Dr. Liam Fox says clean drinking water could soon become the world’s biggest problem in the 21st century, but it doesn’t have to be. Addressing a crowd gathered at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City on Friday, he said finding long-term solutions must be a global priority.

When Fox, a former UK defence secretary, attended events sponsored by the United Nations, he was concerned about the international organisation’s priorities. Gender equality was a higher priority than people’s access to clean water, he said. Providing clean water to people worldwide is ranked sixth on the UN’s development goals.

“If you put access to clean water under gender equality, I think you’re missing the point: If women have to travel long distances to fetch water in their everyday lives, they’ll never achieve equality,” Fox said. “They’ll never get a proper education.”

Fox said that to ensure global access to clean water, about $150 billion in funding will be needed annually by 2030.

“We spend $107 billion a year on cosmetics and we spend over a trillion dollars a year on global alcohol sales. We could actually provide clean water and sanitation to every person in the world for a tenth of the world’s cash order. … Isn’t that amazing when you start thinking about it in those terms?”

After his time in politics, Fox has devoted his time and research to water, warning that unless we as a global population start looking for long-term solutions, water will become the biggest problem of the 21st century. This is the subject of his latest book, The Coming Storm: Why Water Will Write The 21st Century, which will be published in the US on October 1.

Part of the concern about the future of water access is its impact on geopolitical security. “There are 56,000 large dams in the world,” Fox said. “China controls 28,000 of them. If there is real competition for water resources, you can imagine A) the points of conflict that can arise and B) the mass migration that can follow if things don’t follow a sensible course.”

Simply put, people will go where there is water. If nothing is done to ensure water supplies and water shortages occur, Fox said one of the “biggest risks” is mass migration – a migration the likes of which has never happened before in human history, he stressed. He also compared China’s control over water to the recent completion of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Africa.

“Ethiopia is now able to effectively control the flow of the Nile all the way down to Sudan and Egypt. There is no reason to believe that they have any ill intentions in doing this. But the power is there, and when the world basically allowed this to happen, Beijing noticed that they were becoming a power upstream that was offering virtually no resistance at any level,” Fox said. “So there are security concerns.”

“We need better geopolitical cooperation on international shared waterway treaties,” Fox added.

But water scarcity doesn’t have to mean the end of the world if we take responsibility for water management – on a global and individual level. Fox cited as an example the problems Israel has faced in its watersheds in the past and how Israel as a country has brought about effective change.

“When the Sea of ​​Galilee was almost beyond recovery, they implemented drastic water controls and achieved significantly better water treatment. Israel’s water treatment rate is currently 86%.”

He told Deseret News that the water issue should not be the responsibility of just one side of the political spectrum.

“I think it’s too important to be conceded to either of them. This issue affects people of all political persuasions and people of no political persuasion, people who don’t even know what politics is,” he said. “I think it’s a basic human duty. In my view, our most important human right is access to clean water and sanitation. Everything else is secondary. You can live without democracy if you have to. But you can’t live without water.”