People can and do deny it's happening. I don't care what you call it - global warming, climate change, whatever. The fact is, we're shortly to turn the clock on 7 billion people, most of them in countries that can ill afford to support the additional population! What the hell are we supposed to do? Just let them all die from preventable DIRTY water-born diseases? Are we supposed to just turn our backs on providing technology at low or even no cost to countries that need it that can turn salt water into potable water? Are we supposed to let people just die of thirst, reasoning according to the marketplace "oh well, tough titty, them's the breaks kiddo, too bad you were born poor." Aren't we already saying that to too many of of our children?
Why the World May Be Running Out of Clean Water
By BRYAN WALSH | Time.com – 16 hrs
ago
Earlier this month, officials in the South
Pacific island nation of Tuvalu had to confront a pretty dire
problem: they were running out of water. Due to a severe and lasting drought,
water reserves in this country of 11,000 people had dwindled to just a few days'
worth. Climate
change plays a role here: as sea levels rose, Tuvalu's groundwater became
increasingly saline and undrinkable, leaving the island dependent on rainwater.
But now a La Niña–influenced drought has severely curtailed rainfall, leaving
Tuvalu dry as a bone. "This situation is bad," Pusinelli Laafai, Tuvalu's
permanent secretary of home affairs, told the Associated Press earlier this
month. "It's really bad."
So far Tuvalu has been bailed out by its neighbors Australia and New Zealand, which have donated rehydration packets and desalination equipment. But the archipelago's water woes are just beginning — and it's far from the only part of the world facing a big dry. Other island nations like the Maldives and Kiribati will see their groundwater spoil as sea levels rise. Texas, along with much of the American Southwest, is in the grip of a truly record-breaking drought — even after days of storms in the past month, Houston's total 2011 rainfall is still short of its yearly average by a whopping 2 ft., or 60 cm. Australia has experienced severely dry weather for so long, it's not even clear whether the country is in a state of drought, or more worryingly, a new and permanent dry climate that could forever alter life Down Under. "Climate-change impacts on water resources continue to appear in the form of growing influence on the severity and intensity of extreme events," says Peter Gleick, one of the foremost water experts in the U.S. and head of the Pacific Institute, an NGO based in Oakland, Calif., that focuses on global water issues. "Australia's recent extraordinary extreme drought should be an eye-opener for the rest of us." (See photos of the world's water crisis.)
Volume 7 of the Pacific Institute's regular report on global water usage, The World's Water, comes out today, just in time to address the squeeze of droughts, the increasingly apparent impact of climate change and the threats facing our relatively scarce supplies of freshwater. The sweeping report is a reminder that clean water is vital to life — as Gleick points out, more than 2 million people die each year from preventable water-related diseases — and that on the whole, we're not doing a very good job of husbanding that resource. There's even a risk here that parts of the U.S., especially the arid West, may have passed "peak water" — the point at which it becomes essentially impossible to increase supply.
Potential water shortages are one more reason to try to reduce carbon emissions and blunt the worst impacts of climate change — a warmer world is likely to further dry out already arid regions, even as extreme rainfall intensifies in already wet areas. But however severe the effects of climate change become, we're going to need to use water much more efficiently than we do now: the world's population is expected to pass the 7 billion mark by the end of this month, and more people will need more water. "New thinking about solutions and sustainable water planning and management, better data, case studies and efforts to raise awareness, are all needed," Gleick writes in The World's Water
Smarter water policy might mean rethinking
other fields of resource use. Take, for example, natural gas drilling. Hydraulic fracturing
has vastly increased American supplies of natural gas, which is good for gas
companies and, because natural gas generally has a greener footprint,
potentially good for the environment as well. But fracking requires a
significant amount of water — up to 5 million gal. (19 million L) per well. That
might not be a major problem in a relatively wet state like Pennsylvania, but in
bone-dry states like Texas, water-intensive fracking has sparked a backlash.
There's also the uncertain risk of water contamination from fracking and
drilling, and the problem of water waste. "The rapid expansion of the use of
hydraulic fracturing to increase natural gas production has serious potential
consequences for local water resources," says Gleick. It's important that "more
effort be put into both understanding the real risks and protecting water
resources before pushing for accelerated programs of natural gas
production."
What we need most of all is a rethink of how we deal with water and a recognition of just how valuable it is — especially in a warming world. That means focusing on modulating demand as much as increasing supply. Through most of the 20th century, governments dealt with water problems through massive construction projects designed to expand and regulate supply — think the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas or the Three Gorges Dam in China.
But the era of those big projects may be
ending, largely because we've begun to recognize the environmental problems that
come with major dams, including the loss of aquatic wildlife and the
displacement of local populations. Last month Burma's military government — not
ordinarily responsive to public opinion — canceled a planned $3.6 billion
Chinese-backed hydroelectric dam that would have displaced thousands of
villagers. Just as we've recognized that energy efficiency is often the fastest
and cheapest way to address carbon emissions, there's much that can be done to
curb water waste. We need to "adopt 21st century strategies of new forms of
sustainable water supply, rethink water demand and efficiency of use, and
[embrace] smart use of pricing and economics," says Gleick. The alternative
could mean ending up like poor Tuvalu — high and dry.
No comments:
Post a Comment