tagged w/ Water Scarcity
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Meghalaya India, the wettest place on Earth is now known as a wet desert due to water scarcity. Has climate change also now even reached the most hidden pristine parts of our world?
From the article:
Nothing can be more ironical: despite being the wettest place on earth Cherrapunjee is suffering from acute water scarcity, earning for itself the epithet wet desert.
And now the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) is assisting the Meghalaya government to go into the causes of the scarcity, especially during the lean period. The study will include technical assessments on the status of river catchments in Meghalaya and social and institutional analysis of the forces that have led to the shortage of water, says Jevon Harding of TERI.
TERI will assist the Rain Water Harvesting Mission, formed by the state government, to combat the shortage of surface water. One of the components of the study will be to come up with a strategy of rainwater harvesting.
Cherrapunjee receives about 12000 mm rainfall annually, but the residents face severe crisis of surface water specially during the lean season when rainfall is sometimes nil.
Women and children trudging uphill with water-filled clay-pots on their backs from deep gorges is a common sight in Cherrapunjee today. The perennial springs gushing out abundant water are also now on the verge of drying up due to random large-scale destruction of forests.
Environmentalist Naba Bhattacharjee said, It-s a false notion that high rainfall will ensure perennial water supply for infinity. Only 0.0007 per cent of the world-s total water is potable and which is on decline due to change in rainfall pattern and inadequate precipitation due to global warming and climate change.
He, however, emphasized on revival of traditional rain water storage systems supplemented by improved modern technology suitable for hilly the terrain.
Emphasizing on equitable distribution of water among people, anthropologist Nitish Jha of the TERI said, There is no physical crisis of water in Meghalaya, but there is an economic scarcity of water only in Cherrapunjee (now called Sohra), which receives the highest rainfall in the world.
Jha said that the TERI would venture into an extensive survey over a period of one year to ascertain the cause of water crisis in Shillong and Sohra and subsequently come out with a detailed project report on tackling the situation through effective management and conservation measures.
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Jha pointed out that the peculiar land tenure system prevalent in the State coupled with the menace of unscientific coal mining and stone quarrying have depleted water levels in the perennial catchments of the state.Meghalaya India, the wettest place on Earth is now known as a wet desert due to water... more
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By the end of this year a first-time record of 3.3 billion people, more than half of the world's population, are expected to live in urban areas according to the UN.
This was announced in a documentary entitled Eco-Cities, Sustainable cities for the Future launched by IUCN, International Union for Conservation of Nature West Asia/Middle East Regional Office and Ministry of Environment during the Eco-Cities of the Mediterranean 2008 conference held in Jordan from 18-20 October, 2008.
The idea about this documentary, funded by the IUCN global Water and Nature Initiative (WANI), came from the pressing need to address the concept of sustainable cities or eco-cities as a solution for all the environmental and economic challenges facing cities in the Middle East and North Africa.
The film focuses on the environmental challenges, current actions and future plans in Jordan and Egypt. Highlighting the issues of water quality and scarcity, solid waste, urbanization and air pollution the documentary also tackles the solutions and actions to face those environmental challenges such as renewable energy, water treatment and harvesting, solid waste management and recycling and the results of those solutions not only on the environment, but also on the economy and society.
I think all of us have responsibilities to look very seriously at the impacts of our actions on the environment. And if we don't, then the future of our children and grandchildren will be bleak, HRH Prince Hamza bin Al Hussein of Jordan said in the Eco-Cities documentary.
The cost of environmental degradation in Jordan and in the Arab World is around 5% of the GDP, so once we reduce that through better environmental management, we improve our economy, according to HE Khaled Al Irani, Jordanian Minister of Environment.
I believe eco-cities is a process rather than a product; it is a way of life. It is an approach that people need to change their lives and worldviews in order to make sure that harmony between nature, people and markets is taking place, says Dr Odeh Al-Jayyousi, IUCN West Asia/Middle East Regional Director.
According to the 25-minute documentary, Jordan's annual water supply is 900 MCM, while the demand is 1500 MCM. The majority of the deficit comes from the unsustainable groundwater use. More than 65% of our water in Jordan is used for irrigation, says HE Khaled Al Irani, Jordanian Minister of Environment.
16 million people living in Cairo depend on the Nile. Yet its river basins are subject to untreated sewage and industrial effluence. We are trying to save the quality of water of the Nile, but our main concern is industrial waste, says Dr Mawaheb Abul Azm, CEO Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency. Before 2001, 100 MCM of untreated industrial waste were dumped into the Nile each year according to governmental figures. However, inspections and enforcing environmental laws have stopped industries polluting the river.
By the end of this year a first-time record of 3.3 billion people, more than half of... more
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Parts of the world may have to be abandoned because severe water shortages will leave them uninhabitable, the United Nations environment chief has warned.
Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said water shortages caused by over-use of rivers and aquifers were already leading to serious problems, even in rich nations. With climate change expected to reduce rainfall in some places and cause droughts in others, some regions could become 'economic deserts', unviable for people or agriculture, he said.
Steiner argued that only urgent action to combat global warming and poverty could prevent the creation of thousands of 'environmental refugees'. Previous UN agreements to reduce global warming emissions and the Millennium Development Goals on poverty had not been met. His warning echoes those of other environment leaders, who have said that water shortages could be the greatest threat posed by climate change.
'In many ways [water] is the most dramatic expression of mismanagement of natural or nature-based assets,' Steiner said. 'The day a person or a community is bereft of water is the day that your chance of even the most basic life or livelihood is gone and economic activity seeps away.
'Unchecked climate change will mean that some parts of the world will simply not have enough water to sustain settlements both small and large, because agriculture becomes untenable and industries relying on water can no longer compete or function effectively. This will trigger structural changes in economies right through to the displacement of people as environmental refugees.'
Steiner said it was not possible to identify specific places at risk, but said vulnerable areas were those which were already considered to be 'water scarce' because of dry weather and a lack of infrastructure to store and transport water. Last week a study of the water footprints of 200 nations led by conservation group WWF warned that 50 countries were already experiencing 'moderate to severe water stress on a year-round basis'.
This week experts from the UN Convention to Combat Desertification meeting in Turkey will warn that high food prices and endemic droughts are jeopardising the lives of hundreds of millions of people, particularly in Africa.
Some of the most dramatic examples of water shortages this year include conflict-stricken Sudan, the dramatic drying of Lake Faguibine in Mali on which 200,000 mostly nomadic people depend, fatal clashes over drying boreholes in northern Kenya, and economic and social crisis on the sparsely populated border between Bolivia and Argentina, according to Unep. Oxfam has estimated that 25 million people have been affected by the most recent drought in Ethiopia.
Rich nations are not immune. California has declared a state of emergency over water shortages, Australia has committed billions of dollars to cope with drought, and governments in Europe have been forced to ship in water to stop communities running dry.
'A plant, never mind a human being, simply cannot live without water,' said Steiner. 'It's not a matter of how we can live for three years without some water; these are not the kind of things we can do for a while and recover.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/02/climate-change-desertification-water-drought
Parts of the world may have to be abandoned because severe water shortages will leave... more
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You can register there and give your opinion in an open debate on water commoditization up to October 10th. Vandana Shiva represents the con side, and someone named Steven Hoffman represents the pro side. This is a good opportunity to let your voice be heard about commoditization of water resources. And of course, it isn't any surprise to see DOW Chemical sponsoring this especially since they wish to buy desalination plants and probably wants to see privitization to hold back resources to spur the building of such plants. There is an all out assault on our resources by corporate America for profit now and we must fight it for our own survival. I firmly believe that now, and this open debate is where you can make your opinions known. I am registered there as 'waterahumanright.' Please participate and give the water justice movement and environmental democracy a hand.
Currently, the voting is: pro 40% / con 60%.
Thanks!You can register there and give your opinion in an open debate on water... more
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Most people may drink only two litres of water a day, but they consume about 3,000 if the water that goes into their food is taken into account. The rich gulp down far more, since they tend to eat more meat, which takes far more water to produce than grains. So as the world's population grows and incomes rise, farmers will if they use today's methods need a great deal more water to keep everyone fed: 2,000 more cubic kilometres a year by 2030, according to the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), a research centre, or over a quarter more than they use today. Yet in many farming regions, water is scarce and likely to get scarcer as global warming worsens. The world is facing not so much a food crisis as a water crisis, argues Colin Chartres, IWMI's director-general.
The solution, Mr Chartres and others contend, is more efficient use of water or, as the sloganeers put it,; more crop per drop;. Some 1.2 billion people, about a fifth of the world's population, live in places that are short of water (see map). Farming accounts for roughly 70% of human water consumption. So when water starts to run out, as is happening in northern China, southern Spain and the western United States, among other places, farming tends to offer the best potential for thrift. But governments, whether to win votes or to protect the poor, rarely charge farmers a market price for water. So they are usually more wasteful than other consumers even though the value they create from the water is often less than households or industry would be willing to pay for it.
The pressing need is to make water go further. Antoine Frarot, the head of the water division of Veolia Environnement, a French firm, promotes recycling, whereby city wastewater is treated until it can be used in industry or agriculture. This costs about a third less than desalination, and cuts pollution. He expects his recycling business to quadruple in the next decade. Yet as Mr Frarot himself concedes, there are many even cheaper ways to save water. As much as 70% of water used by farmers never gets to crops, perhaps lost through leaky irrigation channels or by draining into rivers or groundwater. Investment in drip irrigation, or simply repairing the worst leaks, could bring huge savings.
end of excerpt.
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I believe that irrigation holds the solution to a great part of the global water crisis. In many parts of the world sprinkler irrigation is still the most used method of irrigation because it is the most available and least expensive. This method however is very wasteful, and using it in places where pervasive drought is common is not cost effective. In order for us as a species to mitigate the crisis we will surely face regarding water if present behavior persists we will have to change how we do things. Regarding the irrigation of crops it will be how they are irrigated, when they are irrigated based on changing weather patterns, and also in focusing on areas looking towards less water intensive crops in drier areas.
It is unfortunate that the very places where the most water intensive crops are grown such as cotton, rice, and corn (India, China, Africa, and the Southwest US ) are experiencing the most pervasive droughts and desertification now. As population increases towards 9 billion and resources become scarcer, farmers will most certainly have to devise ways of conserving water to get optimal growth and yield from a limited resource.
Through shifting the emphasis on crop varieties grown in these areas if possible and by changing irrigation methods from sprinkler to drip irrigation, trillions of gallons of water could be saved. Also in places where weather patterns are changing and are seeing more rain, rain catchement systems will be invaluable in helping to catch excess rain and use it for irrigation purposes.
more at the link.Most people may drink only two litres of water a day, but they consume about 3,000 if... more
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As the 21st Century begins as the Age of Drought, a look at three places--Florida, China, and Nevada--where dryness has gone big. In Florida, the world's most famous swamp, the Everglades, has been turning into a salt flat. In China, vast problems with water pollution have been compounded in some areas by problems of having no water. And Nevada's Lake Mead, once the largest reservoir in the world, now is given a 50% chance of drying up completely in the next dozen years.As the 21st Century begins as the Age of Drought, a look at three places--Florida,... more
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Scientists are not paying enough attention to glacial melting in the Andes, the Himalayas and peaks in other developing countries, a United Nations-backed report found on Monday.
Experts from the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) said while there has been excellent monitoring of glacial trends in Europe and North America, ice fields in Central Asia and the tropics have been largely overlooked.
This is a major concern given that shrinking and thinning glaciers -- a phenomenon linked to climate change -- could put freshwater supplies at risk for hundreds of millions of people, authors Peter Gilruth and Wilfried Haeberli said.
"Data gaps exist in some vulnerable parts of the globe undermining the ability to provide precise early warning for countries and populations at risk," they concluded.
Their report, released at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. scientific body, called for more investment in high-tech monitoring tools for Central Asia, South America, East Africa and in Papua New Guinea.
The IPCC has said global warming, stoked by the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, will trigger more droughts, floods, heatwaves, and severe storms, and cause sea levels to rise as glaciers and polar ice caps melt.
According to the UNEP and WGMS study, the average melting rate of mountain glaciers has doubled since the turn of the millennium, with record losses seen in 2006 at several sites.
If governments fail to agree to deep emissions cuts when they negotiate a successor deal to the Kyoto Protocol next year in Copenhagen, the authors said it was possible that glaciers may disappear completely from many mountain ranges this century.
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It isn't surprising the poorer countries are not being monitored regarding this. It seems even issues of class have intruded on this moral issue as well. Scientists are not paying enough attention to glacial melting in the Andes, the... more
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The world's supplies of clean, fresh water cannot sustain today's "profligate" use and inadequate management, which have brought shrinking food supplies and rising food costs to most countries, WWF Director General James Leape told the opening session of World Water Week in Stockholm today.
"Behind the world food crisis is a global freshwater crisis, expected to rapidly worsen as climate change impacts intensify," Leape said. "Irrigation-fed agriculture provides 45 percent of the world's food supplies, and without it, we could not feed our planet's population of six billion people."
Leape warns that many of the world's irrigation areas are highly stressed and drawing more water than rivers and groundwater reserves can sustain, especially in view of climate change. At the same time, he said, freshwater food reserves are declining in the face of the quickening pace of dam construction and unsustainable water extractions from rivers.
At a time when billions of people live without access to safe drinking water or suffer ill health due to poor sanitation, when food producers battle biofuel producers for land and water resources, and when global climate change is altering the overall water balance, 2,500 water experts are gathered this week at the Stockholm International Fairs and Congress Center to craft solutions to these problems.
World Water Week is an annual event co-ordinated by the Stockholm International Water Institute. This year's conference has the overall theme of Progress and Prospects on Water: For A Clean and Healthy World with Special Focus on Sanitation" in keeping with the UN declaration of 2008 as the International Year of Sanitation.
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According to an announcement here the amount of people without potable water is going down. This is good news, and is in part due to organizations such as Water Partners International, Water Aid, and other organizations coming together in the water justice movement to bring potable water to more areas of the world that need it most.
It is an encouraging sign, but the work is far from over. Glaciers worldwide continue to melt threatening the water supplies for millions of people as freshwater lakes and rivers continue to decline due to a combination of climate change/global warming, overusage and pollution. The measures outlined by the forum need to be seriously instituted instead of just being talk to carry over for the next year.
As population rises freshwater resources will become even scarcer due to climate changes, pollution, and corporatization, so conservation and more efficient irrigation practices worldwide must be instituted. It is then ironic to see the water fountains going outside the sign to this forum. I wonder if they realized that.
Anyway, I know this issue is not "sexy" and some think it redundant. Well, sorry, but it is the most important environmental issue and crisis we are facing in our world, and the only way people will know about it is for those with the passion to get the message out to persevere in doing so.The world's supplies of clean, fresh water cannot sustain today's... more
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Climate change and a rising population in the region are lending to a drought that is now near crisis stage in Cyprus. I find it very hard to comprehend why so many people do not take this seriously. Water is the mainstay of our lives. Without it we die. The people of Cyprus and actually the entire Mediterranean area are now seeing rising temperatures with less water due to water evaporation. This is now a global crisis that must be addressed along with the climate crisis. We cannot continue to take water for granted and expect it will be there when we need it. For the people of Cyprus as well as people in Australia, Asia, Africa, South America, and now North America, this is just a foretaste of what is to come if we do not get serious about water conservation, more efficient irrigation, and cutting Co2 emissions.Climate change and a rising population in the region are lending to a drought that is... more
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The south-western US is suffering its eighth consecutive year of drought. There are concerns that the Colorado River, which has sustained life in the area for thousands of years, can no longer meet the needs of the tens of millions of people living in major cities such as Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
We cannot continue to waste water as we are doing. We are turning the Western US into a desert.The south-western US is suffering its eighth consecutive year of drought. There are... more
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During the European heat wave of 2003 that killed tens of thousands, the temperature in parts of France hit 104 degrees. Nearly 15,000 people died in that country alone. During the Chicago heat wave of 1995, the mercury spiked at 106 and about 600 people died.
In a few decades, people will look back at those heat waves "and we will laugh," said Andreas Sterl, author of a new study. "We will find (those temperatures) lovely and cool."
Sterl's computer model shows that by the end of the century, high temperatures for once-in-a-generation heat waves will rise twice as fast as everyday average temperatures. Chicago, for example, would reach 115 degrees in such an event by 2100. Paris heat waves could near 109 with Lyon coming closer to 114.
Sterl, who is with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, projects temperatures for rare heat waves around the world in a study soon to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
His numbers are blistering because of the drying-out effect of a warming world. Most global warming research focuses on average daily temperatures instead of these extremes, which cause greater damage.
His study projects a peak of 117 for Los Angeles and 110 for Atlanta by 2100; that's 5 degrees higher than the current records for those cities. Kansas City faces the prospect of a 116-degree heat wave, with its current all-time high at 109, according to the National Climactic Data Center.
During the European heat wave of 2003 that killed tens of thousands, the temperature... more
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Dawn strikes the mountains rising above St. Mary’s Lake in Montana’s Glacier National Park. When the park was created in 1910, it had 150 glaciers. Now it has 30 glaciers, significantly reduced in size.
Many of the world’s freshwater glaciers are shrinking, as warming temperatures melt them away. Some have disappeared all together. The glaciers on both Mount Everest and Mount Kilimanjaro are among those glaciers noticeably decreasing as temperatures climb, causing lower-lying towns considerable worry.
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And when they all melt away then will humanity (if it still exists) say this is a crisis that needs to be 'solved now' when it is too late? Will we still be 'debating' it?Dawn strikes the mountains rising above St. Mary’s Lake in Montana’s... more
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Fred Pearce is an environment and development consultant whose latest book is When the Rivers Run Dry : Water–The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century.
Our list of things to worry about – global warming, oil shortages, bird flu, terrorism, etc. – seems to grow every year. Why do you say water is the “defining crisis of the twenty-first century?”
Oh, there are plenty of things to worry about. Most of them arise from Homo sapiens having to work out how to live together in ever greater numbers on the one planet. Right now we seem to be good at finding technical and organizational fixes (none of the above are really insuperable problems), but rather poor at finding ways of making them happen. In truth, I’d put water up there with global warming at top of the agenda. Many climate scientists think that our big problems with global warming will come less from the warming itself and more from the big changes in hydrology that it causes – droughts and floods, dried out soils and ecosystems, empty rivers, and maybe the worst, the sheer unpredictability of where and when we will have water.But water also defines quite well our problems in moving from a world of apparently plentiful resources – a world in which if we screw up we can move on – to a world of finite resources, where we have to manage carefully to get by. We still often see water as an essentially free and unlimited resource. But it isn’t. The public policy response to water shortages is still to build a new dam or sink a new well, with little regard for the thought that there may be no more water in the river to be captured, or underground to be pumped.
Apart from the air we breathe, water is the most basic, most urgent, need that we all have. We can survive for a while without food, but not without water. We can survive forever without oil – but not without water. Water has no substitute. The good news, though, is that it is a constantly renewed resource. The natural water cycle of evaporation and rainfall constantly cleans and recycles it. We will never “run out” of water in the way we might run out of oil. So the trick, as we find local and sometimes regional reserves running out, is to realise that fact, and to manage our use of water in a way that meshes with the natural cycle.
From that perspective, managing water is a model (and, because of its urgency and universality, the defining model) of how we deal with nature. Not as a force to be confronted, but as a force to be nurtured and to be worked with. That notion holds in every sphere from using “soft engineering” in order to manage floods, to harvesting the rains and to preserving wetlands.
The short answer to the question, therefore, is that meeting water needs (and managing our water demand to fit water availability) is both a major challenge in itself for the 21st century and will define more widely our ability to coexist with nature and make good use of the planet’s fast diminishing “natural capital.” And my belief is that if we can get water right we will be able to get most things right.
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This is an informative and important view about the one resource we cannot live without: water. And along with mismanagement, waste, overconsumption, population increases, broken infrastructure, corporatization, and now climate change entering the mix, our rivers are drying up. This is a crucial issue that I truly wish more people knew about and felt an urgency about. As Mr. Pearce stated in this first question, if we can get water right we will be able to get most things right. But we have to act now.Fred Pearce is an environment and development consultant whose latest book is When the... more
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In the wake of climate change scientists are refocusing their efforts on crop resistance rather than just crop yield as the effects on global food sources are felt more pervasively. And the key is water.In the wake of climate change scientists are refocusing their efforts on crop... more
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A harbinger of global climate change that is happening too rapidly all across this world to be just natural. But will the cause really matter should the millions of people who depend on these glaciers for water to survive no longer have it because the world was too busy debating instead of doing something to address it?A harbinger of global climate change that is happening too rapidly all across this... more
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