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We're running out of water | Print |  E-mail
Wednesday, 17 December 2008

Summoning the goodwill to keep tabs on yet another epic global crisis isn’t easy, but it’s oh so important

Amanda Martinez

In early December, I attended an information panel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a provocative title: “The War for Water.” The panel was meant to lay out some of the formidable challenges of providing clean water worldwide in the midst of growing demand, increased pollution and climate change, and to spark debate about the best way to identify and cultivate the technologies that might overcome these challenges. But the panel ultimately failed to address these issues in any significant way for the simple fact that the packed auditorium’s audience of more than 200 of Boston’s self-selected water curious couldn’t seem to get past the panel’s establishing statement—that we’re currently experiencing a global water crisis.

Now I know times are tough, and that the word “crisis,” due to the recent uptick in the frequency of its use, may have lost a little of its patina of urgency, but nary a week and certainly no more than a month goes by without some major newspaper or magazine sounding the clarion call of a desperate, burgeoning water emergency either here at home or in one of a spate of other countries, developing or otherwise. And yet still, when the MIT panel was opened to the audience for questions, attendee after attendee asked the panel of water industry executives, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and one lone representative (decidedly a stooge, I’m sad to report) from the Environmental Protection Agency’s water safety lab to please parse the basics.

“So if there are all these contaminants in our water supply, what’s being done to address them?” one man asked in response to the statement that our current water treatment methods are ineffective at eliminating an increasing host of micropollutants, including nanoparticles, pharmaceuticals and endocrine-disrupting chemicals. The EPA representative did little to assuage the man’s concerns, blatantly stating that the agency was “not in a position to assess the risk of micropollutants in the water supply,” condemning the future potential of developing such assessment ability as “a monumental effort,” reminding us that the EPA only performs a contaminant risk assessment once every six years and finally, foisting responsibility onto the states to “impose stricter standards” than those of the federal government.

Other questions held a similar tone of chagrin, betrayal and exasperation, and finally culminated with the query of one man, who, looking to be neither a hermit nor a member of the crowd that at one recent presidential rally actually booed The New York Times, asked: “If there is such a crisis as you say, why is this the first I’m hearing about this? Who will tell the people about this crisis?”

Could it be that we’ve missed all of the headlines (and there have been some sexy ones) hailing water as the resource most likely to precipitate wars in the coming decades? Are we not aware that water is the new oil? Is it only those of us who were unlucky enough to receive a citation between May of 2007 and April of 2008 for watering our lawns between the forbidden hours of 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. who truly understand that peak water has arrived?

Well, just in case, here’s the crux of the crisis. There are an estimated 350 quintillion gallons of water on Earth. Unfortunately, less than 1 percent of that water comes readily available for our human endeavors, sequestered as it is in the oceans’ saline waters and frozen polar caps. Although we’d die without it, water is not just for drinking. About two-thirds of the water we draw from rainfall, rivers and aquifers is used in agriculture for irrigation. This is why water scarcity equals food scarcity. Water and energy are also inextricably linked. For power generated via coal and oil, every megawatt hour produced requires 21,000 to 50,000 gallons of water. Conversely, the state of California spends 20 percent of its annual electricity consumption just pumping water from one part of the state to another.

Rampant, sustained pollution and surging population growth are draining traditional freshwater sources faster than nature’s ingenious hydrologic cycle can replenish them. Rising gross domestic product has had an even greater impact on water demand than population growth, requiring, according to one recent study, an additional 22,000 cubic meters of water per year for every $1 million gained in GDP. Add to these stressors climate change’s seeming penchant for inflicting drought, and the concept of global water scarcity suddenly and starkly begins to lose its mystique.

Take the domestic view and the last year reveals a passel of in-house water woes and concomitant squabbles. This past June, Gov. Schwarzenegger declared a statewide drought, crowning the previous March, April and May as possibly the driest ever in recorded history. In March, researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography predicted a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead, the reservoir for over 22 million people in the Southwest, could be dry by 2021 if the current rates of water usage persist. The Great Lakes, which comprise approximately 20 percent of the world’s surface fresh water and quench the water needs of 40 million people in eight states and parts of Canada, are experiencing declining water levels. But that didn’t stop politicians from such faraway, water-strapped states as New Mexico and Texas from feeling covetous, a move that prompted Great Lakes states to introduce protective legislation to Congress. In February, politicians in drought-saddled Atlanta even went so far as to dispute a 190-year-old document determining Georgia’s border with Tennessee in the hopes of gaining access to a tiny patch of the Tennessee River.

Take the worldview on water scarcity, however, and the situation immediately slips to dire. As it stands today, 1.2 billion people on the planet have no access to clean water. If that’s scary, by 2030, the world will need to gain access to 50 percent more water. Australia, the world’s driest continent, is struggling through a decade-long drought that has wrung A$20 billion from its $1 trillion economy in the last six years. Major rivers such as the Nile and the Yellow River in China are so taxed, they now fail to reach the sea at certain times of the year. In rural Africa, it is not uncommon for a woman to spend eight hours a day, walking ten miles or more to fetch water. And the statistic that may have elicited the greatest collective gasp from the MIT-panel audience was that which stated that every 15 seconds, somewhere in the world, a child dies from a preventable waterborne-related disease.

It’s not that we don’t have the technology to meet these challenges. Many solutions already exist and others are quickly evolving that are capable of addressing water scarcity on several fronts. These range from more efficient water use (drip irrigation as opposed to flood irrigation) and improved municipal water infrastructure (every year billions of dollars’ worth of drinking water are lost en route to our taps due to leaky pipes), to novel seawater desalination technologies and wastewater treatment methods.

As the panel members pointed out, the true challenge to large-scale development and implementation of these technologies lies at the heart of a controversial dilemma that pits the psychology of water against the business of water. Should access to clean water and sanitation be considered a fundamental human right or should it be treated, at least initially, as a commodity? Right now, it is considered effectively neither, but knee-jerk morality screams choice A, the choice with the best outcome for all may be to fully commoditize and thus, create a market for water, which would then spur innovation, stimulate investment, drive competition, light a fire under adoption and much more quickly enable us to install efficient water infrastructure in developing countries.

In sum, shock may have been the pervading sentiment at the panel discussion, and that’s fine. The statistics and predictions are arresting. But now that we have an inkling of what’s at stake, we need to take action. Because, as one panel member pointed out, invoking an image of Georgia’s governor praying for rain on the steps of the state capitol during last year’s drought, “hope is not a method.”

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Nice column. Unfortunately in Santa Cruz we are going to keep building overly dense projects and will burn oil to fuel our desal plant.

I know we are supposed to "keep it weird", but Santa Cruz supporting OPEC just sucks. We need another reservoir if we are going to continue to build build build, but.....population stabilization is the real solution.
peter j cook , December 18, 2008
Great Article
0
Hello Amanda,

I just wanted to say, fantastic article. Extremely informative and I appreciate how you write with such urgency while avoiding triteness. We're a Vancouver Canada-based organization called WaterDrop and our vision is to get water recognized as a serious global threat to everyone. We not only want to create awareness, but we want to enact change through proactive and evolutional engagement. I'd love to hear how you got involved with writing this fantastic article, which we are now using as a resource and referral point for many other areas.

Thanks again and keep up the good work,
Jered
Jered , December 18, 2008 | url
Executive Director
0
Good article Amanda,
Apparently, the Santa Cruz Land Trust and it's Watsonville Wetlands 486 acre acqusition written about last week is going to be part of the problem instead of part of the solution....here's how.
I have been trying for over 2 years to dialogue with Director Terry Corwin and the Santa Cruz Land Trust about our ground water emergency here from berry overproduction locally and their plans to preserve farmland. They have been avoiding me and now I understand why. The Land Trust plans to continue pumping ag wells on their newly acquired 480 acre Watsonville Wetlands/Slough property to rent it out for continued berry production there despite the fact the the Pajaro Basin Management Plan requires that all ag wells on this and another 7,500 acres be stopped to stop further salt water intrusion resource loss!
To best protect the wetlands and address our massive 45,000 acre foot yearly water overdraft, this land must be fallowed. It is located in the most critical area where, according to the Pajaro Basin Management Plan, well pumping must be ceased to stop saltwater intrusion. Land contiguous or proximate to our invaluable and dwindling wetlands should not be farmed. It can only harm these habitats. Renting and farming this land for funding to "restore wetlands" (and this nonprofits' executives' and employees' salaries?) is a ridiculous contradiction and very poor vision and stewardship.
This land growing berries yearly would use almost as much water as our new $100 million desal plant (before O&M) can produce in a year operating 24/7....and we are in a drought and countywide water emergency? Any nonprofit or state grant funding must be contingent on fallowing this land to best conserve our water supply and wetlands.
This decision really makes me question the understanding of the "Land Trust" of the true gravity of our water crisis here and their ability to provide responsible stewardship.
Please write to the Land Trust about the unadvisability of their plans. They won't talk to me or return any of my calls. Please see begentlewiththeearth.com for complete details.
Thanks for your help,
Douglas Deitch
Executive Director
Monterey Bay Conservancy
Doug Deitch/Monterey Bay Conservancy , December 18, 2008 | url
Excellent article
3553
Great writing. Appreciated and Dugg
Tana Brinnand , December 19, 2008

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