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Half the world's population could face a shortage of clean water by 2080 because of climate change, experts warned Tuesday. Wong Poh Poh, a professor at the National University of Singapore, told a regional conference that global warming was disrupting water flow patterns and increasing the severity of floods, droughts and storms - all of which reduce the availability of drinking water. Wong said the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that as many as 2 billion people won't have sufficient access to clean water by 2050. That figure is expected to rise to 3.2 billion by 2080 - nearly tripling the number who now do without it.

We profile two women activists taking on the global water crisis. Canadian Maude Barlow is a well known leader in the global struggle for water justice. Ge Yun from China is in the vanguard of her country's growing conservation movement. In this program, they both warn us about the link between climate change and the loss of one of our most basic human requirements: water for life.

Earlier this year, the World Bank released yet another in a seemingly endless stream of reports by global institutions and universities chronicling the melting of the world's cryosphere, or ice zone. This latest report concerned the glaciers in the Andes and revealed the following: Bolivia's famed Chacaltaya glacier has lost 80 percent of its surface area since 1982, and Peruvian glaciers have lost more than one-fifth of their mass in the past 35 years, reducing by 12 percent the water flow to the country's coastal region, home to 60 percent of Peru's population.

The watermark on the outlet tower, seen in 2007, shows the fall in the water level of Pejar Dam near Goulburn in the Australian state of New South Wales. Thousands of people rallied in southern Australia Sunday to protest the dwindling water levels in the Murray River, claiming the loss was causing an environmental disaster.

Every week to 10 days, by boat in summer and over the ice in winter, he crossed the lake to a spot about a mile and a half from Bolshie Koty, a small village in the piney woods on Baikal's northwest shore. There, Dr. Kozhov, a professor at Irkutsk State University, would record water temperature and clarity and track the plant and animal plankton species as deep as 2,400 feet.

Over a billion people today suffer from water scarcity; deforestation in the tropics destroys an area the size of Greece every year - more than 25 million acres; more than half of the world's fisheries are over-fished or fished at their limit. "Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we're living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets," argues Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. But, he cautioned, as environmentalists have pointed out: "Mother Nature doesn't do bailouts."

We need to do two things, broadly. We need first to slow the rate of climate change. The second thing is that we need to start adapting to the climate changes we can't avoid. And the best way to say it is that we need to avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable.

But basic science fails to shed light - at least directly - on daunting challenges confronting society such as how best to adapt and what stock to place in various solutions. Adapting will involve dealing with sea-level rise, upheaval in agriculture, stark changes in energy demand for heating and cooling, new water resource management regimes, and fundamental change in the world's transportation and energy infrastructure. It is a challenge of enormous scale, requiring that civilization overcome "technological, financial, cognitive and behavioral, and social and cultural constraints," as the chapter on adaptation in the IPCC's 2007 report put it. Adapting to global warming and stemming the greenhouse-gas tide will touch nearly every aspect of life, forcing climatologists, biologists and oceanographers to work with energy experts, social scientists and automotive engineers, even economists. Together, these strange bedfellows must produce recommendations useful to political leaders from presidents to planning commissioners. Those collaborations are not in place.

They'd come from the Arctic permafrost, the African plains and the jungles of Asia, but after five days of meeting, conferencing, dialoguing, blessing, praying and celebrating, the 400 attendees of the Indigenous People's Global Summit on Climate Change did not reach consensus on the how to move forward to combat the forces of climate change. Speakers over the week emphasized how much indigenous people have in common, whether they are from Borneo or Barrow, saying that they share a spiritual connection to the Earth, concern for plants and animal life and sense that for more than a century they have been left out of the decision-making process that is today eating away at the ground beneath their feet. They bear the brunt of erosion, changing migration patterns, rising sea levels, diminishing sea ice, drought, polluted air and water. But their common ground did not guarantee agreement on how to move forward.

Some of the mightiest rivers on the planet, including the Ganges, the Niger, and the Yellow river in China, are drying up because of climate change, a study of global waterways warned yesterday. The study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado found that global warming has had a far more damaging impact on rivers than had been realised and that, overwhelmingly, those rivers in highly populated areas were the most severely affected. That could threaten food and water supply to millions of people living in some of the world's poorest regions, the study warned.

The world has only six years left to limit greenhouse gas emissions, Pachauri warns. "It's essential that we take action by which we allow emissions to peak no later than 2015," he says, to limit the world's temperature increase to 2C. Beyond that and we reach a tipping point when the world's poorest communities will suffer the most. "They are the ones who are the most vulnerable" due to a much greater scarcity of water, a decline in agricultural lands, and the danger of sea level rises, as spelt out in the fourth assessment report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Oxfam Australia says that climate change could leave up to 75 million people in the Asia-Pacific region homeless by 2050. The Future is Here: Climate Change says that these island nations are already suffering from drought, food shortages and rising water levels.

"Imagine these scenarios: The rice bowl of Vietnam cracking. Popular diving spots in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia lying idle with no tourists. Nearly half of Bangkok inundated with water. Well, they could become a reality in 20 to 30 years-no thanks to the adverse effects of climate change in Southeast Asia exacerbated by forest fires particularly in Indonesia which recently blanketed the region with deadly smoky haze. Scientists warn in a new World Bank report of major impacts on the region if the temperature rises by up to 2 degrees Celsius-warming which they say may be reached in two to three decades-fueled by the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. The warming climate will push up the sea level in the region and cause an increase in heat extremes, a higher intensity of tropical cyclones, and ocean acidification stemming from excess carbon dioxide in the air, according to the latest edition of the bank's "Turn Down the Heat" report."

I often dream about the ocean