Growing water scarcity is now one of the leading challenges for sustainable development, and that challenge is poised to intensify as the world’s population continues to swell and climate change intensifies, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva warned today.
Competition for water will intensify as humanity’s numbers exceed 9 billion people around 2050 — already, millions of family farmers in developing countries suffer from lack of access to freshwater, while conflicts over water resources already surpass those tied to land disputes in some regions, he noted in remarks made at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (19-21 January) in Berlin.
Additionally, climate change is already altering hydrological regimes everywhere, Graziano da Silva said, citing estimates that around one billion people in dry regions may face increasing water scarcity in the near future. These are regions with a high concentration of extreme poverty and hunger.
Agriculture is both a major cause and casualty of water scarcity. Farming accounts for around 70 percent of fresh water withdrawals in the world today, and also contributes to water pollution due to pesticides and chemicals.
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Author: Judith D. Schwartz| Published: December 7, 2016
We often think of water as a “noun”, as something bounded by place. After researching and writing a book on water, however, I’ve come to regard water as a “verb”. Water is always in motion. It expands in volume or retrenches; it retains or releases energy. It changes state, moving from gas to liquid to solid and back again, in an ongoing dialogue with land and sun.
This is not just to fuss over language. Rather, I believe that understanding how water “works”—how it moves across the landscape and through the atmosphere—is essential to truly address our many water challenges. This is so whether we’re contending with scarcity, in the case of drought, or too much water, as in floods. And because the workings of water intersect with factors like climate, biodiversity and food security, we can better grapple with other significant global problems by zeroing in on water processes.
Let’s take a quick look at three ways that water moves:
Infiltration In a functioning landscape, rain is held in the ground and supports plant and microbial life or slowly filters into groundwater stores. Our water “infrastructure” here is soil, and the richer the better: every one percent increase in soil organic matter (mostly carbon) represents an additional 20,000 gallons of water per acre held in the ground. This means it’s a lot harder to make a flood, and the longer the ground stays moist between rains.
What we perceive as a “lack of water” problem is often an “inability to keep water in the ground” problem—itself a symptom of carbon-depleted soil. As Precious Phiri, a land management consultant based in Zimbabwe and Africa Coordinator for Regeneration International, says, “there are places where you will be in a drought no matter how much rain you get.” Simple approaches to building soil carbon, such as managed animal impact, can make a tremendous difference in food security. Jody Butterfield, co-founder of the Africa Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe, says increased water infiltration in animal-treated fields can mean the ability to grow food for seven months rather than merely two—the difference between being self-sufficient and relying on food aid.
Author: Dr. Joseph Mercola | Published: October 8, 2016
“Carbon for Water,” a film by Evan Abramson and Carmen Elsa Lopez, reveals a reality most people in the Western world cannot fathom — a world where a large portion of each day is devoted to finding drinkable water.
In the Western Province of Kenya, 90 percent of the population have no easy access to drinking water. In order to make the available water safe to drink, they must first search for firewood, and then boil the water.
Alas, firewood is an equally scarce commodity, and locals resort to illegally cutting down and stealing wood from the ever-dwindling forest — a practice said to contribute to deforestation, which makes the threat of water shortage even more severe.
At present, Kenya’s forest covers less than 2 percent of the land, but as noted by the filmmakers:1
“Just six or seven decades ago a beautiful forest covered most of Western Province. Today, a lot of the forest is gone. Forest degradation and the reduction of rainfall are connected.
Once the forest is destroyed, the rainfall is reduced. In order to avoid conflicts that might lead to civil wars, Kenya’s forests need to be protected urgently, but that can’t happen if people rely on firewood to boil the water they need to drink.”
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Diana Donlon is Center for Food Safety’s Food and Climate Campaign Director where she leads Soil Solutions, a program communicating the critical importance of rebuilding soil health for food security, fresh water availability, and climate stability.
In bone-dry California we are counting the days until October when the rainy season should begin.
When wells run dry in the Central Valley, fires rage in Big Sur and pine forests in the Sierra Nevada die off, you can’t help but wonder where all the water has gone. But what if we asked a slightly different question: where should the water be?
To answer this it helps to know that soil hydrologists classify fresh water as either blue or green. According to Henry Lin, Professor of Hydropedology / Soil Hydrology at Penn State University,
“Blue water refers to water collected in rivers, lakes, wetlands and groundwater. Blue water is available for withdrawal before it evaporates or meets the ocean. Green water refers to water absorbed by soil and plants and is then released back into the air. Green water is unavailable for withdrawal.”
Nevertheless, it may be surprising to learn that what ends up as blue water represents only approximately 38.8 percent of total precipitation, whereas what ends up as green water represents the remaining approximately 61.1 percent of precipitation.
Although green water clearly represents the lion’s share of precipitation, as Professor Lin states, “green water is an often overlooked resource.”
Why do we fail to see the green water—the water that is stored in soils and consumed by plants?
Film-maker Deborah Koons Garcia provides one hypothesis. Koons Garcia, who wrote and directed Symphony of the Soil, an homage to Earth’s living soil system, points out that most people are “soil blind.”
If we “saw soil,” she says we would recognize that when it is healthy, soil acts like a giant sponge that absorbs water during floods and provides it to plants in times of drought. We would also “see” the difference between soils that have structure and soils that don’t. In order for soil to store water effectively it must have organic matter, or carbon. This carbon gives soil the structure necessary to carry out its filtering and holding functions. When rain falls on soils that are carbon deficient, the water isn’t absorbed into the soil sponge.
PARK RAPIDS, MINN. – The mating dance of the hex mayflies drew John Sorenson to the Straight River at sunset.
As the bugs floated like snowflakes in the fading summer light, he pulled on his waders and waited patiently for the distinct sound of trout breaking the dark water to feed.
“It’s a treasure,” he said, stepping to the edge of the grassy bank and casting his line, as he has for years.
But the Straight River is becoming warmer and more polluted as farm irrigation rigs multiply along its banks. Now Sorenson fears that the fish huddling in the cooler deep spots are a stark sign that northern Minnesota’s only naturally producing trout stream is in trouble.
“In 10 years the Straight River could be a big muddy stream good only for carp,” he said.
And the peril is flowing downstream — into the Mississippi River and across a watershed that covers almost half of Minnesota, signaling a new and rising threat to one of the state’s great natural wonders. Like many others across Minnesota, the great river is heading toward an ecological precipice.
In the last five years, the Upper Mississippi watershed has lost about 400 square miles of forests, marshes and grasslands — natural features that cleanse and refresh its water — to agriculture and urban development. That’s an area bigger than Voyageurs National Park and represents the second fastest rate of land conversion in the country, according to one national study.
That breathtaking transformation is now endangering the cleanest stretch of America’s greatest river with farm chemicals, depleted groundwater and urban runoff. At this rate, conservationists warn, the Upper Mississippi — a recreational jewel and the source of drinking water for millions of Minnesotans — could become just another polluted river.
Here, around Park Rapids, potato fields are replacing forests, and drinking wells show rising levels of nitrate contamination from fertilizers.
Along the western edge of the vast watershed, soaring demand for irrigation is depleting sensitive aquifers and rivers that feed the Mississippi
And where the Upper Mississippi curves like a giant question mark through the center of Minnesota, many of its tributaries are showing signs of stress — phosphorus that breeds algae, sediment that makes the water cloudy, even bacteria in stretches farther downstream.
“What we do to our land, we do to our water,” said John Linc Stine, commissioner of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Yet because most land use decisions are in the hands of private property owners and local governments, Minnesota has limited power to protect the river. “We can see it coming and still not be able to do something about it,” Stine said.
The battles over land use along the great sweep of brown river go beyond drinking water, to deeply held values that give the headwaters state part of its identity, said Bonnie Keeler, an environmental scientist at the University of Minnesota.
“Like clear lakes, stewardship, a sense of place and pride, and the identity of Minnesotans around clean water,” she said.
Quite beyond their sheer beauty, forested lands in the watershed also provide immense economic value in purifying drinking water for millions of people, an issue that has drawn the attention of federal regulators. This past summer, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched a special project to predict how changing land use around the Upper Mississippi affects water quality, part of a larger effort to understand the threats facing major drinking water systems across the country.
Keeler, who directs the Natural Capital Project at the university and studies the social value of such things as clean water and forests, said it’s hard to find the right balance between protecting the Upper Mississippi and preserving economic engines such as agriculture and tourism. But, she added, the debate has thrust a new kind of environmental thinking to the forefront: Clean water, natural landscapes and wilderness have an economic value that deserves a place in the broader equation that defines a healthy economy.
In short, Keeler said, “What would a map of an ideal watershed look like?”
That’s because upstream forests, wetlands and other “natural infrastructure” play a critical role in supplying clean water downstream. They stabilize soil and reduce erosion, regulate water flow to mitigate floods and droughts, and purify water. Yet the world’s watersheds lost 6 percent of their tree cover on average from 2000-2014, putting citizens at risk of losing their water supplies.
Global Forest Watch (GFW) Water, a global mapping tool and database launched today, examines how forest loss, fires, unsustainable land use and other threats to natural infrastructure affect water security throughout the world. GFW Water provides data sets, statistics and risk scores for all of the world’s 230 watersheds, areas of land where all of the water drains to a common outlet such as a river. Users can drop a pin anywhere to learn about the risks to the water supply near them, and find resources on how investing in natural infrastructure protection can help alleviate these threats.
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Author: Arthur Neslen | Published on: September 22, 2016
Waste water, pesticide run-off and pollution threatens people across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Regulation, data and business action are needed.
A week before Russia’s Daldykan river was turned red by a leak from a metals plant, the UN issued a warning as chilling as it was overlooked: 323 million people are at risk from life-threatening diseases caused by the pollution of rivers and lakes.
Cholera, typhoid and other deadly pathogens are increasing in more than half of the rivers in Africa, Asia and Latin America, according to a UN environment programme (Unep) report. Salinity levels have also risen in nearly a third of waterways.
Asia has been worst hit, with up to 50% of all rivers now affected by severe pathogen pollution caused by a cocktail of untreated waste water disposal, agricultural pesticides run-off and industrial pollution.
In a telling footnote to the Russian Norilsk disaster, Nasa released satellite images on 15 September showing that far from being a one-off, the Daldykan river had turned red on multiple occasions in the past 20 years.
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“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” – John Muir
There was a recent article in The Washington Postentitled “Meat is Horrible”, once again vilifying meat, that was full of inaccurate statements about the harm cattle impose on the land, how bad it is for our health, and how it should be taxed. Stories like this are all too common and we’ve absolutely got to change our thinking on what’s causing greenhouse gas emissions and our global health crisis.
Hint: it’s not grass-fed steak
In the few days since the story originally came out, I’ve been brewing up some different angle to write. I’ve written here, and here about the benefits of red meat, and how Tofurky isn’t the answer to healing the environment or our health. I keep saying the same thing over and over. Recently, I posted this as a response to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new claims that a plant-based diet is optimal. I also wrote about Philadelphia’s sugar tax here, and I don’t think a meat tax is any better of an idea, especially when the government is subsidizing the feed. I’m feeling quite frustrated.
This morning, I went back to see the post and noticed that the story has been “significantly revised to address several inaccurate and incomplete statements about meat production’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.” Most of the original points, references and charts are missing. However there are still some important pieces of information that I feel the author missed. The main one being that meat itself isn’t evil, it’s the method by which we farm it (feed lots and CAFOs-Confined Animal Feeding Operations) and how we prepare it (breaded and deep fried), and what we eat alongside it (fries, and a large soda).
Author and climate activist Bill McKibben has published a manifesto to “declare war” on climate change. While I agree about the urgency, I question the wisdom of invoking warfare. For one, how well have our battles against vast, multifaceted problems worked out? (Think: the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the war on poverty.) Equally important, the language of combat is exactly wrong for addressing climate disruption. Rather, we need to wage peace with nature: to understand how natural systems regulate climate and to ally with the processes that maintain those functions.
But we’re running out of time.
“Increasingly, people are ready for a peace footing with nature.”
Shifting to renewable energy—the core of McKibben’s mobilization—is essential. But this alone won’t avert climate disaster. Even if we stopped fossil fuel emissions this minute, it would take centuries to bring CO2 down to appropriate levels. Plus, what remains unspoken: We could suck all the CO2 we want out of the atmosphere and still suffer the droughts, floods, heat waves and wildfires we now associate with climate change. We’re blind-sided by carbon, as if breaking our fossil fuel addiction were all that’s needed to restore climate dynamics. Climate is too complex to be reduced to a single variable.
Many ecological processes that influence climate reflect the movement and phase change of water. While carbon dioxide traps heat, water vapor acts as conveyer of heat, retaining and releasing heat as it circulates. Consider transpiration, the upward movement of water through plants. This is a cooling mechanism, transforming solar radiation to latent heat embodied in water vapor. According to Czech botanist Jan Pokorny, each liter of water transpired converts 0.7 kilowatt-hours of solar energy, an amount comparable to the capacity of, say, a large room air conditioner. A single tree can transpire upwards of 100 liters of water in a day. That’s a lot of cooling power—not to mention the shade, the drawdown of carbon, and everything else a tree does for us.
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Amidst the cries of “protect our water, protect our land, protect our peoples,” Native Americans, ranchers and farmers are standing their ground along a highway in North Dakota. They are blocking the crews of Energy Transfer Partners — a Dallas-based company whose workers are protected by both police and armed, private security personnel — from accessing the site of the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The roughly 1,200-mile-long pipeline would transfer about a half million barrels of oil a day from North Dakota to Illinois. Opponents of its construction worry that a leak or rupture would spell disaster for not only the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, but for all communities along the Missouri River that depend on it for drinking and agriculture.
At least 10 arrests have been made. Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier told the Bismarck Tribune that those arrested “were not staying within bounds set by law enforcement and getting in the way of surveyors working on the pipeline.” The arrests included a pediatrician and a grandmother who allegedly crossed the highway to check on a buffalo pasture.
As reported by Truthout in May of this year, Lakota youth, protesting the proposed construction of the pipeline, began a relay race from their Spirit Camp in Cannonball, North Dakota, to the office of the Army Corps of Engineers in Omaha, Nebraska, to deliver a petition against the pipeline. The Corps later decided to grant the necessary permits and green light the pipeline’s construction.
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