[suspenseful piano music plays]
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[suspenseful piano music plays]
[Chiwetel] The Earth from space.
[classical music builds]
The only known planet in the universe with surface water.
[suspenseful piano music plays]
Water is what made life and civilization possible.
But the ancient water patterns on Earth are shifting.
No one can be sure anymore where tomorrow's water is coming from.
[classical music builds]
Already, water scarcity affects four out of ten of the world's population.
Soon, it will be the future for many of us.
And in many places, the countdown has already begun.
[dramatic title music]
-[crowd cheering] -[clock counts down]
New Year's Eve, 2020--
a very different kind of countdown.
[crowd chants countdown]
-[loud bong emanates] -[fireworks noise explodes]
["Auld Lang Syne" plays]
It was time to say goodbye to the teen years of the 21st century.
More people had had more fun than at any time in history.
-[music plays] -[fireworks noise explodes]
None of us knew it then
but 2020 was about to go very wrong.
The first coronavirus deaths were only days away.
Within weeks there would be no more crowds...
No more parties...
No more celebrations...
For years experts had predicted that a pandemic was on its way
but not enough people were listening.
[fireworks noise explodes]
And on New Year's Eve 2020,
the coronavirus was not the only disaster waiting to happen.
[fireworks noise explodes]
[Turton] The human population is outstripping the water supply.
This is suicidal.
[Famiglietti] The water crisis is something that's happening now
and it's happening around the world.
When we don't have water, people fight.
-[dramatic music] -[loud explosions]
All hell breaks loose.
[woman 1] Oh, no, no, no, no. The house is burning.
[Chiwetel] In Australia, 46 million acres of land is being incinerated by wildfire.
Thirty-four dead.
An estimated three billion wild animals killed...
Some species driven to the brink of extinction.
Similar record-breaking wildfires reported in California, Alaska and Siberia.
Worldwide, extreme weather events have doubled since 1980.
Officials in Cape Town, South Africa say
it's just 92 days away from having to shut off most water taps.
They are calling April 21st Day Zero.
[crowd screams and whistles]
[Chiwetel] Mexico City-- one of the largest cities in the world
struggles to come to terms with water shortage as a way of life.
In the worst hit neighborhoods,
the poor have taken control of the water supply into their own hands.
[woman 2, in Spanish] We hijacked more and more water trucks.
That was the only thing that got them to notice us.
Aggression.
[Chiwetel, in English] In the Mid-West,
the water which irrigates America's Breadbasket
is disappearing forever.
[Callcicrate] We are in a really, really big mess.
Industrial agriculture is really a mining operation.
Where they use up water.
They use it up until it's gone...
[Chiwetel] In Brazil,
hard-pressed units of armed police are the last line of defense
against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
[man speaking in Brazilian Portuguese]
[Chiwetel, in English] A force of only a thousand in an area the size of India.
-[laughter] -[man speaking in Brazilian Portuguese]
[Chiwetel, in English] The prize on this raid,
an illegal tractor.
But small victories will do little to slow down the pace of destruction.
Nearly 20 percent of the forest has already vanished.
And there's a price to pay.
In recent years, research has shown that, in a rainforest,
if you take away the trees, you take away the rain...
And for regions far beyond Brazil,
the result could be catastrophic.
[Nobre] What would you do if you knew what I know?
It's absolutely essential
that humanity understands
what kind of risk we are running right now.
I mean, losing our habitat.
Losing the planet where we have evolved.
It means really losing the capacity of continuing to live on Earth.
[Chiwetel] The day that water runs out has been called Day Zero.
This film is about people who are fighting
to make sure it never happens.
Around three and a half billion years ago,
water was where life on Earth began...
and today all living creatures depend on it for existence.
[peaceful music gradually increases]
The Florida Springs.
Thousands of lakes and dozens of rivers criss-cross the state of Florida
on their way to the sea.
For nearly 50 million years, it has been one of the wonders of the world.
And for centuries, it's provided the people of Florida
with most of their drinking water.
But now, there's something going wrong in the Florida Springs.
Jill Heinerth has been diving here for more than 20 years.
She's seen how things are changing...
Because below the surface of the Springs,
you can find the back door to the astonishing story
of what is happening to the world's fresh water.
[underwater noise emanates]
-[choral music builds] -[insects and birds chirp in background]
[ethereal choral music plays]
[Chiwetel] The Floridan aquifer,
a reservoir of fresh water stretching for 100,000 square miles
under the state of Florida, and beyond...
The largest concentration of fresh water springs on Earth.
[Jill] I'm still filled with wonder
every time I have an opportunity to go into an underwater cave.
They're just magical environments.
I liken it to swimming through the veins of Mother Earth.
I am swimming in the sustenance of the planet.
[Chiwetel] Of all the water on Earth,
just over two percent can be used for human consumption.
Most of that is inaccessible,
locked up in ice caps and glaciers.
A third of the fresh water we can get to, is found underground,
in these vast rock bound aquifers.
They contain a hundred times more
than all the surface water in lakes and rivers combined...
Until now, it's been enough to sustain life on Earth...
But modern life on Earth is something different.
[Jill] What I've learned over many years of being here
is that that clear water doesn't necessarily mean clean water.
I've seen the flow of the springs slow down
as if they're tired and getting sick.
I've seen the bottom vegetation disappear
and being replaced by filamentous algae...
Whether that's nitrate pollution from agriculture
or whether it is just using too much!
I've seen it change. I've seen things disappear.
[ethereal choral music plays]
[Chiwetel] Jill is like the canary in a coal mine...
Pollution. Depletion...
the clues she's found here are a warning that something is happening...
And not just in Florida.
[tense music plays]
Los Angeles, a good place to start an investigation into water.
[tense music plays]
There's never been enough to go round...
-[music plays] -[passing traffic sounds]
A hundred years ago, they built the world's largest aqueduct
to stop the city drying up...
And in the days of the prohibition--
when the rest of the country was dying for alcohol,
in LA they were fighting each other over water.
Water crisis is in the city's DNA.
Los Angeles is the showcase of the American dream.
The shop-window of the modern way of life.
The world capital of the swimming pool,
250,000 in LA county alone.
[choral music builds tension]
But stuck between the desert and the ocean,
the people of LA...
might just be living dangerously.
[string music rises]
This is Jay Famiglietti. Water scientist.
Every time California starts running out of water,
he's the pundit they come running for.
[Bill] ...Senior Water Scientist from NASA's jet propulsion laboratory
Jay Famiglietti. Jay.
-[cheering and applause] -Hey, Professor. How are you, sir?
[string music rises]
[Bill] Finally, a witness that will tell us expert testimony about this.
They call you the Al Gore of water I hear.
Wow, well, that's-that's impressive.
-Well, you know it's a... -[laughter]
When stories like this break, they break in a very, very big way.
Why isn't there a panic or at least a sense of urgency?
Where is the governor going on TV?
What's the plan, man? Water, it's serious shit, bro.
[laughter]
It's not clear to me that the general public really appreciates
that the water crisis, the water scarcity is
something that's happening now and it's around the world.
It's happening all over the world.
[Chiwetel] Severe drought has been a regular feature
in the Californian story.
[train horn blares]
The years between 2012 to 2014
were the driest for over a thousand years...
But it's not only Californians who are in trouble...
At NASA, Jay Familglietti pioneered a space mission
to try to discover what was happening to water supplies over the entire planet.
[woman 3] Three, two, one and lift off
of GRACE mission tracking the movement of water across our planet.
[Chiwetel] The project was called GRACE,
the Gravity and Climate Recovery Experiment.
It acts like a scale in the sky.
[digital bleep]
It's composed of two satellites
about the size of a squashed minibus.
They orbit at about 400 kilometers
and they are separated by about 200 kilometers
and they are chasing each other around as the earth spins around.
And when the satellites fly over that region,
the region exerts slightly less
of a gravitational tug on the satellites
and they float just a little bit higher.
[digital bleep]
It's really allowed us to map up
the regions around the world that are gaining or losing water.
[digital bleep]
[Chiwetel] GRACE was a huge scientific success
but the news from space wasn't good.
Two billion people around the world
depend on vast underground aquifers
for drinking water and growing food.
The GRACE satellite proved that most of these aquifers
are losing water much faster than anyone predicted.
[Familglietti] The drought situation
is much worse than I think is generally perceived,
this maybe why we're not getting the public response that we want.
We found that over half of the world's major aquifers,
over half, 20 of them
are past sustainability tipping points and by that,
I mean that the water is being removed.
It's being extracted from these aquifers
at a rate that's greater than it's being replenished.
[Chiwetel] GRACE was a wake up call...
The satellites had looked into the future,
and for vast swaths of the US and the world,
the future is dry.
[Familglietti] Population is growing, and climate is changing.
We don't have the water that we thought that we did.
So it's a different world out there.
[digital bleeps]
-[digital bleeps] -[background piano music plays]
[Anders] We've been spending all these revolutions looking at the moon
then as we come around this non inviting place
we look up and there is the Earth.
It's 240,000 miles away, it was small enough--
you could cover it with your thumbnail.
[Anders] Wow! That's crazy.
[Lovell] Aww, that's a beautiful shot.
[peaceful background music plays]
-[camera shutter clicks] -[peaceful background music plays]
[Chiwetel] The time, Christmas Eve, 1968.
The location: The Apollo spaceship on the far side of the Moon.
-[camera shutter clicks] -[background piano music plays]
When this photo was taken, there were only three and a half billion people on Earth.
Already, there are twice that many.
In the 1960's, New York and Tokyo
were the only two megacities with populations of more than ten million.
Now there are more than 30.
Most of them much bigger than New York.
It was water that made these cities possible in the first place.
But what happens now if the water starts running out?
-[tense background music plays] -[rushing sound of the wind]
[children] ...One step, two step, tickle you under there.
[laughter]
Cape Town in South Africa is facing one monumental question.
How does it survive?
[woman 4] Four million residents of Cape Town are staring down
a painful reality.
In a little more than two months,
the South African city could run out of water.
-[kid] Woah! -[laughs]
[Chiwetel] February 2018, in Cape Town, South Africa...
there's hardly been any rain for three years.
The reservoirs are almost empty.
[tense background music plays]
[man 1] Day Zero, a doomsday scenario when the taps run dry.
For Cape Townians, it is a real possibility
as long as their cities main water supply looks like this.
They are calling April 21st Day Zero.
[woman 5] I'm not saying it's bigger than 9/11
but I'm saying it poses as much of a challenge
as a catastrophe such as 9/11 did but in a completely different way.
[Chiwetel] Tourist brochures were still calling Cape Town
the honeymoon capital of the world.
But the plastic water cans were telling a different story.
[Turton] There is the perception that this is a short term drought
and day zero
is needed just to tide people over to the next rainy season,
which will be two or three months in the future.
The data that we have all tells us that this is not a short-term disturbance.
From the 1980s onwards,
there's been a perceptible shift
in the rainfall pattern in South Africa.
The weather service in South Africa
are unable to predict the future
under these conditions of climate change.
-[bird screeches] -[tense background music plays]
[Chiwetel] Cape Town is proud of its Mediterranean climate
but the climate is changing
and the future is unpredictable.
A population that was two million 20 years ago
is four and a half million today.
The demand for water never stops growing.
Water is not only the stuff you drink
or the stuff you shower in or the stuff you flush the toilet with.
Water is embedded in everything.
Water is part of our everyday modern living.
Water creates the jobs
that give people the salaries that they live on.
Water creates the food.
Every element of our modern economy requires fresh water.
-[uplifting piano music] -[water splashing]
[Chiwetel] The Theewaterskloof Dam,
Cape Town's biggest reservoir.
This is what it used to look like.
A hundred billion gallon playground that has kept the city watered
for the past forty years.
But that was before it stopped raining.
And when a city starts running out of water,
no one can be sure of a soft landing.
[insect chirping]
The same reservoir three years later.
By then Theewaterskloof had become an international icon of water crisis.
[woman 6] This is one of Cape Town's main sources of water.
A source that could run completely dry within a matter of weeks.
The last ten percent of the water is unusable
so to all intents and purposes, this reservoir is empty.
[Chiwetel] Old farm houses...
old roads from before the dam was flooded.
Rows of vines that have stood many years under water.
The man-made solution to Cape Town's water problem
was no longer up to its job.
[insect chirping]
[Turton] A dam always has in the bottom a sediment pile
and when the dam dries out, that desiccates.
It becomes dry like blotting paper.
So, when the rain starts falling
and the first water comes in, the first thing it has to do
is rehydrate that pile of blotting paper.
So, you are talking of hundreds of millions,
if not billions of liters of water
that will get absorbed by that before the water becomes available as yield.
There is a need for a philosophical shift
away from we are masters and owners of nature
to we are now developing in partnership with nature.
We have to give nature a little bit of a space
in order to provide good and useful services for humankind.
[Chiwetel] But the water crisis, when it comes,
will not affect all of humankind in the same way.
This is Helen and Ray,
the kind of people who until now
have never really had to think about where their water came from.
In normal times, their consumption is about 80 gallons a day.
Now it's down to 13.
And that's a life changer.
We're not the same people that we were this time last year.
-[Helen] It's not full, huh? -[Ray] No, babe.
The idea that we could turn our taps on and there would be no water was real.
[man 2] The officers are acting on a tip off.
Local residents told them, employees at this body shop
are washing cars with city water
and that's a criminal offense.
I personally felt incredibly anxious.
[aggressive screaming and shouting]
[woman 7] There have already been scuffles here.
Security guards now monitor the site.
And there was this sudden madness that was going on.
[all, chanting] Water for all or the city must fall.
Water for all or the city...
[woman 8] The local government has brought in severe restrictions
forcing people to look for alternative supplies.
They ran out of water at the department stores.
They ran out of containers at the plastic supply stores.
[all, chanting] Water is life. Water is life.
Water is life.
[crowd member] There's no man with water.
No motor cars, no jobs,
no farm workers, no vegetables.
It becomes unimaginable.
[Helen] It has been quite humbling.
It's always crappy being the...
the camel.
[Helen] Pack horse.
[Ray] If I pass out along the way, darling, just give me mouth to mouth.
[Helen laughs] Just keep going, little man.
Keep going, little man.
-Stopping. -You can do it, baby.
[Helen] Now they are just cutting into my hands.
[Chiwetel] The water crisis laid bare a secret
that Cape Town would like to forget.
Thirty years after the end of apartheid,
the city still has the reputation
of being one of the most unequal places on Earth.
The water you get still depends on who you are and where you live.
Helen and Ray live in Newlands,
one of Cape Town's most desirable neighborhoods.
The woman working on the balcony is their maid Paulina.
And where she comes from, every day is Day Zero.
[Paulina] When I started working for Helen I was 28 years old.
I'm now 54 years old.
I'm doing everything at her house.
Wash, clean, iron, everything.
I cook, I do everything.
But with all those things, I need to save water.
Because one day we are going to wake up and we don't have water.
And then what's gonna happen without water?
[Chiwetel] Every Friday, Helen gives Paulina water and Paulina takes it home.
These heavy bottles contain a hidden truth about water shortages,
not just in South Africa but around the world.
[indistinct chatter]
[in native language] Would you like some water to drink?
[in English] I always give some people, you know, I always give water.
[Chiwetel] The question is why Paulina needs to take the water home.
And the answer becomes clear once we know exactly where home is.
Paulina lives in Capricorn.
One of the informal settlements, shanty towns, on the edge of Cape Town.
Few people here have access to running water in their homes.
For many years,
there were only 21 public water taps in the whole settlement.
Bye, guys.
[indistinct chatter]
[feet scrapping on stones]
[Chiwetel] In prosperous Newlands,
Day Zero seems like an unprecedented disaster.
But here in Capricorn, it's just another day.
[Paulina] There is a problem with water in Capricorn.
We get water in the morning at six o'clock.
Around ten or eleven, there is no more water.
In my house I tell them all every day,
we need to save water, we can't just do whatever we do with water.
We need to save water.
We wake up at five o'clock in the morning to fetch water,
it only lasts for one hour.
Some of us working night shifts, when we come back, there's no water.
Can't bathe for the day.
We must wait until tomorrow.
And this water in the taps,
you can't drink it, it smells.
It's horrible. Sometimes it's green.
You don't even know what is happening.
But we must drink it, there's no choice.
Sometimes there's no water to cook.
[woman 9] Really?
To cook porridge here, there's no water.
Even to buy water it's expensive.
[Puialina] To buy water is very expensive.
Really, really--
I buy it for my son, it's safer for him to drink that water.
This water that's coming out of the tap, I don't trust it.
[Paulina] You don't trust...
Capricorn just gets worse every single day.
We are suffering in this town.
[Chiwetel] In an ideal world, access to water is a human right.
But, in the real world, water is a yard-stick of inequality.
Over two billion people still live without safe drinking water in their homes.
The average American flushes more water down the toilet
than most Africans use everyday.
Worldwide,
poor water sanitation kills nearly a million people every year.
The threat to Cape Town came and went.
In May 2018, the three-year-old drought was over.
-[laughter] -[indistinct chatter]
[indistinct chatter]
[Chiwetel] They prayed for rain and the rain came.
The whole city celebrated.
[man 3] So having analyzed the new data, we are now in a position
to state that we have not only managed to avoid day zero this year
but we can also safely get through the summer of 2019.
[Chiwetel] Water flowed back into the rivers,
the dams filled up, Cape Town had been saved...
but for how long?
[Turton] To simply assume that
the next rain is going to suddenly wash all your problems away
is in my view, suicidal.
Unfortunately the day zero debate only focuses on
water for baths, water for toilets, water for drinking, water for showers.
Domestic water. That's not the significant water.
There's water for the economy.
There's water to sustain jobs.
There's water for tourism.
There's water for agriculture, water for the food that we eat.
That's big water.
So there is no economic future based on the business as usual approach.
[Chiwetel] Scientists do not expect the Earth
to run out of water any time soon.
The total amount of fresh water
hasn't changed since the age of the dinosaurs.
The pattern of human civilization,
the great cities, agriculture, power plants,
all the infrastructure of life on Earth,
has been determined by the availability of water.
But the patterns of water availability are shifting.
The evidence from space shows that while in some regions,
the water supply remains stable,
in others there are unsettling fluctuations.
The world's wetlands, in the tropics
and the extremely high latitudes are getting wetter.
[digital bleeps]
The dry areas in between are becoming drier.
Too much water, or too little,
either way, these fundamental shifts can be devastating.
[digital bleeps]
[gentle guitar music plays]
My name is Mike Callicrate.
We're in St. Francis, Kansas.
We raise cattle and hogs and we have some chickens for eggs.
And we basically produce food.
[gentle guitar music plays]
[Chiwetel] Mike Callicrate is a country boy through and through.
Born third of eight children
to a family that had been farming on the plains
since the early 1900s.
His dad and his granddad had been farmers
and Mike was never going to be the one to change anything.
-[guitar music plays] -[cheering and hollering]
[Mike] I started riding bulls when I was in high school.
I'd go to high school rodeos and then it was an easy
transition to want to go to college and rodeo in college.
I not only was a bull rider and could make money rodeoing
but I made the bull ropes that the bull riders use to hang onto.
I ended up being one of the top three bull rope makers in the country.
[Chiwetel] This is Callicrate country, the High Plains,
home to 20 percent of the entire agricultural output of the United States.
Today, Mike raises 1,500 head of cattle on his family farm.
But small family farms are dying out on the high plains.
And Mike Callicrate has every reason to be worried.
His family have seen the high plains die once before.
For a time, the waves of migrants who settled in the high plains
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had enjoyed success.
Demand was high and the crops were rich and plentiful.
But deep ploughing and over exploitation had loosened the topsoil...
[wind blows]
...and when drought came during the 1930s,
followed by high winds,
the fine soil of the prairies
blew as far as Chicago and Washington, D.C.
The High Plains became a dust bowl
covering 100 million acres of land.
Many believed the Day of Judgment had arrived
and the world was coming to an end.
And in a sense, the worst environmental disaster in American history
was a judgment.
[haunting wind bellows]
The farmers of the Dust Bowl knew there was water underground.
They used to say they could feel it moving beneath their feet...
But they couldn't reach it.
It was only in the '40s that geologists worked out
that they were sitting on enough water to submerge the entire state of Colorado,
to a depth of 45 feet.
They called it the Ogallala aquifer,
one of the biggest underground reservoirs of freshwater in the world.
The water contained between layers of clay, silt, sand and gravel
has been there since the last Ice Age.
And there was enough of it to fill Lake Huron.
Under the High Plains, the Ogallala reaches out
for 175,000 square miles
from the Texas Panhandle to South Dakota.
The wooden windmill pumps used by the early settlers
made little impression
on the massive reserves of water which lay underneath their farms.
But after World War II, they adopted better drilling technology
and high-tech irrigation systems.
Soon a new, industrial-scale agriculture,
was turning the lands of the Dust Bowl into Americas bread-basket.
But it all depended on the Ogallala,
and water was now being extracted from the aquifer
faster than it could be replaced.
By the 1950's, some of the survivors of the Dust Bowl
were turning into millionaire landowners.
It was Boom Time for America.
The birth of rock and roll.
Nineteen-cent Hamburgers in the drive-in diner.
Modern life moving so fast
that even a reservoir the size of Lake Huron
couldn't keep up with the demand.
Almost a third of the Ogallala's water has already gone,
most of what's left will disappear in the space of a lifetime.
The farmers of the High Plains are looking down the barrel of a new Dust Bowl.
[Mike, on radio] We are in Yuma County
and Yuma County is probably the most irrigated county in Colorado.
The heart of the industrial agriculture of Colorado.
On the left is probably the biggest feed-lot in the country.
There is about 130,000 in capacity there in that facility,
and next to it on the west side is probably another 20,000 cattle.
So right in that area there could be as many as 150,000 head of cattle on feed.
This is not a farm, this is a factory.
So the big feedlot is going to be located where the water is
and that is over the Ogallala aquifer.
You can see all of the irrigation around.
These feedlots, these are center pivots.
The water used in a feedlot is not what the cattle are drinking,
it's what the crops are consuming
in the production of the corn, the alfalfa hay.
I can tell you that the industrial model will fail because it is not sustainable.
It is like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
[Chiwetel] The statistics stagger the imagination.
More excrement comes from the biggest feedlot
than a city the size of Denver.
The world's 1.5 billion cattle drink five times more water
than the entire human race.
[man 4] Our barbecue is prepared with just the right amount of heat
to keep in the natural juices and hold in that wonderful flavour.
[Chiwetel] Over 90% of water from the Ogallala is used for irrigation.
[woman 10] Ever hear of a criss-cross burger,
it's easy to make and wonderfully good to eat.
[Chiwetel] It takes 600 gallons for a simple hamburger.
[man 5] Put the barbecued meat on a tender bun
and you've got some eating that's world beating.
Try our famous barbecue at the refreshment stand now.
[Chiwetel] Nearly a thousand gallons for a regular steak.
[man 6] Is there anything more important for a family meal than meat?
Better buy it from the store you can trust.
[Chiwetel] The water to produce a full-grown cow
is enough for a 10-minute shower everyday for over 130 years.
The Ogallala will run out of water in the space of a lifetime.
This is where it is going.
It's not the water we drink which is the problem,
it's the water we eat.
And the world's appetite is growing fast.
There's been a 500% increase in meat production since 1961
and with the world population expected to grow to nine billion by 2050,
further massive increases in production will be needed to meet demand.
But by then, almost all the Ogallala will be dry.
[Familglietti] What's become very clear
is that the world's major aquifers are being depleted.
Some of them at a very rapid clip.
We've got the aquifers in the Arabian peninsula
and across the Middle East.
Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, India, Bangladesh, North China plain.
Over here in North Western Australia. Really all over the world.
So this is a cause for huge concern
because those aquifers provide the water for irrigation to grow
most of the food that we grow in the world.
The high plains aquifer in particular
we grow a tremendous amount of grain and beef.
And this is a region that is projected to run out of groundwater in about 30 years.
When I think about the collapse of water availability
in our big food producing regions.
So much of that middle part of the United States
is dominated by agriculture
and provides food security for this country
so what will those people do for jobs? And what will we do for food security?
The implications for that I think are staggering.
[digital bleeps from satellites]
[Chiwetel] Today, the face of the cattle business on the High Plains
is the face of industrial agriculture.
They take the lion's share of the market.
They take the lion's share of the Ogallala's
rapidly diminishing supply of water.
The small farmers are being pushed aside.
[Mike] I think that we are in a really, really big mess
as far as agriculture is concerned.
That we would exploit our resources
to the point where there isn't any more water.
Where there isn't any more healthy soils.
What about my grandson? What's he going to do for water?
[Chiwetel] The threat to the Ogallala's fresh water haunts the high plains.
Ghost Towns are making a come back.
Tens of thousands of small farmers
have sold up and moved on in the past 20 years.
Unable to keep pace with the demands of the market.
[Mike] What we would like to do up here is really show
a regenerative model of production.
What can heal the land? What can use less water?
[Chiwetel] From where Mike's coming from, it's no surprise
that he's become the champion of the traditional family farm.
The dilemma is the farms that use less water
cannot satisfy the world's craving for beef
and the farms that produce most of the world's beef,
are killing off the supply of fresh water for everyone.
[Mike] Without the water of the Ogallala Aquifer,
the big corporations wouldn't be here at all.
And the thing that's so tragic I think is that the water is free.
It doesn't cost them anything.
It's absolutely free.
It should be in the property of people everywhere that live in the region.
That water should be the people's water.
It's like the air we breathe.
I mean how long can you live without water?
[Chiwetel] But time on the High Plains is running out.
Every day that passes, there's less water in the Ogallala.
When it's dry, it will take 6,000 years of rainfall to fill it up again.
[Mike] The corporate model of industrial agriculture
is really a mining operation.
It's really an extraction model of agriculture.
Where they use up the natural capital that being water and soil.
Or when that water is depleted to a point
that it makes no more sense to pump it,
the big corporations and the industrial agriculture corporations will be gone
and like in a mine, when a mine is spent,
when a mine has no more gold, no more silver,
no more coal, what does the mining company do?
They shut the mine down and they leave.
[poignant piano music plays]
They leave behind...
broken communities.
They leave behind empty feedlots
and they leave behind the destruction.
Big industrial farmers are not going to stop
until the Ogallala Aquifer is pumping air.
[wind howling]
[digital bleeps pulse]
[digital bleeps fade]
[percussive music builds]
[Chiwetel] Brazil.
The front line between nature and modern civilization.
Many believe that this is where the future of the world's climate will be decided.
A frontier...
[gun clicks]
...where the idea of climate change ceases to be an abstraction.
Already, Brazil is the world's ninth biggest economy.
But economic development has come at a high price.
The Amazon is the biggest rainforest in the world.
But in Brazil,
illegal logging has already reduced its size by almost a fifth.
While the country's population doubled to over 200 million since 1970,
the rainforest lost an area the size of Texas.
It's already possible to envisage an Amazon without a rainforest.
[in Portuguese] Over here, the tractor, we found the tractor.
We managed to track down the tractor
inside the nature reserve.
[Chiwetel, in English] There's more fresh water in Brazil
than anywhere on Earth.
But its biggest cities are being hit by drought.
[crowd chants]
[Chiwetel] Water demonstrations in the streets,
a sense that something in the climate is going wrong.
And the growing awareness...
that the fate of the trees in the forest
and the failure of the rains in the city
are somehow connected.
[waves crashing]
-[child screaming and yelling] -[waves crashing]
[Chiwetel] The man on the beach playing with his daughter
is Antonio Nobre.
[child shouting in Portuguese]
[Chiwetel, in English] He works for the Brazilian Institute
for Space Research.
And if you ask him what he does,
sooner or later he will tell you the same story he tells his daughter,
he's trying to save the world.
He'll tell you that saving the world is stressful.
That he's already had four major heart operations.
He'll tell you he delayed having a family
because he was so involved with his work in the Amazon rainforest.
[converses in Portuguese]
[Chiwetel, in English] Tonight's story is about the minotaur.
But the story he tells about the Amazon is far more frightening.
[in Portuguese] You can rest assured that you are breathing the purest air on Earth,
here in the Amazon,
because the plants take care of this as well.
The benefit of how plants work is through another ingenious cycle...
[Chiwetel, in English] Professor Nobre is one of Brazil's leading scientists
and has made it his mission to make the world understand
the coming catastrophe.
[in Portuguese] As in the upper airways of the lung,
the air in the Amazon is free of excess dust.
[Chiwetel, in English] The Amazon.
Seventeen times the size of the British Isles.
The largest treasure house of plants and animal species in the world...
and for many, the closest place on Earth to the Garden of Eden.
Thirteen hundred different kinds of birds live among its trees.
Three thousand species of fish swim in its rivers.
Compared to the forest's 55 million years of existence,
human beings are mere newcomers.
But now the newcomers...
are threatening to destroy the rainforest forever.
[Nobre] We are producing a desert
in the most rich forest ecosystem in the world.
One species from ignorance is destroying the whole system.
We are basically compromising the very web of life that sustains us.
Without which, we would not have a chance.
I have this incredible suffering from people not listening.
The Indians are more careful, and they are more respectful
because they are a product of the forest.
One of the traditional leaders of the Yamomami told me
that if you chop down the forest,
the rain will stop
and there will be nothing to drink or eat.
And when I asked him,
how they knew about this connection between the forest and the rain, he said,
"Our ancestors have always known how the rain was made."
They learnt it from the spirits of the forest.
[Chiwetel] Without trees, there would be no water.
The thought had occurred to Christopher Columbus
when he first came to America.
The trees in the forest are not there because of the rain.
The rain is there because of the trees.
It is the idea that has been at the heart of Antonio Nobre's work in the rainforest.
We have a phenomenon that's so mundane.
Everybody say, "Oh, a tree".
But they don't realise, we don't realise what is happening inside.
We don't realise how complex, how incredibly evolved.
It took 400 million years to get to this point.
The tree is an incredibly complex machine
that is able to pump water deep from the water in the soil,
and pump it against gravity
and keep going and going and going. All the way to the leaves.
And release that in the atmosphere like if it were a geyser,
and you don't see it because it's vapor, it's invisible.
And as it does it, it is like an irrigation system in reverse.
[Chiwetel] Water vapor alone will not turn into rain unless it is seeded.
In the Amazon, the forest produces its own rain by throwing out into the sky
clouds of volatile organic compounds,
which transform the vapor into raindrops.
And the more rain the forest needs,
the more particles the trees release into the atmosphere.
[Nobre] It's magical, in a sense.
It's magical dust
that sprinkles there into the atmosphere which makes the rain to come down,
pixie dust.
And this was the explanation for it, the solution to the mystery.
Finally, "Elementary, my dear Watson".
[orchestral music plays]
[Chiwetel] It's been called the river in the sky.
Everyday each of the forest's 400 billion trees
sends 1,000 liters of water into the atmosphere.
Twenty billion tons.
More water above the tree tops than flows from the River Amazon itself.
Now all of this is threatened by interests that want to turn the forest
into cattle ranches and soya beans.
[satellite digital bleeps]
Satellites from NASA's Landsat programme monitoring the rainforest.
For 25 years, photographs from space
have documented the deforestation.
Six thousand eight hundred acres of rainforest destroyed every day.
Nearly 300 an hour.
An area the size of almost three football pitches every minute.
[helicopter whirling]
It's is the job of IBAMA, Brazil's environmental police force,
to protect the rainforest.
But it's a dangerous business.
In the Amazon, the fight against climate change
goes head to head with the fight to make money.
Brazil has become the most dangerous country in the world
to be an environmentalist.
[helicopter whirling]
Midsummer 2018.
IBAMA are on a mission near Concelvan, in North-Western Mato Grosso,
at the heart of an area known as the Arc of Destruction.
[in Portuguese] Look at the wood there.
Sometimes more than one company uses the same sawmill
so they can obscure their activity
and avoid inspections.
[speaks Portuguese]
[Chiwetel, in English] They'd hoped for an element of surprise
but here, as often happens, the loggers have been tipped off.
[in Portuguese] Good morning. Everything OK?
Who is in charge here?
-Do you work here? -I do.
[Chiwetel, in English] Militia protect the IBAMA investigators from ambush.
[in Portuguese] Is the owner here?
[continues speaking in Portuguese]
[man 7] He isn't here today, no.
[man 8] Who is the timber merchant here?
Charles.
Charles?
[Chiwetel, in English] The timber yard has a license.
But IBAMA suspects it's a front for illegal logging.
[in Portuguese] The company is working here day and night?
The office is over there, right? Is the paperwork in there?
I don't know.
The office is over there.
[Chiwetel, in English] They are looking for contraband timber,
extracted illegally from protected areas.
[in Portuguese] Does the wood arrive in the morning or afternoon?
[man 9] I don't know.
I'm going to photograph the site a little.
-Name? -Wellington dos Santos Oliviera.
[Chiwetel, in English] The bosses are missing.
Little can be done but to book the low-grade workers who are left behind.
To those who want to save the rainforest, IBAMA have always been the good guys.
But the odds have turned heavily against them.
While this film was being made,
a new president has come to power in Brazil with a different agenda.
IBAMA's strength has been drastically reduced.
Budget cuts, senior officers fired. Operations cut back.
Even the loggers they catch are going unpunished,
as the new government paves the way
to open up the rainforest to agribusiness and mining.
In the six hours it took to make the raid,
elsewhere in the Amazon,
another 1,300 acres of rainforest have disappeared forever.
[birds squawking]
[Nobre] Everything that's living obeys the same principles,
the circulation in human body, the circulation in the rainforest.
When we started looking into the water
and how the water flows and how the water is
manipulated by trees in so many ways,
I start feeling like there should be a better parallel
with human physiology or human workings, metabolism,
and they found the analogy was a heart.
'Cause it's actually pumping.
Then you have the rivers coming off the Amazon,
they are draining the tissues of nature.
The tissues of the landscape.
And you see that's precisely what the blood does in our body.
When the blood go through your tissues, it collects all the waste,
and then bring it back to the heart, which pumps it again.
It's refreshed in the lungs and go all around your body.
And this is precisely what happens in--in a large scale,
in a continental scale, in the Amazon.
But instead of blood you have water. So water is the blood of the landscape.
[Chiwetel] All things in nature are connected...
and water is the common thread of circulations
that links all forms of life.
What is happening in the Amazon affects all of us.
In nature, what goes around, comes around.
[Nobre] The notion that the forest functions like a heart is a new one.
Once you take it out, the heart dies and then the whole system dies.
We are crossing the point of no return right now.
[Chiwetel] Since the new government came to power in Brazil,
the pace of destruction has accelerated.
An estimated loss of two and a half billion trees every year.
In their place, cattle ranches.
Eighty percent of the deforested Amazon
has gone to supply the world's rocketing appetite for beef.
In exchange for the rainforest,
Brazil now boasts the second largest cattle herd in the world.
Anyone can buy a Brazilian hamburger
in New York, London, Moscow or Beijing.
Meanwhile, as Professor Nobre predicted,
Brazil's great cities
are already beginning to pay the price for deforestation.
Diminished rainfall in Rio and Sao Paulo...
Severe drought in Belo Horizonte.
[waves crashing]
[Nobre] What would you do if you know what I know?
[Chiwetel] The question that has haunted Antonio Nobre's working life
has come to haunt us all.
[Nobre] The Second World War was nothing.
What is coming our way is one thousand times worse.
[Chiwetel] The filming of this story began in a very different world
than the one we live in today.
Everything has changed.
Coronavirus has taught us that some warnings do come true.
[Nobre] It's absolutely essential that humanity, uh, understands
what kind of risks we are running right now.
I mean losing our habitat.
Losing the planet where we have evolved.
It means really losing the capacity of continuing to live on Earth.
[woman 11] More than 15,000 scientists
are sounding an alarm about climate change,
they call it a warning to humanity.
[overlapping news reporting]
[man 10] Here along the Golf Coast, it's catastrophic.
There's a frantic effort underway tonight to find survivors.
[man 11] 2014 was the warmest year in the Earth's recorded history
and it's only getting hotter.
[man 12] As we see the climate warming,
the one thing that we're most clear about
is we'll have more cold events and more heat events.
[reporting continues]
[Chiwetel] The world is experiencing a perfect storm
of climate change and rising population.
[man 13] More than 1,200 people are believed to have died...
[Chiwetel] Experts say it's through water
that most of us will feel the effects of climate change first.
[man 14] Nobody can say when the next flood will be
but everybody knows that the waters will rise once more.
[Chiwetel] But for many, the water crisis has already begun.
Until now, Day Zero
was something that could only happen to other people in far off places.
The fight back begins when the message comes closer to home.
Fighting back is what the farmers on the High Plains are doing
to protect their water from over-exploitation.
-[whistling and jeering] -[sombre music plays]
Fighting back is what has been happening in city after city
as water shortages drive protesters onto the streets.
But Day Zero is more than a local problem.
-[whistling and jeering] -[sombre music plays]
It's a global problem...
-[whistling and jeering] -[sombre music plays]
...and involves us all.
To the world leaders, and those in power
I would like to say that you haven't seen anything yet!
[Chiwetel] Australia, Cape Town, California, Kansas.
Behind all these local Day Zeroes,
science has discovered a common denominator.
And a common solution.
[insect chirring]
"What would you do if you knew what I know?"
Well, now we know.
And now it's up to all of us to do something, before it's too late.
Modern life on Earth,
the life we've grown used to,
is unsustainable.
There's not enough nature to go round.
They used to say that water was nature's way of talking to mankind.
Well, we've reached to the point in time
where we're going to have to start listening.
[soft choral music playing]
[music fades]