The era of drought and the return of hydraulic states

In 2023, Argentina will stop entering 21,000 million dollars in exports due to the drought that has devastated a large part of the soybean and corn crops and reduced the once mighty Paraná in some sections to the size of a stream that can be crossed on foot. In 2022 in Corrientes, one of the provinces that irrigate its waters, fires consumed more than one million hectares, 12% of its surface.

In Bolivia, since 1985 the snow cover of the Andean glaciers has been reduced by 56.2%. Some 39,000 hectares of ice have disappeared due to climate change and the closer impact of deforestation. The forests of the Amazon plain regulate temperature by affecting air humidity and contribute to the stability of aquifers by retaining rainwater.

The advance of the Bolivian agricultural frontier doubled the deforestation rate in 2022 in relation to the average of 2016-2020. In 1985, cultivated areas covered 2.8 million hectares. In 2021, 10.8 million due to the expansion of soybean crops and livestock. In the highlands, Lake Poopó, the second largest in the country, has disappeared due to evaporation and overexploitation of its tributaries. The Uro ethnic peoples who lived on its shores have had to migrate.

the alps melt

In satellite photos, Europe appears greener than most of Africa. But the areas of brown and yellow tones are getting larger. In 2010, a summer heat wave destroyed 17% of Russia’s grain crops.

According to a study by the Technical University of Catalonia, in the Iberian Peninsula summer temperatures last an average of five weeks longer today than in the 1970s. After 30 consecutive months of drought, the Spanish reservoirs are at 50% of their capacity.

In France, 22 communes in the Ardeche department, in the Rhône-Alpes region, have prohibited the construction of new homes in their municipal boundaries due to increasing water restrictions. In January and February for 32 days it did not rain a drop anywhere in the hexagon, in the driest winter since 1959.

In Italy, the Po is carrying 61% less water than usual at this time of year. From the peaks of the Alps comes between 25%-50% of the flow carried by the largest rivers in Europe: the Danube, the Rhine, the Po and the Rhone.

african droughts

After the worst drought in 40 years, in Google Earth the color of East Africa is increasingly similar to that of the neighboring Arabian Peninsula. The lack of rain has displaced more than a million people. By altering the Indian monsoon cycle, climate change has changed rainfall patterns in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. Since 1981 it has not rained so little in most of the Horn of Africa.

The UN World Food Program estimates that in 2022 around 23 million people in those three countries will go one or more days a week without eating. The heat accelerates evaporation, which dries up fields and pastures, starving livestock. For each degree that the temperature increases, the atmosphere can capture up to 7% more humidity, which it extracts from water currents, soils and plants.

In tropical areas, when it does not rain, the equatorial heat dries the soil with devastating rapidity. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warns that if it is not stopped, climate change will make droughts like the current ones in the Argentine pampas or those in the Horn of Africa a hundred times more likely.

From the Holocene to the Anthropocene

According to the NASA website, in the last 800,000 years there have been eight climate cycles that interspersed glaciations and warm geological eras. The last ice age ended 11,700 years ago, giving rise to the Holocene, whose regular seasons allowed for the emergence of agriculture.

Until the advent of the industrial revolution, which many believe began the Anthropocene, most climate changes were caused by slight oscillations in the Earth’s axis of rotation, which varies the amount of solar energy it receives. With the Anthropocene, it is civilization that modifies the cycles of nature. The WMO estimates that by 2022 the concentrations of the three main greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – will reach the highest levels ever observed.

The story begins in Sumer

In Water: A biography (2021), Giulio Boccaletti points out that water is the res publica par excellence: an essential substance for life and whose control requires considerable collective efforts. 97% of the water is in the oceans. The rest is divided between glaciers and aquifers.

Of all the forms in which it exists, the most important for the biosphere is water, which exists in a gaseous state. Clouds make the planet habitable. Under certain climatic conditions, atmospheric rivers can carry as much water as the entire Amazon and up to 10 times the flow of the Mississippi.

In fact, water controls the weather. But not only that. Boccaletti recalls that the history of human control of water is that of the political institutions themselves. China’s Grand Canal, the longest in the world, was built between the 7th and 13th centuries BC The Cloaca Maxima, which is still part of Rome’s sewer system, dates from the 6th century BC The Lagash Canal, between the Tigris and Euphrates , still carries water, 4,000 years after it was built by the oldest city-state in Sumer.

hydraulic states

In oriental despotism (1957), Karl Wittfogel (1896-1988) argued that in antiquity water management required the creation of large centralized bureaucracies that ended up dominating political and religious life and the economy. According to him, “hydraulic despotism” characterized ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Hellenistic Greece, imperial Rome, the Abbasid Caliphate, imperial China, the Mongol Empire and Inca Peru.

Taming rivers, building canals and aqueducts reduced their resistance to despotism. Wittfogel, a German sinologist who went into exile in the US fleeing Nazism, believed that Asia produced the most oppressive “hydraulic societies”, a model inherited by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.

Its hydraulic infrastructures were the tangible concretion of its political architecture. In order to turn Moscow into a “port” with access to four seas – the Baltic, the Caspian, the White and the Black – Stalin ordered the construction of the Moscow-Volga canal, which was dug by hand by more than 100,000 forced laborers. More than 10,000 of them lost their lives during its construction.

The Aral Sea, the fourth largest inland lake in the world between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was another victim of Stalinist megalomania, which diverted its tributary rivers to irrigate cotton crops, drying it up to virtual extinction.

The temples of modern India

Between 1958 and 1959, the Mao regime mobilized 100 million peasants to build canals and other irrigation projects as part of the “great leap forward”, which ended up claiming between 20 and 25 million lives.

But in the 20th century, all kinds of political systems took a liking to the huge hydroelectric dams that Nehru called “the temples of modern India” even as their construction flooded villages, displaced millions of people, submerged forests and spread poverty. malaria.

Not all big water works need the whip. In the Netherlands, the collective effort required to reclaim land from the sea by building dikes gave rise to voluntary associations that spawned democratic institutions.

The Mekong Keys

Today nearly two-thirds of river flows pass over or through some type of levee or dam. Hydroelectric power plants today generate 20% of the world’s electricity. In China, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, Asia’s largest river, is by far the largest hydraulic project in history.

In 1992, Chinese Premier Li Peng, who studied hydroelectric engineering in the Soviet Union, gave the go-ahead for the gigantic project, which was to displace 1.5 million people. In 40 years, China’s installed hydropower capacity increased 20 times, to 350 Giagawatts, more than in any other country.

Since 2000, China’s annual investment in water security has risen from $5 billion to seven times that figure in 2010. The Mekong, on which four densely populated Asian countries, including Cambodia and Vietnam, depend for their water supplies, rises in Lancang , China.

Beijing is damming the river at 23 points from Tibet to Yunan, giving it the keys to the locks that regulate its flows. China is exporting that model to sub-Saharan Africa, funding dams like the Renaissance dam on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia. With this background, it is not surprising that Boccaletti believes that the hydraulic States of this century will make those of the 20th century pale.