One of the Largest Public Health Issues of Our Time
As the planet’s once plentiful blue resource gets used up, companies are acting to secure their supply and become more efficient users of water. A business publication from the UK called Ethical Corporation has published an interesting report on this trend, which we’ve pulled excerpts from here:
The world’s water supplies are drying up. Half of the planet’s wetlands have disappeared over the past century. In Europe, six in every 10 cities with more than 100,000 people are using their groundwater supplies at a faster rate than they are being replenished, the European Environment Agency reports.
Water experts have coined the phrase “water stressed” to describe the scenario. It’s reckoned that countries require 4,654 litres of water per year per person to meet citizens’ needs. If they fall short, they are said to be stressed.
Today, the term covers about 440 million people, including the inhabitants of European states such as Denmark and Poland. In much of the Middle East and some parts of Africa the situation is even worse. By 2075, the number of people in regions with chronic water shortages is estimated to be between three and seven billion, according to the Stockholm International Water Institute.
So what’s behind the water scarcity? In short: man. The world’s population has tripled over the past century and is expected to increase by about 50% to more than nine billion by 2050.
Simple population growth is not the whole answer, however. Rapid rates of industrialisation, urbanisation and wealth accumulation mean that people are now using on average six times more water than they were a century ago. Water consumption is expected to continue doubling every two decades, a recent report by Goldman Sachs says.
Virtually every industrial activity requires water. The likes of power-generation, mining, paper and drinks sectors are particularly water intensive. Non-industrial services, meanwhile, such as tourism and entertainment, can depend heavily on water resources as well.
Even the water that industry doesn’t use up is often made unpotable. Back in 2001, before an official crackdown on pollution, Chinese businesses were dumping an estimated 23.4bn tonnes of sewage and industrial waste a year into the Yangtze river. In Europe, only five of the continent’s primary rivers are considered pollution-free.
Farming’s thirst
By far the biggest water-use culprit, however, is agriculture. Farmers are thought to be responsible for 70% of all human water use. That percentage is set to rise, according to the Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute. Farmers will need 2,000tn litres of water a year by 2030 to keep pace with the world’s growing food needs, the institute says.
Climate change presents an additional threat to world water supplies in the coming century. It is predicted that global warming will increase evaporation rates across much of the planet and cause freshwater held in glaciers to melt. Rainfall could also drop off dramatically in some parts of the world.
It’s not only policymakers that need to worry about a world with less water. Business should be concerned too. Today’s panic over the scarcity of credit could be minor in comparison with tomorrow’s threat of water scarcity.
“Lack of water of adequate quality directly reduces production,” says Marc Levinson in a recent report by the investment bank JP Morgan. Agriculture, drinks and food processing are most vulnerable to water shortages, he says. All businesses, however, would be affected by the increased input costs that would result from diminishing water supplies. Companies would also see their capital expenditure rise as they were forced to find expensive new ways of treating and extracting water.
Levinson raises the further spectre of regulatory risk. To date, rules governing water use and discharge have been relatively light for companies. Many countries subsidise water use for agriculture. Introducing water permits and fixed prices are two obvious ways governments could intervene to control water use.
Drought-hit Australia shows what might be round the regulatory corner. Earlier this year, it introduced a cap on ground and surface water usage for the Murray-Darling Basin, the country’s most important agricultural area.
The probability of reputation damage presents a third major risk for the business community. As access to water decreases, people will be looking to point the blame. “Water is a very emotional issue and, although business isn’t the biggest user of water, it risks being the first to be cut off,” says Anne Léonore Boffi, water project office at the Geneva-based World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
Coca-Cola knows this only too well. Five years ago, campaigners in the south Indian state of Kerala began blaming the US soft-drinks company for a sudden shortfall in local water supplies, dubbing it “Killa Cola”. Its bottling plants were accused of polluting local aquifers.
Many risks lurk in multinationals’ supply chains rather than their own direct activities: food and drink companies, for example, depend heavily on irrigated agriculture for raw materials.
JP Morgan estimates that the combined water consumption of Nestlé, Unilever, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola and Danone approaches 575bn litres a year – enough to cover the daily basic water needs of everyone on the planet.
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If You Don’t Vote, You Don’t Matter
At Nuprana we focus on water conservation– we try to gather the most relevant information and news about the issue and we encourage immediate action by offering affordable and easy to use water-saving products in our www.nuprana.com site. But we are facing a crucial moment in our country regarding environmental issues and we, at Nuprana, can’t ignore that.
This is a time for decision and action. We found this video, we loved it and think that a very relevant point is being made here. They ask whoever sees it to send it on to five friends, and we decided to do a little more. Thank you for watching it and please resend it to more than five of your friends. You will be doing this country a favor.
The Water Front
We received an email from Veronica Segovia, she is the on-line media intern for Food & Water Watch, and wanted to share with us a documentary called The Water Front. I must admit that I was shocked by what I saw just in the trailer of this documentary. I had heard of a lawsuit that the residents of a black neighborhood in Detroit had recently won that was related to water supply and discrimination, but I had no idea of the suffering these people were put through.
I encourage everybody to see this film, to blog about it, to talk about it with your friends and remember that this kind of abuse is possible not only in third world countries, but here in the US. So listen, dig deeper into the news, don’t just trust what you see on mainstream media.
Thanks Ms. Segovia for sharing this with us along with another interesting project called Take Back the Tap. You can rest assured that Nuprana.com will always support initiatives like this one.
Our focus is water conservation and we are committed to creating awareness about this issue and protecting our watersheds. Our ultimate goal is to prevent water shortages that have the potential to create situations like this, where people are abused by the ‘owners’ of their water. How can this be happening when we haven’t yet reached a real water crisis? The only explanation possible is CORRUPTION. We must make sure this kind of situation doesn’t happen again, particularly as water becomes more scarce and hence more valued.
New resource addresses water conservation issues from all angles
ALBUQUERQUE- Like many places in the United States, water sources in New Mexico are rapidly being depleted due to population growth, new sub-developments, and big companies who use large amounts of water for their manufacturing and refining processes.
Inspired by this situation, we, Elizabeth Beachy (a public health professional with 10+ years of experience in social marketing/health communications) and Osvaldo Gomez (an MBA with 10+ years experience in marketing and sales), created NUPRANA LLC. We wanted to do something to help preserve the precious natural resources that are left for our son’s generation to enjoy. And of all of our natural resources, none is more precious than water.
Surrounded by the desert, we decided to order high-efficiency fixtures for our home. It took us quite awhile to find the appropriate fixtures on-line but we finally did, installed them, and saw how easy it was to save water. With new fixtures we were able to save significant amounts of water without having to make any major changes to our daily water-use behaviors.
The more we learned about New Mexico’s water situation, the more we started to worry about our family’s health. We will soon be drinking water from the Rio Grande potentially contaminated with pesticides, radioactive waste, and many other non-regulated pollutants. And what about our son’s generation? Where will they get their water in 20 years and how contaminated will it be by then?
Why NUPRANA
The vision driving NUPRANA is a vision of conscious water use, cleaner waterways, safer drinking water, and pristine freshwater sources preserved and revered for their natural beauty. Systematic water conservation is necessary to make this vision a reality.
We are focusing on three main areas to encourage water conservation. The first area is education. Little is known in the general public about the state of our water, and there is still no sense of urgency about saving water, despite over half the country heading toward water shortages. To support our educational efforts we created the “LEARN” section of the Nuprana site, which provides a comprehensive overview of water issues in the world and in the United States. We also seek to keep people up to date on water conservation issues through the “Water Conservation News” section of the site, which posts recent news from local news sources around the country.
Nuprana’s second objective is to empower people to easily save water in their own homes, by offering affordable and user-friendly water conservation products that don’t require tools or a plumber to install. Nuprana products use high-efficiency technologies that compensate for decreased water flow with increased pressure, so that once the products are installed you usually won’t feel the difference. We believe this is important in order to address some of the key barriers to water conservation.
Our third area of focus is advocacy, because while we can contribute to water conservation by using less water in our homes, decisions are being made every day by our elected officials that affect our water quality and availability. We need to be proactive and educate our elected officials and our communities, so that they too can understand the importance of water conservation and make the appropriate decisions.
We encourage you to take a look at the information available on our site at www.nuprana.com. We strongly welcome your feedback! Let us know what you think of our products, the information we’ve posted, and our mission. Please contact us if there is something you think we could be doing better, or if you have suggestions as to how we can better spread the word about water conservation.
Thanks for joining us in this important mission! If we all begin to decrease our water consumption through these simple measures, we can make a difference for the generations to come.
Together, drop by drop, we can conserve the precious water that our lives depend on.
Elizabeth Beachy is co-founder of Nuprana LLC, and editor of Nuprana’s Water Conservation News. She can be reached at ebeachy@nuprana.com
Last century’s oil or this century’s water? We must make a choice.
ALBUQUERQUE- In the midst of the frenzy to find and exploit fossil fuels, we are sacrificing our most precious natural resource—WATER.
Sure, oil is now priced at over US$110 a barrel (equal to 42 gallons), while in most parts of the US water only costs $0.51 per cubic meter (equal to 264.2 gallons). That means that one gallon of crude oil is valued at $2.62 while one gallon of tap water is valued at $0.002 or one-fifth of one cent.
But how reflective are these prices of the relative worth of these two commodities? With countless alternative energy sources we can easily survive without oil, but we can’t survive without water. It sustains all life on this planet and is vital to every aspect of our lives.
What would happen if water were publicly traded like oil is? We’ve already seen what happens to the market price of water as soon as it is bottled and sold as a commodity—the price is suddenly equal to or greater than a soft drink. That’s roughly 7000 times the $0.00025 a 16 oz. bottle of tap water should cost.
We clearly take our water for granted. And perhaps we take it more for granted in the U.S. than many other countries do. Germany and France charge about 4 times what we do for water, and use about 40% less per person.
But what happens when our waterways and thus our drinking water become contaminated? Our nation’s water sources are currently being polluted faster than at any time in the past. In 2002, about 30% of U.S. waters were assessed by states for a report to Congress. Results revealed that about 45% of assessed stream miles, 47% of assessed lake acres, and 32% of assessed bay and estuarine square miles were not clean enough to support uses such as fishing and swimming.
Of perhaps even greater cause for concern is the fact that drinking water standards for levels of aluminum, foaming agents, fluoride, chloride, and a host of other viruses, bacterium, chemicals, radioactive materials and other contaminants, have not been established and are not regulated by the EPA. So we simply don’t know how polluted our drinking water really is.
And what will happen when our demand begins to outweigh our supply? The EPA already estimates that 36 states will be facing local, regional, or statewide water shortages by the year 2013.
Is our water (and our health) really worth a few days’ supply of oil?
Every barrel of oil produced requires a total of 1,851 gallons of water, according to the US Geological Survey. This water is usually pumped out of underground aquifers that take decades to be replenished. A process called “hydrofracking” is used in 90% of the drilling sites to get to the gas or oil, which involves shooting millions of gallons of water and drilling chemicals at explosive pressure deep underground to break up the rock. Some chemical residue remains underground in the process. The identity of the chemicals, which can be highly toxic, is protected as a “trade secret” thus making it difficult to know how to treat wastewater and what pollutants to look for in nearby drinking water supplies.
The injection of fracturing fluids is not regulated by the EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act, thanks to an exemption for the Oil & Gas industry that was requested in 2001 by Vice President Dick Cheney. In fact, the Oil & Gas industry is the only industry in America allowed to inject known hazardous materials into our underground drinking water supplies unchecked. As if that is not enough, the Oil/Gas industry is also exempt from the four other key Federal Environmental regulatory act protections: Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, CERCLA/Superfund law, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, in addition to the public right-to-know provisions under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act.
Oil and gas drilling throughout the United States has resulted in thousands of wastewater spills, which have contaminated local drinking water sources. In New Mexico alone, more than 700 cases of oil and gas companies polluting groundwater sources have been documented since 1990. As per New Mexico’s antiquated mining laws, the maximum fine to be paid by the industry for groundwater contamination (or for any other violation of county or state laws) is $1000.
But the egregious assault on our water and our environment by Oil & Gas companies doesn’t stop there. According to Friends of the Earth, oil companies are slated to receive more than $32.9 billion in handouts from U.S. taxpayers over the next five years. So willingly or not, we’re participating in their plunder. And with the world’s biggest oil companies reporting a combined $123 billion of record-breaking profits in 2007, it is hard to imagine how they have been able to continue to elude responsibility for their widespread contamination of our drinking water.
Last century’s oil or this century’s water?
Our most critical decision as we watch our natural resources become contaminated or destroyed is whether we will continue to cling to the last century’s antiquated fossil fuel dependence or whether we are ready to look and move forward.
Will we continue to prioritize corporate profits over human health?
Will we continue to compromise the health of our waterways—and the millions of life forms that depend on them to survive?
Will we continue to burn fossil fuels, pollute the environment and exacerbate the global warming conditions that make our freshwater ever more scarce?
Will we continue to take our limited clean water supplies for granted, overwatering our lawns, flushing clean drinking water down our toilets, and using many gallons more water than we truly need per day?
Or will we finally have the foresight to move toward the inevitable changes we must make, in hopes of sustaining the 7 billion people and counting on this planet?
We need to finally shift to renewable energy sources that no longer pollute our air and our water. We must begin to conserve the precious water we have left. We should start paying a more appropriate price for our water, and demand that it be free of contaminants. We need to hold our elected officials accountable for protecting our health, our environment, and our water.
Ultimately we must look forward and begin making decisions based on the kind of world that we and our children will want to live in, in this century.
Elizabeth Beachy is co-founder of NUPRANA, a green business dedicated to making water conservation affordable and accessible to everyone. Visit our site at www.nuprana.com to learn more.
