When The Rivers Run Summary

Fred Pearce’s book When The Rivers Run Dry argues that humanity is facing a substantial water crisis, both now and in the decades to come. He first notes worldwide water patterns and examines worldwide water economics. Then, he spends much of the rest of the book discussing specific places where water supply is currently an issue and correlating those places to those worldwide trends. Pearce first discusses the world’s groundwater crisis, looking at overuse of groundwater in India, the Great Plains, and the Middle East; Libya’s scheme to bring desert groundwater to its people, the Great Manmade River); and arsenic poisoning of wells in Bangladesh. He then moves onto the world’s devastation of wetlands and other wet places across the world, looking at how humans have targeted wetlands like the fens of Great Britain, the Sudd of Sudan, the Pantanal of Brazil, and the Okavango Delta in Botswana.

He then examines the bipolar effects of climate change on the flow of rivers: he first mentions how rivers in the temperate latitudes will run out of water and eventually dry out, mentioning how the Colorado River will lose up to ⅓ of its waters due to declining precipitation (FACT CHECKED: a new study by Udall and Overpeck suggests that the flows will decrease by 35% by the end of the century according to https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/02/27/climate-cha nge-is-already-reducing-flows-in-the-colorado-river-scientists-report/?utm_term=.d3b19ad6a6f9). Then, he contrasts this with how rivers in tropical areas, such as the Amazon and the Congo, and in arctic areas could gain water due to climate