“We were so terrified with the water coming into the house and the sound of the storm. In front of my eyes, the walls of our house collapsed.” That’s Geeta Maiti, a resident of Mousuni Island, part of the Indian Sundarbans—a 4,000 square-mile World Heritage site on the Bay of Bengal, shared by India and Bangladesh. There, a rich ecosystem supports the world’s largest mangrove forest and several hundred animal species, including the endangered Bengal tiger. The region is home to approximately 13 million people. It is one of the most vulnerable areas to climate change in the world.
“Losing Ground” was directed by Lisa Hornak and Erin Stone. It is part of The Atlantic Selects, an online showcase of short documentaries from independent creators, curated by The Atlantic.
In places around the world, supplies of groundwater are rapidly vanishing. As aquifers decline and wells begin to go dry, people are being forced to confront a growing crisis.
Much of the planet relies on groundwater. And in places around the world – from the United States to Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America – so much water is pumped from the ground that aquifers are being rapidly depleted and wells are going dry.
Groundwater is disappearing beneath cornfields in Kansas, rice paddies in India, asparagus farms in Peru and orange groves in Morocco. As these critical water reserves are pumped beyond their limits, the threats are mounting for people who depend on aquifers to supply agriculture, sustain economies and provide drinking water. In some areas, fields have already turned to dust and farmers are struggling.
Climate change is projected to increase the stresses on water supplies, and heated disputes are erupting in places where those with deep wells can keep pumping and leave others with dry wells. Even as satellite measurements have revealed the problem’s severity on a global scale, many regions have failed to adequately address the problem. Aquifers largely remain unmanaged and unregulated, and water that seeped underground over tens of thousands of years is being gradually used up.
In this documentary, USA TODAY and The Desert Sun investigate the consequences of this emerging crisis in several of the world’s hotspots of groundwater depletion. These are stories about people on four continents confronting questions of how to safeguard their aquifers for the future – and in some cases, how to cope as the water runs out.
Bar chart race: the countries with the largest cumulative CO2 emissions since 1750. Rankings as of the start of 2019: 1) US – 397 GtCO2 2) China – 214 3) former USSR – 180 4) Germany – 90 5) UK – 77 6) Japan – 58 7) India – 51 8) France – 37 9) Canada – 32 10) Poland – 27
Chart by Carbon Brief based on code by John Burn-Murdoch.
