The tradable water

Some of my fondest memories from childhood in Charsadda are playing cricket in the street outside our house and, when thirsty, run inside the house to drink fresh water directly from the hose. Everytime our relatives and friends from Islamabad and Lahore visited us, they would fill up bottles and gallons with our sweet Charsadda water for consumption later. Today, drinking water directly from the hose sounds like a fictional idea from another life. The water is not so clean and not so sweet anymore. And that is still therapeutic compared to what is ahead of us: a world where clean drinkable water is so scarce that it would become a tradable commodity.

Gold or Bitcoin, both are tradable for cash and lots of other products because of their limited supply in the world. When water becomes a scarce commodity, it may not surprise many of us that someday not too distant in the future it would be traded for other items and services. Instead of transferring Bitcoin to a digital wallet or swiping your credit card, you might as well be pouring some clean drinking water in exchange for an iPhone.

Many of us know about the Netflix superhit show Squid Game. That is indeed a great show targeting the issue of inequality. However, there is another South Korean show on Netflix called The Silent Sea. If I can share my personal opinion of the show, I’d say that it is the best and the most important show I have seen in the entire last year. It depicts a future scenario where human activity such as climate change has caused desertification and drinkable water has dried up. The result is a draconian measure installed by the government of the time to avoid a situation where there is no water left at all. People with access, money, power and good overall standing have access to clean drinking water. The rest are left to their own devices. Spoiler Alert: If you have not seen the show yet, then skip the next paragraph.

There is a space crew that goes to the moon to retrieve a mysterious sample, which can potentially help in generating the cleanest water mankind can use. That is the only panacea left for humanity to survive and the mission must do whatever it takes to bring the sample back to earth from a deserted station on the moon called Balhae station.

While that is an entertaining fictional work on Netflix, that scenario is not too much in the distant future. We will see it in our lives, I promise. I remember from school days we used to read what was called the anomalous expansion of water where water expanded instead of contracting when frozen. There is another anomaly related to water in the age of climate change: the hotter the planet gets, the more glaciers melt and sea level rise due to excess water but it doesn’t mean more water for humanity to consume. It rather means more water for humanity to drown in and less water to consume because clean water resources will evaporate due to excessive heat, extreme weather events, prolonged drought, wildfires, drying wells, dwindling biodiversity resulting in less and less water that can support life, and so forth.

Just as nobody was crazy about buying Bitcoin back in 2010 and even before, to say that we must buy up water now and preserve it for selling it for a higher price later would be ridiculed too. On a more moral level, calls for investing in technologies to combat climate change and the preservation of clean water are also falling on deaf ears. Try telling people to consume less water in the shower or pour only enough to drink to avoid waste and you will understand from their reaction why water being scarce today is a crazier idea than Bitcoin was in 2009. We must save the water; from us and for us.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 22^nd, 2022.

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