ONE is familiar with the terms ‘suicide’, ‘fratricide’, even sadly ‘matricide’ and ‘patricide’. ‘Aquacide’ is a new one. It is usually applied to an herbicide used to control weeds. The social scientist Roman Krznaric has given aquacide a different meaning — national suicide by dehydration. He warns in his compelling book History for Tomorrow (2024), that “water makes and breaks civilisations”. The only place, he says, one can find an abundance of water now is in history.

Our planet seen from space looks startlingly blue, saturated by oceans. They cover 70 per cent of the earth’s surface. In reality, only 2.5pc of that water is fresh, and even 99pc of that is trapped in glaciers and underground aquifers.

Throughout history, water as a life-giving resource has been taken for granted, except by the Chinese. Apparently, the Chinese character for the word ‘govern’ comes from ‘water control’ or ‘harnessing the rivers’. While Europe luxuriated in the Holy Roman empire and Great Britain gorged on its imperial surpluses, millions of Chinese laboured to make theirs a ‘hydraulic civilisation’.

Over millennia, from 2,000 BCE onwards, they built canals and dykes to control and regulate the often dangerous flow of its rivers.........

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