2026-09-02
37 分钟This is The Guardian.
The Guardian Archive Long Read.
Hi, my name is Tim Smedley and I am the author of Drought is on the Verge of Becoming the Next Pandemic,
published in 2023. So my long read is about water demand
and how water demand is outstripping supply in many parts of the world, including the UK,
and taps will run dry if we continue on our current path.
So I look at how it came to this and what we can do about it.
So I've spent the previous three years researching the water crisis for my book, The Last Drop,
and this long read is an edited extract from that book.
And I was actually researching the global water crisis.
My research took me to Arizona, to Jordan, to Ghana,
but it was actually the England water story that in some ways became the most compelling.
I suppose it's so unexpected to people here.
We're a rainy country, how can we have water scarcity?
Was the question that a lot of people asked, probably is the question that I wanted to answer to start with.
And I discovered that we actually have a lot of grey and drizzly days, but not that many hard rain days.
As one expert told me, drizzle adds nothing to the rain gauge.
And South East England's rainfall is actually low internationally.
It's comparable to Lebanon.
To kenya london has less rainfall than sydney or perth australia