Footprints in Water

I met the late and much lamented Arjen Hoekstra, ‘Mr Water Footprint’, in the Antarctic in 2015. We were guests of the Chilean government, attending a conference on the ‘Future of the Southern Hemisphere’, one of the perks of which was to spend a weekend in the Antarctic with the Chilean Navy. We bonded on the trip thither and had long conversations there, in Patagonia, and back in Santiago. Among the striking things I learned from him occurred in the course of the following exchange, which I report almost verbatim:

Arjen: ‘How much fresh water consumed in the UK is imported?’

Me (surprised): ‘Do you mean bottles of mineral water?’

Arjen: ‘No.’

Me (stumped): ‘No? – does the UK pipe water from the continent?’

Arjen: ‘No.’

Me (more stumped) ‘I’ve no idea where to start -’

Arjen: ‘70%’.

Me (amazed): ‘What! but – how can that be?’

Arjen: ‘It is imported in the form of fresh fruit and vegetables’.

Yes: we import water in the form of fresh fruit and vegetables, quite a lot of it produced in water-stressed countries, and it is brought by air into the UK to be fresh enough for immediate sale in supermarkets. That’s three levels of madness in one blow.

Arjen Hoekstra was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, but not only that, he was one of the most interesting and significant. Professor of Water Management at Twente University in the Netherlands, he became internationally famous – in the recondite circles of hydrology and water policy – for his work on measuring the ‘water footprint’ of different countries, advising governments, the World Bank, UNESCO and international agricultural organisations on water use, conservation and sustainability. He was a superstar in this domain, though unknown to the wider public.

I thought of him this week while reading an article about the effect of dam building since the early nineteenth century, which has had the effect of shifting our planet’s North and South Poles by their sheer weight, and lowering the level of the oceans by nearly an inch. And then I read an article about the grand project in China to transfer water from the south of that large country – it is 24% bigger than Australia – to its water-starved north and the megacities of Beijing and Tianjin, where water availability lies below the UN limit for absolute scarcity. This limit is 1000 cubic metres of water per person; Tianjin has 113 cubic metres per person. In comparison, the US average water availability per person is 8900 cubic metres.

To address the problem, China has undertaken a spectacular scheme, the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, to move water from its river-and-rainfall-drenched central and southern regions to the parched north, by means of a vast engineering feat of dams, reservoirs, canals, pipes and pumping stations along two routes, East and Central, moving immense quantities of water through them. On the books is a yet more ambitious – and dangerous – plan: the West route, to take water from earthquake-prone Tibet, the ‘Water Tower of Asia’, and channel it to China’s north and west – the latter the region of Xinjiang and the Takla Makan ‘Sea of Death’ desert (I’ve been there, to visit the ruins of Jiao He and Gaocheng and the Burning Mountains where the grottoes of Dunhuang are located, and can tell you that the Takla Makan is the very paradigm of a desert. Irrigating it will, some say, make it China’s California).

If Elon Musk gets round to terraforming Mars in his lifetime, he will find the engineers for it in China. What they have done in their country is tantamount to the same. China’s economic thirst for water and hunger for energy is making them take big risks; energy-hunger is behind the plans for the Motuo (also known as Medog) Hydropower Station in Tibet, which will be the world’s biggest dam, its turbines producing from the captured waters of the Yarlung Tsangpo River a staggering 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, triple the output of the Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze. (Going by boat from Chongqing to Shanghai in the days before this dam was built I was exhaustedly asleep as it passed through the Three Gorges – a lifelong regret.)

Apart from the earthquake risk this poses – the Tibetan plateau is rising at the rate your fingernails grow because the tectonic plate on which India sits is pushing it skywards – there is major concern in countries south of the plateau about disruption to their water supplies. This indeed is an indicator of a more general problem: the prospect of water-wars, tensions between countries which share rivers, especially if upstream countries take water for power and agriculture thus diminishing flows downstream. Winner of the 2026 Stockholm Water Prize, Kaveh Madani, says in the January 2026 UN report he authored that ‘In every continent where humans are present, water bankruptcy is manifesting itself’, because of the tremendous rate at which rivers and ground-waters are being depleted.

Arjen asked me:

‘What percentage of Earth’s mass is water?’

Me (like everyone else): ‘70%’.

Arjen: ‘That’s the percentage of Earth’s surface covered by water.’

Me: (abashed): ‘Oh.’

Arjen: ‘Water is 0.02% of Earth’s mass. This is a very dry planet.’

Me: (aghast): (unprintable).

We are right to worry about climate change - under the heat dome sitting, at time of writing, over north-western Europe we have a foretaste of a scalded Earth - but alas we have to add a few more worries under the ‘environment’ rubric, water chief among them. That it is an issue reserved mainly to experts in the subject, insufficiently in public consciousness, is a big part of the problem itself. It is like the danger to other living species, whose place in the ecological cycles of life is crucially such that disruption of them is a danger to humans, a fact likewise insufficiently understood. It is a hard truth that the rest of nature would be better off without humans around, not a comfortable thought, and nature is not merely complaining - groaning, suffering - but exerting its revenges already. On the grounds of self-interest alone (thus leaving aside the argument that all of the natural environment intrinsically merits being within the compass of moral concern) we would do well to see the Whole - water, plants and animals, ourselves - as under attack from the economic predation, the pursuit of profit driving consumption, rivalries, envies, desires for stuff, that is nothing short of a form of suicide.