Expert explains a world suffering from water shortage

This is a very interesting video about the water situation in the World and in the US, with some useful recommendations at the end.

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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Minnesota Voters approve $5.5 billion for Land and Water Conservation

SAINT PAUL, Minn., Nov 05, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ — Yesterday Minnesota voters approved the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment, the largest conservation ballot measure in history, according to The Trust for Public Land (TPL), a national conservation organization. At more than $5.5 billion dollars for land and water conservation, the winning measure nearly doubles the previous largest conservation ballot measure, New Jersey’s Constitutional Amendment in 1998, which dedicated $2.94 billion in sales tax to the Garden State Preservation Trust.

The historic success of the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment will increase investment in clean water, natural areas, cultural legacy, and parks and trails by about $290 million a year for 25 years. An estimated $220 million a year will protect and restore natural areas, parks, and lands vital for water quality.

“Minnesota voters are willing to pay to protect our waters and natural lands for our children and grandchildren,” said Susan Schmidt, director of The Trust for Public Land’s Minnesota Office. “They know that these lakes and natural lands play an important role in preserving our quality of life. With our natural lands diminishing, we could not afford to wait to protect the water quality of our rivers, lakes, and streams, or to conserve natural areas, parks, and habitat for fish and wildlife.”

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Source MarketWatch

Israel Could Bring Solutions to L.A. Water Shortage

By Lilly Fowler

There was a time when the actions to solve Los Angeles’ water problems read like a dystrophic political novel.

At the beginning of the last century, L.A. Mayor Frederick Eaton and William Mulholland, superintendent of the city’s newly created Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), plotted to gain control of water sources in Owens Valley, which left Owens Lake dry and area farmers with little recourse.

The result was the completion of the first Los Angeles Aqueduct, which supplied the city with much of its water from 1913 until a second aqueduct was completed in 1970. (Los Angeles also draws water from Northern California via the California Aqueduct and competes with other Western states for water from the Colorado River.)

The city of Los Angeles recently began atoning for its sins by returning some of the water to the Owens region, which has forced L.A.’s 3.8 million residents to do more with less. With the city’s population expected to reach 4.2 million to 4.9 million by 2020, according to the Southern California Association of Governments, solutions are needed to address the area’s growing water needs.

A recent conference at UCLA’s School of Law, “Transboundary Environmental Management in the Arava and Beyond,” proposed that Los Angeles might gain some ground regarding its often-contentious water policies if the city turned to Israel’s example.

The Sept. 9 forum, sponsored by the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a leading teaching and research program in the Middle East, suggested that both Israel and Los Angeles have made many of the same mistakes when trying to develop water in arid, dry lands and could learn a great deal from each other when dealing with issues of water scarcity.

“There are very strong parallels between what’s going on in the Western United States and what’s going on in the Middle East,” said Peter Gleick, the keynote speaker at the conference.

Gleick, a MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland-based environmental research organization, said both countries are struggling with the issue of how to best share their water supplies with neighbors. Although Israel, according to Gleick, faces the more complicated problem of sharing water from sources like the Sea of Galilee, natural underground aquifers and the Jordan River with its Jordanian and Palestinian neighbors, the dilemma in both countries is much the same.

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Source: The Jewish Journal

Pennsylvania Town Requests Voluntary Water Conservation

DUBOIS - Mayor John “Herm” Suplizio is asking City of DuBois residents to voluntarily conserve water, he announced at yesterday’s city council meeting. Mayor Suplizio called on residents to eliminate unnecessary water usage in order to maintain the city’s water supply. Water levels are currently down at the city’s reservoir.”We’re not at a mandatory level yet, but we’re not far away from it,” said Mr. Suplizio. “If people don’t have to wash their cars, it would be nice of them not to. Just little things … if you don’t have to hose down your garage, things like that.”

Source: The Progress

Ethiopia Says It Needs $266 Million for Emergency Drought Aid

By Jason McLure

Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) — Ethiopia needs $266 million to help feed 6.4 million people suffering from food shortages due to drought, an increase of 1.8 million since June, the government said.

Millions of peasant farmers and pastoralists in the Horn of Africa country are struggling to cope with the affects of the failure of the short rains in February and March, known as the “belg,” Mitiku Kassa, the state minister for agriculture and rural development, said today in the capital, Addis Ababa.

“It is unprecedented, the failure of the belg,” Kassa said at a meeting with international donors. “We need additional resources.”

International relief agencies need 270,245 metric tons of food to meet aid needs from September to December of this year. Donors have pledged less than two-thirds of the aid requests made earlier this year, Kassa said.

About 80 percent of Ethiopians rely on rain-fed farming even though the economy has experienced double-digit growth over the past four years. Beyond the number of people needing emergency aid, another 7.4 million people depend on a donor- funded “safety-net” program that provides food to families for at least six months of the year.

Ethiopia, a nation of 78 million people, now has 50,000 tons of food in its emergency reserves, down from 400,000 normally.

Shortages of emergency food reserves hampered the response effort to the drought earlier this year, the agriculture ministry said in a report today.

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Source: Bloomberg

Starbucks Wasting More Than 6 Million Gallons of Water a Day

American coffee giant Starbucks became the target of conservationists today after an investigation by the U.K. newspaper The Sun estimated that the company wasted up to 6 million gallons of water every day, enough to quell the thirst of a small African nation.

As part of a company policy aimed at preventing germ buildup in its taps, Starbucks stores are directed to keep water running constantly into a sink, called a dipper well, to clean utensils and wash away food residue, The Sun reported.

As a result of running water all day, every day at each of the company’s 10,000 worldwide coffee emporiums, Starbucks wastes water in an amount The Sun estimated to be “enough daily water for the entire 2 million strong population of drought-hit Namibia in Africa or fill an Olympic pool every 83 minutes.”

The investigation was launched after a couple who spotted a running tap at a U.K. Starbucks were told by a store employee that it was left on to clean the pipes. They contacted Starbucks head office to find out more and later received a letter confirming that it was company policy to keep water constantly running into the dipper wells.

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Source: ABC News

More Canadians limit water and energy usage

OTTAWA - Canadians are saving water both coming and going, from top to bottom, and from east to west.

The proportion of Canadian households using reduced-volume toilets more than doubled to 37 per cent from 15 per cent between 1994 and 2006, while the percentage with a low-flow shower head rose to 57 per cent from 44 per cent, according to one of two environmental reports Thursday from Statistics Canada.

“Households in Eastern Canada were more likely to use low-flow shower heads while those in Ontario and the West were more likely to use reduced-volume toilets,” it said, adding, however that Ontario led the way in the use of both.

Meanwhile, more Canadian households are also turning to programmable thermostats to cut back on their energy use, according to the other analysis.

In 2006, 40 per cent of households with a thermostat had a programmable one, up from just 16 per cent in 1994, it said. Of those with a programmed thermostat, 68 per cent were programmed during the heating season to lower the temperature while they slept while only 46 per cent of households with an unprogrammed or non-programmable thermostat turned down the heat overnight.

Programmable thermostats, though they’ve been in existence for about 100 years, have only become popular over the past decade, Gordon Dewis, author of the report, Thermostat Use in Canadian Homes, noted in an interview.

While rising energy costs are clearly a factor behind some of the heat and water conservation efforts of Canadians, the report suggests saving money isn’t the only consideration.

“Among households with thermostats, the likelihood that the temperature was lowered when the household members were asleep increased as the total annual income increased,” observed the report on thermostat use.

“Higher income, home ownership and living in a single-detached dwelling were . . . associated with greater use of water-saving fixtures,” echoed another report.

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Source: Canada.com

For more information about water conservation, visit Nuprana.com’s LEARN section

U.S. Congress Approves Great Lakes Compact

New York Environmental Groups Applaud D.C. for Protecting Great Lakes, Urge President Bush to Swiftly Sign Landmark Law

ALBANY, NY (09/23/2008; 1230)(readMedia)– Environmental groups across New York State applauded the U.S. Congress today for protecting the integrity of the Great Lakes by passing the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact. With growing threats to export water from the Great Lakes Basin and mounting evidence of the effects of global climate change, the Compact now awaits President Bush’s signature. The measure passed by a vote of 390 to 25.

The Compact was signed into law by New York’s Governor Paterson earlier this year, as along with the remaining seven Great Lakes States. The United States Senate passed the Compact unanimously in August.

Designed to shield the Great Lakes from harmful water withdrawals, the Compact institutes critical protections for the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River ecosystem. It would protect the Great Lakes from harm by implementing an effective water management plan and promote water conservation measures throughout the Basin.

“Truly a consensus document, the Compact is the landmark framework to ensure sustainable Great Lakes water management for generations to come,” said Dereth Glance, Executive Program Director for Citizens Campaign for the Environment.

“New York’s congressional delegation brought home a huge victory for the St. Lawrence River, Lakes Ontario and Erie, and the three million New Yorkers who rely on the Great Lakes for drinking water,” said Katherine Nadeau Water & Natural Resources Program Associates for Environmental Advocates of New York. “The Compact guarantees New York’s voice in Great Lakes water use decisions and ensures fair and responsible management for this irreplaceable natural resource.”

The Great Lakes are the world’s single largest source of surface freshwater, representing 95 percent of the fresh surface water of the United States. The lakes are critical for New York, providing drinking water for millions of people in the region, numerous industrial and agricultural uses, navigation, hydroelectric power and energy production, recreation and tourism, and important fish and wildlife habitat.

“When hope appeared lost, the people, elected officials, and businesses of our region united around the Great Lakes and got the job done,” said Marc Smith, Great Lakes States Program Manager with National Wildlife Federation. “Critical to this effort were the eight Great Lakes governors and the more than 1,300 state legislators who voted for the Compact. Congress has now followed suit. President Bush has already expressed his support and we look forward to his signing the Compact into law.”

“The Great Lakes Compact is a great victory for New York and the entire region,” said Roger Downs, Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter Conservation Associate. “The Compact will help prepare the region for climate change and ensures that New York’s Great Lakes will be available for the use and enjoyment of future generations.”

“The Great Lakes are Western New York’s most important natural asset,” said Julie Barnett O’Neill, Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper. “This agreement will foster the water conservation and diversion protection needed to protect our amazing fresh water seas for generations to come.”

“We are thrilled that Congress has acted swiftly to pass the Compact,” said Jennifer J. Caddick, Save The River Executive Director. “The St. Lawrence River is the lifeblood of our local communities and this legislation will protect one of the North Country’s most important resources.”

Although seemingly abundant, less than one percent of the Great Lakes water is renewed each year, leaving them vulnerable to depletion. The lakes’ fragile ecology has suffered from pollution, invasive species, and the water diversions to support cities. With growing concerns about the loss of these natural resources, Congress’ approval of the Compact couldn’t be timelier. Environmental groups applaud the actions of Congress, and urge President Bush to continue to protect the Great Lakes.

Source: ReadMedia Newswire

For more information about water conservation, visit Nuprana.com’s LEARN section

Nestle Eyes Water in Chaffee County, CO - Despite Laws Protecting Basin From Water Removal

Nestle Waters of North America is in the process of cutting a deal with the town of Salida, CO and the Arkansas River Conservation District. The goal? Avoid laws created to prevent the wholesale removal of water from a specific basin.

From Chris Woodka of the Pueblo Chieftan:

Nestle Waters North America, Salida and the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District are working on a deal that would allow the bottled water giant to ship up to 200 acre-feet of water a year to its Denver plant, possibly to market as spring water.

The spring is located in Nathrop, north of Salida.

Essentially, Nestle would take advantage of the Upper Ark’s augmentation plan to use Salida’s water to replace the water it pumps from a well near a spring on property it is buying near Nathrop. Salida would sell the company excess water for 20 years, and the Upper Ark’s augmentation plan would allow the water to be used to replace flows, since Salida’s water cannot be used outside the city without a change in court decree.

Unfortunately, those charged with protecting the Arkansas River seem happy to see the water leave the basin (from the same story):

Some have asked why the Upper Ark would support moving water from the basin, but Scanga believes bottling water is no different than his family business, meat packing and marketing, where animals are raised on water in one basin, slaughtered and shipped all over the country.“It’s the same thing, putting water in a bottle or putting water in an animal,” Scanga said.

We’d like to go on record as suggesting bottling water is not the same as raising livestock - and the laws in place seemingly recognize that reality.

Little Local Opposition

I spoke to Pueblo Chieftan reporter Woodka about the deal, and he says local opposition is light; while some have questioned the removal of so much water from the basin - and the odd thinking of Scanga (the man charged with protecting the basin’s water) - there isn’t much in the way of widespread opposition to Nestle’s proposed water mining operation.

Still, even if those charged with protecting the watershed are OK with the removal, the other impacts to the area are the same facing rural communities everywhere.

Truck Impacts to the Area

One of the biggest is an increase in truck traffic: Mapquest tells us Nestle’s Denver plant is approximately 140 miles from Salida, and the story suggests Nestle wants to pull as much as 65 million gallons of water annually. Given an average 6,000 gallon water load (water’s heavy, so tankers typically carry less than a gasoline tanker might), that means the area’s looking at 60 truck trips per day (30 trucks coming and going) - every day of the year.

In addition, the tankers will likely take US 285 - a winding road that takes in several high passes in the Rocky Mountains, a reality which suggests Salida’s going to see a lot more truck traffic in the summer months than the winter.

A Recurring Pattern

This attempt to remove water from the Upper Arkansas River neatly follows Nestle’s operations in other areas; they establish the bottling plant, then begin tapping other water sources in the area - increasing impacts like truck traffic, noise, pollution, and water withdrawals from underground sources - with little or no economic return to the area.

Let’s hope Colorado wakes up before it’s too late.

Source: StopNestleWaters.org

For more information about water conservation, visit our LEARN section

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