Shallow thinking about water imperils the planet

The Coming Storm: Why Water Will Write the 21st Century. By Liam Fox. Biteback; 368 pages; £25. To be published in America in October; $29.95

What would summer be without water: without frolicking on a beach, fishing in a lake or savouring a novel poolside? And yet, for anyone who cares about the health of the world’s oceans, 2024 has been a bleak year. Mass fish deaths, driven by drought and heat, have been reported on opposite sides of the world, in Vietnam and Mexico. Most of the world’s coral reefs have bleached, a process in which unusually warm water temperature makes coral brittle, bone-white and susceptible to disease and possibly death.

Nor is the news much better for people. In March the UN reported that around half the world’s population experiences “severe water scarcity" annually. Drought has caused one of Mexico City’s main reservoir systems to run dry, and population growth has led the city to overtax its water table, leading it to gradually sink—a similar fate to Jakarta, which is subsiding so quickly that Indonesia is building a new capital on a different island. Humanity, a species nurtured on a watery planet, is struggling to manage its most abundant resource, as two new books highlight.

Olive Heffernan’s “The High Seas" is the more compelling and better reported of the pair. It focuses on the 64% of the world’s oceans that are outside the control of any country and cover around half of the Earth’s surface. She argues that the world is witnessing a saline tragedy of the commons on a vast scale. Oceans are Earth’s greatest carbon sink, having absorbed roughly one-third of all carbon emissions since the dawn of the industrial age. Phytoplankton—tiny flora and bacteria—take in about as much carbon as all plants and trees on land combined. Oceans also provide around one-sixth of the world’s animal protein eaten by humans.

Countries and companies, all making individually rational decisions, risk doing irreparable damage to both of those functions. Sometimes these decisions are legal: no law stops Russia from sending its decommissioned satellites to rest in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean, despite risks to the marine ecosystem. But often they are not: some Chinese fishing vessels, for instance, use illegal nets, seize protected fish such as sharks near the Galapagos and lie about their catch.

Nowhere is this tension between rationality and risk clearer than in people’s quest to fish the ocean’s mesopelagic zone, the region between where photosynthesis stops (around 100 metres below the surface) and the part entirely devoid of light (which starts at around 1,000 metres down). This area is home to some odd fish, including the siphonophore, a tentacular colony of stinging creatures, and slender snipe eels with 750 vertebrae (most adult humans have 24). Mesopelagic creatures account for 95% of the ocean’s fish by weight; every day they complete the largest animal migration in the world, rising from the depths to feed at higher levels.

Several countries have tried and failed to fish the mesopelagic zones, citing high costs and low catches, but Norway is making a more sustained effort, processing unappetising creatures into fishmeal for its thriving (and lucrative) salmon farms. But mesopelagic fish play a vital role in the ocean’s carbon-sequestration cycle, and nobody knows the effects of thinning them out—whether the zone can be sustainably fished or whether it could quickly become as overfished as the surface. (As one researcher explains, “If this works, it will be an opportunistic fishery…you’ll have to go and get as much as possible before it disappears.")

This speculation about short-term benefits versus unknown but plausibly catastrophic long-term harms crops up throughout the book. The seabed is rich in minerals, including valuable ones such as gold and platinum, and although no one has yet found a way to mine them cheaply, efforts are intensifying. Some of these minerals may help the world get greener, but disturbing seabeds creates plumes of sediment that smother creatures below and cause lasting damage to biodiversity.

Sometimes Ms Heffernan’s concerns descend into excessive hand-wringing. Marine life offers immense commercial potential. AZT, an HIV drug, and Remdesivir, the first approved covid treatment, came from compounds found in sponges. Some 34,000 marine compounds have been found suitable for a range of products including cattle feed, ice cream and virus tests. Once scientists harvested these compounds from marine life itself; today they can use genetic information uploaded to online databases. Ms Heffernan asks whether using digital gene-sequencing amounts to “biopiracy", but precisely what is being stolen and from whom is unclear.

Overall, however, her book is admirably clear-eyed, refusing the easy consolation of toothless treaties and mollifying pabulum from politicians. Just as Saudi Arabia is building a greener economy while also positioning itself to be “‘the last man standing’ when it comes to oil extraction", she notes that many countries likeliest to ratify a treaty intended to protect the high seas will keep polluting and overfishing.

Whereas Ms Heffernan crossed the globe and plumbed the depths to write her book, Sir Liam Fox, a former Conservative politician, appears to have plumbed Wikipedia’s depths for his almost comically fact-rich tome. He wrote it “to join the dots" and explain why water—battles over access, climate-driven threats and maritime conflicts—will prove as much a flashpoint in this century as oil was in the 20th.

His reasoning is sensible: in the coming decades much of the world’s population growth will take place in African and Asian countries that already struggle to provide their citizens with fresh water. Countries’ water management can affect their neighbours, stoking the prospect of conflict. Strife can also erupt over access to shipping channels, as the low-level conflict in the South China Sea demonstrates. Failure to provide citizens with clean water can also lead to malnourishment and disease. And abundance can quickly turn to scarcity: “Today’s flooded will become tomorrow’s thirsty," Sir Liam argues.

Yet despite (or perhaps because of) Sir Liam’s worthy concerns and puppyish enthusiasm, his book reads like a school report. Declaring that it “is difficult to precisely predict the effects that climate change…might have in the future on human health" wins zero points for bravery.

Still, Sir Liam’s book has value. It is alarming but not alarmist and compiles a tremendous amount of water-related information. Neither book offers concrete recommendations beyond heightened concern. But if, over the course of this century, water and the life it sustains grow scarce or imperilled, conflict and privation seem not just possible but inevitable.

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