California Adds Delta Tunnel to List of Possible Water Solutions

By Collin Sullivan of Greenwire

SAN FRANCISCO — California officials are studying whether a 35-mile tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta might help solve some of the state’s water supply problems.

Teresa Engstrom, chief of the delta engineering branch at the California Department of Water Resources, confirmed that the agency is conducting feasibility studies on an “all tunnel” option that would route water under the Bay Delta from rivers and reservoirs to the north of Sacramento to farms in the south.

The idea to build a tunnel sprang from a handful of public workshops the department held recently on how to approach California’s long-running fight over water rights in the northern part of the state. A tunnel, she said, could theoretically offer a way out of the vexing maze of water supply, endangered species and farming issues facing the state.

“We had a lot of comments that said, ‘Why don’t you go under?’” Engstrom said. “So we thought we would take a look.”

Engstrom stressed that the all-tunnel option has no more weight at this point than competing ideas to build a canal around the delta or new levees along the water’s current route through the middle of the delta region. All are under consideration.

DWR engineers conducting environmental and geotechnical studies expect to have a draft environmental report completed by the end of the year on all three proposals, Engstrom said. A final public draft would then be ready next year.

The new wrinkle comes as lawmakers, farmers, commercial fishers and environmentalists continue to bicker over whether to build major new infrastructure to both protect endangered fish and improve water deliveries to farms in the Central Valley. Pumping through the region is currently restricted to protect endangered delta smelt and salmon, much to the ire of struggling farmers.

Jonas Minton, water policy adviser for the Planning and Conservation League, called the tunnel proposal and the council bad ideas. He estimated that such a tunnel would likely stretch beyond 50 miles, making it “longer than the Chunnel connecting England with France.”

“The Department of Water Resources says it has no idea how much the tunnel would cost,” added Minton, guessing it would easily surpass the $13 billion spent 15 years ago to build the tunnel connecting France and England.

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Source: New York Times

Rising Tension Over Nile Water

CAIRO (AP) — Ministers from the 10 African countries on the Nile river began crucial discussions Monday over drafting a new water sharing agreement, which is hampered by Egypt’s refusal to reduce its share of world’s longest river.

In an opening address to the Nile Basin Initiative, held in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, Egypt’s Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif urged for a “return of the cooperation and harmony” among the group’s members, describing the ongoing dispute as a “misunderstanding.”

In the two-day meeting, participants are hoping to conclude the Nile Cooperative Framework Agreement, which establishes a permanent body to oversee water allocation along the Nile.

During talks last month in Kinshasa, Congo, officials from the 10 countries of the Nile basin, failed to agree over a new system of water sharing desired by a majority of the members.

A 1929 agreement between Egypt and Britain, acting on behalf of its then east African colonies, set up the original sharing framework and gave Cairo the right to veto upstream projects.

In a 1959 agreement with Sudan, Egypt was awarded an annual 55.5 billion cubic meters of Nile water, the largest share of any country along the river.

The remaining eight riparian states resent Egypt’s quota and want to draft a new agreement. The other Nile basin countries are Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda and Burundi.

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Source: Sun-Sentinel

Study: West Faces Water Catastrophe

by Bruce Finley, The Denver Post

Denver » A new study projects that all reservoirs along the Colorado River — which provide water for 27 million people in seven Western states, including Utah — could dry up by 2057 because of climate change and overuse.

If warming led to a 10 percent reduction in the river’s flow, it would create a 25 percent chance of depletion, according to the University of Colorado research released this week. Warming resulting in a 20 percent reduction would raise the chance of depletion to 50 percent, the study found.

“In the short term, the risk is relatively low,” said Balaji Rajagopalan, associate professor of civil environmental and architectural engineering at the university and lead author on the study, which was accepted for publication by the American Geophysical Union.

“But after that, the risk escalates enormously. If you do nothing, and you have no policies in place, even drastic measures such as cutting people off will not help from staving off catastrophe.”

Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Bureau of Reclamation participated in the study. Rajagopalan said the study was done in response to a 2008 University of California study that found a one-in-two chance that overuse and warming could deplete reservoirs much sooner — by 2021.

A 10-year drought along the Colorado River, which runs 1,450 miles from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico, has created anxiety. Lawyers are looking into how down-river users such as Californians might assert water rights if reservoirs dried up.

Dozens of dams along the Colorado River trap 60 million acre-feet of water in reservoirs — four times the annual flow of the river. (An acre-foot is the volume of water needed to cover an acre to a depth of one foot, or 325,851 gallons, enough to sustain a family or two for a year.)

The reservoirs along the river supply cities including Phoenix and Las Vegas. Drought in recent years has dropped water levels in those reservoirs to less than half full. Currently, the reservoirs are about 59 percent full.

Study authors advocated “adaptive management” of supplies, with basin-wide discussion of how best to reduce down-river use and ramp up efficiency.

“Use the time to put together policies that can be sustainable,” Rajagopalan said. “There’s lots of room for creative policy. We need to start right now — not wait.”

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Source: Salt Lake Tribune

Waste Not: A Solution for California’s Water Woes

By Noah Buyaher, WSJ Blogs

The knives came during California’s budget battle — literally. But there’s still at least one big tussle in the Golden State left this year: solving the state’s water crisis.

As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, Gov. Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders are planning a big push to address water shortages in the state, which has suffered a three-year drought. Everything from new reservoirs to urban conservation efforts is being considered.

But a big lever, according to a new study out of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, is getting farmers to use H2O more efficiently.

The finding is no great surprise. The Institute’s co-founder Dr. Peter Gleick has long advocated a “soft path” for water (freeing up new supply by curbing waste). And he’s been a critic of what he calls misinformation about the plight of Central Valley farmers. He says that they’re getting more water than they claim, and that the causes for astronomical unemployment rates in some farm communities owes more to the recession and poverty than the drought.

What’s interesting about the analysis is just how much the authors think a combination of irrigation technologies and management practices can save: 5.6 million acre-feet in an average year. That’s 17% of all water used by California farmers, and more than twice the total the state’s millions of city-dwellers could save if they wised up about their water use. It’s also a whole lot more than the enormous desalination plant in Carlsbad, Calif. will produce when it comes online.

The report reiterates what demand-siders in both the water and energy debates have been saying for a long time: Spending money on capital-intensive projects (like desalination plants and huge solar arrays) makes little sense when there are cheaper and bigger opportunities in improving efficiency.

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Source: Wall Street Journal

Water Decision Leaves Atlanta High and Dry

By Jay Bookman, AJC

Yesterday’s ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Paul Magnuson, denying metro Atlanta access to water stored at Lake Lanier, leaves the metro region up the creek.

Let me be more specific: Up a bone-dry creek.

The potential impact of the decision is disastrous. Magnuson ruled that with the exception of Buford and Gainesville, the metro region has no right to withdraw water from Lake Lanier, and no right to store water there against future drought.

The state was given three years to try to get Congress to alter its authorized purposes for Buford Dam. If it is unsuccessful, Magnuson ruled, “the operation of Buford Dam will return to the ‘baseline’ operation of the mid-1970s. Thus, the required off-peak flow will be 600 cfs and only Gainesville and Buford will be allowed to withdraw water from the lake. The Court recognizes that this is a draconian result. It is, however, the only result that recognizes how far the operation of the Buford project has strayed from the original authorization.”

At first blush, it’s likely that Gwinnett County would face drastic and immediate water shortages if that occurred. Its whole sewer and water infrastructure, and the bonded indebtedness that financed it, is predicated on access to Lake Lanier. The impact on the rest of metro Atlanta would be less immediate but severe, particularly in times of drought.

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Source: AJC

“Water Hog” Label Haunts Dallas

By ANA CAMPOY, Wall Street Journal

DALLAS — A reputation as a wasteful “water hog” is complicating Dallas’s efforts to siphon water from nearby communities.

Local officials, who say they need to nearly double their water supply in coming decades to keep up with a fast-growing population, want to build new reservoirs and buy water from nearby Oklahoma. But these efforts are entangled in federal lawsuits as Dallas’s neighbors see the city’s love for emerald-green lawns and lush golf courses as rampant waste.

“It’s not that they need the water to survive,” said Michael Banks, an East Texas dentist who lives near a river Dallas wants to dam. “What they want is to destroy our wildlife so they’ll have enough water for their grass.”

City officials recognize they have an image problem. “We’ve been called water hogs,” said Ramon Miguez, Dallas assistant city manager. But he said the city has made significant efforts to conserve water in recent years, including educating residents not to drench their lawns.

Spats between communities that sip and those that gulp are becoming increasingly common in the South and the West. Sprawling cities packed with houses featuring big lawns and many bathrooms typically don’t use water very efficiently, experts and environmentalists say.

So when city officials scout for more water beyond their boundaries, they don’t get much sympathy from their neighbors.

“It’s an environmental equity issue,” said David Feldman, chairman of the Department of Planning, Policy and Design at University of California, Irvine. “Before they give up their water, they want to make sure that the city isn’t being wasteful.”

In recent years, cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas have been forced to conserve water aggressively to meet their needs and persuade other communities to let them tap their supplies.

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Source: The Wall Street Journal

With increasing water needs, will China dehydrate India?

China—and not Pakistan—is a bigger threat to India simply because it does not have enough water.
Unlike India, which has 9.56% of its surface area covered with water, China has just 2.8%. This did not matter in the past. China’s land mass is so huge that, despite its larger population, it has one-sixth the density of people per km compared with India.

But water consumption increases exponentially with industrialization. Power plants, chemical factories, mining, steel and urban sanitation require huge quantities of water. Hence, China’s water needs have increased dramatically.

That could be one reason why annexing Tibet was crucial to China’s plans. It now controls 1,700km of the Yarlung Zangbo river, the Tibetan part of the Brahmaputra. The remaining 2,900km of the river winds into India through Arunachal Pradesh, and then, through Bangladesh. That, say experts, could be one more reason behind China eyeing parts of Arunachal Pradesh.

More worrisome is the fact that China has already completed feasibility studies for a major hydropower dam at the Tsongpo gorge to generate at least 40,000MW a year, more than twice the output of Three Gorges hydroelectric project. Construction is expected to start this year and the residual waters are expected to be diverted to China’s lands. It would starve India and Bangladesh of their share of the river’s waters.

Moreover, with Left parties winning Nepal’s elections, and China’s proposal last week for no-visa travel between Nepal and China, there are fears that the waters which flow into the Ganga (primarily Kosi), too, may get diverted, because many of India’s northern rivers begin in Nepal. That could parch northern India.

At risk will be India’s agriculture and hydroelectric dams on these rivers. It could revive the saying that the next wars will be fought for water, not land.

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Source: LiveMint.com

Water: A neglected resource in Taiwan

With the public focusing on plummeting GDP figures and rising unemployment, little attention has been paid to another pressing problem — the plunging levels of the nation’s water reserves.

This winter has been much drier than usual, with many regions receiving less than half their normal rainfall, while other regions have received none at all. Many reservoirs are approaching critical levels. The main store of water for much of the heavily populated north, Taoyuan County’s Shihmen Reservoir (石門水庫), has seen less than a fifth of its average rainfall in its catchment area so far this year and is already below half capacity. Officials have reduced the amount of water released daily and are considering enforcing stricter rationing measures should the rain continue to hold off.

Taiwan may be blessed with plentiful rainfall (the annual average is around 2,500mm), but its geography makes storage of large amounts of water difficult. As severe climate change becomes a reality and begins to disrupt traditional weather patterns, who’s to say that in a few years or decades the nation’s abundance of water won’t fade and that serious droughts, such as the one in 2003, won’t become more common?

Solving such a problem in Taiwan — with its water intensive industries and farming — is a huge challenge, but the government needs to formulate a comprehensive management strategy for reducing water usage if it is to avoid a scenario that sees businesses and the public competing for precious water resources.

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Source: Taipei Times

Shrinking Colorado River will intensify water wars

I have a classic Western postcard tacked to the bulletin board above my computer. It shows two men in a field holding shovels over their heads, locked in mock battle. Behind them runs an irrigation ditch. The caption reads: “Discussing Western Water Rights, A Western Pastime.”

I know firsthand how worked up people can get over water. At an annual ditch meeting two years ago, my western Colorado neighbors seemed on the verge of an insurrection when the board sheepishly announced that a leak in the local reservoir had not been fixed. The reservoir, which supplies our late-season water, would not fill, and the ditches would run dry by the end of July. Our green patches of grass, alfalfa and corn would quickly become brown, bare and cracked.

In years past, my neighbors might have shrugged off one shortened growing season; once the reservoir was fixed, after all, the ditches would flow copiously all summer long with snowmelt from the mountains behind town. But that was then. Nowadays, something weird is going on with the weather. The snow pack — the source of nearly all of our water — has become unpredictable, with most years on the lean side. No matter how much snow flies in the winter, it seems to melt off earlier every spring.

Climate-change scientists confirm the West’s water supply is shrinking. A difficult period of triage lies ahead. If our cities get their way, the rural areas and the Indian tribes will end up handing over their water.

It’s already happening in places like Southern California and Las Vegas, where deals are being cut to pump groundwater and divert traditional agricultural waters to the urban areas.

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Source: The Salt Lake Tribune

Two-Thirds of the World to Face Water Scarcity by 2025: UN

New York (PTI): The United Nations warned that two-thirds of the world’s population will face a lack of water in less than 20 years if current trends in climate change, population growth, rural to urban migration and consumption continue.

Speaking at a high-level symposium on water security here on Thursday, UN Dy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro stressed that “if present trends continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with water scarcity by 2025, and two-thirds of the world population could be subject to water stress.”

“The lack of safe water and sanitation is inextricably linked with poverty and malnutrition, particularly among the world’s poor,” Migiro said at the two-day meeting organised by the World Water Organisation (WWO).

“It limits girls’ school attendance and exacerbates maternal mortality. Yet today about 900 million people still rely on unimproved drinking-water supplies, and 2.5 billion people remain without improved sanitation facilities,” she added.

Unless urgent action is taken the conflict between water supply and demand is set to get worse, Migiro told the symposium’s participants, comprising of experts from the UN, Member States, as well as corporate, medical, scientific, academic and non-government organisations.

Migiro noted that agriculture consumes roughly three quarters of the world’s fresh water supplies and in Africa the proportion is closer to ninety per cent.

“More than 1.4 billion people live in river basins where their use of water exceeds minimum recharge levels, leading to desiccation of rivers and the depletion of groundwater, she said.

The Deputy Secretary-General stressed that achieving water security would mean more effective water management, including enhancing food security through more equitable allocation of water for agriculture and food production. “It means ensuring the integrity of ecosystems, and it means promoting peaceful collaboration in the sharing of water resources, particularly in the case of boundary and trans-boundary water resources.”

“In establishing the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one half, by 2015, the number of people without access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation, the United Nations has challenged the international community to work together to improve such conditions,” she said.

The symposium aims to identify specific threats and vulnerabilities to global water security and propose practical solutions for the protection and preservation of water supplies.

Source: The Hindu

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