Dangers of climate change: lack of water can lead to war

Climate change leads to higher temperatures. Higher temperatures lead to melting glaciers, so snowmelt-based water supplies decrease. Climate change also leads to more irregular rainfalls rather than the more sustained and regularized patterns that make it easy to store and irrigate crops. In the Middle East and North Africa, the world's most water-stressed region, per capita water supplies were expected to halve by 2050 even in the absence of global climate change, having effects on an increasing population. The effects on agriculture will be unpredictable but unpleasant.
Water is basic. When there's not enough of it, people die. When there's not enough to keep crops properly irrigated, there's famine. So it's not a big shock that when water decreases, conflict over it increases. Or to put it more simply, a lack of water leads to war. Societies unable to adjust to the new challenges are left with two main options: fight or flee. The former strategy implies securing an increasing share of the diminishing resources -by force if necessary. Obviously, countries would prefer to talk in order to equitably share water access than to fight over such access. It's when talking fails that fighting begins.
As an example, Egypt depends on the Nile for almost its entire water supply. It's not surprising that Egypt has literally threatened to go to war to secure its access to water from the Nile. Egypt is not the only potential ignition point for conflict in the arid Middle East, where over 90 percent of fresh-water crosses international borders.
Countries should place policies that account for the fact that although water is renewable, it is not infinite. Policies can make existing water supplies sufficient, or they can destroy them. Aid donors can do a great deal to help resolve water conflicts. Political leaders must be involved. Water conflicts are solvable technically, but technical resolutions can only be put into place by political compacts.

An engineering game for girls

Debbie Sterling, a US engineer who became increasingly frustrated by the very high percentage of men in his profession, thought that something should be done about it. "Only 11% of engineers are women and girls start losing interest in science when they are very young" she writes on her blog. "This is quite worrying and we should try to change that statistic."

She wanted young girls to become more interested in science and engineering so she decided to put her ideas into practice and created GoldieBlox, a game aimed at girls between five and nine years old, that is half way between a story book and a construction kit. The heroine in the story book is a girl named Goldie that has to face a number of engineering challenges– assisted by her trusty friends Nacho the dog, and Katinka, the dolphin ballerina.

Sterling spent a year researching different ways to get girls interested in construction toys, fearing that Lego and Meccano had not managed to do so. "The question was quite simple: boys have spatial attitudes and they like building things; girls, on the other hand, have better verbal capacities and they prefer reading stories," she says. "So I thought we could put those two things together, spatial plus verbal, book series plus building tools."

The research also suggested that girls are not satisfied with the building alone – they want to know the reason behind it. “Girls aren't just interested in 'what' they're building, they want to know 'why' they are building it”, says Sterling.

“Goldie's stories relate to girls'interests because her machines solve real problems and help her friends. The result: girls love it”.