Post-water political-economics

ABSTRACT

Existing concepts of water political economy focus on political bargaining within relatively static institutional and climactic environments. This article adds ‘post’ to water political economy to explore how non-stationary climate interacts with endogenous political institutions to create and magnify policy and behavioural uncertainties. These post-water political economy ideas are then applied to food security to explore potential future scenarios. The implications are terrible for poor people living in water-scarce, food-importing countries, but not much better for everyone else.

KEYWORDS:

• Political economy
• climate change
• water scarcity
• food security
• ecosystem services

Adding politics to post-water economics

The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed. (William Gibson, 1990s, cited in Quote Investigator, 2012)

Water-shedding in South Africa is fast becoming a reality, and while not taking place on a national scale as yet, the frequency of disruptions in water delivery systems due to water shortages is greatly increasing. (Nazzal, 2022)

This article explores ‘post-water political economics’ (PWPE), or the ways in which political choices will interact with economic incentives to turn water scarcity into shortage, local problems into global problems and small disruptions into larger catastrophes.

To do this, I define water as an economic and social good in a water political-economy (WPE) context in which institutions might work or fail. In section 3, I explore how climate-related disruptions combine with WPE to create PWPE dynamics. In section 4, I outline a realistic scenario in which PWPE disrupts food production and trade and thus food security. PWPE dynamics are not new, but their uneven distribution is spreading to affect more of humanity.

Consider, for example, how Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine – a purely political move – did not just upset international trade in food, but also triggered political interventions into markets for energy, transit and talent. Ukraine is not the only victim. Dozens of countries experienced food insecurity, which weakens social harmony and political stability. Or consider the 2021 ‘heat dome’ event in the Pacific Northwest region of the US and Canada. Temperatures peaked at nearly 50°C, forests erupted into flames and around 1000 people died of heat stress (Mulkern, 2022). The speed and force of this event overwhelmed a wealthy area with impressive natural resources and man-made infrastructure. Events such as this will increase in frequency and force as climate chaos strengthens and develops. How will people in poorer, less-prepared areas cope?

To answer these questions, we must consider the central role of institutions – the formal rules and informal norms that guide, limit and/or permit actions and reactions (Ciriacy-Wantrup, 1969; North, 1990). Both the Russian invasion and the ‘once per 200 years’ heat dome exposed institutions to surprising pressures that were hard to understand, let alone address. In both cases, these surprises resulted in responses that took time to develop and only partially offset damages.

This article is motivated by a desire to understand how climate change (and related disruptions) will affect and alter our understanding of WPE. Its main point is that these factors will strain or break models that assume stationarity, exogeneity, locality and risk. The ‘chaos’ of climate change will come from non-stationarity of climate, endogenous local political reactions to this non-stationarity, spillovers from those local disruptions into other political spheres, and the impacts of these disruptions on a global, multi-player non-cooperative game with imperfect information and uncertainty – most obviously through the surprises that come when ‘Nature bats last’ (Ehrlich, 1969, p. 28).

Systems will attempt to adapt to shocks, but that process will be hindered by cheap talk, unobserved action, surprise linkages and an ever-changing cast of players in novel roles playing across multiple scales and scopes. This article will not explore those complex (and probably undefined) dynamics, but we know they matter. Economic historians still argue over the causes of the Great Depression; they cannot even agree on how welfare was defined or policies affected welfare. Our PWPE future will feature similar arguments over intractable issues, and those arguments – just like those concerning the Great Depression – will do nothing to alleviate human suffering.

The quotations at the beginning of this section capture the reality: Some people already suffer from political failures to deal with water scarcity. Those failures will grow in magnitude, frequency and distribution as PWPE dynamics bring ugly futures into present lives.

WPE in context

The end of abundance means the supply side/cost recovery model of water management no longer delivers the results we want […] and it will cause trouble until we change the way we manage water […] so that economic incentives are integrated into the management of scarce water. Those changes need to be implemented with the leadership and cooperation of political and social leaders. (Zetland, 2011, pp. 5–6)

This section explores WPE, which tends to focus on how politics affects the management of water as an economic good rather than disruptions to political institutions. Section 3 builds a bridge from WPE to PWPE by weakening assumptions of a stationary climate, exogenous institutions, local management and known risks. Each weakening raises the pressure on political institutions and the risk of post-water shortages when institutions fail to adapt.

Is adaptation necessary? Yes. But it is not easy. For a parallel, consider the momentous changes (on many margins) that are needed to convert energy systems from fossil to renewable power. We need to make – and pay for – new supplies of raw and manufactured goods, radical alterations of distribution systems, changes in our financial and legal systems, and so on. Sadly, the wholesale reform of energy systems that have evolved over centuries is taking far too much time. As mitigation fails, we will face the even higher cost of adapting our water management to climate-change-disruptions (IPCC, 2021).

Social (political) water versus economic water

It is possible to separate water’s economic and social uses in a way that clarifies when and where to use economic or political tools for rationing and/or sharing. Note that I say ‘social’ uses rather than ‘political’ uses because economists tend to separate private costs and benefits (both accruing to the person or entity taking action) from social costs and benefits that include non-decision-makers. The tools affecting such uses tend to be called ‘economic’ and ‘political’, since a reference to ‘social tools’ can have many meanings.

To separate uses, first define water as a good. Figure 1 shows how water (or any good) can be classified into four different types of good depending on exclusion (i.e., whether the water can be excluded from others’ control) and rivalry (i.e., whether one person’s use subtracts the quantity available to others).

Figure 1. Excludability and rivalry define water as a good. Management by either economic or social tools depends on excludability.

Source: Ostrom and Ostrom (1977).

Next, check to see if water is managed by tools appropriate to its current nature as a good. Management via markets/prices or political/collective mechanisms must reflect rather than ignore water’s excludability. Excludable water should be treated as private property and allocated via markets or prices. Non-excludable water that belongs to everyone (as a collective good) should be managed via political (top-down) or community (peer-to-peer) mechanisms. Those definitions also imply that markets should not be used to allocate social water and political mechanisms should not be used to re-allocate economic water.

Finally, consider the endogenous relationship between water management and its nature as a good, since mismatches can aggravate scarcity. This analysis must allow for changes in water’s nature (e.g., excess demand turning a club good into a common-pool good) and changes in its management (e.g., assigning property rights to turn that common-pooled good into a private good). These dynamics can play an important role in market and government failures. The ‘end of abundance’ quotation above, for example, refers to the problems that result when management institutions built on the assumption of unlimited water (as a public good) fail to change when scarcity converts water into a common-pooled good. At that point, shortage risks can be reduced by a change in rights (treating water as a private good allocated by price) or a collective action that prevents a common-pool ‘dilemma’ (or tragedy) by sustainably managing water to maintain what Ostrom et al. (1994) call a common-pool ‘situation’.

These three steps help us understand how to (mis)manage scarcity. They should be retraced when circumstances or choices move water from one of Figure 1’s boxes to another – assuming the goal is to maximize social welfare. If farmers, for example, compete to pump water from an aquifer, then institutions need to adapt, to prevent a common pool ‘situation’ from turning into a ‘dilemma’.

A short review of WPE

Many economists treat politics as exogenous to their models – providing necessary (but unspecified) mechanisms in supporting economic activity. Political economists explore how economic incentives/markets and social bargains/politics influence each other (North et al., 2006). In the best cases, economics and politics complement each other to create accurate prices for allocating goods within institutions that reduce risk and harmful spillovers. In the worst scenarios (the ones that attract attention), economics and politics clash to distort exchange patterns, undermine risk management and multiply perverse results.

In one of the older papers to consider and define WPE, Ostrom (1962) identifies the main pressures, the mechanisms for resolving them (organizations that reconcile conflicts), and the need to change management in response to ‘changing requirements and conditions of life’ (p 457). These characteristics are very much in line with my PWPE framework, but they were oversimplified in later years by scholars who focused on the politics affecting markets but ignored the reverse relation.

Bauer (1997), for example, traces the disruptive influence of political decisions on water markets in Chile. His analysis of market failures focuses on the negative externalities from market dysfunction rather than on non-excludable water. Moving from the need to ‘get markets right’, we come to Dinar’s examination of the political challenges to ‘getting prices right’ in a book on water pricing reform (Dinar, 2000). Since Dinar is interested in excludable water, he looks at ‘politics’ in the context of winners and losers from water pricing reforms and the challenges of recovering system costs. Although it seems that Swatuk (2008) puts more weight on non-excludable factors, he is looking at politics as a means of understanding the mismanagement of excludable water in South Africa. Bauer’s, Dinar’s and Swatuk’s individual studies focus on the impacts of political choices on economic uses of water rather than on separating excludable and non-excludable uses (pace Ostrom, 1962) or the political process of managing non-excludable waters, which Carson (1962), Olson (1965) and Ostrom (1965) spent more time examining.

To understand how WPE and PWPE differ, consider the assumptions underlying most WPE analysis: Water scarcity impacts vary with local geo-physical constraints and political-economic institutions. Local institutions target success by encouraging cooperation and punishing defection, but they cannot hedge all risks. Trade reduces risk by allowing the unlucky or uninterested to buy what they lack, for example, arid countries buying food (virtual water). Section 3 discusses the PWPE disruptors of these WPE patterns.

Most of us (with the exception of self-sufficient farmers) already live ‘post-local water’ lives. We sell our non-water goods and services in markets and use those proceeds to buy water, food and other water-rich goods from those who have access to water. The question is whether we can continue with such business as usual as climate chaos forces more institutions into a post-water world.

The vulnerabilities of WPE institutions

WPE scholars know economic structures depend on governance institutions that are political (top-down) or collective (peer-to-peer). Water markets, for example, cannot exist without enforced property rights. Farmers cannot export if politicians close the boarders. To better understand how governance institutions can fail, we need to look at how they are supposed to work. They come in many forms, but their function is always the same: to regulate markets in excludable goods, protect common-pooled goods and promote public goods. Given the fact that those last two goods are jointly referred to as ‘the commons’ (Zetland, 2022), Dietz et al. (2003, p. 1908, emphasis added) define five necessary elements for ‘effective’ governance of the commons:

• The resources and use of the resources by humans can be monitored, and the information can be verified and understood at relatively low cost.

• Rates of change in resources, resource-user populations, technology, and economic and social conditions are moderate.

• Communities maintain frequent face-to-face communication and dense social networks that increase the potential for trust, allow people to express and see emotional reactions to distrust, and lower the cost of monitoring behaviour and inducing rule compliance.

• Outsiders can be excluded at relatively low cost from using the resource.

• Users support effective monitoring and rule enforcement.

In sum, the group needs to know what is happening, have enough time to adjust to changes, communicate often enough to build consensus, protect the resources from outsiders, and internally monitor and enforce rules.

These criteria are mostly missing in a world undergoing climate change, where rapid changes and non-stationarity causes disruptions that cannot be understood before the uncoordinated responses of political entities lead to reactions by others whose ‘invasive’ impacts surprise other communities and contribute to overall uncertainty. (Whew!)

In this world of PWPE, the strongest, fastest and richest will grab water from the weaker, slower and poorer – with grave social and political implications.

Disruptors of WPE

The Anthropocene era, which began with the Industrial Revolution, gets its name for the way in which humans are impacting ecosystems previously assumed to be beyond our influence (Bendell, 2018; Mbow et al., 2019). This article’s focus on PWPE reflects the Anthropocene reality, that is, a world in which climate fluctuations go outside pre-Anthropocene, ‘stationary’ trends, and where political reactions to those non-stationary fluctuations (1) add ‘forcing pressures’ that exacerbate climate change and (2) spill over into other, previously isolated political systems, thereby triggering more political reactions. Taken together, these interdependent disruptors create a ‘new normal’ of uncertainty (in place of previous norms of risk) that will disrupt or break institutions that cannot change fast enough (Williamson, 2000).

Let us explore those disruptors.

Non-stationarity

The ‘scissors of water scarcity’ have blades for both supply and demand. Climate change has tightened both blades (IPCC, 2021): the intensity, location and timing of the water cycle are moving outside historic ranges (‘stationarity’). Temperatures push outside record highs and lows. Precipitation and storms surprise us. These disruptions are reducing ecosystem services for regulating, provisioning and cleaning, thereby increasing adaption burdens.

Endogenous feedback loops

In most places, wealth and technology have increased access to water more quickly than depletion and degradation have reduced it. Both of these trends will reverse in a post-water world, thereby reintroducing economic, social, political and psychological costs familiar to the world’s poor, but novel to the world’s rich (Zetland & Colenbrander, 2018). Farmers accustomed to cheap, abundant water will face scarcities that force them to grow less, change crops, or fallow land. Lower food supplies will lead to higher prices and calls for political intervention.

Weakening and failing ecosystem services will bring costs (heat deaths, reduced crop yields, etc.) to places too poor or disorganized to compensate for losses. In places that react, there are costs ranging from additional spending on infrastructure to protect against floods and droughts, to increased cooling for overheated workers, to supplementing natural flows with desalinated water. All these actions will use energy and materials that will place additional forcing pressure on the climate, which necessitates further adaption.

Cascading spillovers

Increasing climate damages will trigger local economic and political responses that further increase climate damages. These local cycles will then merge and reinforce at regional, national and global scales, creating a ‘super cycle’ of damage and responses that increase climate forcing in an atmospheric prisoner’s dilemma in which each actor’s response makes it harder for others to cope (Gardiner, 2006). These dynamics mean that the share of vulnerable groups will rise as conditions worsen and adaptation options fall.

As an example, consider how farmers sharing an aquifer might compete to drill deeper wells as aggregate pumping drops the water table. Each deepening leads others to deepen further. All experience more scarcity, but some face shortages. That is the WPE step. Now assume that the aquifer loses yield as wells deepen (as when over-exploited artesian wells lose their pressure). If farmers then divert surface waters, they create a spillover that can trigger a supercycle at the regional or watershed scale. Farmers worldwide have already depleted a large share of the groundwater on which they have historically relied (Rodell et al., 2018).

From risk to uncertainty

The move from stationary, exogenous and local takes place under conditions of risk, that is, a set of ‘known unknowns’ that can be described using probability distributions derived from pre-Anthropocene climate history (Kim, 2012). The move to non-stationary, endogenous and regional/global dynamics leaves us without much idea of what will happen where, that is, a situation of ‘unknown unknowns’ or uncertainty. This new condition will make it hard to plan for the future or – given the many ways we take water for granted – even understand impacts in the present.

A little more technical detail will illuminate this vulnerability.

Risk calculations result in an expected payoff that is the sum of payoffs from potential outcomes weighted by their probabilities. Knight (1921) defined [Knightian] uncertainty to refer to situations where payoffs, probabilities and completeness (knowing all potential outcomes) are unknown. Economists can model risk with statistics and various assumptions of continuity. They cannot model uncertainty due to unknown values, unknown parameters and missing variables. The lack of a model explains why economists (and nearly everyone else) are constantly surprised by political decisions and the ways in which responses deflect and magnify each decision.

In a seminal article on climate change futures, Weitzman (2011) points out the dangers of assuming risk when uncertainty is relevant. He warns that assumptions of risk could exclude outcomes such as ‘the death of humanity’ from consideration, which gives pause (p. 288).

Turning from water damages to water uses, consider an important uncertainty: the unknown value of water in use. We know that a loss of access to water is costly to individuals in terms of value forsaken. We can try to estimate those costs by observing responses (to quantify opportunity costs), but such observations are hard to make when water shortages are unpredictable and trivial where they are. We know as little about the value of gains from water access as we do about the losses from water shortages. Scale this knowledge gap from local and limited to global and widespread, and you see the challenge of understanding the massive risk. We can barely conceive of the damages from São Paulo or Cape Town losing their drinking water supplies from these uncertainties (Moore, 2018). What if the Amazon rainforest tipped into a carbon-shedding savanna? We can describe these scenarios, but we cannot model them with risks and probabilities.

PWPE, thus, results when you disrupt WPE with non-stationarity, endogeneity, cascades and uncertainty. Institutions that have formed and evolved to manage WPE are ill-suited to ‘novel’ PWPE dynamics, which means that they will struggle and perhaps even fail in post-water conditions (North, 1990). The next section explores a scenario in which failure brings dire consequences.

Scenario: food security

Winston Churchill was perhaps the most famous advocate of reducing risk by trading with diverse partners. As First Lord of the Admiralty of the British Empire just before the First World War, he argued that British ships should be fuelled by oil rather than coal (Yergin, 1990). When asked about the risk of abandoning abundant domestic coal for foreign oil, Churchill said, ‘On no one quality, on no one process, on no one country, on no one route and on no one field must we be dependent. Safety and certainty in oil lie in variety and variety alone’ (Ediger & Bowlus, 2019, p. 427). With America and Germany pursuing similar strategies, Churchill’s gambit transformed national economies and global energy trade. It is not hard to argue that the same diversification has characterized the food trade for more years, for more people, given the diversity of climates and foods eaten around the world.

Consider the alternative: pursuing food security by growing crops irrigated with domestic water supplies. Although it delivers food in the short run (as well as profits to domestic farmers), it is not a good strategy if water supplies are scarce, because the country would have no alternative but to rely on international supply at some point (Elhadj, 2022). Indeed, a game-theoretical framework would recommend the opposite: importing food – and thus ‘virtual water’ – while conserving domestic water. Such a virtual water strategy would reduce food self-sufficiency in the short run but increase it in the long run (Allan, 1997). It would also allow domestic ecosystems, which often compete with irrigation for water, to continue to function – delivering useful provisioning and regulating services (TEEB, 2010).

In this section, I review the current state of food-security and trade, identify food-insecure countries, explore how disruption might arise and impact those countries, and explain how disruption might transform the geo-political balance of power as well as disrupting the ecosystem services that provide numerous, hard-to-replace benefits. This scenario is subject to the disruptors previously explained, due to multiple flavours of political uncertainty. Brexit did not happen overnight, but it was very disruptive – just like Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine. Those political events had major impacts on citizens and neighbours, but also on people living on the other side of the world. Trade wars fought in the name of food security will have similar global impacts.

Current flows of virtual water

Table 1 orders countries in terms of net virtual-water imports, from those with maximum exports (negative values) to maximum imports (positive values). The table also shows water stress (SDG indicator 6.4.2), that is, the share of water used for economic purposes (WUEP) out of total sustainable water supply (total renewable supplies less environmental flow requirements), the share of agricultural use within WUEP, and dependency, or the percentage of total renewable supplies arriving from outside the country.

Table 1. The top five virtual water exporters (India et al.) and importers (Japan et al.), along with their local water stress, intensity of agricultural irrigation, dependency on outside sources of water, and volume of agricultural trade.

No.	Country	Virtual imports (Mm^3/year)	Stress (%)	Agriculture (%)	Dependency (%)	Rank imports/exports
1	India	−95,408	66 %	90 %	31	26 (export)
2	Argentina	−92,377	10 %	74 %	67	2 (export)
3	USA	−79,580	28 %	40 %	8	9 (export)
4	Australia	−77,192	6 %	60 %	0	4 (export)
5	Brazil	−76,948	3 %	56 %	35	1 (export)
⋮	⋮	⋮	⋮	⋮	⋮	⋮
207	UK	57,883	14 %	14 %	1	3 (import)
208	Germany	60,335	35 %	2 %	31	7 (import)
209	Italy	62,157	30 %	50 %	5	38 (export)
210	Mexico	66,194	32 %	76 %	12	28 (export)
211	Japan	116,754	37 %	67 %	0	2 (import)

Sources: Countries are ordered from maximum net exports of virtual water (negative values) to maximum net imports (positive values) based on data from Mekonnen and Hoekstra (2011). Data from 2009 to 2017 (depending on availability) on water stress (share of economic use out of sustainable supply), share of agricultural use within economic use, dependency (share of total supply from outside the country), and rank (by value of net exports or imports) in global agricultural trade are from the FAO (2019, 2020).

The final column highlights virtual-water exports and imports (by value) based on data from FAO (2019). Some virtual-water exporters are suffering ‘medium’ water stress (India) whereas others are experiencing ‘no stress’ (e.g., Brazil, Australia). These national aggregates can obscure regional water stresses. Parts of India, for example, are suffering ‘critical’ (>100%) stress (FAO & UN-Water, 2021). Correlations between virtual-water exports and food exports tend to align. Argentina is the second-largest exporter of virtual water and crops & livestock (by value). Japan imports the most virtual water and the second-highest value of crops & livestock.

Note that the biggest net recipients of virtual water (i.e., counties 207–211 in Table 1) are rich, whereas three of the five biggest virtual-water exporters are middle-income countries. Such a trade balance aligns with typical notions of comparative advantage (poorer countries making relatively less intense use of their natural resources) but might be perverse if it increases water scarcity or food insecurity. Indeed, the case of Japan (GDP/capita of $40,300) as the largest importer of virtual water and India (2019 nominal GDP/capita of $2,100) as the largest exporter fits the caricature of ‘the rich North’ consuming assets of ‘the poor South’.

Countries vulnerable to trade disruption

National totals reflect absolute scales, but per-capita data reveal relative risks. Table 2 orders 15 countries according to a vulnerability index (right-most column) that averages the ordinal values of two scarcity rankings (e.g., Jordan’s 9 comes from a mean of 13 and 5). The first ranking (omitted) orders countries by their ratio of water use to sustainable supply (third column); Kuwait has the greatest excess at 4,566%. The second ranking (also omitted) orders countries by their net per-capita sustainable water supply (fourth column); Kuwait ranks driest with 5 m³/capita/year. The fifth column, showing the share of agricultural water use out of total use (i.e., ignoring renewable or sustainable supply), indicates that some extremely water-vulnerable countries are using their scarce water to grow food.

Table 2. The top 10 and bottom 5 countries, based on water vulnerability index, with their ratio of water use to local supply, net water availability, and use of water for agricultural irrigation.

No.	Country	Use ratio (%)	Net water (m^3/cap/year)	Agriculture (%)	Vulnerability index
1	Kuwait	4566 %	5	54 %	1
2	United Arab Emirates	2665 %	16	83 %	2
3	Qatar	766 %	22	52 %	4
4	Saudi Arabia	973 %	73	82 %	4
5	Israel	169 %	139	52 %	6
6	Jordan	116 %	93	53 %	9
7	Algeria	140 %	172	64 %	9
8	Tunisia	124 %	342	77 %	13
9	Egypt	141 %	563	79 %	15
10	Syria	149 %	615	88 %	15
⋮	⋮	⋮	⋮	⋮	⋮
152	Bhutan	1 %	29,594	94 %	144
153	Panama	1 %	32,797	37 %	149
154	Iceland	0 %	219,672	0 %	153
155	Congo	0 %	31,857	9 %	154
156	Papua New Guinea	0 %	35,935	0 %	155

Note: Countries are ordered from highest to lowest water vulnerability (order on the far left is based on the index on the far right). Columns show the share of water use out of sustainable supply, per capita sustainable water supply and share of agricultural water out of total use.

Source: Author’s calculations using data from Aquastat (2021).

The interpretation of Table 2 is direct: Countries with very little water per capita are using more than their sustainable supplies through some combination of desalination, groundwater mining and waste-water recycling (FAO, 2003). Many use this scarce water for irrigated agriculture. Is this use wise in terms of food (and national) security? Allan (1997, p. 1) thought it irrelevant: ‘There’s been no war over water when many economies in arid regions have only half the water they need [because] the Middle East region has been able to access water in the global system via trade. Economic systems, not the evidently inadequate hydrological systems, have solved the water supply problem for the region’.

Indeed, FAO (2020) reports that virtual water sustains the residents of 19 countries experiencing water scarcity (less than 500 m³/capita/year) and 14 countries experiencing water stress (500–1,000 m³/capita/year). In the future, it is nearly certain that more countries will move into these categories due to ‘population growth, agricultural intensification, urbanization, industrial production and pollution, and climate change […] If the natural environment continues to be degraded and unsustainable pressures put on global water resources, 45% of the global gross domestic product, 52% of the world’s population and 40% of global grain production will be put at risk by 2050’ (UN-Water, 2018, p. 10).

Although economists see trade as a win-win activity, it can be disrupted by politicians attentive to lobbying, protests, and sensational media. Political decisions can disrupt food prices, markets and trade in discontinuous ways that economic models can neither integrate nor predict. The next two subsections explain how climate change is increasing water scarcity and how political reactions can convert WPE risk into PWPE uncertainty that contributes to food shortages, hunger and civil unrest.

Food production at risk

The impacts of increasing water scarcity fade as one moves along the supply chain because water’s share of value added falls as distance-from-field increases. The following paragraphs consider how climate change and water scarcity disrupt food production, and how those disruptions affect national and international food security.

The acreage of arable land subject to reasonable weather will fall as climate change pushes temperatures, precipitation and storms out of familiar ranges (Mbow et al., 2019). Farmers will adapt by shifting crops, irrigation and growing methods. Change will take time, but conditions will take a ‘step change’ for the worse on average – even ignoring ongoing threats from groundwater and topsoil depletion. In an overview of six risks to food systems, Bendell (2023) lists falling agricultural productivity, crashing ecosystem services, reliance on fossil fuels for fertilizing and growing crops, ‘multi breadbasket failures’ in exporting countries, wealth-driven increases in demand for animal products (and thus fodder inputs), and models that favour cost-minimization and trade over local production resiliency. Losses in surface and groundwater supply – the subject of this paper – are a seventh danger.

What about the silver linings of climate change? Higher CO₂ concentrations are increasing net primary productivity. As growing seasons lengthen at high latitudes, farmers are already migrating to new lands in Canada and Russia (Lustgarten, 2020). But a few seasons (perhaps decades) of trial and error will be needed to adapt to different soil conditions, even where these are favourable. Even if farmers succeed, there will still be a loss of crop diversity as farmers adapt to changing micro-climates, invasive species, climate conditions, and so on.

It is slightly ironic that advances in agricultural technology and techniques – by reducing ‘waste’ – have left farmers more vulnerable than city dwellers to water scarcity. Technological solutions – desalination, salt- or drought-tolerant GMOs, precision irrigation, and so on – will be available but unevenly distributed and/or implemented, due to up-front capital costs, adaptation costs, and other well-known challenges. In many cases, farmers will fallow land in the face of water scarcity, reducing output (Pfiffer & Lin, 2014; Ward & Pulido-Velazquez, 2008). These trends will reduce the viability of small-scale and subsistence farms. In some cases, farmers will substitute labour or capital for water as an input (e.g., watering individual plants or farming indoors). In other cases, uncompetitive farmers and their families will migrate to urban areas, increasing demand for food at the same time as their contribution to supply drops.

These (un)natural trends will be exacerbated by political adjustments and interventions that might serve the common good in a particular jurisdiction but may just as easily serve the narrow ends of corrupt elites (Elhadj, 2022; Zetland & Moeller-Gulland, 2012).

Political winners and losers

In a post-water world, food supply chains will shift from club good (anyone who wants food can buy as much as they want) to common-pool good (my demand leaves less for you) to private good (your government stops exports to serve local demand). This last beggar-thy-neighbour step will cause more disruption, hunger and violence than the initial climate impacts leading up to political interventions, but that does not mean politicians will refrain. The 2007 food crisis began with falling production and rising prices, but it was worsened by export and trade restrictions that sparked riots in forty countries and increased the number of hungry people worldwide by 20% (Golay, 2010; Headey & Fan, 2010).

PWPE-influenced scarcity will divide nation-states into four classes: net importers that are poor or rich and net exporters that feel safe or do not. Each nation’s class will depend on its food trade balance (Figure 2) and national food production. Poor importers such as India will face hunger; rich importers such as Dubai or the UK will trade money for food – assuming no general collapse of trade. Brazil and Canada are secure enough to export. Indonesia and Myanmar may worry that neighbours covet their food surpluses.

Figure 2. Top food exporters and importers.

Source: MacDonald et al. (2015, fig. S1).

Although it is possible that the WTO can miraculously improve food trade in ways that offset or eliminate food insecurity, it is more likely that a few nations will improve their security via trade agreements and changes in local production patterns (more diversity) while the majority of nations (and the world’s poor) will struggle to cope.

Looking within countries, some farmers will be relatively better off than urban consumers dependent on markets for their food supplies, since it will still be possible to self-supply on a small, labour-intensive scale. In other cases, farmers will be relatively worse off as rising heat and falling water supplies reduce or eliminate their growing options. These farmers may then migrate to cities (as they have many times in the past) in hopes of earning enough to buy food in markets.

Domestic markets will have higher prices and lower diversity as farmers swap garden and speciality crops for commodity crops, driven by the combination of policy (feed the people) and incentives (a shift of demand from taste to calories). Higher prices will increase food poverty in poor countries and middle-income countries without social safety nets. In rich countries, people will not starve, but their choices will shrink as the supply curve for resource-intensive foods (beef, coffee, chocolate, and so on) shifts in. Poorer people will suffer a stronger shift from diversity to monotony, from quality to commodity. Traditional dishes will grow scarcer as changing growing conditions reduce the supply of local ingredients. Lower diversity will also reduce intake of micro-nutrients, thereby increasing nutrition-related health problems.

Spillovers to and feedback from ecosystems

If a greater share of a falling water supply is diverted to irrigation, then ecosystems will lose out, exposing us to a hot, dry Silent Spring that will directly lower our quality of life – and life expectancy (Carson, 1962; Weitzman, 2011).

Climate-change-driven impacts on the water cycle are already stressing ecosystems (IPCC, 2021). Mal-adaptive attempts to irrigate by draining aquifers and diverting rivers will further damage – and sometimes kill – those ecosystems. Although some substitution will be possible in the sense of ‘soft sustainability’ (Solow, 1993), we will lose access to the natural capital and services of irreplaceable ‘hard’ ecosystems (Bendell, 2023; Boulding, 1966; Dasgupta, 2021; TEEB, 2010).

Costanza et al. (2014) estimate the global value of ecosystem services to be much larger than global GDP. The challenge – as they explain when comparing their 2014 values to those of Costanza et al. (1997) – is that the ‘volume’ of these services is falling as ecosystems are lost or damaged – a pattern that fits the PWPE-scenario. The implications of these changes are profound.

First, Nature will convert public goods into common-pool goods. Falling river flows will leave some users without water. Shifts in precipitation will curse some lands but bless others. This move from plenty to scarcity can be partially compensated through political mechanisms (re-adjusting water rights or access to common-pooled water) or markets in water (locally) or food (globally), but such adaptations need time and political will to implement (Banzhaf et al., 2019; Rochford, 2017; Schlosberg & Collins, 2014; Turvey, 1963). Indeed, it is more likely that those without political or economic power will be left to face shorter, grimmer futures (Schlosberg & Collins, 2014). The rich and powerful will gain in relative terms, but they will lose absolute wealth and – as a tiny minority – face high costs to defend their persons and property from the masses. Although economists such as Nordhaus (2019) disagree with this scenario – they assume growth will overcome losses and damages from climate change – others such as Ackerman and Finlayson (2006), Keen (2020), Stern (2016), and Weitzman (2011) dispute their assumptions, methods, and models. It seems unwise to bet humanity’s future on hopeful simulations.

Second, people will struggle to access shrinking ecosystem commons. Lakes, rivers and aquifers may be privatized. The rich will plant trees, install air conditioning and fill their swimming pools to create private ecosystems (Borunda, 2021b; Buranyi, 2019). Politicians will be forced to ration remaining resources among the residual poor. Productivity will drop as outdoor work becomes harder and more expensive (Kjellstrom et al., 2009). Life expectancy will drop as heat takes the old and infirm (Borunda, 2021a). The overall economy will shrink as resources are moved from building the future to defending the past (Randers, 2012).

Finally, politicians will be quick to blame outsiders for collapsing prosperity and future prospects. For reference, consider the impacts of the Little Ice Age(s) that took place between 1400–1850: war and invasion, famine and hunger, the murder of ‘witches’, Jews and other scapegoats. Cold and ice differ from heat and drought in temperature but not in the ways they disrupt food systems, security and cooperation. The middle classes are more likely to abandon the poor and defenceless than accept a lower quality of life. Our concept of civilization will change – or break (Bendell, 2018; Gardiner, 2006).

Adapting to a PWPE world

Stein’s Law (or tautology) states ‘if something cannot go on forever, it will stop’ (Stein, 1986, p. 262). Our stopping point is approaching more quickly in more places as climate change and related disruptions add ‘post’ to WPE. Figure 3 shows how water-abundant and water-scarce countries can respond to rising water scarcity and increasing food-security risks.

Figure 3. In a post-water political economics (PWPE) world, proactive mitigation and reactive adaptation possibilities depend on water scarcity. Political actors will determine actual realities.

Source: Author’s elaboration.

The upper row applies to countries (or smaller autonomous political regions) with current and expected water abundance. Using FAO (2020) to query ‘Renewable internal freshwater resources per capita’ and a cut-off of 1,000 m³ per capita per year (‘stressed conditions’) identifies 53 stressed countries (2017 data), 45 countries in the ‘warning’ zone (1,000–3,000 m³ per capita per year), and 85 countries with relative water abundance. These figures obscure intra-national variation (Australia, Brazil, Greece, and the US are all classified as ‘abundant’), but internal variations can potentially be managed. Countries in the abundant category need to build mitigating institutions for managing scarcity while water is relatively abundant. (A crisis might increase political support for change, but emergency changes are not always wise.) Turning to the future, they will want to make treaties and alliances with water-scarce countries to facilitate adoption (and preserve sovereignty) as scarcity increases. For the 53 (or 98) countries facing current or probable scarcity, it is necessary to acknowledge the excess of demand over supply and initiate or strengthen mechanisms to ration water. In the absence (or failure) of these mechanisms, adaptation – living with less or migrating to less-water-stressed countries – will be necessary to cope with the pressure.

Most readers will appreciate the optimism in these scenarios, which may not be realistic. If there is one lesson we can draw from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that humans are just as capable of blame, greed and conflict as they are of compassion, selflessness and cooperation.

Conclusions

Although it is possible to argue that part of our lives is already ‘post water’ – in the sense of consuming virtual water embedded in products – this article has looked at how increasing water scarcity (in quality and quantity) will restrict direct and indirect water uses. From an economic perspective, scarcity will translate into higher costs. The political reactions will be harder to predict, control or mitigate. The central role of political policies affecting water means that the balance between smooth, continuous change (economic risks) and sudden, disruptive shifts (political uncertainties) is likely to tip towards the latter. We will suffer from unexpected and harmful shocks, whether they come from climate chaos or human perfidy.

Although it is obvious that we need to match management to use and institutions to scarcity, it is also pretty clear that these guidelines are weakly observed in most of the world. The barriers to robust adaption – inadequate attention, planning and funding – are well known, but the cost of mal-adaptation is rising. In some cases, people and places will be rescued by food imports or prescient engineering. In others, trade will increase problems and poor engineering will increase risks. In all cases community cohesion and political leadership will play a critical role. Communities that spend time and money on water security will have an easier time managing their PWPE-dynamics. Communities that do not will face thirst, poverty, and a choice between migration and suffering.

It is easy to end on a note of cautious optimism, of hope that these easily foreseen issues will be mitigated and eliminated by planning and adjustment, but it is hard to put too much weight in that outcome in the presence of past failures to heed warnings regarding sustainability (Herrington, 2021; Meadows et al., 1972). It seems more likely that we are going to be forced to adapt to water scarcity in ways that will be neither efficient nor just. Our post-water political-economic lives will be complex, challenging and tragic.

Acknowledgements

I thank the editors and four referees for extremely useful corrections and suggestions that have pushed me to revise and refine my main points. I also acknowledge the valuable role that Tony Allen (1937–2021) played in my understanding these issues. All remaining mistakes are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.