Let’s start with a few numbers that give perspective: about 2 BILLION people don’t have access to safe water and more than 2 million people die each year from water-born diseases. In developing nations, its common for people to walk miles to a well or ATM water dispenser to get safe water. If you think all’s well in the U.S., think about Flint a few years ago where rusted pipes denied residents clean water for months (years?). In the US, there are more than 240,000 water main breakages each year, leaking 2.1 TRILLION gallons annually.
How can this be possible?
Some of this is the result of the sad facts of life: if you live in a developing country or continent (India or Africa for example), its likely that your government can’t afford the infrastructure necessary to give all its citizens access to water. In India alone, about a billion people don’t have access to affordable, safe water. We in the West are spoiled, believing everyone has access to safe water.
Our evolving climate is making it more difficult on multiple fronts. When things get hotter for a prolonged period, everything dries out and rivers run dry. Long term droughts have been the norm here in the Western US for years, causing reservoirs, rivers, and aquifers to shrink. These long term droughts and extreme heat are happening around the world, from the U.S. to Europe to India to Australia.
Water scarcity causes governments to look for new sources of water, some of which are easier than others. Think protecting the local aquifers, waste water treatment, desalinization, and the American Way — sue your neighbor for their water rights.
Climate causes the opposite affect as well: extreme flooding often follows extreme draught. As I write this, extreme flooding is happening in northern Italy and Vermont. This causes governments to look at building new infrastructure to capture the rain water, divert flooding, and build up their dams.
Why Should I Care?
Let me give you a couple of real-life examples. The city of Phoenix has stopped all development on its outskirts unless the developer can prove they have a 100 year supply of water. As I write this, looking across the East Mountains valley in New Mexico, another developer has had to stop planning for 4,000+ homes and retail establishments because the local aquifer can’t handle more usage. It’s an ongoing fight between the developer, state and local cities that’s lasted for two decades.
Pollution, waste and water pipe leakage all conspire to make much of India’s in-ground drinking water undrinkable. As noted above, the average family living in rural India has to walk to a well/source of water, often miles/kilometers away, at least once a day. And carry the water home in a bucket! Think about that for a while as you turn on the faucet.
Southern California is being forced to rethink their water supply. More than 90% of its water is imported, from the Colorado River, from the Northern Delta, and from the LA Aqueduct coming out of the Sierras. The rest is rain fall and treated waste water. As the draught continues (this year has been unusually wet, causing some people to think its yesterday’s problem. Not.), California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and three other states are wrangling new agreements to re-apportion water usage from the Colorado River. It got so “heated,” the Federal Government had to step in and mediate.
Living in the East Mountains around Albuquerque, limited water impacts almost everything. The threat of fire is constant. Thinning the trees around our house is a never-done chore. We’ve built a rain-water capture “system” to irrigate the greenhouse and provide water for the small animals in our backyard. We live off a well which means we monitor all uses of our water, living in fear that our well will run dry. We don’t know its capacity because measuring a well’s amount of water is as much art as science.
From LA to Mumbai to Milan to Sydney, Cities and States are Grappling with Water Resiliency Issues
In June the Network for Global Innovation held another edition of it’s Global Round Table Series in partnership with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Government officials and leaders from public/private utilities down with leaders from the private side, NGOS, and environment groups from four countries to discuss the shape of water resiliency challenges in their regions and their views on what was needed to get done. Here’s a link to the discussion: NGIN Water Resiliency Roundtable
As I finish this post, I’m in Paonia Colorado attending a motorcycle rally. We rode through New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado to get here. Temperatures never got below 90 during the day and regularly were in the 100- 112 range. Parched is how I would describe this part of the country.
Do we really think we live in ordinary times? Heat. Fires. Floods. And now we’ve entered Water-less times.
Take care,
fred
Scary - growing up iin SOCAL raised my H2O consciousness at an early age - it would help if we could develop a safe, affordable de-salinization process that could be deployed worldwide. Gregg