Jeff Nesbit Has an Idea of How the World Will End
Jeff Nesbit, author of This is the Way the World Ends, talks climate change, resource depletion, and how to talk to the climate change skeptic in your life.Â
Sabrina Stierwalt, PhD
Jeff Nesbit is the executive director of Climate Nexus and the author of the book This is the Way the World Ends. He discusses the impending effects of climate change, those that already exist in our world, and the “water wars” of the future.Â
Talk to us about resource depletion. What is one resource that is being affected by climate change, and what does this mean for civilization?
This Is the Way the World Ends takes a hard look at water scarcity, food insecurity, mass migration and other climate impacts happening right now all over the world. But why should we care about water scarcity in places far removed from us, like Yemen?
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Beyond the obvious humanitarian concerns, environmental changes also threaten the geopolitical landscape due to conflicts over life-sustaining resources. Lack of water are already starting wars and causing mass migrations. Climate change is driving all of it. It’s long past time we recognize that it’s here, right now, and it’s causing immense pain, suffering and damage.
“Forget the global financial crisis, the world is running out of water,” U.S. embassy officials told the State Department in a 2009 cable. They’d just been briefed by Global 500 company Nestlé’s senior officials who pay close attention to political regime changes and environmental and ecological challenges. With a third of the world experiencing freshwater scarcity by 2025, and the situation “potentially catastrophic” by 2050, this changing “water economy” will wreak havoc on the way of life and livelihood of millions within a decade, the cable stated.
No one paid much attention to that internal briefing. It wasn’t breaking news about nuclear weapons or terrorists. But it was a harbinger of water wars.
Without water, no civil society is possible. People become desperate. As drought and starvation kill millions, those remaining either must migrate or fight over shrinking freshwater. Water scarcity and food insecurity can throw a country into civil war and destabilize an entire region, creating a breeding ground for worldwide terrorism.
Yemen—the poorest country in the Middle East—has few prospects for development, constant political crisis due to its brutal civil war, a continuous flow of refugees, high cost of living increases, lack of basic health and social services, chronic food shortages, and devastating poverty. But for all their political troubles, “the headlines do not reveal the part that water plays in this crisis,” The Guardian said. “13 million Yemenis—50% of the population—struggle daily to find or buy enough clean water to drink or grow food.” Each year, 14,000 Yemeni children under five die of nutrition and diarrhea.
Yemen is the first casualty of what will almost certainly be the “water wars” of the future. Though bordered by oceans on two sides, Yemen is running out of fresh water. This simple fact is at the root of many of its problems. Without water, and then food, virtually every other aspect of a civil society becomes untenable.
Years before civil war broke out in Yemen, political and civil society observers warned that water scarcity was creating chaos and would almost certainly lead to armed conflict. In 2009 Times of London reported, “Yemen could become the first nation to run out of water.” Yemen’s minister of water and the environment called water scarcity “insidious” and the “biggest threat to social stability.”
In a cable to Washington, the U.S ambassador to Yemen stated, “14 out of 16 aquifers are depleted in Yemen . . . water shortages have led desperate people to take desperate measures with equally desperate consequences.” He warned that water scarcity was poised to shred civil society in Yemen—a water war with ripple effects far beyond the country’s borders.
Two years later, the Arab Spring appeared to erupt from nowhere. But the Yemen uprising—the street riots and political chaos that destabilized their central government—was driven largely by a lack of fresh water.
Today Yemen is a harbinger for what the world will face as other countries suffer similarly in coming years from the twin forces of climate change and the overuse of fragile water supplies. Some refugees will migrate to export terrorism. But most will flee because they can’t find water to drink or food to eat and are caught in the resulting turbulence. Those who remain must fight each other for survival.
The effects of climate change seem to be appearing much faster than people anticipated. What are five of the most most impactful effects of climate change?Â
Severe climate impacts are here, now. They’re beginning to cause immense pain and suffering around the world. Here are the top five impacts from the book, and five predictions for what could happen in the future if we don’t act.
- Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the Horn of Africa are now essentially out of water.
- More than half of the world already relies on food imports to survive because they can’t grow enough food in their own country.
- Half of all species on Earth are now experiencing local extinctions.
- Extreme heat waves and weather events now routinely cause immense damage.
- Acidification and de-oxygenation are now threats to nearly every species living in the world’s oceans.
One of the biggest complications of discussing climate change lies with its skeptics. How do you approach talking about the importance of climate change with critics?
Real skeptics simply want to know what’s true. After studying the problem closely for more than two decades, the scientific community is now quite certain about the underlying human causes and potential near-term impacts of climate change. We believe physicians who diagnose and treat our illnesses. We believe car mechanics who diagnose and fix our cars. We should believe scientists who tell us that we are altering our climate system dangerously, and collectively start to find solutions.
