Experts concluded that “any consequences of draining the
homes, changing microclimate, algae blooms and stale water, Rybinskoe Reservoir would be more drastic than those of fill-
pollution, slowing down of water flow, and local risks of malaria.” ing it in the first place,” says Victor Danilov-Danilyan, head of
“Even if there wasn’t deep public awareness and discussion, surely research at the Water Problems Institute (WPI) of the Russian
many of the hydrologists and engineers knew that there would be Academy of Sciences. It would take at least several hundred
significant and unavoidable impacts … Many people were aware of it, years for the area, covered in sediment that had accumulated
but it was very difficult, I’m sure, to say anything,” Paul R. Josephson, industrial and household pollution, to recover on its own, he
a professor of Russian and Soviet history at Colby College, told me. adds, while cleaning it up would essentially mean “relocating
It was, indeed, quite difficult: one could be sentenced to hard this awful mess elsewhere” at a cost that Russia couldn’t afford.
labor for daring to criticize the government. In fact, one could And so the reservoir remains.
even be very much in line with the government and still end up Decades later, the last surviving Mologa townspeople and
purged. That was what happened to Konstantin Bogoyavlensky, their descendants still come to the nearby town of Rybinsk for
a turn-of-the-century engineer who designed the first known an annual get-together in mid-August. Some of them visit the
hydropower station project on the Volga, in the Samara region, a ruins that occasionally resurface when the year is particularly dry.
little downstream from Ulyanovsk, in 1910. The local authorities That happened again in 2021, when summer left water levels in
and clergy protested Bogoyavlensky’s idea, which required flood- the reservoir low, causing alarm about potential water shortages
ing a lot of land, and it was shelved until after the 1917 revolution. downstream. In aerial photographs, the streets and foundations
Described as a fanatic, the engineer spent years lobbying the of Mologa formed an eerie geometry emerging from the lakebed.
T
Gosplan, the USSR state
planning agency, is he dam cascade has effectively turned the
notorious for completely
destroying Mologa, a town Volga into a chain of reservoirs. How much
almost as old as Moscow. water gets through from the upper parts to the
When the Volga is low,
its ruins can emerge from
lower parts now hinges on a complex tech-
the water, drawing many nical process that involves wrestling both innate uncertainty
ISTOCK
Atlantis comparisons.
and worrying global trends. Natalia Frolova, a hydrologist and
A river no longer
runs through it
W
a
Kam
hen I visited the
The Volga, with its final node in
largest tributary, the cascade, the
the Kama, is a massive
Volga Cheboksarskoe
cascade of 11 reservoirs
with hydropower plants Reservoir, about 370 miles east
responsible for about 5%
of the total electricity
of Moscow, in 2010, I saw algal
production in Russia. blooms that made the water look
Volga
like a witch’s brew.
The nearby city of Cheboksary,
the capital of Chuvashia, one of
several ethnic republics in Russia,
was leafy, quiet, and welcoming
when I visited. I was part of a press
Hydropower plant tour organized by RusHydro, the
owner of the cascade, which had
0 500 KM
been lobbying the government to
increase the water level in the res-
geographer at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, explains ervoir. Years later it is still five meters below where RusHydro
how the trend of shifting precipitation played out in 2021: the wants it to be, because the Cheboksarskoe Reservoir is where,
spring high water on the Volga was more or less normal and well after four glorious decades, the Big Volga project finally stumbled.
predicted, and the reservoirs were full, but the drier conditions By the mid-1980s, with glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev decided
that brought out the Mologa ruins this past summer caused water the Soviet Union could do with a bit more freedom of the press
levels in all the reservoirs to fall below normal levels. and transparency, letting citizens discuss and even criticize the
For the Volga cities, it’s not just about the quantity of water decisions of their government. And so the irreversible environ-
but also the quality. The Volga is consistently among the three mental damage to the Volga gradually became part of a wide
most polluted rivers in the country, accounting for nearly 40% public conversation too. A 1989 book about the river called out
of all polluted wastewater in Russia. Alexander Demin, a river the people behind the construction of reservoirs that led to “the
researcher at the Water Problems Institute of the Russian Academy life-giving water of the Volga turning into dead water, with noth-
of Sciences, says only about 10% of all wastewater from point ing for us to do about it.” “Boasting around the world that the
sources like sewer pipes is treated to levels required by Russian Volga-matushka [mother-river] has been tamed several times,
regulation. There are also many diffuse sources of pollution that still calling themselves her sons, those who tamed her also con-
are not effectively regulated: agricultural runoff, rainwater, melt- demned her to a long, horrible, and painful illness,” the book reads.
water, wastewater from ships, and even polluted soils and other It was also apparently no longer possible to simply give thou-
detritus that wash into the river as sediment. sands of people two months’ notice to leave their ancestral land,
Since nearly all Volga cities and towns—and Moscow, via the as was the initial plan for Mologa (the relocation ultimately took
canal—end up using the river for their water supply, this pollu- four years). Two nearby regions in European Russia, bordering
tion comes with a hefty bill for water treatment. “The worse the Chuvashia, would be most affected by projected flooding: the
water in the Volga, the costlier it is to make it potable,” Demin Nizhegorodskaya Oblast to the west and the republic of Mari
notes. Given that the Volga basin is home to 60 million people, El to the north stood to lose territory, along with treasured
about half of Russia’s industry, and a comparable portion of its historical landmarks such as gravesites and city churches, to
agriculture, the costs add up. rising waters. The republics protested and imposed delays,
A recent analysis compiled by Carbon Brief, a UK-based climate counting on central government funding to run out, which it
media outlet, puts the USSR and Russia third in the world in all- did. In 1989, the Soviet government decided to keep the water
time historical greenhouse-gas emissions. A national assessment level in the Cheboksarskoe Reservoir at a level that meant the
report compiled by Russian climate scientists in 2014 said that hydropower station there could produce only about 60% of its
at a time of human-caused climate change, average annual tem- designed electricity-generating capacity. The reservoir ended
peratures in the country have been increasing twice as fast as the up about 380 square miles smaller than planned.
global average. The report also stated that the trend is expected
to continue. Impacts of climate change fueled in part by Soviet
B
industrial development are already visible around Russia, from
permafrost degradation to desertification in the agriculture-heavy ecause of the Cheboksarskoe debacle, the Volga-
southern reaches of the country. The same large-scale industrial Kama cascade is, on paper, still unfinished. In a
development that spawned Big Volga and was powered by the sense, the Soviet Union lost one of the more curi-
river’s waters also contributed to the global problem of climate ous Cold War races: in the 1930s, as part of the
change—which has now brought the threat of water scarcity to New Deal, the US government started building a cascade of hydro-
millions of people living in towns along the Volga. power stations in the Columbia River basin in Washington state. For
Drought
in Zimbabwe
has forced
tens of
thousands
of farmers
to migrate
to the
country’s
Eastern
Highlands.
How many
more can
the region
support?
D R Y
J
ulius Mutero has harvested virtually nothing in the past six ends sooner too. In the driest Growing maize—
Zimbabwe’s staple crop—
years. For his entire adult life, he has farmed a three-hectare months, dust billows across
is becoming unfeasible,
plot in Mabiya, a farming community in eastern Zimbabwe. sunbaked farmlands where leaving millions
There he grows maize and groundnuts to feed himself, his wife, only thorny shrubs remain. of farmers without
enough food.
and their three children. He sells whatever’s left for cash. Years of severe droughts
But over a decade ago, his area started getting less rain and have wiped out all Mutero’s
the rivers dried up. What was already a hot climate, with tem- crops. He tried planting maize
peratures that could reach 30 °C (86 °F), began recording sum- varieties that mature early, but even they didn’t survive. And
mer highs up to 37 °C (99 °F) on a regular basis. Now the rainy with no pastures for his livestock, he watched helplessly as all
season begins in late December instead of early November, and it seven of his cows died.
By
Andrew
Mambondiyani
“Life is now extremely hard here,” Mutero says. His family nervous. “I don’t know what my family and I will face and how
survives largely on food aid supplied by nonprofits or Zimbabwe’s we will be received,” he said.
government, but it’s not enough. Mutero is just one of the 86 million people in sub-Saharan
TSVANGIRAYI MUKWAZHI/AP PHOTO
He feels he has no choice but to abandon his home in search Africa who the World Bank estimates will migrate domestically
of water. He’s fortunate—a traditional leader has promised him by 2050 because of climate change—the largest number pre-
a small piece of land about 30 kilometers from Mabiya in the dicted in any of six major regions the organization studied for
country’s Eastern Highlands, which get more rain and heavier a new report.
mists than the rest of the country. In Zimbabwe, farmers who have tried to stay put and adapt
When we spoke in October, Mutero was planning to build by harvesting rainwater or changing what they grow have found
a new home and relocate his family by year’s end. But he was their efforts woefully inadequate in the face of new weather
extremes. Droughts have already forced tens of thousands from praise from migrants but disdain from local farmers who
the country’s lowlands to the Eastern Highlands. But their des- were there first.
perate moves are creating new competition for water in the Two senior government officials in the Eastern Highlands’
region, and tensions may soon boil over. Manicaland province—Edgars Seenza, the provincial coor-
dinator, and Charles Kadzere, the provincial lands officer—
Running out declined to comment for this story. Vangelis Haritatos,
Zimbabwe has endured droughts for the past three decades. Zimbabwe’s deputy minister for lands, agriculture, fisheries,
But they’re happening more often and becoming more severe water, and rural resettlement, didn’t respond to questions
as a result of climate change. Up to 70% of people in Zimbabwe sent to his WhatsApp number.
make a living from agriculture or related rural economic activi-
ties, and millions of subsistence farmers there depend entirely “Soon people will fight”
on rain to water their crops. Over the last 40 years, average tem- Leonard Madanhire, a farmer who lives in what’s known as
peratures have risen by 1 °C , while annual rainfall has decreased the Mpudzi area in the Eastern Highlands, is worried. He
by 20 to 30%. grows mostly maize on his five hectares of land. His herd
At the height of the most recent drought, which lasted from of cattle has dwindled from more than 20 a decade ago to
2018 to 2020, only about half as much rain fell
in Zimbabwe as usual. Crops were scorched
and pastures dried up. People and livestock
crowded around hand-pumped boreholes to
By 2050,
the World Bank
86 MILLION 49 MILLION 40 MILLION
find water, but the wells soon went dry. Some people in people in people in
estimates,
people in the driest areas had so little to eat SUB-SAHARAN EAST ASIA AND SOUTH
as many as AFRICA THE PACIFIC ASIA
they survived on the leaves and white, pow-
dery fruit of baobab trees.
More rain fell during the last growing
season, but many farmers still feel uneasy about the future. five. Most nearby grazing lands, which he has long shared
Maize—Zimbabwe’s staple crop, which was aggressively pro- with other farmers, are now occupied by climate migrants.
moted by the former colonial government beginning in the In September, Madanhire took me on a long hike along
1940s—is becoming impossible to grow. the banks of the Chitora River. Freshly built dwellings stood
Over 5 million Zimbabweans—a third of the population— on land that was once pasture; other structures dotted the
don’t have enough to eat, according to the World Food Program. river’s banks. A couple of seemingly frustrated herdsmen
A study in 2019 of how vulnerable countries were to agricultural were trying to steer cattle and goats through the narrow
disruption due to drought ranked Zimbabwe third, behind only patches of pasture that remained.
Botswana and Namibia. A few kilometers up river, migrants had planted vegeta-
As Mutero and other climate migrants know, conditions are ble gardens on the river’s edges. Madanhire says farming along
somewhat better in the Eastern Highlands. This mountainous the banks that way causes erosion and puts more silt and debris
region stretches for around 300 kilometers along Zimbabwe’s in the water for everyone downstream.
border with Mozambique. Many of the region’s major rivers, He fears that resources will soon run out as more people
including the Pungwe and Odzi, begin there as streams. The come to the area. Rivers that originate there, like the Mpudzi,
area’s climate and fertile soils are perfect for growing crops Mushaamhuru, Murare, and Wengezi, are now running dry half-
such as tea, coffee, plums, avocados, and a sweet pinkish-red way through the dry season, he says.
fruit called lychee. “Soon people will fight for the little water left,” he says. Already,
When climate migrants started showing up in the Eastern skirmishes have broken out between farmers, migrants, and tra-
Highlands a decade ago, they settled without permission on ditional leaders over who settles where and who gets to decide.
state land, and the government was swift to evict them. But they Madanhire isn’t alone in his concerns. Josphat Manzini is a
returned in even larger numbers, and officials have more or less banana farmer in Burma Valley, a lucrative farming area in the
given up trying to stop them. Eastern Highlands that’s long been renowned for producing
By 2015, the government estimated that more than 20,000 the best bananas in the country. He’s been anxious as climate
migrants had settled in the Eastern Highlands. Though no more migrants settle on nearby river banks and tap the water he needs
recent official estimates exist, anecdotal evidence suggests the to irrigate his more than 20 hectares.
number has continued to climb. Manzini says migrants have overrun several local rivers, tax-
Today in some parts of the highlands, migrants occupy any ing water supplies and stirring up so much silt that the debris
vacant land they can find. In others, traditional or community is obstructing three dams as well as many smaller streams in
leaders like the one helping Mutero, who are known in local the area.
dialect as sabhuku, have taken up the task of allocating land to Now, for the first time in his life, the prospects for banana
migrants. The leaders—whose roles are largely ceremonial—are farming in the Eastern Highlands are looking bleak. “There is
doing this in defiance of government orders. They’ve earned no future here,” Manzini says.
will be forced
19 MILLION 17 MILLION 5 MILLION to migrate
people in people in people in as a result
NORTH LATIN EASTERN EUROPE of climate
AFRICA AMERICA & CENTRAL ASIA
change.
Natalie Watson, the managing director of Bopoma Villages, For many, though, it’s already too late.
a nongovernmental organization that runs a clean water and Despite the uncertainties that await him in the Eastern
hygiene project, says rainwater harvesting has great potential to Highlands, Mutero has already made up his mind. “I’m moving;
make a difference. She cites a well-known Zimbabwean farmer nothing will stop me,” he told me. “That’s my only option.”
named Zephaniah Phiri Maseko, who before he died transformed
Andrew Mambondiyani is a science journalist based in
dry land into lush fields using methods that Watson’s organiza- Zimbabwe and a former MIT Knight Science Journalism
tion now teaches. Fellow.
Making friends
with
flooding
By
Erica Gies
Above:
Qunli Stormwater
Park in Harbin City
Opposite:
Nanchang Yuweizhou
Wetland Park
Our attempts
to control
water have
been a disaster,
says one
influential
Chinese
designer.
His radical
theory:
we should work
with it instead.
GUTTER CREDIT HERE
F
or years, Beijing landscape architect the water supply; flood control is separated from
Yu Kongjian was ridiculed by his fel- drought resistance,” he wrote in 2016 for a paper
low citizens as a backward thinker. he presented at a Harvard symposium.
Some even called him an American Since the 1700s, we’ve filled or drained as much
spy—a nod to his doctorate from as 87% of the world’s wetlands, which would other-
Harvard’s Graduate School of Design wise be flexibly absorbing and releasing water. It’s a
and his opposition to dams, those key reason urban flooding is increasing worldwide:
symbols of power and progress in modern China. as populations grow and cities expand, builders pave
Yu’s transgression: he advised working with floodplains and farmland, fell forests, and channelize
water, rather than trying to control it. rivers, leaving stormwater that once filtered into the
Yu is at the forefront of a movement that aims ground with nowhere to go. The land area lost to
to restore the ebb and flow of water to urban cities has doubled worldwide since 1992. When a
environments. His landscape architecture firm city increases the area of roads, sidewalks, or parking
Turenscape, which he cofounded in 1998, creates lots by 1%, stormwater runoff boosts annual flood
flexible spaces for water to spread out and seep magnitude in nearby waterways by 3.3%.
underground, both to prevent flooding and to be In dense cities, only around 20% of rain actu-
stored for later use. His vision is to heal the natural ally infiltrates the soil. Instead, drains and pipes
PHOTOGRAPHS THROUGHOUT COURTESY OF TURENSCAPE
hydrology that we’ve disrupted by tightly confin- carry it away—lunacy, Yu thinks, in places with
ing rivers with levees, putting buildings or parking water shortages.
lots where water wants to linger, or erecting dams
that have, to varying degrees, dried up 333 rivers In the early 2000s, Yu and a research team created
in the Yangtze area. “Those gray infrastructures a map of Beijing showing where land was at high
are actually killers of the natural system, which risk for flooding, which he called the “ecological
we have to depend on for our sustainable future,” security pattern.” His recommendation was that
Yu has said. By trying to solve one problem at a this land should remain undeveloped, and should
time—flooding here, water scarcity there—the be used instead to absorb stormwater.
20th-century approach to water management has Government officials ignored him. But then, in
undermined itself. “Drainage is separated from July 2012, disaster struck. Beijing’s largest storm
in more than 60 years chucked down as much as billion people around the world already live with
18 inches of rain in places, flooding roads three severe or high water insecurity. Researchers predict
feet deep and filling underpasses. Yu barely made that as the climate continues to warm, two-thirds
it home from work. “I was lucky,” he says. “I saw of the global population—more than 5.25 billion
many people abandon their cars.” Almost 80 peo- people—will experience progressively worse and
ple died, most of them drowned in their vehicles, more frequent drought conditions.
electrocuted, or crushed under collapsed buildings. These recent disasters have brought home to
The damage stretched across 5,400 square miles many people the truth of what climate scientists
and cost nearly $2 billion. have been saying for years: climate change is
“The 2012 flood gave us the lesson that the eco- water change.
logical security pattern is a life-and-death issue.”
Yu says. Less than a year after the 2012 storm, President Xi
Climate change has worsened these threats. Jinping announced a nationwide program dubbed
With every 1 °C increase, the atmosphere holds “sponge cities” (because a sponge absorbs water
7% more water vapor. So when clouds burst into and then releases it slowly). The idea of giving water
rain, it pours. Meanwhile, dry areas get drier as space was thus elevated from fringe concept to
the warmer air evaporates more water out of soil national mission. In 2015 the central government
and plants. began demonstration projects in 16 cities, and it
Now we’re starting to see the impact on the added 14 more in 2016. Each project covered at
water cycle. Summer and fall 2021 brought deadly least five square miles, although some were larger,
flooding to New York, New Jersey, Tennessee, with the goal of retaining 70% of the average annual
Alabama, Germany, Belgium, India, Thailand, and rainfall on site by 2020.
the Philippines. At the same time drought, crop fail- In November of that year, the state-controlled
ures, and forest fires plagued the American West, broadcaster China Central Television reported
Syria, Guatemala, Greece, and Siberia. Global eco- completion of the 30 pilot projects. It said they
nomic losses from flooding rose from $500 million were preventing and mitigating urban disasters,
annually, on average, in the 1980s to $76 billion increasing environmental benefits to waterways, and
in 2020. When it comes to drought, more than 2 reducing water pollution. CCTV further reported
that between 2016 and 2020, the sponge city con- seasons. “For me, flood is a time of excitement
cept had been implemented in 90 provincial-level because the fish come to the field, the fish come
cities and included in the master plans for 538 cit- to the pond,” he said. But as the country urban-
ies. A new goal aims for 100 cities with more than 1 ized, the Chinese abandoned that knowledge and
million people to meet the 70% rainwater capture followed the Western path. Now, he believes, they
target by 2030. need to reclaim that ethos: “We need to make
“It is, of course, a success story,” says Chris friends with flooding.”
Zevenbergen, an expert in urban flood-risk manage- Yu has built Turenscape into an empire, with 600
ment at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education employees in three offices. The company has more
in the Netherlands and a visiting professor at China’s than 640 projects completed or underway in 250
Southeast University. Chinese government reports Chinese cities and 10 other countries. Turenscape
are best viewed with skepticism, but Zevenbergen also publishes a magazine called Landscape
says he’s cautiously optimistic that the rosy assess- Architecture Frontiers, in both Chinese and English, 1
ment will be borne out. and supports master’s and PhD candidates and
Sponge cities are part of a worldwide movement postdocs who are researching hydrology or ecology,
that goes by various names: green infrastructure or measuring the efficacy of completed projects.
in Europe, low-impact development in the United The founder and dean of the College of 2
States, water-sensitive urban design in Australia, Architecture and Landscape at Peking University,
natural infrastructure in Peru, nature-based solu- Yu has also taught periodically at Harvard. He
tions in Canada. In contrast to industrial manage- lectures regularly at the Ministry of Housing and
ment, in which people confine water with levees, Urban-Rural Development, and his 2003 book 3
channels, and asphalt and rush it off the land as Letters to the Leaders of China: Kongjian Yu and
quickly as possible, these newer approaches seek to the Future of the Chinese City is in its 13th print-
restore water’s natural tendency to linger in places ing. He’s been asked to consult in other countries:
like wetlands and floodplains. Mexico, for example, is hoping he can help solve 4
Because of that common thread, I’ve come to Mexico City’s water problems, which are similar
think of them collectively as the “Slow Water” move- to Beijing’s.
ment. As in the Slow Food movement, solutions
are tailored to local ecology, climate, and people. When planning a project, designers first must fig- 5
The most ambitious Slow Water projects involve ure out what water did before people built a city. In
conserving or restoring wetlands, river floodplains, a large white room at Turenscape’s offices, young
and mountain forests, simultaneously safeguarding men and women sit at desks separated by a jungle
carbon storage and protecting homes for threat- of plants, focused intently on that question. They 6
ened plants and animals. But there are also small construct models of how water behaves within the
urban projects, shoehorned between buildings or built environment, factoring in each place’s specific
in narrow corridors along streets. ecology, geology, hydrology, and culture—a kind
of computational geography. The data allows Yu
In April 2018, on a day with a “very high” air pollu- and other Slow Water practitioners to model how 1 Pedestrian & artifact
tion rating, I visited Yu at Turenscape’s headquar- reshaping the land and available space in various 2 Dewdrop
ters in Beijing. A slim, intense man with shrewd ways affects how water flows and slows. 3 After runoff
eyes and just a bit of gray at the temples, he told Yu is now something of a hero to young landscape 4 During runoff
me that his passion for repairing humans’ relation- architects. Accompanying us to various sites was 5 Cut & fill
ship with water comes from his childhood during Geng Ran, an employee who exudes intense excite- 6 Previous site
the Mao years, spent on an agricultural commune ment to be working for him. Throughout the day,
in Zhejiang province southwest of Shanghai. The we were perpetually trotting after Yu as he rushed
youngest of five children, he spent his days observ- ahead. “He’s always like this,” said Geng, laughing.
ing Chinese “peasant wisdom” for managing water, While Yu retains his farmer’s values, he is a
techniques that had been practiced for thousands man of modern China. He bought and renovated a
of years. To cope with scarcity, farmers maintained building in one of Beijing’s few remaining historic
little ponds and berms to help rainfall infiltrate the hutong neighborhoods, turning it into a private club
ground, storing it for a dry day. The seasonal creek for fellow Harvard grads, Beijing politicians, and
next to his village swelled and retreated with the other power brokers. This move is in keeping with
his modus operandi, according to Niall Kirkwood, broader riverbanks, newly freed from concrete, are
a professor of landscape architecture and technol- dotted with thousands of small sedges planted in
ogy at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design who closely set rows to hold the earth, like a pointillist-
has known Yu for many years. Kirkwood says Yu rendered landscape. We passed young willows, a
is a political animal, and that this—along with his native streamside plant that can survive flooding.
vision and ambition—accounts for his success. Elsewhere, reeds, dwarf lilyturf, and other native
I got a chance to observe Yu in his natural hab- plants stabilize the soil. Turenscape mostly uses
itat that evening. He escorted me and Geng into native plants in its designs because they thrive on
the club through a set of engraved metal doors and the water, weather, and nutrients available.
across the courtyard, where the traditional stone In summer 2020, during heavy summer rains, Yu
floor had been replaced with thick glass. Inside he sent me photos of Yongxing River Park. The trees
When planning a ushered us downstairs to a massive table under- and grasses had grown up considerably since I’d
project, designers
neath that transparent floor. As we sat in ornate, visited. The channel contained a lot of water but
build models of
how water behaves carved chairs sipping bright-green cucumber juice, was nowhere close to overtopping. Turenscape
within the built I looked at the moon above. Finance ministers were does not yet have data on Yongxing’s flood capac-
environment,
factoring in each also visiting the club that evening, so Yu rotated ity, infiltration rate, or water-cleaning services, but
place’s specific between our tables. Before we left, he gave me a Yu called its management of that year’s monsoon
ecology, geology,
hydrology, and
souvenir: a heavy tome titled Designed Ecologies: a “great performance.”
culture—a kind The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu. After
of computational dinner, his driver chauffeured us in a brand-new It can be hard for people to conceive of making
geography.
Mercedes minivan to my hotel, where Yu got out space for water in a populated area, but it’s possi-
to walk home—his daily constitutional. ble. Taking advantage of space in growing exurbs
like Daxing is one approach. Another is to stop
A week later I visited one of Turenscape’s proj- building atop protective wetlands and coastal
ects in progress: Yongxing River Park, located in habitats—absorption capacity that is continually
Yu is
Daxing, a far-flung exurb of Beijing. “Before” sat- squandered.
ellite pictures from three years earlier showed a Other opportunities to make space for water and
concerned river straightened and confined by steep concrete
walls. “Now” pictures were chock-a-block with
reduce future losses are found even in city centers,
where buildings are torn down more frequently
that buildings around a more generous, meandering than people assume. Disasters can also be a cat-
applying two city blocks wide, the park follows the river.
Workers removed concrete along the river channel
former industrial sites can offer up a lot of space
too—often right alongside rivers. Other techniques
a cookie- and excavated soil to widen the riverbed. That dirt to accommodate water in compact cities include
on decks off the bedrooms are watered with roof- bigger factor may be that the interventions simply
caught rain, stored in tanks under the raised plant aren’t ambitious enough. Absorbing 70% of rain-
beds. “We collect 52 cubic meters of stormwater fall across five square miles of a city that spans
[annually], and I grow 32 kilograms of vegetables,” 2,900 square miles won’t prevent flooding. Slow
Yu says proudly. His efforts also reduce runoff from Water projects work best when they can absorb
his building’s roof and decrease his personal water water across the full landscape, so planners need
usage from city sources. to think beyond the urban footprint. A city is part
of a larger watershed. Restoring space for water
Though Xi’s sponge cities initiative is based on upstream in natural river floodplains can lower
principles that mirror his own ideas, Yu fears that the water levels downstream.
in some cases, China may be doing it wrong. The In this, too, Yu is hard at work. He’s creating
country has sometimes used cookie-cutter solu- a landscape master plan for all of China. At his
tions for other programs, Yu says, but for sponge office, he showed me a series of maps that docu-
cities to be successful, each project must be place- ment China’s elevation, watersheds, flood paths,
specific. As Yu puts it, “Every patient needs a dif- biodiversity, desertification, ecological security,
ferent solution.” soil erosion, and cultural heritage. As urbanization
Monsoon rains across China have been heavy spreads, as estuaries and deltas silt up, as water
the last couple of summers, challenging not only starts to move differently across landscapes and
standard water infrastructure, such as dams—sev- cityscapes, he identifies the spots where his proj-
eral of which have failed or come close to it—but ects will have the biggest impact.
also the fledgling sponge cities. In summer 2021, “This is a philosophy for taking care of the con-
one pilot project city with a population of around tinental landscape,” Yu says. “It’s time to expand
UNIVERSITY OF
7 million, Zhengzhou, suffered significant flooding the scale.”
CHICAGO PRESS,
APRIL 2022, $26
when more than eight inches of rain fell in one hour
Erica Gies is a journalist based in Victoria,
and almost 300 people died, leading some to ask British Columbia, and San Francisco. This
whether sponge cities were working. story has been adapted from her book Water
Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought
Zevenbergen notes that designs may need to and Deluge,available for preorder at
be tweaked to better match local needs. But the slowwater.world.
The scientists and techni- which heat up the surrounding or go into a very weak mode, Moat and others are so keen to
cians are part of an interna- air as they travel northward, under conditions that global observe the Atlantic circulation.
tional research collaboration, are a major factor (though not warming may be replicating. But much of what has been
known as RAPID, that’s collect- the only one) in why Western If that happened, it would discovered so far is that the
ing readings from hundreds of Europe is warmer than eastern likely be a climate disaster. It Atlantic circulation is more
sensors at more than a dozen Canada even though they lie at could freeze the far north of variable, perplexing, and per-
moorings dotting the Atlantic roughly the same latitude. Europe, driving down aver- haps unpredictable than pre-
roughly along 26.5° North, the The waters become cooler age winter temperatures by viously understood.
line of latitude that runs from and denser as they reach the more than 10 °C. It might cut
the western Sahara to south- high latitudes, forcing the cur- crop production and incomes
ern Florida. rents to dive miles below the across the continent as much THE FLORIDA CURRENT
They are searching for surface, spread outward, and of the land becomes cooler and
clues about one of the most bend back southward. That sink- drier. Sea levels could rise as NOAA’s
important forces in the plan- ing of the water deep into the much as a foot on the Eastern
et’s climate system: a network ocean helps propel the system. Seaboard, flooding homes and Atlantic Oceanographic and
of ocean currents known as The problem is the Atlantic businesses up and down the Meteorological Laboratory is
the Atlantic Meridional circulation seems to be weak- coast. And the summer mon- a squat, white five-story build-
Overturning Circulation ening, transporting less water soons over major parts of ing, fringed by palm trees on
(AMOC). Critically, they want and heat. Because of climate Africa and Asia might weaken, Virginia Key, a barrier island
to better understand how global change, melting ice sheets are raising the odds of droughts just a few miles from down-
warming is changing it, and pouring fresh water into the and famines that could leave town Miami.
how much more it could shift ocean at the higher latitudes, untold numbers without ade- The warm upper layer of
in the coming decades—even and the surface waters are quate food or water. the Atlantic circulation, known
whether it could collapse. retaining more of their heat. It would be a “global catastro- here as the Florida Current,
“Measuring this ocean sys- Warmer and fresher waters phe,” says Stefan Rahmstorf races past the island, squeezed
tem is vital to understanding are less dense and thus not as at the Potsdam Institute for between the state and the
our climate,” Moat says. prone to sink, which may be Climate Impact Research. Bahamas. It’s an ideal place to
The Atlantic circulation undermining one of the cur- Most scientists say a col- observe one of the most pow-
is, effectively, one leg of the rents’ core driving forces. lapse of the currents is a remote erful stretches of the system,
world’s mightiest river. It Simply put, the currents possibility this century, but because the topography of the
runs tens of thousands of influence much of the weather even a steep slowdown would Florida Straits confines the cur-
miles from the Southern we know in the Northern have significant impacts, poten- rents, which can otherwise
Ocean to Greenland and Hemisphere, particularly tially cooling and reducing rain- span hundreds of miles, down
back, ping-ponging between around the coastal Atlantic but fall around the North Atlantic to dozens. (The Florida Current
the southwestern coast of also as far away as Thailand. while increasing precipitation is part of the Gulf Stream, a
Africa, the southeastern US, If the currents change, so too across parts of the tropics. It stretch of the Atlantic circula-
and Western Europe. will the weather, disrupting might raise sea level by about tion that traces the southeast-
The system carries warm, temperature and precipitation five inches off the US south- ern US before cutting across
shallow, salty water northward, patterns that have shaped our east coast. the ocean to Europe.)
transporting about 1.2 million lives and societies for centuries. Despite the stakes, scien- NOAA scientists have been
gigawatts of heat energy across Some climate models pre- tists have only a coarse com- monitoring the Florida Straits at
RAPID’s array of moorings at dict that the currents will prehension of the currents’ around 27° North almost contin-
any moment. That’s equivalent decline by as much as 45% this behavior, the balance of the uously since 1982, in large part
to about 160 times the energy century. And evidence from the forces that drive them, or their by taking advantage of under-
capacity of the entire world’s last ice age shows that the sys- susceptibility to shifting cli- water telephone cables. The
electricity system. The currents, tem can eventually switch off mate conditions. That’s why now-defunct phone lines along
the seafloor provide a cheap,
unobtrusive way of observing
PACIFIC
OCEAN
1 The shallow
upper leg of the
Atlantic Meridional
Overturning INDIAN
Circulation carries OCEAN
warm, salty water
northward.
ATLANTIC The Atlantic currents
OW
OCEAN E FL are one leg of a much
AC
U RF bigger system of cur-
R MS
WA rents known as the
Global Meridional
Overturning Circulation,
COOL SUBSURFACE FLOW which also loops
through the Indian and
4 The deep, cool Pacific Oceans.
waters run back
down the Atlantic.
researchers found they could the oceans work and interact behavior. They needed ways to OUT AT SEA
reliably measure. They receive with the climate, says Molly continuously monitor the cur-
daily readings from instru- Baringer, deputy director of the rents across the ocean in order On
ments set up in a telephone NOAA lab, who helped develop to distinguish short-term fluc-
trunk room on Grand Bahama the cable program. tuations from long-term trends, a sunny day in early November,
Island. With careful calibration, But the ongoing cable mea- among other things. I followed a pair of NOAA
they are able to translate those surements and the historical The UK’s National Ocean- researchers down a pier on
measurements into estimates of records have taken on added ography Centre established the the southeastern edge of the
how much water flows across importance as concerns have RAPID effort in 2004 to do just Rosenstiel School of Marine and
that line of latitude. grown about the effects global that, anchoring cables across Atmospheric Science campus.
Meanwhile, William Johns warming could have on the the Atlantic. It made obvious We ascended the gangway
and other oceanographers Atlantic circulation, and the sense to collaborate with onto the F.G. Walton Smith, a
at the University of Miami’s impact that could have, in NOAA and the University of 96-foot-long catamaran with
Rosenstiel School of Marine and turn, on the climate. “It’s the Miami research groups as well, dark green hulls and a white
Atmospheric Science, located way the ocean moves around taking advantage of those ongo- deckhouse, owned by the
just across the causeway from heat,” Baringer says. “You have ing monitoring efforts. University of Miami.
the NOAA lab, have used sen- to understand it to understand Moat says the researchers Roughly every quarter, at
sor-strung moorings and other climate change.” are trying to shed light on how least in pre-pandemic times,
instruments to study the cur- Through the 1990s, there variable the currents are, how researchers from both insti-
rents east of the Bahamas since were a growing number of much heat they deliver, how tutions have boarded the ves-
the 1980s. They’ve observed other attempts to measure parts much carbon they pull down sel for 30-hour sprints out and
both the deep, cool boundary of the currents, using short from the air, how harmonized back to the Bahamas. They use
current flowing south and a stretches of anchored moor- the southward and northward an A-frame and winch on the
stretch of the warm northward ings, drifting floats, shipboard limbs are, how much local stern to lower what are known
limb that forks off and flows observations, and other means. winds influence the system, as CTDs into the waters at nine
around the islands. But oceanographers came to and—critically—whether or stations along the way, near the
These efforts began as part realize that these snapshot not the Atlantic circulation is line of the old telephone cable.
of a broader push to improve observations weren’t enough slowing down at the rate cli- The CTDs include a carou-
scientific understanding of how to fully capture the system’s mate models predict. sel of tubes that capture water
Molly Bar-
inger, deputy
director of
the Atlantic
Oceanographic
and Meteoro-
logical Labo-
ratory, helped
establish
NOAA’s effort
to monitor
the Florida
Current using
an underwa-
ter telephone
cable.
patterns known as a “critical years or decades, not days, and periods. Growth in the needle-
slowing down.” Boers found there’s no reason to expect tsu- leaf forests of Northern Europe
evidence of these warnings namis flooding Manhattan or slows by as much as 50%. Crop
across eight different records, ice entombing the city. production “decreases dra-
suggesting “an almost complete But a shutdown would flip matically” in Spain, France,
loss of stability.” the global climate system into Germany, Denmark, the United
“In the course of the last a fundamentally different state, Kingdom, Poland, and Ukraine.
century, the AMOC may have inflicting somewhat unpredict- Laura Jackson, the lead
evolved from relatively stable able consequences across large author of the study, stresses
conditions to a point close to a parts of the planet. that it was an “idealized” model,
critical transition,” Boers wrote. Much of Europe could using a large amount of fresh
But how close is “close?” turn into a starkly different water to quickly shut down the
In an email, Boers said it world, according to a study by Atlantic circulation and shorten
remains difficult to define the researchers at the Met Office the length of the experiments.
threshold in terms of a spe- Hadley Centre in the UK, which “A more realistic scenario,
cific global temperature or time, closely analyzed the effects on or a different model, might
given the numerous layers of that continent using a high-res- show different magnitudes of
uncertainty. olution climate model. Within change,” she said in an email.
“The only thing we can 50 to 80 years after a massive Still, other studies looking
say is that in the course of the infusion of fresh water that halts beyond Europe have concluded
last century the AMOC has the Atlantic circulation, sea sur- that a collapse or significant
moved toward its critical point face temperatures drop as much weakening of the Atlantic cir-
expect, even if our models (which on its own had not been as 15 °C from the Barents to the culation would have wide-scale
get much better, to be able to expected by many),” he wrote in Labrador Seas, and 2 to 10 °C effects on much of the world.
predict with 100% confidence an email. “And that with every across much of the rest of the Some models find that parts
whether such an element of additional ton of emitted green- North Atlantic. of Asia and North America
the climate system will go into house gases, we’ll likely push Sea ice drifts farther and far- could grow cooler as well. The
another state or not,” Lohmann it further.” ther south, reaching the north- slowing currents could disrupt
says. ern tip of the United Kingdom the delivery of crucial nutrients,
An August paper by another in late winter. devastating certain fish popu-
researcher added to these con- HOLLYWOOD VS. REALITY The continent experiences lations and otherwise altering
cerns, concluding that the extensive cooling as well. Winter marine ecosystems.
currents might be closer than So storms intensify, become more As the Gulf Stream sub-
expected to the standard sort frequent, or both. On average, sides and flattens, ocean lev-
of tipping point as well. what happens if the Atlantic most of Europe gets drier, aside els could quickly rise eight to
Scientists have found tell- circulation collapses? from the Mediterranean during 12 inches along the southeast-
tale early warning signs of a The Day After Tomorrow, summer. But more of the pre- ern US. The tropical rain belt
collapse in models and geo- the popular 2004 disaster film cipitation that does fall arrives could drift south, weakening
logical records from the last in which an abrupt halt of the in the form of snow. rainfall patterns across parts of
ice age, wrote the author, currents shock-freezes the Given these cooler and drier Africa and Asia and ratcheting
Niklas Boers, a professor of Northern Hemisphere over conditions, surface runoff, up monsoons in the Southern
Earth system modeling at the a few nightmarish days, is a river flows, and plant growth Hemisphere.
Technical University of Munich wild Hollywood exaggeration. all decrease. A certain amount of weak-
and a researcher at the Potsdam The changes brought about if The Garonne River in ening may act as a counterforce
Institute for Climate Impact the network of ocean currents southern France carries 30% against climate change, mitigat-
Research. collapsed would unfold over less water during peak winter ing to some degree the warming
The signs include decreas-
ing sea-surface temperatures
and salinity in the North
Atlantic, a salinity “pile-up”
“The only thing we can say is that in the
in the Southern Atlantic, and course of the last century the AMOC has
a characteristic shift in current moved toward its critical point.”
that would otherwise take place. should today’s policy debates I think we just always should like asking: Why do we study
But how these competing forces or climate actions be shaped keep this in mind.” oceanography in general?
balance out overall and over by the danger of events that When I met with Baringer, “The ocean matters. The
time would depend on multiple, may not occur until the 2100s on a picnic table outside of ocean carries a huge amount
overlapping layers of uncer- or 2200s, if they occur at all? NOAA’s lab to comply with of heat. It sequesters carbon. It
tainty: how much the system Some who study the AMOC covid protocols, I asked how moves nutrients around. If we
weakens; whether it shuts down believe that people, and the concerned she is about climate didn’t have the ocean circula-
entirely; how much less carbon press in particular, are overly models predicting a steep slow- tion or upwelling, you wouldn’t
dioxide the oceans, forests, and obsessed with the catastrophe down or possible collapse of the have fish. The whole ocean
farms pull down; and how much scenario—“the drama” of The Atlantic circulation. matters, and the AMOC, that
warmer the planet gets. Day After Tomorrow, as Lozier Baringer said she doesn’t large circulation, is a big part
puts it. “worry that much” about it. of what the ocean is doing.”
This, she stresses, is largely That’s in part because she But that is also arguably
THE OCEAN MATTERS a distraction that misses the thinks it’s hard to properly the biggest reason to worry
point. We don’t need some account for all the feedbacks about how human actions
T he danger in the distant future to in such a complex and roughly could alter one of the planet’s
underscore the risks of climate understood system—and in most complex—and exqui-
potential for a steep slowdown change: there are plenty of seri- part because, like Lozier, she site—natural systems. There
or collapse of the AMOC raises ous consequences unfolding in thinks there are more pressing are, as Lozier and Baringer
difficult questions. the present. climate concerns. She listed note, more imminent climate
How worried should we “I love the AMOC and have ocean acidification, droughts, risks to worry about. But in
be about very low-odds but studied it forever,” Lozier says. wildfires, and sea-level rise, the long term, perturbing this
very high-consequence pos- “But when we talk about what which she believes the field is immensely powerful network
sibilities like a shutdown will we should really be concerned largely underestimating. of ocean currents could be the
happen this century? How with, it’s ocean warming, sea- So why, I asked, is it so biggest climate risk the world
can we properly evaluate the level rise, ocean acidification, important to study the Atlantic is taking.
risks and take appropriate hurricanes. These are the circulation?
James Temple is MIT
actions with so much scien- things we know are happen- “I don’t like that question,” Technology Review’s senior
tific uncertainty? How much ing. Those are huge impacts. So she said, “because it’s sort of editor on climate change.
technologyreview.com/algorithm
JF22_feature-satellites.indd 68
Water
12/1/21 11:11 AM
MAPPING THE WORLD’S FRESH WATER
JF22_feature-satellites.indd 69
FROM SPACE
The Congo River is the world’s second-largest river system Satellites equipped with remote sensing instruments can peer
after the Amazon. More than 75 million people depend on it into places where “in situ” measurements—those taken on
for food and water, as do thousands of species of plants and site—are outdated, hard to gather, or kept private.
animals that live in the swamps and peatlands it supports. Kitambo spoke by video call from Toulouse, France, where
The massive tropical rainforest sprawled across its middle he’s conducting PhD research at the Laboratory of Space
helps regulate the entire Earth’s climate system. The amount Geophysical and Oceanographic Studies. These days, he’s
of water in the system, however, is something of a mystery. analyzing troves of satellite measurements and hydrologi-
Hydrologists and climate scientists rely on monitoring cal models to understand how the Congo River’s tributaries,
stations to track the river and its connected water bodies as wetlands, lakes, and reservoirs are changing. That includes
they flow and pool across six countries, and to measure pre- studying records from more than 2,300 “virtual” gauging sta-
cipitation. But what was once a network of some 400 stations tions, which estimate two key metrics throughout the basin:
By
has dwindled to just 15, making it difficult to know exactly “surface water height,” or the water’s level above a reference
Imaging
how climate change is affecting one of Africa’s most import- point, and surface water extent.
MARIA GALLUCCI
ant river basins. He says most of the region’s field data dates back to before
“To take action, to manage water, we need to know about 1960, the year most countries in the region gained indepen-
our water resources,” says Benjamin Kitambo, a geologist dence from European colonizers. Since then, research there
with the Congo Basin Water Resources Research Center in has sharply declined, and collecting data on surface water
Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. “But we can’t has proved difficult.
know something that we don’t measure.” About five years ago, the Congo Basin research center
Researchers around the world are increasingly filling data began installing a network of water-monitoring stations to
gaps on the ground using information gathered from space. address the “severe lack of basic knowledge” about the river’s
12/1/21 11:11 AM
main navigable channels, which often serve as roads. But are gaining a clearer picture of how water flows across Earth
some places in the vast basin were too remote or rugged for and circulates in the atmosphere. 70
researchers to reach. In others, people removed the newly Satellites observing Earth’s surface measure and map water
installed instruments to sell the materials, or because they using optical and radar sensors. Optical sensors form images
feared being spied on. of water bodies by detecting the solar radiation that reflects
JF22_feature-satellites.indd 70
Many parts of the world face similar challenges. Countries in back from targets on Earth. One form of radar sensing, called
Latin America and the Caribbean have seen a “dramatic decline” synthetic aperture radar, measures the extent and height of
in ground-based measurements since the 1980s, according to surface water by transmitting pulses of microwave energy
a 2018 assessment published in the journal Water Resources toward the planet and then measuring the amount of energy
Research. In the Mekong River basin—which extends through reflected back to the spacecraft, as well as the time it takes
six nations from China to Vietnam—countries closely guard for the signals to return. Unlike optical sensors, radar can see
their data on water availability, if they gather it at all. through clouds and at night.
Yet measuring water is key to helping people prepare for Scientists can then combine those observations to explore
natural disasters and adapt to climate change, experts say. how a region’s water resources are changing over time. One
Rising global temperatures are projected to increase the risk study using 30 years of satellite imagery from NASA’s Landsat
of storms and flash floods in certain areas and severe drought program found that water has shifted dramatically across
in others. Meanwhile, massive infrastructure projects and Earth’s surface as a result of both natural movement of riv-
sprawling urban development are altering and straining fresh- ers and human interventions like dams and irrigation. Some
water resources like rivers and lakes. 44,000 square miles of land are now covered in water, and
This need to know is driving a series of ambitious research 67,000 square miles of water have become land, research-
initiatives using remote sensing tools. As the technology for ers with the Dutch research institute Deltares reported in
gathering and analyzing data from space evolves, scientists a 2016 paper.
Water
12/1/21 11:11 AM
JF22_feature-satellites.indd 71
NASA / JPL
Yet even with the remote sensing technology available “We’re going to have access to global information on surface
today, surprisingly few freshwater bodies are closely tracked waters in a way that we never had before,” says Cédric David,
Imaging
for their water height; instead, many existing radar satellites a hydrologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Scientists will
mainly focus on oceans and ice sheets. To date, any single sat- be able to observe changes in the amount of water stored on
ellite has measured only about 5 to 10% of the world’s largest Earth’s surface and estimate how much water flows through
rivers and just 15% of water storage changes in the world’s river systems.
lakes, according to NASA. Researchers like Kitambo say SWOT’s observations will
A new radar system built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory increase the accuracy and quality of their numerical models,
in Pasadena, California, will soon be able to observe much which simulate and predict how water swells, drains, and flows
more of Earth’s surface, and at 10 times the resolution of cur- over time. Specifically, scientists can use SWOT data to calcu-
rent technologies. The Ka-band Radar Interferometer uses two late daily discharge—or the volume of water flowing through
antennas to transmit and receive pulses over a 75-mile-wide channels—from the Congo’s major tributaries and within the
swath as the satellite passes over a body of water. An antenna rainforest at the basin’s center. This will help them understand
sends signals to a spot below; the system then analyzes the the development of seasonal floods, which affect everything from
lakes, rivers, and reservoirs during its 21-day repeating orbit. based in Brooklyn, New York.
12/1/21 11:11 AM
MIT Technology Review’s
conference on
the computing
technologies that will
power business.
ESSAYS
“The people most harmed by the problem
are often those least at fault.” p. 78
SANDRA POSTEL
n the world of water, 2021
needs to change
Western Europe reeled from deadly
floods that sent rivers surging to lev-
els not seen in 500 to 1,000 years.
Conventional ways of supplying water and preventing floods Destructive floods hit central China
will be no match for climate change. as well, displacing more than a quar-
ter of a million people from their
ANDREA DAQUINO
INFRASTRUCTURE
remained locked in a megadrought— climate change had made Cape One reason was a recently completed
the second-driest 20-year period in TEMPTING AS IT Town’s extreme drought five to six project that diverted floodwaters
1,200 years. MIGHT BE, THE times more likely. into a 1,300-acre wetland, which
One might think that the impres- SOLUTION IS Droughts, floods, and other held the water and lowered parts
sive water engineering installed climate-related disasters come with of the raging Maas by more than a
in the US and elsewhere over the NOT TO FURTHER big price tags. In 2017, three large foot. The wetland also sequesters
last century would safeguard soci- BEND NATURE hurricanes in the US were the pri- carbon and doubles as a nature pre-
ety from such catastrophic events. TO OUR WILL mary cause of a record $306 billion serve, offering valuable climate and
Globally, some 60,000 large dams in damages, more than six times the wildlife benefits as well as recreation
now capture and store water, allow- BY BUILDING yearly average since 1980. While opportunities. Through its “Room for
ing engineers to turn rivers on and BIGGER, HIGHER, 2017 appears to be an outlier, climate the River” program, the Dutch are
off like plumbing works. Each year, AND LONGER scientists expect annual disaster implementing these nature-based
the world’s cities collectively import costs of that magnitude to be com- flood control projects at 30 locations
the equivalent of 10 Colorado Rivers VERSIONS OF mon by the end of the century. around the country.
through vast networks of pipelines WATER- Tempting as it might be, the Napa County, California, took a
and canals. And thousands of miles ENGINEERING solution is not to further bend similar approach when redesign-
of artificial levees protect cities and nature to our will by building big- ing its flood-control system for the
farms from flooding rivers. INFRASTRUCTURE. ger, higher, and longer versions of Napa River. In the early 1900s, engi-
In many ways, it’s hard to imagine water-engineering infrastructure. neers straightened and deepened
our world of nearly 8 billion people It is to work more with natural pro- the Napa’s channel and filled in its
and $85 trillion in annual goods and cesses, rather than against them, wetlands and tidal marshes. After
services without this water engineer- and to repair the water cycle, rather the area endured 11 serious floods
ing. Cairo, Phoenix, and other large than continue to break it. Along between 1962 and 1997, local offi-
desert cities could never have grown with water-saving measures, such cials asked the US Army Corps of
to their present sizes. California’s approaches can create more resilient Engineers to collaborate on a “living
sunny Central Valley would not have water systems. They can also help river” strategy that would reconnect
become such an abundant producer solve our interconnected water, cli- the Napa with its historical flood-
of vegetables, fruits, and nuts. mate, and biodiversity crises simul- plain, move homes and businesses
Yet when it comes to water, the taneously and cost-effectively. out of harm’s way, revitalize wet-
past is no longer a good guide for As floods worsen, for exam- lands and marshlands, and construct
the future. The heating of the planet ple, instead of raising the height levees and bypass channels in stra-
is fundamentally altering the water of levees—which often intensifies tegic locations. Residents voted to
cycle, and most of the world is unpre- flooding downstream—we can con- increase their local sales tax by half
pared for the consequences. sider ways to strategically reconnect a cent to pay their share of the $366
One of the most alarming rivers to their natural floodplains. In million effort. In addition to gaining
wake-up calls came in 2018, when this way, we can mitigate floods, cap- new trails for birding and hiking, the
the city of Cape Town, South Africa, ture more carbon, recharge ground- city of Napa has benefited from more
was nearly forced to shut off the water, and build critical habitat for than $1 billion in private investment
drinking water taps of 4 million fish, birds, and wildlife. that revitalized the downtown.
residents. Three consecutive years The Netherlands, a country In an effort to scale nature-based
of drought had dried up its reser- renowned for its advanced water systems, the US Congress directed
voirs. City officials began publicly engineering, avoided major dam- the US Army Corps of Engineers
announcing “Day Zero”—the date age from the historic floods in July in 2020 to consider them on equal
water would no longer flow to house- 2021 thanks to its new approach to footing with more conventional
hold faucets. flood control, which gives rivers infrastructure. A significant shift
Conservation measures helped room to spread out during flood in approach, however, will likely
Cape Town push Day Zero further events. The Maas River, which flows require changes in Corps rules and
out—and then, luckily, the rains in from Belgium (where it is called procedures, as well as additional
returned. But no city wants to rely the Meuse), broke its 1993 high- funding.
on luck to bail it out of disaster. flow record last July, but it caused Agricultural practices that rebuild
Scientists later determined that less damage than that earlier flood. soil health offer another strategy.
W AT E R W I T H O U T B O R D E R S
Exporting water
impacts of climate change, we can he Sulphur Springs Valley
avoid the worst of those impacts T is a windswept desert in
in a time of record
by investing more heavily in such southeastern Arizona,
nature-based water solutions. bounded on three sides by forest-
drought
topped mountain ranges known as
Sandra Postel is the author of
the sky islands. It can take an hour
Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle or more to drive between inhabited
of Water and Prosperity and
Fresh water can and will eventually run out if places in the valley, but the com-
ANDREA DAQUINO
W AT E R W I T H O U T B O R D E R S
school (as did their grandparents), warming. As the region becomes liters, depending on where it was
and today they graze their cattle on IF THEY CAN’T hotter and drier, necessitating more grown.
the plains and grow corn, soybeans, FIND ENOUGH extraction from the aquifer, less This means that countries and
and grapes. WATER WITHIN water trickles in from monsoons or companies, whenever they trade
All of this relies on an aquifer snowmelt to replenish it. goods, are in effect moving massive
underneath the valley. This layer THEIR OWN amounts of water across borders.
of rock and soil accumulated its BORDERS, THE What we don’t get But because the water footprint of
moisture over tens of thousands THINKING GOES, about the water cycle food or clothes or anything else is
of years—caught during the mon- In school we teach children about never acknowledged in this trade,
soon season, or as snow on the WHY NOT JUST the water cycle, in which water the movement of water itself cannot
nearby mountaintop melted. For IMPORT IT moves from the oceans to the sky be properly regulated.
generations, farmers—and the (EMBEDDED IN to the land to freshwater basins Partly for this reason, richer
many others who have migrated and eventually back to oceans. In countries such as Saudi Arabia and
across the country to make this FOOD) FROM this telling, the water we use never China have begun buying up land in
epic landscape their home—have SOMEWHERE really disappears. other countries to compensate for
greened their desert by digging ELSE? But these tales gloss over some- their own lack of fresh water. If they
wells a few hundred feet into the thing important: the water cycle can’t find enough water within their
ground and tapping the ground- can take decades or hundreds of own borders, the thinking goes, why
water below. years to complete a turn. Much of not just import it (embedded in food)
In the past decade, however, the fresh water we use every day from somewhere else? The problem
these wells have started to run comes from groundwater, which is that the places they’ve been shop-
dry. Travel beyond the homesteads can take hundreds or thousands of ping are themselves water-stressed,
and family-run farms you’ll see years to accumulate. If we use water including countries in sub-Saha-
why—thousands of acres of neatly faster than it can be replenished, or ran Africa and the Sulphur Springs
ordered trees bearing pecans and pollute it and dump it into the seas Valley in southwest Arizona.
pistachios, vast fields of alfalfa and faster than the natural water cycle Why Arizona? Because the land
corn, huge dairy herds, and rows can clean it, the resource will even- is cheap and well connected to air-
of greenhouses growing tomatoes tually run out. ports, and because water-use reg-
cover the once-barren desert. This If you instead think of water as ulations are almost nonexistent.
enormous carpet of industrial agri- a finite material being used up in The United States is, in fact, the
culture, with food grown for export much the same way as oil or gas, largest exporter of water on earth,
to places around the world, takes you quickly start to see its presence according to Robert Glennon, a
deep wells to sustain. For every 100 in every part of the economy. More law professor at the University of
acres or so, a corporate farm owner than 70% of the water we use is Arizona and one of the country’s
will dig a well as deep as 2,000 feet put into food production, for exam- leading experts on water policy.
and pull up water from the ancient ple. But water is also used to make Glennon calculated that during a
aquifer at up to 2,000 gallons per everything from T-shirts to cars to recent severe drought, farmers in
second, often 24 hours a day. The computer chips. the American West used more than
drilling rigs often resemble those Like its cousin the carbon foot- a hundred billion gallons of water to
used for oil. print, a water footprint can be a grow alfalfa that was then shipped
There are almost no regulations useful shortcut to understanding a mostly to China.
governing the extraction of ground- product’s environmental impact— Across the US, groundwater is
water in Arizona. As long as the or your own. The water footprint of regulated by the “reasonable use”
farms pay a permitting fee, they can a cup of coffee is around 140 liters, doctrine, which Glennon dismisses
pump as much as they like. for example. It takes about 15,000 as “an oxymoron of the first order.”
Added to the over-extraction liters to grow a kilogram of beef. A That policy permits “limitless use
of water from the aquifer, Arizona couple of slices of bread can rack of the water so long as it’s for a
(along with the American Southwest up 100 liters. A kilogram of cotton reasonable purpose,” he says, “ and
in general) is now experiencing one (a pair of jeans and a shirt, say) can everything is reasonable … It’s just
of the worst droughts in hundreds have a footprint of anything from a recipe for exploitive use of the
of years, likely driven by global 10,000 liters to more than 22,000 resources.”
STORY TELLING
Faster than you think are less affected. By keeping track DEVI LOCKWOOD
You might expect this to be a major of the ups and downs of the satel-
The power
international priority, but it’s not. lites, scientists can map out regions
Maggie White, a senior man- of the world that are gaining or los-
of story-
ager of international policy at the ing water over time.
Stockholm International Water Scientists already knew the ice
telling in the
Institute (SIWI) and a longtime sheets in Greenland and Antarctica
water advocate, says that even were melting, but GRACE showed
fight against
though water is everywhere and how much. Since 2002, Greenland
is needed for everything, it has has shed around 280 billion met-
climate
never been prioritized in regula- ric tons of ice annually, causing
tions because it doesn’t have its global sea level to rise by 0.8 milli-
change
own formal lobbying voice. The meters per year. The Antarctic lost
water needs of powerful industries around 150 billion metric tons of
like agriculture and energy get pri- ice per year in the same period.
oritized over the management of The glaciers of the Tibetan plateau Stories may be the most
global water supplies. and in Alaska and western Canada overlooked climate solution
White told me about the push- have retreated as well. GRACE of all.
back she faced while trying to get also revealed that more than half
the water crisis mentioned in the of the world’s major aquifers were
official texts of the Paris climate being depleted, including those in
agreement in 2015. The sticking California’s Central Valley, the north-
point for many negotiators was that west Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula,
water resources were seen as a local India, Pakistan, and the northern
or national issue. As soon as they China plain.
were brought into a multilateral The two key causes: human over-
agreement, they were perceived to use of groundwater supplies, and
rub up against sovereignty issues. the extreme droughts brought on by
Water has always been a source of climate change. The climate crisis
contention between countries, so and the water crisis are therefore
some might feel that there’s good interlocked. GRACE showed that
reason to keep water out of the con- human fingerprints on the fresh-
versation—but whatever the rea- water landscape are the dominant
son, any discussion of water was force changing patterns of water
edged aside. availability around the world, and
To see just how global the that the threats to water security
impending crisis is, you might head are coming faster than you think.
into space. Since it was launched The locals whose families have
in 2002, NASA’s Gravity Recovery lived in the Sulphur Springs Valley of
and Climate Experiment (GRACE) Arizona for generations have already
mission has measured how water figured this out. With the above-
moves around the world. It uses ground water sources drying up, t might sound strange to
two satellites, each the size of a car, and with the aquifer being depleted, I think of storytelling as a
DEVI LOCKWOOD (FIGURE); PIXABAY (WATER)
sweeping over the surface of the many of them have had little choice climate solution, but after
planet and responding to gravita- but to leave their homes and farms spending five years documenting
tional tugs from the masses below. behind. 1,001 voices on climate change in
When the two satellites move over 20 countries, I believe one of the
a snowstorm or floods, the gravita- Alok Jha is science most powerful forms of climate
correspondent at The Economist
tional attraction of that extra water action is to listen deeply to people
in London and author of The
pulls the satellites closer to the sur- Water Book (Headline, 2015). already affected by the crisis. To
face. Over dry areas the satellites ensure that solutions actually help
STORY TELLING
communities most at risk, we must when it lifted, all I wanted was to Here was one front line of cli-
first hear their stories.
“WE FIGHT FOR go outside: to walk and breathe mate change, one story. What would
Climate change is an environ- THE PROTECTION and hear the sounds of other peo- it mean, I wondered, to put this in
mental justice issue. The people OF OUR LEVEES. ple. I needed to connect, to remind dialogue with stories from other
most harmed by the problem are myself that not everyone is murder- parts of the world—from other front
often those least at fault. Solutions
WE FIGHT FOR ous. In a fit of inspiration, I cut open lines with localized impacts that
that ignore people already liv- OUR MARSH a broccoli box and wrote “Open call were experienced through water?
ing with the impacts of climate EVERY TIME WE for stories” in Sharpie. My goal became to listen to and
change—most of whom live in the I wore the cardboard sign amplify those stories.
Global South—risk perpetuating
HAVE A around my neck. People mostly Water is how most of the world
the same systemic inequality that HURRICANE. stared. But some approached me. will experience climate change.
delivered this mess to their door- I COULDN’T Once I started listening to strang- It’s not a human construct, like a
steps in the first place. ers, I didn’t want to stop. degree Celsius. It’s something we
There is a lot of shouting about
IMAGINE LIVING That summer, I rode my bicy- acutely see and feel. When there’s
climate change, especially in North ANYWHERE cle down the Mississippi River on not enough water, crops die, fires
America and Europe. This makes ELSE.” a mission to listen to any stories rage, and people thirst. When
it easy for the rest of the world that people had to share. I brought there’s too much, water becomes
to fall into a kind of silence—for the sign with me. One story was so a destructive force, washing away
Westerners to assume that they sticky that I couldn’t stop thinking homes and businesses and lives. It’s
have nothing to add and should about it for months, and it ulti- almost always easier to talk about
let the so-called “experts” speak. mately set me off on a trip around water than to talk about climate
But we all need to be talking about the world. change. But the two are deeply
climate change and amplifying the I met 57-year-old Franny intertwined.
voices of those suffering the most. Connetti 80 miles south of New I also set out to address another
Climate science is crucial, but Orleans, when I stopped in front problem: the language we use to
by contextualizing that science of her office to check the air in my discuss climate change is often
with the stories of people actively tires; she invited me in to get out abstract and inaccessible. We hear
experiencing climate change, we of the afternoon sun. Franny shared about feet of sea-level rise or parts
can begin to think more creatively her lunch of fried shrimp with me. per million of carbon dioxide in the
about technological solutions. Between bites she told me how atmosphere, but what does this
This needs to happen not only Hurricane Isaac had washed away really mean for people’s everyday
at major international gatherings her home and her neighborhood lives? I thought storytelling might
like COP26, but also in an every- in 2012. bridge this divide.
day way. In any powerful rooms Despite that tragedy, she and One of the first stops on my jour-
where decisions are made, there her husband moved back to their ney was Tuvalu, a low-lying coral
should be people who can speak plot of land, in a mobile home, just atoll nation in the South Pacific, 585
firsthand about the climate crisis. a few months after the storm. miles south of the equator. Home
Storytelling is an intervention into “We fight for the protection of to around 10,000 people, Tuvalu is
climate silence, an invitation to use our levees. We fight for our marsh on track to become uninhabitable
the ancient human technology of every time we have a hurricane,” in my lifetime.
connecting through language and she told me. “I couldn’t imagine In 2014 Tauala Katea, a mete-
narrative to counteract inaction. living anywhere else.” orologist, opened his computer
It is a way to get often powerless Twenty miles ahead, I could see to show me an image of a recent
voices into powerful rooms. where the ocean lapped over the flood on one island. Seawater had
That’s what I attempted to do road at high tide. “Water on Road,” bubbled up under the ground near
by documenting stories of people an orange sign read. Locals jokingly where we were sitting. “This is what
already experiencing the effects of refer to the endpoint of Louisiana climate change looks like,” he said.
a climate in crisis. State Highway 23 as “The End of “In 2000, Tuvaluans living in
In 2013, I was living in Boston the World.” Imagining the road I the outer islands noticed that their
during the marathon bombing. had been biking underwater was taro and pulaka crops were suf-
The city was put on lockdown, and chilling. fering,” he said. “The root crops
STORY TELLING
ELYSE FLAYME
AND THE FINAL FLOOD
From: Boreal, Emily <Emily.Boreal@samphire.house>
To: Picual, Jim <Jim.Picual@samphire.house>,
Joss, Lillian <Lillian.Joss@samphire.house>,
Gupta, Mohan <Mohan.Gupta@samphire.house>
Cc: Executive Committee <Ex.Com@samphire.house>
By Robin Sloan
Illustrations by
Stephanie Arnett
You sent me to find the god of a dying world, and I found her, but it
didn’t turn out the way you expected. I’m not sorry for what I did, but
I do owe you an explanation.
Those of you reading this know very well the problem we faced, but
I assume this message will be forwarded to at least one board member,
so I’ll go over the basics.
Molly Khan had written six books in as many years, starting with
Elyse Flayme and the Ice Queen, surprise best seller, first in the series
that became the heir—at last—to Potter. Even better, this series meant
something, because the crisis that faced Molly’s mythic world of Arrenia
was a clear parable for climate change. The books were urgent and seri-
ous, but also fun and charming and, as Molly’s characters grew up, not
a little bit sexy. They were broccoli fried in bacon fat.
Six years, six books, and a glossy TV adaptation running in lock-
step: so far, so profitable. But Molly Khan’s agent was good. The books
were contracted one at a time rather than all at once, so with each
success, her leverage increased. Furthermore, the TV show was not
permitted to proceed without a book to guide it: there would be no
Game of Thrones–ing ahead of the author’s imagination. Molly Khan’s
agent was really good.
Molly’s seventh book would conclude the series. There we were,
proud publishers, along with our counterparts at the streaming ser-
vice: perched, poised, ready to proceed into the final stage of this bil-
lion-dollar project.
But the Green Tolkien did not submit her seventh manuscript. The
due date passed, and Molly was silent. We knew the book’s title: Elyse
Flayme and the Final Flood. Another month passed. That’s all we knew.
Three more months. The actress who played Elyse was being pursued
for a Star Wars movie. Everything stood frozen, waiting on the author,
her imagination, her drowning world, its fate.
She would not reply to emails; would not answer the phone. She
was holed up in her house in Bodega Bay, the one she bought with
the money from the first Elyse Flayme book and never left. She was,
apparently, staring at the ocean.
So you sent me to California.
My mission was simple: determine the cause of Molly’s delay and
identify what was needed to finish the book. I was authorized to offer, as
enticement, an additional 2% of total back-end across all media, which
could easily amount to $20 million. On the plane to San Francisco, I
imagined myself carrying a giant check. In the rental car up the coast,
I imagined myself hauling a sack of gold bars.
You all warned me about Bodega Bay. I’d wrote steamy fan fiction and they marched on
never been to California at all, so of course in my their centers of government.
imagination it was Eden, warm and woozy and It was those kids who now had Molly Khan
comfortable. This stretch of coast—cold to start tied into a knot.
and colder as I crept north, with the cliffs calv- “I can’t finish it,” she said simply. “I’ve consid-
ing away into the black water and the geological ered every possibility.” She waved at a little desk
fault line totally, hilariously apparent—this was that sat facing the ocean; a tower block of note-
a world ending, literally ending, in slow motion. books rose on its surface. “Arrenia can’t be ruined,
I found Molly’s house out on the edge of town, because I can’t say, yeah, sorry, we’re doomed.
perched on a particularly ragged and desperate No way. But it can’t be saved, either, because ...
cliff. The house wasn’t large, but its design was well, it can’t. You know the story.”
very modern, a slanted box built from wood that I knew it very well. In Arrenia, the elves who
might once have been dark but had long since lived on the coast of the Ghost Ocean had, through
been blasted pale by the salt wind. their misuse of magic, wrecked the climates, plu-
We had met in person only once before but had ral: meteorological and spiritual. The ocean was
corresponded at length, mostly in the comments rising and the stars were raining down curses. To
attached to the manuscript for Elyse Flayme in avert calamity, the elves would have to give up
the Ocean Beyond Oceans, her most recent book, magic—immediately, decisively, forever.
now lingering on shelves. Molly had included my The real achievement of the books was that
name in the acknowledgments: “My thanks also they made this seem appropriately difficult. Magic
to Emily Boreal, who gets it.” This had come as a was fucking awesome! No wonder the elves didn’t
complete surprise, and even now, when I think want to give it up. No wonder they might rather
of it, my face gets hot. drown. In her fiction, Molly dramatized all the
Molly answered the door in sweatpants. paradoxes. She danced inside the grinding gears
“Of course it’s you,” she said. “Smart of them.” of inevitability. There were revenant sharks in the
I told her I was just here to help, if I could. Ghost Ocean. You could ride them.
Molly nodded. “Fine. Let’s see if you can.” “But aren’t the books actually about that ten-
On the flight, I wondered if Molly had suf- sion?” I parried.
fered some kind of breakdown; the writer’s agony Molly looked at me witheringly. “Yes, but I
and ecstasy that, if we’re being honest, editors still need an ending.”
find sort of delicious. Encountering her, I had I searched. “The ending could be about ... not
the sense not of a bulwark broken, but one cur- knowing ...”
rently loaded down almost unimaginably. Molly “Oh, Emily, yes! Very literary. I’ll end the series
Khan was short and slender, swallowed up by with Arrenia’s fate still hanging in the balance. I’ll
her sweats; following her into the house, I was say: That’s the point! We don’t know the future,
conscious of all the money, all the expectations, do we? Meanwhile, I’ll haul my royalties away, go
all the emotions balanced on that little body as if enjoy my life, because I’m part of the last gener-
it were a fulcrum. ation for whom that’s even possible.”
There were millions of readers, yes. Millions She paused. I was already dead.
Wonderful idea
of viewers, sure. But the thing you really had to “Wonderful idea.”
contend with was the cosplayers. Elyse Flayme
had become a central symbol of the climate jus- I started reading Elyse Flayme in high school and
tice movement; at every rally, on the steps of continued through college. I was one of them,
every capitol, you found dozens of Elyses, and the millions who mothed to this author because
even more Osric Worldenders, partly because she saw the climate nightmare clearly; because
his cold wrath resonated powerfully and partly she stood beside us in the vise grip of energy and
because his costume called for very short shorts. time. But we had put off the reckoning, all of us,
Molly had achieved the thing that had eluded a author and readers alike. If a happy ending was
thousand earnest climate journalists; she had impossible, but we refused to revel in doom …
surpassed even the girl from Sweden. How? what did that leave?
By transcribing, without flinching, the fears of Molly Khan poured wine and led me to the
a generation. They trusted her. Molly’s readers glassed-in balcony that projected off the back of
the house. We talked while the sun dipped into fingers, careening toward their destination. Is
the real ghost ocean. I asked her what it had been this how she had written all the books?
like, wrestling with the book. She told me about I padded into the kitchen, afraid to disturb
her notes, her experiments. Enough to fill five her because breaking the spell would be costly,
finales, she said. All abandoned. and because I was afraid she would turn around
I didn’t push her; didn’t even mention the and her eyes would be like Osric Worldender’s,
offer I’d been authorized to make until halfway shadowed pits crackling with black lightning.
through the second bottle of wine. I rustled in the refrigerator, found yogurt, and
“You could donate the money to climate activ- tapped out an update email, cc-ing most of the You could donate
the money to
ists,” I said lamely. people now receiving this. As you might recall, climate activists
Molly shot me an acid look. “You know what I wrote that things were going well; that Molly
I think about that kind of laundering.” appreciated our generosity; that she seemed very
I did; everyone did. Elyse Flayme’s best friend energized! This was all true. But I might also have
Meritxell was always coming up with ways in added: The money was an insult; she had not
which they could keep using magic and delay slept; I was afraid to speak to her.
Arrenia’s destruction, and Elyse was always say- I fiddled with my phone while the clacking of
ing, We have to choose what matters to us, Mer. the keys continued. While I waited, a few of you
We talked into the night. Mostly, I listened. I sent enthusiastic replies: Way to go! Yeah, Emily,
came to understand that Molly Khan had been great news! I guess you really do “get it”!
cooped up in that house by herself for way too The clacking slowed, became a stately chug.
long. Her false starts came spilling out. The The chug broke down into silence. Molly lifted
horizon faded to buzzing black as she ticked her head and peeled herself away from her lap-
through the various versions she’d tried and top. She looked out across the ocean and, from
rejected. She went digging in the notebooks my perspective, was framed against it: a ragged
for half-remembered lines. The truth is, they all silhouette, baggy sweatshirt and wild hair con-
sounded great to me, but Molly wasn’t satisfied. spiring to make her into a witchy apparition.
All along, a certainty was growing in my mind.
Molly Khan emptied the second bottle of wine, In another world, she would have rolled her shoul-
and when I probed her about Elyse Flayme— ders, put her head down, and finished the book.
asked what Elyse had kept hidden; what this She would have committed to the page these
avatar was capable of, in the end—she became events, which she had imagined and described
animated. She had been rooting in the kitchen to me the night before:
for more to drink, but this question brought her Elyse Flayme would have climbed the great
back out onto the balcony: she said one thing, tower at the center of Svanta City, using all the
then another, and another, all while I cheered powers she’d accrued over the past six books
her on. I was the only witness: there, in the dark to knock down the obstacles in her path, abso-
above the ocean, out of nothing, came some- lutely shredding the elvish security forces. Osric
thing: an ending. Worldender would have been there at her side,
Soon after that, Molly sat at her desk and throwing black lightning, exultant. At the tow-
started to type what she’d just explained. I col- er’s top, she would have found the Ghostburn
lapsed on the bed in her little guest room. My last Council, the ones who profited most from the use
thought before sleep was that I had succeeded of magic. Among them would be Meritxell, her
in my mission: unblocked the writer, secured old friend, who had been catapulted into power
the future of the franchise. Maybe I deserved a in book five and aimed to transform the council
commission … just a tiny cut of that $20 million. from within. Meritxell, who—
In the morning, I found Molly in the same Elyse Flayme would have killed them all. She
place exactly. She had not slept. A low-slung dis- would have abrogated all her values, crossed all
trict of coffee mugs had joined the tower block of the lines established in the previous six books.
notebooks on her desk. Her keyboard clattered She would have done precisely the thing her foe
like a subway car; she barreled down the track, from the first book, Mauna the Ice Queen, had
not stopping at any of the stations. She was abso- stood poised to do: the massacre young Elyse
lutely focused; no part of her moved except her had prevented, in an impassioned speech that
kids still quoted on the hand-written signs they on the drive, but again, I pushed it aside, because
carried to rallies at capitols. THEY ARE ABOVE I understood how dangerous it was. Now, though,
ALL AFRAID, one sign might read. WE WILL I saw how deeply Molly Khan was suffering, and I
SAVE THEM WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR saw—as she did—that she would never complete
NOT, might read another. this book in the way she, or any of us, had planned.
There would be no speeches in this final scene, What had Ambassador Agora said to Elyse
just blue fire and black lightning and, in the space Flayme in book three? “We cannot undo these
that death opened, a glimmer of hope. curses with the same kind of magic that cre-
In another world, that’s what Molly wrote, ated them.”
Final_Flood_v19_Final_ReallyFinal.docx. In this I was certain what Molly Khan had to do, so
one, she—I don’t know how else to say it: she I told her.
crumbled. I watched it happen, like a cliff sliding She looked at me, there on the beach, her eyes
into the ocean. Exactly that heavy. Exactly that final. narrow. She asked for clarification: “Can I ...?”
She put her head down on the desk, and it She was the god of a dying world. Of course
stayed there. I wondered if she was crying. I she could.
wondered what I should do if she was crying.
Then she stood, screamed once, and stalked out We climbed up to the house, where Molly pre-
of the room. pared a proper breakfast. For the first time, I
In that moment, I was terrified. Would I have detected a lightness in her. Ever since I’d arrived—
to soothe her? Was that my mission? I am not a and for the whole year prior—her brain had been
soother. I do not soothe. I annotate. I stood fro- whirring, searching, grasping. Failing. Now she
zen in the kitchen and strongly considered flight, allowed it to rest. She gave me a plate of eggs, per-
That is absolutely but in a pulse of character development worthy of fect, then dialed her great and terrible agent. When
unhinged. Elyse herself, I bested my chickenshit heart and Molly explained my idea, her agent’s reply shook
I love it.
I mean, I hate it. hustled to pursue Molly Khan, who had exited the phone speaker: “THAT IS ABSOLUTELY
But I love it! not only the room but the house. UNHINGED. I LOVE IT. I MEAN, I HATE IT.
Outside, thick fog had settled along the coast, BUT I LOVE IT!”
and I could not locate any witchlike apparitions. I presume you know what her agent loved and
I scrambled around, checked the front of the hated, because you’ve read Molly’s announcement,
house, looked up and down the road, raked the and perhaps some of the reactions to it, but just
coast with my eyes. Nothing. in case—and for the board member, hello—I’ll
Then I very gingerly approached the cliff, where take this opportunity to make it perfectly clear:
I spotted a figure pacing the beach below. I hustled Molly Khan will not submit her seventh book,
down switchbacking stairs to find Molly circling but the series will not go unfinished.
the sand, staring into the gray. The muscles across Remember: Molly Khan retains all rights to
her face were tight. In her hair, I saw crumbs, along Elyse Flayme and her world, and those rights
with a stalk of some hardy coastal grass. The wind include the power to commit them to the public
whipped off the water, stung my eyes, extracted domain, which she has now done.
tears. There were tears in Molly’s eyes, too. Now anyone can write their own ending—
“IT DIDN’T WORK,” she shouted above the and not only in the shadowy confines of fan fic-
wind. “This is what happens. Like a loop, this tion, but in the scrum of the market. They can
whole year. I think I have an ending, and I get so publish it, sell it, get it made into a movie. In a
excited, but I realize I can’t publish it, because stroke, Molly Khan has given up her control over
it’s not what they deserve. THEY’RE BEYOND Elyse Flayme. She has turned down the sack of
ME, EMILY! I can’t write what they deserve!” gold bars I carried, and all the giant checks that
If I had found Molly’s crumpled body on the might have followed, and given it all to … anyone
beach, rather than her scowling face, I wouldn’t who wants it?
have been surprised; and it was that realization We cannot undo these curses with the same
that shook me into action. kind of magic that created them.
Because, as I said before, a certainty had been Don’t worry: you will not be denied your final
growing in my mind. The idea occurred to me first fountain of money. The public domain, after all, is
on the plane, but I had smothered it. It reappeared open to you, too! You can commission a conclusion
Come hell
We’ve been messing with the
oceans for many years, and for at
least 60 of those, this publication
or high water
has been writing about it.
From “Climate Control and the Oceans”: From “A Sterile Sea”: The modification is From “Coal and Climate Stoking the Fires of
Without a clear picture of how the ocean beginning. “Man, a land organism, is influ- Research”: One thing to avoid is running
overturns and with no accurate time scale encing the chemical composition of sea around warning that the Antarctic ice cap is
for interaction with the atmosphere, ocean- water more than any of the species that going to melt and flood a lot of real estate.
ographers and meteorologists alike are at live within the marine environment,” said Some scientists have suggested that this
a loss to explain adequately the general Edward D. Goldberg, Professor of Chemistry could happen quickly—a highly speculative
mechanism of the earth’s climate. Now at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. For conclusion. As J.H. Mercer of the Institute
man, with his carbon-dioxide-producing example, some 3,000 tons of mercury reach of Polar Studies at Ohio State University
industry, has become yet another unknown the oceans each year from natural conti- pointed out, the projected warming could
modifying factor. The influence of this nental sources and 4,000 tons from fun- melt enough ice to raise global sea levels
new and geologically unique factor may gicides and industrial processes; the lead some five meters, but this would likely take
be operating in any of several directions. input to the oceans from automobile fuel is several centuries. More sophisticated com-
It could be tending toward a new ice age or “roughly equivalent” to that from sedimen- puter models should be developed, and it
could be producing another great tropical tary action; pesticides, “a recent and novel would be prudent to monitor the Antarctic
epoch like that prevailing when coal and entry to the marine environment,” now are ice by satellite regularly. Meanwhile, there’s
oil deposits were laid down. The interac- widespread, and so are radioactive species; little merit in the “scare-the-hell-out-of-
tions are so involved that experts do not and man has introduced two new elements: them” approach typified by one prominent
yet know how to sort them out. One thing sewage outfalls and accidental pollutions geophysicist, who stood on the U.S. Capitol
they are sure of—this influence is at work from man’s commerce. Perhaps half of all steps indicating where the water would
on a scale to dwarf all previous changes these contaminants are introduced into the come to dramatize his case for restricting
man has made. ocean by activities in the U.S. the use of coal.
MIT Technology Review (ISSN 1099-274X), January/February 2022 issue, Reg. US Patent Office, is published bimonthly by MIT Technology Review, 1 Main St. Suite 13, Cambridge, MA 02142-1517. Entire contents ©2022. The
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