Filmed over three years, Day Zero journeys across the planet investigating the growing water crisis. Industrial agriculture has allowed the human population to grow to 8 billion. But, with underground aquifers rapidly depleting, and with the destruction of the Amazon rainforest disrupting the global climate, the industrial model is about to fail with catastrophic consequences for world food supplies. When the Earth was photographed from the far side of the moon by Apollo 10, there were 3.5 billion people on Earth. Now, there are twice that many. In the 1960s, New York and Tokyo were the only two megacities with populations of over ten million. Now, there are more than thirty. Most of them with populations much bigger than New York. Water made these cities possible, but what happens if the water starts running out? At Nasa, Jay Famiglietti pioneered a space mission to try to discover what was happening to water supplies over the entire planet. Two billion people depend on vast underground aquifers for drinking water and growing food. The Grace satellites proved that these aquifers are losing water much faster than anyone predicted. Grace was a wake-up call. The satellites had looked into the future and, for vast swathes of the US and the world, the future is dry. The High Plains Aquifer provides water for irrigation across the Mid-West region of the United States. Almost a third of the 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. A process mirrored across much of the planet. There is more fresh water in Brazil than anywhere on Earth but its biggest cities are being hit by drought. Water demonstrations in the streets, a sense that something in the climate is going wrong. Professor Carlos Nobre is one of Brasil's leading scientists and has made it his mission to make the world understand the coming catastrophe. A tree is an incredibly complex machine that is able to pump water from deep underground all the way to the leaves and release it into the atmosphere as vapour. And as it does so, it is like an irrigation system in reverse. The Amazon rainforest produces its own rain by throwing out clouds of volatile organic compounds into the atmosphere which transform water vapour into raindrops. The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed at an accelerated rate in order to feed humanity's growing appetite for meat. And with the world population expected to grow to 9 billion by 2050, further massive increases in production will be needed to meet demand. But by then, many of the world's aquifers will have run dry as extreme weather events and drought grow in frequency. The day the water runs out has been termed Day Zero. 'The Second World War was nothing. What is coming our way is a thousand times worse.' Day Zero: https://amzn.to/3jTrVoj This channel is not monetized. All ads are run by the copyright owner.