Burleigh McCoy

Deborah Perrone is a water resource engineer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who worked on the study.

And she says the places with the most rapid declines tended to be in dry regions around the world with lots of cultivated land.

So in India, the U.S., China, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and lots of places.

And we had an episode yesterday that was all about day zero water.

The predicted day a place runs out of water.

And the solution seems simple, right, Emily?

Use less.

But there are a lot of reasons why that's really difficult.

One big issue is that many aquifers span borders.

So multiple countries have to agree on how much water they can use.

And in a lot of places, people across borders already don't get along or they can't agree on water usage.

Yeah, I talked to Filippo Menga about this.

He's a political geographer at the University of Bergamo in Italy.

And he says the problem isn't the amount of people.

Right.

And it's a good and a bad thing.

It means we're using way more water than we need, especially in richer countries.

But it also means we can theoretically use less.

True.

But that requires good data and countries reporting honestly how much water they are pulling.