Posthaste: There's a new crisis looming in a commodity 400 times bigger than oil

financialpost.com:

It’s something we use everyday — couldn’t survive without, actually — and often take for granted.

Yet freshwater could run out by 2040 at our current rate of consumption, says a report by BofA Global Research.

“Some 75 per cent of our planet is covered with water, yet less than 1 per cent is usable, and even this is depleting quickly,” said BofA equity strategists led by Haim Israel.

Water is the most ‘traded’ commodity in the world, with the “virtual water trade” 400 times as big as oil, says the report.

Use is up 40 per cent over the past 40 years and is estimated to go up another 25 per cent by 2050, but supply has more than halved since 1970, according to the World Bank.

Why is this happening?

We are in an era of “hyper consumption,” where the production of fast fashion, food and technology suck up vast amounts of water.

Manufacturing one T-shirt takes the water equivalent of three weeks’ worth of showers; one steak, 3.5 months of showers, said the report. Data centres, which need cooling, are the 10th biggest water consumer in the United States and “ChatGPt ‘drinks’ a litre every 40 commands.”

Water demand already surpasses population growth by 1.7 times, and by 2050 the world’s population is expected to hit 10 billion.

Agriculture remains the world’s biggest consumer of water, with meat production taking the lion’s share. To produce a person’s daily food takes between 2,000 and 5,000 litres of water.

The energy sector is another heavy user, taking up 75 per cent of industrial water use.

Shortages are already visible, says the report. Already half the world’s population suffers high water stress at least one month of the year.

In 2021, droughts in Taiwan held up semiconductor production, (a semiconductor factory