It is remarkable how few commentators or analysts raised the alarm before the great financial crash of 2008. One who did was a journalist for the Financial Times called Gillian Tett. It may be germane to the understanding of why Gillian Tett perceived dangers in the reckless behavior of bankers that her colleagues did not, that she was educated not as an economist, but as a social anthropologist. In the course of earning her PhD in social anthropology, Tett spent a year milking goats in Tajikistan, an experience she insists helped her to understand the behavior of the bankers and other financial actors, and to predict the crisis, to widespread derision and hostility from bankers and treasury officials, two years before it happened.
Most people in financial institutions are highly specialized, and fail to understand how what they do might impact the rest of society, or that their own behavior is conditioned by a particular culture, imagining instead that an obsession with money and profit is a universal human trait. Tett's social anthropology background trained her to look at societies and cultures, including that of investment bankers, in the round.
So it is not just in the academy that silos are a problem. The contradictions between deep, specialized knowledge and breadth of vision, between insider understanding and outsider insight, affect everything from our ability to perceive an approaching financial crisis to the way we develop our cities, educate our children, or understand how the biggest challenge to humanity—climate change—changes the future and our ability to forecast it with any accuracy.
The planetary emergency that climate change presents and the impact it will have on the near future is one of the more persuasive real-world examples of the perils of silo thinking. To understand the effects of substantial shifts in the geophysical conditions that have supported human development in the Holocene, to mitigate human impacts on the climate, or to adapt to the consequences of failing to do so demands skills drawn from political economy, physical geography, hydrology, agronomy, biology, ice science, atmospheric physics, sociology, economics, and epidemiology: all have something to say, but none is sufficient. Nor do we have institutions, national or international, that are the right shape, at the right level, and with the right approach to bring together the necessary skills in science, law, politics, and diplomacy to negotiate the complex and half-understood issues.
Regional specialists in disciplines other than those connected to climate change, for instance, routinely ignore the impacts of future climate variability on the region's future. Perhaps a set of problems so vast and multifaceted is, perversely, easy to ignore, so it is not unusual to hear presentations and discussions at China-focused conferences that pay no heed to the information that is presented in the parallel universe of climate-focused events.
At the China-focused conferences, economists and political scientists will present graphs projecting the likely direction of the economy or the population, the growth of cities, or trends in higher education: there seems to be no facet of China that cannot be predicted, but such predictions rarely include, for instance, the crisis that currently afflicts the supply of water, something so essential to life that its failure is unthinkable.
North China never did have very much water, and the combination of overpopulation and the demands of industry and agriculture has now brought us to the sobering point that China's eleven most important provinces, which produce 40 percent of China's GDP, are running out of water. A few years ago, the Yellow River, the mother river of China, failed to reach the sea; some estimates give the aquifers of north China about thirty years, based on current rates of over-extraction (Currell Reference Currell2012; Watts Reference Watts2011b).
If such estimates are correct, the contribution those provinces currently make to China's economy, their industrial and agricultural output, not to mention the energy they produce, would effectively cease. And what would happen to their populations without water? Would they become environmental refugees? Would they be accommodated elsewhere in China, bearing in mind that they number some half a billion people? Would the surrounding provinces be invited to sacrifice their supply to preserve life in the capital? Are China's political and economic system and its international relations likely to continue undisturbed, faced with a crisis so fundamental?
This doomsday scenario is extremely unlikely to come to pass without attempts to mitigate it, but avoiding it, however that might be done, would inevitably have a material effect on China's future: if north China is not to run dry, water must be conjured from somewhere—bought from the Russian far east, or piped from the south of China, in a radically enlarged version of the troubled South-North Water Transfer Project (Ivanova Reference Ivanova2012), or perhaps extracted from the sea through desalination, a process that, absent a future technological leap, is expensive and heavy on energy (Watts Reference Watts2011a). All of these are costly options, and are unlikely to provide solutions so effective as to allow north China to go about its business as before (Currell et al. Reference Currell2012).
There are other shadowy pachyderms moving patiently across the landscape, apparently invisible to the untrained eye. A glimpse of any of them could have economists reaching for their calculators: the climate impacts on domestic food production; the long-term health effects—and the cost of treatment—of air, water, and soil pollution; and the defense—or inundation—of China's coastal megacities, vulnerable as they are to sea level rise.
Of all the specialist projections of China's future that I have seen in the last few years, it is striking how few take account of these material questions. It is as though they were quite invisible. Were economics only an exercise in mathematics, or population trends simply a matter of government policy, this would be explicable. As it is, it is curious how infrequently we raise our heads to inquire how other disciplines see the future, and to try to understand what we might learn from their insights.
How will societies as highly stressed as those in most of Asia cope with the shocks that climate change will deliver? How accurate can we be in predicting what those shocks will be at a local level, where most adaptation must happen in order to be effective?
Beyond the political borders of China, but not beyond the borders of the ecosystems that China shares with its Asian neighbors, the picture is even more complex. The cryosphere of the Himalaya/Hindu Kush, including the Tibetan Himalaya, is the largest planetary store of fresh water outside the polar regions. For centuries, its tens of thousands of glaciers have fed the great river systems of Asia, including those of the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yellow River, the Yangtze, and the Ganges; all of them derive their waters, to some degree, from glaciers that have now entered a phase of fairly rapid retreat.
Chinese scientists announced earlier this year that China's glaciers have lost 15 percent of their mass in the last thirty years (AFP News 2014). In Nepal, the most recent survey revealed that 30 percent of the ice has been lost in the last two decades (Rai Reference Rai2014). They are not just retreating from the snout, but also dying from the top, failing to build ice in the accumulation zone. In the longer term, this will reduce their contribution to the rivers; in the short term, there are other dangers.
The condition of the glaciers is monitored with growing concern by scientists and governments in the region, the people who live in the already water-stressed watersheds of the Himalaya. How quickly the glaciers will disappear remains uncertain, but the consequences of the melting are already being felt in changes to the region's hydrology—the rapid build-up of dangerously unstable glacial lakes, or flooding and water-logging of precious agricultural land. And since the Himalaya makes the region's weather, the loss of its snow and ice will have unknown impacts on Asia's monsoons, and therefore on the region's agriculture.
Meanwhile, China's plans to build ever more hydroelectric dams have taken its engineers to the Himalaya's transboundary rivers. Not only is this one of the world's most active earthquake zones, but there are no source-to-sink transboundary water agreements in place to regulate the rivers as they are, let alone as they will be once their ecosystems have been altered by major dams. Without an agreement that covers a river's entire length, its complex ecosystems cannot be protected and the diverse interests that depend on the river have no forum in which to discuss, let alone agree, on how this common resource can be managed for all its users. At present, there is no mechanism or forum in which to mediate, for instance, between China's energy needs and Cambodia's dependence on fish from the Mekong; or between China's desire to dam the great bend of the Brahmaputra, India's hydropower ambitions for the lower reaches of the river, and Bangladesh's need for the Himalayan silt that the river has deposited for millennia in the delta, despite the fact that some eighteen dams are currently planned that will sit between the source of that silt and the Bay of Bengal.
Nor is there agreement between engineers, who view a river as a liquid battery from which energy must be extracted, and ecologists, who see rivers as ecosystems and worry about the unforeseen consequences of interfering with them. There is no agreed formula to work out how to balance the claims of the wider economy of a river—and the value of the ecosystem services it delivers throughout its length—and the value extracted at a single installation, such as a hydroelectric dam.
Almost all the lower riparian nations, India and Pakistan in particular, manage their domestic water poorly, but prefer to blame their upper riparian neighbor for any water stress. Neighborly relations in the region are not warm, and demand for water, as these economies industrialize and populations urbanize, is likely to grow faster than their capacity or willingness to forge equitable and sustainable agreements on the care of transboundary rivers. Water—how much there is, when it comes, and whether it is managed for the benefit of all users, will be critical for the peace, prosperity, and stability of the region. Hydrologists must explain the effects of dams on rivers to agronomists and economists; meteorologists can work out the monsoon impacts of the loss of glacier ice, predictions vital for estimates of future food security; economists will need to understand the impacts of water stress on industry and agriculture and explore the relative costs of mitigation and adaptation; historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists can help to understand the hidden forces that foster or inhibit cooperation. Breaking down the silos that obscure the shape and dimensions of the challenge is only the beginning.
