Senior Sequence

The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water

Copied from In Focus: Environment
FPIF | Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Maude Barlow illuminates the connection between water and global security in her book, Blue Covenant. According to Barlow three water crises - dwindling freshwater supplies, inequitable access to water and the corporate control of water - pose the greatest threat of our time to the planet and to our survival. Learn more in an excerpt from her book: "The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water."

Tom Athanasiou notes several types of climate realism: beltway realism that limits U.S. commitments and initiatives to those that are immediately sustainable by veto-proof congressional majorities, internationalist realism that begins with the recognition that a viable global accord will necessarily require substantial rich-world financial commitments, and scientific realism that ignores the politics of the moment and stresses instead the physical demands of the climate system. In "Toward a Defensible Climate Realism" He in argues for a path forward in that satisfies all the "realisms."

Accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore called on the nations of the world to mobilize to avert climate disaster "with a sense of urgency and shared resolve that has previously been seen only when nations have mobilized for war." The Military vs. Climate Security report measures in fiscal terms how far our own nation has to go to reach that goal.

Last month's conference on climate change in Bali, Indonesia, brought the North-South fault line in climate politics into sharp relief. While U.S. intransigence on the question of mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions took center stage, not far behind was the issue of what commitments fast-growing developing countries like China and India should make in a new, post-Kyoto climate change regime. Walden Bello discusses the environmental movement in Newly Industrializing Countries in Elites vs. Greens in the Global South

Links

The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5016

Toward a Defensible Climate Realism: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4941

Military vs. Climate Security Executive Summary: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4933

Elites vs. Greens in the Global South: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4899

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