Words for the Water Economy

The current economic crisis and the growing water crisis have much in common.  Both fundamentally stem from people living beyond their means and societies designing unsustainable systems.  As mentioned in the previous post about Australia, “drought” really refers to a temporary  reduction in rainfall.  We need to expand our vocabulary to meet the challenges of climate change.  Here are some dryly humorous suggestions.

Glossary

rain furlough — an extended absence of rain, longer than the short-term effect of a drought, reaching into the indefinite future.

cloud layoffs — circumstances causing clouds to appear, but without the productive labor of raining.

precipitation outsourcing — a type of climate change in which large amounts of atmospheric moisture are redirected to an entirely different region or continent.

glacier recession — the withdrawal and ultimate disappearance of permanent ice deposits as summer melting exceeds winter snow deposits.

wildfire inflation — uncontrolled increase in the number, size, and severity of fires caused by scarce precipitation and dehydrated plants.

arboreal depression — the pervasive shrinkage of forests as water scarcity causes more trees to die and fewer seedlings to replace them; thus reducing the region’s ability to attract and retain deposits of rain.

moisture downsizing — a permanent, often progressive, reduction in the available water for a particular region.

water deficit — a situation in which the consumption of water exceeds the supply naturally available in that area, so that flow is drained from surface bodies of water or from aquifers faster than it can be replenished; thus setting up for a precipitous collapse in the future as demand exhausts the supply.

species bankruptcy — a collapse of biodiversity that occurs when an ecosystem no longer contains enough species so that some of them are able to adapt to fast, rigorous changes in climate and food/water supply.

habitat foreclosure — a catastrophic result of climate change in which a region becomes uninhabitable because its extreme conditions and/or scarcity of food and water make it unable to support significant life.

Perhaps the financeers who have contributed so generously to traumatic climate change will understand the threats better now that these have been framed in more familiar terms.