The unsustainable use of oil and water by a rapidly growing world population is creating serious environmental security challenges and geopolitical problems never before faced by humankind. As demonstrated throughout this book, changes in climate that are already underway and that are predicted to significantly increase in the next decades will exacerbate these challenges, thus playing a pivotal role in the overall environmental security equation.

Oil, Water, Climate, and Population: An Interactive System of Immense Complexity

Oil, water, climate, and population are strongly linked and can be considered as factors of a system in which all components are interconnected and interact among one another in multiple ways. Oil, water, and climate security problems cannot fully be understood in isolation, nor can they be considered independently from demographic perspectives. Their various interconnections and dependencies can be highlighted when discussing the evolution of energy, population, climate, and water. The increased use of fossil fuels, particularly oil, in the last half of the 20th century, has provided the energy required to develop highly efficient technologies, relieving humans from heavy physical tasks and vastly increasing agricultural production, thereby enabling explosive population growth. In turn, population growth over the past few decades, projected population growth until at least 2050, and the rapid increases in the demands for energy and water resources needed to pursue global economic development race are the root causes of the unsustainable use of oil and water.