By Suzanne York. ‘Day Zero’ – it’s a term so applicable to our times of environmental overreach. If you aren’t familiar with the term, it came into vogue a couple of years ago when Cape Town, South Africa, was facing a water crisis of fairly epic proportions.  Day Zero was the city’s term for the
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By Suzanne York. Fresh water – our most valuable of resources – is becoming increasingly scarce.  Yet the world blunders on, seemingly unaware, or at least uncaring, of the looming humanitarian crisis on the horizon. Water scarcity is becoming more and more common in many countries. About 4 billion people – nearly two-thirds of the world
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By Suzanne York. If humanity somehow survives the pending ecological collapse – driven by human impacts – future generations will wonder how it got so bad.  It’s a rather simple explanation though. It is a combination of greed, ignorance and sticking our heads in the sand. Case in point.  Water, and water shortages in particular. 
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By Candela Vázquez Asenjo, youth blogger for Transition Earth. Last month, I visited Jordan for the first time. Its colours, the never-ending lands of desert and the magnificent watercolour rocks that cover the whole country, touched my heart and soul. It did not matter what landscape Jordan was preparing for me, I was always surprised
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By Suzanne York. It’s an almost unbelievable statistic in an age of shocking facts – humans make up just .01% of all life on Earth but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals and 50% of plants since the dawn of civilization. Of all the mammals on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans and only 4% are
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By Suzanne York. The allegory couldn’t be more fitting – humanity burying our collective heads in the sand, as the planet heats up and water scarcity becomes more of a reality in many places around the globe. For the past week or so, there have been numerous headlines on the water tap running dry in
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By Suzanne York. In what is sadly a sign of things to come for many places, Bolivia has declared a state of emergency, as it endures its worst drought in 25 years. The Andean glaciers that for centuries have supplied water to La Paz and its sprawling neighbor El Alto – one of the poorest
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org For several years now, the topic that water would be the next oil has been bandied about, implying that water would be as valuable as fossil fuels. That day of reckoning may be coming sooner than many people think.  Last week, Reuters reported that the city of São Paulo – South
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org All one really needs to take away from the 800-page National Climate Assessment (NCA), mandated every four years by the U.S. Congress, is this: Human-induced climate change is projected to continue, and it will accelerate significantly if emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to increase. As published in the NCA, “The magnitude of climate
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org A new study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that climate change is likely to put 40 percent more people worldwide at risk of absolute water scarcity, due to changes in rainfall and evaporation. Unsurprisingly, the study
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