Running Dry/The answer is in irrigation

Running Dry

Excerpt:

The world has a water shortage, not a food shortage

MOST people may drink only two litres of water a day, but they consume about 3,000 if the water that goes into their food is taken into account. The rich gulp down far more, since they tend to eat more meat, which takes far more water to produce than grains. So as the world’s population grows and incomes rise, farmers will—if they use today’s methods—need a great deal more water to keep everyone fed: 2,000 more cubic kilometres a year by 2030, according to the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), a research centre, or over a quarter more than they use today. Yet in many farming regions, water is scarce and likely to get scarcer as global warming worsens. The world is facing not so much a food crisis as a water crisis, argues Colin Chartres, IWMI’s director-general.

The solution, Mr Chartres and others contend, is more efficient use of water or, as the sloganeers put it, “more crop per drop”. Some 1.2 billion people, about a fifth of the world’s population, live in places that are short of water (see map). Farming accounts for roughly 70% of human water consumption. So when water starts to run out, as is happening in northern China, southern Spain and the western United States, among other places, farming tends to offer the best potential for thrift. But governments, whether to win votes or to protect the poor, rarely charge farmers a market price for water. So they are usually more wasteful than other consumers—even though the value they create from the water is often less than households or industry would be willing to pay for it.

The pressing need is to make water go further. Antoine Frérot, the head of the water division of Veolia Environnement, a French firm, promotes recycling, whereby city wastewater is treated until it can be used in industry or agriculture. This costs about a third less than desalination, and cuts pollution. He expects his recycling business to quadruple in the next decade. Yet as Mr Frérot himself concedes, there are many even cheaper ways to save water. As much as 70% of water used by farmers never gets to crops, perhaps lost through leaky irrigation channels or by draining into rivers or groundwater. Investment in drip irrigation, or simply repairing the worst leaks, could bring huge savings.

Farmers in poor countries can usually afford such things only if they are growing cash crops, says David Molden of IWMI. Even basic kit such as small rainwater tanks can be lacking. Ethiopia, for example, has only 38 cubic metres of storage capacity per inhabitant, compared to almost 5,000 in Australia. Yet modest water storage can hugely improve yields in rain-fed agriculture, by smoothing over short dry spells. Likewise, pumping water into natural aquifers for seasonal storage tends to be much cheaper than building a big dam, and prevents the great waste of water through evaporation.


Irrigation methods


I believe that irrigation holds the solution to a great part of the global water crisis. In many parts of the world sprinkler irrigation is still the most used method of irrigation because it is the most available and least expensive. This method however is very wasteful, and using it in places where pervasive drought is common is not cost effective. In order for us as a species to mitigate the crisis we will surely face regarding water if present behavior persists we will have to change how we do things. Regarding the irrigation of crops it will be how they are irrigated, when they are irrigated based on changing weather patterns, and also in focusing on areas looking towards less water intensive crops in drier areas.

It is unfortunate that the very places where the most water intensive crops are grown such as cotton, rice, and corn (India, China, Africa, and the Southwest US ) are experiencing the most pervasive droughts and desertification now. As population increases towards 9 billion and resources become scarcer, farmers will most certainly have to devise ways of conserving water to get optimal growth and yield from a limited resource.

Through shifting the emphasis on crop varieties grown in these areas if possible and by changing irrigation methods from sprinkler to drip irrigation, trillions of gallons of water could be saved. Also in places where weather patterns are changing and are seeing more rain, rain catchement systems will be invaluable in helping to catch excess rain and use it for irrigation purposes.

This is where satellites that predict such patterns can also certainly be of great help in pinpointing what areas will need such changes as the effects of climate change are also felt more in these areas as well. We must begin now to work on a global plan for water conservation that takes climate change into account, but also seeks globally to shore up outdated water systems and infrastructure.

This is not something that requires any new inventions to be made that will take years to get to market. All it will take is an effort on the part of government and undividuals to see how their actions are affecting the planet and adjust them accordingly. That will not be an easy task granted, but the consequences of not doing so regardless of the types of crops planted will be detrimental to the continued sustainability of the human species.

This as well encompasses other efforts that include a global climate treaty that places caps on Co2 emissions (which causes drought and water evaporation as well as glacier melt) with an emphasis on looking at the population issue which is also an important component of resource depletion, and enforcing caps on water usage in areas where overusage is not necessary. And of course, not allowing private enterprises to buy up water rights simply to exploit water as a commodity.

The global water crisis is the most important environmental issue we will face in this century. We can no longer take this precious resource for granted. We are running dry. It is time to take action to conserve what we have left through effective irrigation practices, infrastructure, and more informed personal choices.

When It Comes To Water, Pickens Is Far From Green

Easy Pickens?

"While touting his plan to wean us off foreign oil, Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens says little of his intention to market fossil water. Thanks to help he obtained from the Texas Legislature, he has stacked the board of a tiny water district and by the power of eminent domain also granted him by the Legislature, he can force landowners to sell him rights to a 320-mile strip of land by which he will pipe the water down the same corridor to Dallas that he plans to use transmitting his wind power. But Pickens is just one of thousands of capitalists who sell precious Ogallala water for private gain. Like him, they are aided by government.

Pickens shouldn't be allowed to sell 65 billion gallons a year as he proposes, but neither should Plains farmers be allowed to pump 6.2 trillion gallons annually, over half of which is poured onto corn. With populations increasing and global warming likely to cause widespread drought, we should redirect the billions we spend on corn subsidies and take control from local water districts. Under federal or state control, we could end Texas's 'right of capture' policy, which parcels water to the landowner with the biggest pump."

Julene Bair is a writer and author of One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter. She will soon complete Where Rivers Run Sand, a personal account of the crisis facing the Ogallala Aquifer.
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How outrageous is this? That one man could use his wealth and political favors to secure ownership of what is a human right in order to sell it for his own profit. This is a blatant example of using the current water crisis we face for personal gain. People like T. Boone Pickens have no soul as far as I am concerned, and we now know the real story behind his so called green wind initiative.

Water for this plan would come from the panhandle section of the Ogallala Aquifer. As one of the largest underground aquifers in the world, the Ogallala runs from Texas to South Dakota and a century ago was said to hold more water than Lake Huron. Since then, cheap electric pumps gave farmers the power to bring water up hundreds of feet, and the depletion began. This aquifer waters a little over one-fifth of the nation's irrigated land, and is steadily being depleted due to population growth, overuse, ineffective agricultural methods that waste trillions of gallons a year, and now global warming/climate change in the form of drought. See my previous entry on this: Devastating Drought Settles On The High Plains. It is a ripe area for exploitation, and that is exactly what T. Boone Pickens is doing. He is hoping to sell this scarcer water at a high price to make a profit from it. A green venture? Hardly.

And the Ogallala isn't the same as rivers or lakes. There is no source of replenishment. It holds "fossil water" which has been sealed underground for hundreds of thousands of years. Once it's gone it's gone forever... again, forever. However, as the Ogallala Aquifer's water level continues to decline, Pickens is looking to expand its usage and more than likely that includes making even more profit agriculturally from ethanol production.

So the wind mills... a diversionary ruse on the part of an oil man posing as a green convert who supported George W. Bush to the hilt and is now being repaid for it at the expense of a precious resource now more precious than oil? A resource of the Ogallala that should not belong to him exclusively, or any one farmer over another. This is why Texas' 'right of capture' policy must be stopped in order to preserve the declining water level of the Ogallala Aquifer and to protect it from vulture capitalists who seek to steal it.

These states need to stand up for their water!

World Water Crisis Underlies World Food Crisis

World Water Crisis Underlies World Food Crisis

The world's supplies of clean, fresh water cannot sustain today's "profligate" use and inadequate management, which have brought shrinking food supplies and rising food costs to most countries, WWF Director General James Leape told the opening session of World Water Week in Stockholm today. "Behind the world food crisis is a global freshwater crisis, expected to rapidly worsen as climate change impacts intensify," Leape said. "Irrigation-fed agriculture provides 45 percent of the world's food supplies, and without it, we could not feed our planet's population of six billion people." Leape warns that many of the world's irrigation areas are highly stressed and drawing more water than rivers and groundwater reserves can sustain, especially in view of climate change.

At the same time, he said, freshwater food reserves are declining in the face of the quickening pace of dam construction and unsustainable water extractions from rivers. At a time when billions of people live without access to safe drinking water or suffer ill health due to poor sanitation, when food producers battle biofuel producers for land and water resources, and when global climate change is altering the overall water balance, 2,500 water experts are gathered this week at the Stockholm International Fairs and Congress Center to craft solutions to these problems. World Water Week is an annual event co-ordinated by the Stockholm International Water Institute. This year's conference has the overall theme of Progress and Prospects on Water: For A Clean and Healthy World with Special Focus on Sanitation" in keeping with the UN declaration of 2008 as the International Year of Sanitation.

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According to an announcement here the amount of people without potable water is going down. This is good news, and is in part due to organizations such as Water Partners International, Water Aid, and other organizations coming together in the water justice movement to bring potable water to more areas of the world that need it most. It is an encouraging sign, but the work is far from over. Glaciers worldwide continue to melt threatening the water supplies for millions of people as freshwater lakes and rivers continue to decline due to a combination of climate change/global warming, overusage and pollution.


The measures outlined by the forum need to be seriously instituted instead of just being talk to carry over for the next year. As population rises freshwater resources will become even scarcer due to climate changes, pollution, and corporatization, so conservation and more efficient irrigation practices worldwide must be instituted. It is then ironic to see the water fountains going outside the sign to this forum. I wonder if they realized that. This is the most important environmental issue and crisis we are facing in our world, and the only way people will know about it is for those with the passion to get the message out to persevere in doing so.

Let us hope to see a report from World Water Week that does more than address problems in words but also solves them with actions.

Devastating Drought Settles on The High Plains

Devastating Drought Settles on The High Plains

Cimarron County, Oklahoma, the westernmost county in the state, is “at the epicenter of the drought,” according to staff climatologist Gary McManus with the Oklahoma Climatological Survey (OCS). The land is occupied by wheat farms, corn fields, and pasture. It’s an area of periodic drought; the Dust Bowl years have not yet faded from living memory.

“The area has been in and out of drought since the start of the decade. Mostly in,” McManus said. “But fall of last year was when it really started to get bad. In some places, this year has been as dry or even drier than the Dust Bowl.” As of early August, the Oklahoma panhandle was experiencing its driest year (previous 365 days) since 1921, according to OCS calculations. Through July, year-to-date precipitation in Boise City, Cimarron’s County Seat, was only about 4.8 inches, barely half of average and drier than some years in the 1930s, the height of the Dust Bowl.

The toll of the drought on crops and pasture is evident in satellite-based vegetation images spanning the past year. On NASA’s Terra satellite, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) collects observations of visible and infrared light that scientists use to create a scale, or index, of vegetation conditions. In images from late July 2007, conditions appeared near or only a little below normal compared to the 2000-2006 average. In mid-autumn, however, during the beginning of the growing season for the winter wheat crop, conditions had already started to deteriorate. By late April/early May, the impact of the drought on the area’s crops and rangeland was dramatic.

In late June and early July, conditions in the agricultural lands appeared to improve somewhat. The apparent improvement could be misleading however. Paul Toon, the Cimarron County Executive Director for the Oklahoma Office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farm Service Agency, says the Panhandle did receive patchy rains in June and July. But late June or July is also when the season’s winter wheat crop is typically harvested. In crop areas, at least, it may be normal for vegetation to be sparse at that time of the year. So the drought might not seem as dramatic in those areas.

Precipitation in Boise City from January through July 2008 was only 12 centimeters (less than 5 inches), only half of average. The dryness is on par with the worst years of the Dust Bowl decade, which came to be called the “Dirty Thirties.” From 1930 to 1936, the January–July precipitation ranged from 10 to 18 centimeters. (Graph by Robert Simmon, based on data from the Global Historical Climatology Network and NOAA NNDC Climate Data Online.)

Viewed from the ground, the situation is equally discouraging. According to Cherrie Brown, district conservationist for the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service in Boise City, subsoil moisture is virtually non-existent. “Any rain that falls is sapped by evaporation in two or three days. Four feet down, there is literally no moisture left in the soil. Recently we were digging as part of a project to decommission a county well, and we dug down to a depth of 7 feet, and there was still no moisture. Even irrigation can’t offset these deficits,” she said. As a result, crops have failed and pasture is severely degraded.

end of excerpt.




This is happening in too many places worldwide simultaneously to simply be attributed to just water waste and mismanagement. From what I see here, these are the classic effects of climate change. And this isn't Australia, Spain, Cyprus, Africa, or Turkey... this is right here in our own backyard and effecting our own people.

Lake Tuz no longer 2nd largest in Turkey due to climate change and waste

Lake Tuz No Longer Second Largest Lake in Turkey

Lake Tuz, located in central Anatolia and known as the second-largest lake of Turkey, can no longer carry that title as it has shrunk by 85 percent over the last 90 years due to global warming, drought and the over usage of its water for irrigation purposes.

Aksaray University department of engineering, geodesy and photogrammetry engineering instructor Semih Ekercin spoke with the Anatolia news agency on Tuesday and said he examined the changes to the coastlines of Lake Tuz, second in size only to Lake Van, located in eastern Anatolia, and Beyşehir Lake, located in the western part of central Anatolia.

Ekercin said he even received support from NASA during the course of his study, adding that after examining satellite maps of Turkey provided by the US, Japan and France, he found there was a serious shrinkage of Turkey's lakes.

Ekercin said Lake Tuz covered 216,400 hectares in 1915. "Lake Tuz has shrunk at an alarming rate from then on. The water surface area of Lake Tuz decreased to 92,600 hectares in 1987," Ekercin said. "I clearly detected from the satellite images that the area of Lake Tuz decreased to 32,600 hectares in 2005. Drought, the over usage of water in the lake basin for irrigation and global warming have led to the loss of water in the lake.

snip

Ekercin said there is a need for urgent and radical measures to protect Lake Tuz. "If the necessary measures are not taken, by 2015 Lake Tuz will no longer exist."
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Radical measures indeed. The World Water Forum is taking place this week in Stockholm... but like every other year, what "radical" plans will come from it? Every year there are meetings, forums, dinners, and talks. And every year we see scenarios like Lake Tuz in Turkey continuing to play out before our eyes. We talk, and yet while talking still continue to perpetuate the climate change/global warming that is dropping levels in waterways worldwide. We talk, and yet continue to pollute our waterways until they are of no use to us or other species and cause the death of many rivers worldwide. We talk, and yet we still do not have a sufficient global plan to deal with the affects of climate change/drought that are slowly and silently creeping to all corners of this world as we continue to waste water with inefficient agricultural practices, infrastructure, and greed.

Those who know of and remember the tragedy of the Aral Sea in Russia see a hauntingly familiar and frightening pattern here. People care more for their own selfish sustainment than for only using what they need, which is considerably less than what they want. How many lakes and rivers will we run dry before we realize that we are running out of time to fight for the sustainability of this planet? Where is the plan? Where are the politicians? The World Bank doesn't have that plan. The IMF doesn't have that plan. The G8 doesn't have that plan. Will the World Water Forum in Stockholm have that plan?

The loss of Lake Tuz like so many other waterways, the Murray River in Australia as a starker example is a harbinger to us that something is terribly wrong.

Why aren't we listening?

WHAT WILL IT TAKE?

How many more?

Water water everywhere, but what will we drink?

Many take water for granted, but as we all know we cannot live without it. However, much of it in the United States and other countries worldwide is polluted beyond human use. We have managed to pollute and toxify the very resource we need to survive, thereby reducing the amount of potable water in our world as our population continues to rise. This presents geopolitical issues as well as poverty, health, and social issues...especially as multi-nationals continue to buy up water for profit to control its distribution.

Who decides who is worthy to have water? Who decides who is worthy to have clean potable water? Who decides who gets to live and who is to die? It is one thing to truly have water scarcity in the form of no water... but to see water all around you and not be able to drink or use it is truly a moral tragedy. Please do all you can to conserve this precious resource, and pass on to those in government that demanding corporate accountability for polluting our natural resources is something that should be more important than covering for their crimes. Climate change has now also been put into motion, so preserving the freshwater we have left is imperative to our continued survival.

Water is life.

Notice the ripples in the water as it moves constantly to the rhythm of life even as we kill it. This particular waterway was poisoned with Pcbs and dioxin to make Agent Orange during the Vietnam war. We don't see any fish here anymore.

Is this the legacy we are going to leave for the future? I sure hope not.

Thanks for listening to this.

Flow-In Theatres This Fall

A must see documentary on the growing privitization of scarce water by corporations looking to profit from the global water crisis. I am very gratified to see this movie coming to theatres this fall. This is an issue I have been talking and reporting about for years. Water safety has always been at the crux of my environmental concern and action, though I am disheartened to see it come to this stage.

In reading of the pervasive and severe droughts that now exist on every continent of our world save Antarctica, this documentary could not have come out at a better time. I am hoping this does for the global water crisis what Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth did to wake people up to the challenge of climate change, which is inextricably linked to the global water crisis.

Please pass this on to all you know. Our water future depends on it.