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Introduction

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Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century

Part of the book series: Critical Criminological Perspectives ((CCRP))

Abstract

In the children’s book, 11 Experiments That Failed (Offill 2011), a young girl poses the question, ‘Can a message be sent in a bottle to a faraway land?’ Her hypothesis is that ‘The hole in the bottom of the toilet leads to the sea’, and she sets out to test this by placing a message in a bottle and seeing what happens when she flushes it down the toilet. The following page reveals an illustration of the girl’s house with water pouring out of the windows and the girl adrift on a toilet seat. Bobbing next to her is a potpourri of household items. The girl’s astonished mother, calf-deep in water, clutches a cordless phone. The only text on the page is as follows:

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Branch (2016: 50) added that ‘[f]or the last two decades, the promises examined most closely have to do with the environment’. According to Branch (2016: 50), Norway gained attention for staging a relatively environment-friendly Winter Olympics in 1994, which ‘suggested that rampant excesses of construction, with little regard for environmental impact, that had occurred [in previous Olympics] did not have to be the norm’. While the 2000 Summer Olympics, the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London were all ‘generally lauded for adhering to ambitious lists of sustainability goals’, Branch (2016: 50) points out that ‘[i]n trying to outbid one another and find support at home, cities increasingly throw in wish-list items that might have little chance of happening without the thrust of the Olympics—the cleanup of industrial sites (London), for example, or the construction of international airports (Athens) and the major expansion of public transportation (almost everyone)’. Branch (2016: 50) continues: ‘Chinese officials promised to improve Beijing’s persistent air pollution for the 2008 Summer Games, but today it remains an intractable problem. Part of the last Olympics, the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi—which reportedly cost more than $50 billion—took place in a pristine mountain valley steamrolled by construction. Environmentalists from around the world denounced everything from the dumping of waste to the blocked migration of wildlife’.

  2. 2.

    Note that other issues, such as Brazil’s political troubles and urban infrastructure, also received a share of the spotlight, as did concerns about the Zika virus, a collapsing economy, a political crisis and concerns about security (Branch 2016; Lefkoe and Cadwell 2016).

  3. 3.

    The discrepancy in range can be attributed, in part, to whether one is considering annual averages, which may hide the actual variability within a year. To understand water scarcity on a global level, some suggest the need to assess local ‘blue water scarcity’—the amount of fresh water that is withdrawn not returned on a monthly level (Hinckley 2016). This kind of assessment suggests that four billion people face water scarcity. Not all of these people face water scarcity all year around; rather, four billion people encounter water scarcity along the lines of one month a year (Hinckley 2016; see generally Taft 2016). About half-a-billion people actually experience water scarcity for the entire year (Hinckley 2016).

  4. 4.

    Todd Millay, managing director of Choate Investment Advisors in Boston, Massachusetts, offers similar figures and percentages: ‘As the world’s population continues to grow and becomes wealthier, demand for water is rising fast.... [B]y 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could be under water stress. From human consumption to industrial and agricultural use, global demand for water and water services are expected to outpace current supply.... [T]here will be a 40% gap between water demand and supply over the next 15 years’.

  5. 5.

    Glaciers and ice caps are the primary source of fresh water on Earth. Groundwater is the world’s second-largest collection of fresh water—and accounts for 95 per cent of the planet’s fresh water that is not contained in polar glaciers and ice sheets (Mooney 2016); it is also the primary source of fresh water for approximately two billion people, and about 20 per cent of the world’s population depends on crops irrigated by groundwater (Barringer 2015). ‘Modern groundwater’—water that is less than 100 years old—is closer to the Earth’s surface (and less salty) than ‘old groundwater’ and, unlike ‘old groundwater’, has the capacity to renew itself through rainfall or melting snow. (Typically, groundwater salinity increases with depth (Kang and Jackson 2016). The largest portion of drinking water is ‘modern groundwater’, but approximately 94.4 per cent of underground water has been there for more than 50 years (Schouten 2015).) Because ‘modern groundwater’ is close to the surface, it can help replenish large bodies of water when they are depleted throughout the year. But with climate change affecting the amount of rain and snow in certain regions, some groundwater reserves are not being refilled as fast as in the past. Human activities that cause pollution are also causing some groundwater in underground aquifers to become unusable, creating further challenges as the global demand for water increases (see Newbern 2015). Finally, it bears mention that there is a difference between the amount of water that may exist below the ground and the amount of water that can be extracted safely or sustainably (see Mooney 2016).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Justice Studies College of Justice and Safety, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA

    Avi Brisman & Bill McClanahan

  2. School of Justice Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Avi Brisman, Nigel South & Reece Walters

  3. Newcastle Law School Faculty of Business and Law, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia

    Avi Brisman

  4. Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

    Nigel South

Authors
  1. Avi Brisman
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  2. Bill McClanahan
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  3. Nigel South
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  4. Reece Walters
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Brisman, A., McClanahan, B., South, N., Walters, R. (2018). Introduction. In: Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52986-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52986-2_1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-52985-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52986-2

  • eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)

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