A Thirsty Planet Looks For Solutions To Water Shortage
- added March 24, 2008
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- JanforGore
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Another important issue that should be on the news and in every newspaper, but isn't.
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Global economic growth, population pressures and the rise of mega-cities have all driven water use to record levels.
Mexico City, Jakarta and Bangkok, to name a few, have underground water sources -- some of them nonrenewable -- depleting at alarming rates.
In Beijing, home to 16 million, aquifers have fallen by more than a dozen metres (40 feet) in 30 years, forcing the government to earmark tens of billions of dollars for a scheme to ferry water from the Yangzte River in the south to the country's parched north.
Aggravating the shortages are pathogen and chemical pollution, which have transformed many primary sources of water in the developing world into toxic repositories of disease.
Desperation forces people to consume these contaminated waters.
"In the coming decades, water scarcity may be a watchword that prompts action ranging from wholesale population migration to war, unless new ways to supply clean water are found," comment a team of researchers in a review of water purification technology published Thursday in the British journal Nature.
But even as scientists and governments look for ways to satisfy a thirsty world, another threat looms on the horizon: global warming.
Rising sea levels are already forcing salt water into aquifers beneath megadeltas that are home to tens of millions, and changing weather patterns are set to intensify droughts in large swathes of Africa, southern Europe and Asia, according to UN's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).
Experts and policy makers point to three broad categories of initiatives to ease the shortage of clean, drinkable water, especially in the world's poorest regions: sanitation, purification, and water management.
end of excerpt.
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Global economic growth, population pressures and the rise of mega-cities have all driven water use to record levels.
Mexico City, Jakarta and Bangkok, to name a few, have underground water sources -- some of them nonrenewable -- depleting at alarming rates.
In Beijing, home to 16 million, aquifers have fallen by more than a dozen metres (40 feet) in 30 years, forcing the government to earmark tens of billions of dollars for a scheme to ferry water from the Yangzte River in the south to the country's parched north.
Aggravating the shortages are pathogen and chemical pollution, which have transformed many primary sources of water in the developing world into toxic repositories of disease.
Desperation forces people to consume these contaminated waters.
"In the coming decades, water scarcity may be a watchword that prompts action ranging from wholesale population migration to war, unless new ways to supply clean water are found," comment a team of researchers in a review of water purification technology published Thursday in the British journal Nature.
But even as scientists and governments look for ways to satisfy a thirsty world, another threat looms on the horizon: global warming.
Rising sea levels are already forcing salt water into aquifers beneath megadeltas that are home to tens of millions, and changing weather patterns are set to intensify droughts in large swathes of Africa, southern Europe and Asia, according to UN's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).
Experts and policy makers point to three broad categories of initiatives to ease the shortage of clean, drinkable water, especially in the world's poorest regions: sanitation, purification, and water management.
end of excerpt.
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- JanforGore
- 5 months ago
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