“You could actually exacerbate the drought situation,” says Gabriel Collins at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Texas, arguing that excessive future water transfers could lead to two large swathes of the country becoming prone to seasonal water shortages, rather than just one.
He adds that while other technologies, such as desalination, might seem tempting, they are enormously expensive and would likely be restricted to heavily industrialized coastal areas where demand makes them economically viable.
Collins recently coauthored an article on China’s longstanding water-scarcity issues with Gopal Reddy, founder of Ready for Climate, an environmental research organization. “The structural problem is, to me, far scarier than this season’s drought,”
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