VERY IMPORTANT TOPIC. I have not yet read your linked article, but ...
Water tankers?
With so much water melting from the Greenland ice sheet, and given the extent of some of these water flows, someone will come up with an engineered plan to harvest this melt water before it gets to the ocean.
There is the opportunity to "mine" ice (with loaders and excavators) from the Antarctic and load it into ships/pontoons as broken ice blocks. This could then be transported to the heavily populated coastal areas deficient in water.
While these ideas may be "engineeringly" feasible, the problem comes with the cost and can the end users pay for it?
Let us assume that Niger/Nigeria/Ethiopia/Chad/Uganda/Burma … has years of drought. No company will make a profit in selling the water to these countries, therefore the population will just suffer diseases as their sanitation systems cease to function.
There have been lost of studies in water needs in the world and the "developed" nations have a far greater use of water than the "undeveloped" nation. There is a concept called "hidden water use".
Hidden water use in foodstuffs:
Many people think that our water consumption is just what we get from the tap, without considering the amount of water required to feed a cow to produce a litre of milk or a Kg of beef, get a chook egg, a kg of rice, bananas vegetables, fruit ……. This is how a world fresh water shortage will cause food shortages.
Hidden water use in clothing and packaging:
The water needed to grow cotton, coconut fibre, leather, nylon, ….
Hidden water use in industry and sanitation
Yes every single item has many litres of "hidden water use" in its construction and disposal, whether it be rubber tyres, paints, steel products etc
Water shortages will affect everyone severely, but because the more industrialized countries have a much higher overall water consumption per person it is fact the industrialized countries which could suffer the most from water shortages - unless they take someone else's water.
What will this mean?
The northern states in the US for example need lots of water to maintain industry and farming.
Countries like Greenland, Canada, those in the headwaters of the Himalayas have fresh water that can be cheaply harvested.
Anyone who thinks that countries like the US will PAY for water from Canada are living in fantasy-land. The US will just and take water from Canada, by inter-Government co-ercion. (All those fresh-water lakes in the North-West Territories.)
As for Australia. No one will come after Australia to take our water directly, but then consider what is happening with the cotton plantations in the eastern states of Australia. Is this not "hidden water use" harvesting as a result of inter-Government co-ercion. The Murray Darling River system is being destroyed through a lack of water flow. Our Liberal Government politicians got a few political donations and rolled over.
Another item to consider is that MANY coastal cities around rely on fossil underground lenses of water which were formed at a time when the sea level was much lower. Once these fossil water supplies are used up these cities have no back up plan to instigate. So the effect of the drying up of a city's underground reservoir will be very fast, almost unexpected, and catastrophic for the population.
Expand
