Expert views: Climate change is wild card in water security - SEI analysts

“A doomsday scenario would be that if the Greenland ice sheet melts, and then there’s six metres of sea-level rise - all bets are off. I think we’ve got bigger problems than water scarcity at that moment,” said David Purkey, a senior scientist and director of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI)’s Northern California office in an interview with Alertnet.

Arno Rosemarin, senior research fellow at SEI’s EcoSanRes (ecological sanitation research) programme warned that climate change may impact vulnerable urban populations in a yet unknown way: “We aren’t going to have enough water. When you add factors like weather changes, drought and flooding -- you can’t manage -- it’s like a monster and that’s not water supply that’s a disaster.”