EcoRadio

Category: Water

The world’s fresh water supplies are almost fully exploited.Almost al, 97 per cent, of the world’s water is salt. Of the fresh water in the world, two thirds is locked up as ice and snow (the cryosphere – to you and me, kid!). Globally, three quarters of the water that is used is used by agriculture. India, China and the United States, use more fresh water than is available. The water level in those nation’s aquifers is falling as a result.The current food crisis has come about largely as a result as the shortfall in available water begins to impact on the cost of irrigation. 

  • Victoria’s autumn rainfall plummets

    The long-term average for the three months of autumn since records began in 1862 is 132.3mm CSIRO report author Dr Wenju Cai said the climate study of the past 58 years showed two significant features.

    The number of rain-inducing La Nina events were being increasingly outnumbered by dry El Nino events.

    And subtropical Indian Ocean patterns influenced by global warming were diminishing autumn rainfall, particularly in May across northern Victoria.

    “When you take these two components together it has a huge impact in the reduction of rainfall and inflows,” Dr Cai said.

    “This is not only very important for agricultural but also in wetting the soils and ensuring there are good inflows in the usually wet months of winter and spring to follow.”

    The report found that spatially alternating high and low pressure systems, known as pressure wave-trains, are crucial influences for rainfall over Victoria in May.

    Such systems have been weakening since 1950.

    La Nina transitional periods usually produce wet autumns in northern Victoria and southern NSW are become shorter.

    Long-term climate is dominated by more extensive dry El Nino events, another strong indicator of climate change.

    Dr Cai said the outlook was serious, and the consensus among scientists was that continuing climate change would reduce inflows by about 15per cent for every degree of warming.

    Under the median estimate of a two-degree rise in temperature – which is conservative – there was likely to be a 30 per cent reduction in inflows for the Murray Darling Basin.

    The sobering figures are vindication for Coliban Water’s conservative approach to its five-year water plan.

    The plan is based on an expected reduction in inflows to the Campaspe system from the long-term average of 38 gigalitres to 15 gigalitres – or more than 60 per cent.

    Department of Sustainability and Environment estimates show that surplus water under a ‘medium’ climate change scenario would be about 23 gigalitres by 2030.

    The figure would drop to only 8 gigalitres by 2055.

    A repetition or continuation of inflows of the past eight years would constitute a more extreme climate change scenario.

    Goulburn-Murray Water strategy manager Garry Smith said the data highlighted the importance of the State Government’s Northern Region Sustainable Water Strategy, a draft version of which would be released in coming months.

  • Almond farmer spends $1million on water to stay afloat

    But Water Security minister Karlene Maywald says rain is “the only thing that is going to help people in the Riverland” and the Government could not allocate water if it was not there.

    “It’s like saying take five per cent of an empty bucket,” she said.

    “It is a dire situation.”

    She said earlier this week that based on latest storage figures, irrigators would not receive an allocation for the start of the season in July. But the Government was investigating other solutions.

    Mrs Maywald this morning attended a meeting of Murray-Darling basin water ministers to discuss the environmental condition of the drought affected basin.

    She said the group was concerned the record drought conditions had not eased and there was very little water in storage.

     

  • A parable in China’s water

    From The Economist 

    Polluted, poisonous and immune to popular efforts to enforce a clean-up:
    Tai Lake is a metaphor for the state of China’s politics
    AP

    THE plain-clothes police are always there, watching Xu Jiehua. When she goes out, two of them follow by motorcycle. Sometimes an unmarked car joins them, tailing her closely on the narrow road winding past the factories and wheat fields around her village.

    Ms Xu is used to the attention. Her husband, Wu Lihong, was arrested in April last year and sentenced four months later to three years in prison for fraud and blackmail. For her, the police harassment is proof that the charges were false, and that Mr Wu’s only crime was to anger local officials with his tireless campaigning against pollution around nearby Tai Lake, China’s third-biggest freshwater body. It is also a warning that she too should keep quiet.

    Last year nature appeared to vindicate Mr Wu. Soon after his arrest, the lake was choked by toxic algae fed by the phosphates from the human and industrial waste that had been poured into the water and its tributaries. For more than a week, the stinking growth disrupted the water supply of 2m people living on its shores. It was one of China’s biggest environmental scandals since the Communist Party came to power. In Wuxi, the city closest to Mr Wu’s home in Fenshui village, residents queued to buy bottled water. The Yangzi River was diverted to flush the algae out.

    Amid an internet-fuelled uproar, officials promised to close down polluting factories and clean up an area once legendary for its beauty. But in late March blue-green blooms were again found along the southern shore. Such growths are rare so early in the year. Officials admit that despite their clean-up efforts the water remains at the lowest grade in China’s water-quality scale, unfit for human contact, and that another “big bloom” is possible this year.

    A repeat of the algae catastrophe on Tai Lake would be a huge embarrassment to both local officials and the central government. As they look nervously at protests around the country fuelled by an upsurge of anti-Western nationalism, the authorities are ever mindful that the anger could readily turn upon them too. Nationalist fervour may be helping to divert public attention away from the party’s mishandling of Tibet—a remote problem in the minds of many Chinese. But it will do little to pacify citizens angered by official corruption, incompetence and negligence.

    There are many such people. Officials rarely give figures, but they have said that the number of “mass incidents”—an ill-defined term—rose from 10,000 in 1994 to 74,000 in 2004. Suspiciously, the government reported a 22% decrease in the first nine months of 2006, but from a much lower base than previously announced figures had suggested. This may reflect underreporting by officials under pressure to show that their departments are achieving the goal of establishing a “harmonious society”, which the party has vowed to build by 2020.

    The same internet and mobile-telephone technology that is helping China’s angry young nationalists organise protests and boycotts is also helping other aggrieved citizens to unite. The past year has seen the first large-scale, middle-class protests in China over environmental issues: in the southern coastal city of Xiamen in June over the construction of a chemical factory, and in January this year in Shanghai over plans to extend a magnetic levitation train line.

    For all the central government’s green talk, a complex web of local interests sometimes linked with powerful figures in Beijing often frustrates efforts to deal with the problems that lead to such unrest. Wu Lihong’s campaigning around Tai Lake threatened factories, the governments that depend on them for revenues and the jobs the factories provide. The anger of laid-off workers has long been one of officialdom’s biggest worries. A factory where Ms Xu worked was among those Mr Wu helped force to stop production.

    In 2002, after peasants blocked a road in protest over pollution in their fields, Mr Wu was jailed for 15 days for allegedly inciting them. He tried to launch an environmental NGO but officials turned down his request to register it (Wuxi already had one, they said, and that was enough). The police summoned him several times to warn him to cease his activities. But Mr Wu, ignoring his wife’s remonstrations, persisted. He spent the family’s savings on work such as gathering pollution data and lobbying the domestic and foreign press.

    The official press—at least organs beyond the control of the local bureaucracy—reported on his efforts glowingly. His living-room is adorned with tributes: an award in 2005 from the central government naming him one of the year’s ten “outstanding environmental-protection personalities”; a photograph of him receiving an honour for his environmental work in 2006 from the Ford Motor company.

    But local officials were not impressed. One evening in April last year, when Mr Wu and his wife were watching television in their bedroom upstairs, police climbed up a ladder, through a window and took him away. They then smashed into his study and seized papers. Ms Xu still has the pile of cigarette stubs they left on the floor.

    Mr Wu, who is 40, was found guilty in August of extorting money from an environmental-equipment manufacturer by threatening to inform the authorities that products supplied to a steel company were substandard. The court also ruled that he had cheated the company by claiming to represent the equipment-maker and seeking payment for the sale. The amount involved was 45,000 yuan ($5,940). Mr Wu denied the charges and told the court that his confession had been extracted by torture. Ms Xu says journalists were barred from the proceedings and no witnesses were produced for cross-examination.

    A higher municipal court rejected Mr Wu’s appeal last November. Last month Ms Xu submitted an appeal to a court in Nanjing, the capital of their province, Jiangsu. But she says she has no hope of success. The polluting companies her husband campaigned against remain open and the authorities have closed only unprofitable ones, she says. She shows visitors one alleged offender, a new lakeside resort complex. Since last year’s disaster, the then Jiangsu party chief, Li Yuanchao, has been promoted to the ruling Politburo.

    Ms Xu believes the national media have been quietly ordered to avoid mention of her husband. The police stopped an attempt by relatives to circulate a petition for his release (more than 100 people signed it before the police seized it, she says). Officials have warned Ms Xu not to talk to the press. A senior environmental-protection official said this month that the battle against Tai Lake’s algae problem would be a protracted one. So too will efforts to silence whistle-blowers.

  • Irrigators at odds over water buyback

    IAL national chair Stephen Mills says, however, “On-farm savings can potentially deliver much more water to the environment than the purchase of water rights.

    “With more government support for investment in technologies that already exist, we can help put more water back into the environment and help restore the balance in our river systems.”

    Water Minister Penny Wong on Tuesday announced the government would spend $3.1 billion purchasing water rights from irrigators as part of a $13 billion plan to secure the nation’s water.

    The money is to be allocated over 10-years, hence the ACF’s response wanting to shorten this time frame, at least with the pace of water buyback.

    Senator Wong on Tuesday said climate change means the government needs to act quickly to address the over-allocation of water in Australia’s food bowl.

    She said the buybacks would see large volumes of water returned to the basin’s waterways.

    “We cannot wait to start purchasing water from the river,” Senator Wong told reporters.

    Victorian Farmers Federation president Simon Ramsay said the market would be affected by the government’s entry into water trading.

    “A $3 billion water buyback will drive up demand and there is a risk that (water) prices will be driven up and that food production and the viability of rural communities will be impacted upon,” Mr Ramsay said.

    Opposition water security spokesman John Cobb agrees.

    He said yesterday the buyback would drive up food prices by cutting agricultural production. (See separate story).

    SOURCE: AAP

  • Melting mountains ‘time bomb’ for water shortages

    From Reuters via the NZ Herald 
     
    People in mountainous areas such as Nepal rely on melt-water for most of their needs. Photo / Reuters

    People in mountainous areas such as Nepal rely on melt-water for most of their needs. Photo / Reuters

    Glaciers and mountain snow are melting earlier in the year than usual, meaning the water has already gone when millions of people need it during the summer when rainfall is lower, scientists warn .

    "This is just a time bomb," said hydrologist Wouter Buytaert at a meeting of geoscientists in Vienna.

    Those areas most at risk from a lack of water for drinking and agriculture include parts of the Middle East, southern Africa, the US, South America and the Mediterranean.

    Rising global temperatures mean the melt-water is occurring earlier and faster in the year and the mountains may no longer be able to provide a vital stop-gap.

    "In some areas where the glaciers are small they could be gone in 30 or 50 years time and a very reliable source of water, especially for the summer months, may be gone."

    Ms Buytaert, from Britain’s Bristol University, was referring to parts of the Mediterranean where her research is focused, but she said this threat also applies to the entire Alps region and other global mountain sources.

    Daniel Viviroli, from the University of Berne, believes nearly 40 per cent of mountainous regions could be at risk, as they provide water to populations which cannot get it elsewhere.

    He says the earth’s sub-tropic zones, which are home to 70 per cent of the world’s population, are the most vulnerable. And with the global population expected to expand rapidly, there may not always be enough water to drink.

    In Afghanistan, home to some 3,500 of the world’s glaciers, the effects of global warming are already being felt in the Hindu Kush, said US Geological Survey researcher Bruce Molnia.

    In some valleys snow has completely disappeared during months when it usually blankets the mountains and many basins have drained, Mr Molnia said.

    "And what I am talking about here is adaptable to almost every one of the Himalayan countries that’s dependent on glacier-melted water," he said.

    – REUTERS

  • Business wakes up to peak water

    Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chief executive of Nestle, the foods group, says businesses must wake up to the value of water. He warns of an impending crisis over supply, in the developed as well as the developing world, because of climate change and problems of over-use.

    He says businesses may struggle in the future to find the water they need and will be forced to pay much higher prices for it, if more is not done to conserve the resource and distribute it more rationally.

    These problems are not confined to poor countries, warns Mark Lane, partner at the law firm Pinsent Masons: "[While] it is true that in the developed world most people have access to toilets and a sewerage system … the problem that the developed world now faces is to adapt its waste-water systems to the changing circumstances brought about by climate change, and sudden much more extreme bouts of rainfall."

    Mr Lane points out that in much of the developed world, the wastewater infrastructure has been constructed on the assumption of a temperate climate.

    With global warming, which will bring more storms and floods and intense bouts of rainfall interspersed with periods of drought, that assumption no longer holds good.

    As a result, in many countries the wastewater infrastructure will need to be expanded and upgraded to cope with much greater volumes of storm water. "This will cost huge sums of money," says Mr Lane, "and one key issue, for example in England and Wales, is how such infrastructure improvements are to be paid for."

    Businesses can prepare by using water more efficiently. Some companies have started to take action, and a growing number of technologies are becoming available for businesses to make their use of water more efficient.

    Pepsi Bottling Group (NYSE:PBG) , the drinks company, has managed to conserve 1m gallons of water per year at each of its plants, using new processes for cleaning equipment. The company can save 13,000 gallons a day on certain high-speed lines by using air instead of water to clean packaging. The company also uses 10 per cent less water through its upgraded reverse osmosis purification systems.

    B&Q, the retail chain, has been actively monitoring water consumption since 2003. The company set a target to reduce mains use across UK outlets by 10 per cent by the end of 2008, but found that by the end of 2007 it was saving 20 per cent.

    This has been achieved using methods such as harvesting rainfall for toilet flushing and using "smart water metering", allowing store managers to see in real-time how much water they are using. Monitoring use in this way lets the company quickly identify and deal with leaks, and helps prevent excessive usage.

    Other techniques include recycling water. For instance, Dow Chemical (NYSE:DOW) at its Terneuzen site in the Netherlands has been re-using about 70 per cent of the 2.6m gallons of the municipal waste water produced daily in the area.

    Cutting water use can also help to cut energy use – Dow found its efforts at Terneuzen reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 60,000 tonnes per year.

    But companies and consumers may be unaware of the amount of water they use, and the amount that goes into products.

    Embedded water, also known as virtual or hidden water, is the water used in the production of goods that is invisible to the end user.

    Examining the amount of embedded water in common products can give startling results. It takes 2,400 litres to produce a hamburger, and 11,000 litres to make a pair of jeans, including the water needed to grow the cotton.

    Tim Jones, principal at Innovaro, says companies could attach "water labels", just as some are using carbon labels showing how much greenhouse gas was emitted during production. This would enable purchasers to make decisions based on environmental principles.