Water scarcity blog

Whilst most of south eastern England is currently classified by the Environment Agency as ‘seriously water stressed’, many western regions possess a water surplus.  The country’s water infrastructure and regulatory control framework is link-constrained and this acts as one of its most significant limitations.  Climate change, population growth and the often overlooked role of the future agricultural sector will pose risks for our ability to capture and retain adequate water supplies as well as to protect the natural and built [...]

Water has traditionally been regarded as a free resource. Any costs for water are usually associated with the cost of processing and delivering alone, rather than assigning any value to the resource. Free, or highly undervalued, water gives limited incentive for water efficiency. There is growing interest internationally the use of water pricing to reduce demand as well as to generate revenue to cover the cost of providing water supplies and maintaining infrastructure.  Attaching value to water is not straightforward. [...]

David Zetland in his posting on the Guardian Sustainable Business Water Hub reasons that determining water footprints will not lead to bigger profits – http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/water-footprints-bigger-profits.  He says “We’d have shortages of single-malt whisky if people only had to pay for the bottle and shipping, but we don’t because we also have to pay for the whisky. Why isn’t the same true for water? The main reason is that we had plenty of water in the past. It was so abundant [...]

The water crisis is frequently referred to as a ‘crisis of governance, and consequently policy reforms to address governance issues receive significant attention. The need to manage water resources within the broader context of natural resource systems requires an integrated set of approaches, some of which support or depend on others to ensure successful and balanced resource management. Good governance is essential, coupled with the need to develop appropriate legal, regulatory and institutional frameworks for managing water resources. The need [...]

Water is our most basic need, essential for life and intrinsically linked with many of our critical national interests. Future climate change and population pressures present significant challenges for those tasked with ensuring security of supply. However is the current preoccupation with demand suppression inhibiting a fully holistic approach? Should greater consideration be directed towards supply enhancement schemes that both take advantage of climate change, and help increase resilience to its effects? Public health and well-being, food production, energy supply, [...]

An earlier post on this blog discussed the history of  ‘water wars’ in California, but in the southern part of the state where Los Angeles diverted fresh water for urban consumption from a mountainous regions that also supplied farmers.  That conflict is playing out still, but with the focus shifted towards the Colorado River.  Another conflict is going ahead in the north, in the Sacramento River delta region.  As reported in the recent newspaper article, the vast delta region to [...]

The diagram below (afterAllianz) distorts the area of each contry in proportion to the water wthdrawn in the three sectors: agriculture, industry and domestic. The total area in the sum of the three maps is 100% of the total water withdrawn in all countries of the world. This provides a graphical image of how water is used around the world. On average 69% is used for agriculture, 23% for industry and 8% for domestic consumption. So by comparing the three maps [...]

The End is not coming, but change certainly has arrived.  The arid American west, populated by farmers and city dwellers that relied on cheap water provided by the many dams of the Bureau of Land Reclamation is experiencing the eleventh year of a severe drought.  This article in the New York Times  reports that the level of Lake Mead may drop below 1,075 for the first time in its history.  The consequence will be a rapid reshuffling of the distribution [...]

Is blue water the new gold?  Will  blue water keep us green?  (Here in the USA, all of our money is green!)  The Nature Conservancy (NC) is pursuing a different sort of strategy to preserve natural habitats and protect water resources that takes this view.  Economists might call it monetizing natural assets, or perhaps, introducing appropriate pricing for externalities - NC calls it Water Funds.  The point is a familiar one to engineers dealing with water scarcity – water has value, but nobody seems [...]

Surface water storage by dams can bring many benefits, such as energy, drinking water supply and water for irrigation – but these benefits can come at great social and environmental cost due to population displacement and ecosystem impact from changes in flow regimes and breaking the continuity of the river. Over 48,000 large dams are in operation worldwide. For a time, dam building slowed, as decision-makers learned of their harmful impacts, but in recent years, the number of new dam [...]