Sally Adee at NewScientist (13 August 2016, paywall) covers how some cities and water mix poorly:
Beyond Rio, evidence of our disregard for the wet stuff is all around, and it is starting to bite. Beijing has sucked so much water out of the ground that the city is sinking by 11 centimetres a year. That’s positively glacial compared with parts of California’s Central Valley, which are dropping by 5 centimetres per month.
In Connecticut, nuclear power plants have shut down for lack of water to cool the furious reactions inside, and coal power stations in India have shut due to droughts.
China has been facing water issues for decades, but a point was put on the issue this May when the citizens of Lintao, of 200,000 people and located basically in the center of China, found they no longer had water. From Marketplace‘s Rob Schmitz:
Lintao is in Gansu province, in China’s arid northwest, situated along the Tao River, a tributary of the Yellow River. The combination of a drought and a surge of urban development means the city’s underground water supply has dwindled to dangerously low levels, leaving tens of thousands of people without easy access to the precious resource.
Experts fear Lintao could be a sign of things to come.
“Four hundred Chinese cities now face a water shortage. One hundred and ten cities face a severe water shortage. This is a very serious problem,” says Liu Changming, a retired hydrologist for the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
China is home to more than 20 percent of the world’s population, but it contains only 7 percent of the world’s fresh water. Liu, who advises China’s leaders on water policy, says all of China’s so-called “water scarce” cities are in northern China, home to half a billion people, and a region that contributes nearly half of China’s economic growth. Former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao once called northern China’s water shortage “a threat to the survival of the Chinese nation.”…
According to Wang Shucheng, China’s former minister of water resources, at current rates of water extraction, many cities in northern China — including Beijing, home to more than 20 million people — will run out of water in 15 years.
Wang said this 11 years ago.
Rob goes on to detail several water transfer projects, but explicit is the question: what about those who were consuming the water now being transferred? Implicitly, are we beyond carrying capacity? The South China Morning Post covers a report by The Nature Conservancy, summarizing it thusly:
The report pointed to nature as a key solution to improving water quality. If conservation strategies – such as reforestation and better agricultural practices – were applied to roughly 1.4 million hectares in the cities, there would be a clear drop of at least 10 per cent in sediment and nutrient pollution, the report said.
In turn, more than 150 million people in these cities would have better water quality, it said.
“The power of nature to solve water crises should not be underestimated,” Zhu Jiang, deputy director of the Ministry of Water Resources’ International Cooperation Centre said on Monday at the report’s release.
“In China, developing a natural model for water treatment can not only protect urban water source catchments to ensure water safety, but effectively lower the costs of water treatment.”
The actual Nature Conservancy report is here. Back at NewScientist, Sally applies the stick before discussing toilet to tap recycling:
In the not-too-distant future, we could see entire cities abandoned – ghost town casualties of drought and water mismanagement. It is not overly dramatic to say that the world’s “use once and throw away” attitude has enabled a slow-motion water apocalypse. “We’re going to have to do something or we’re all going to be juddering to a halt,” says Dominic Waughray, head of environment at the World Economic Forum.
Here in the St. Paul / Minneapolis area of Minnesota, we do not yet face any serious problems with water supply. We’re occasionally warned off the beaches of our numerous lakes due to various water problems, and one or two lakes seem to be losing their contents, but all in all we enjoy them year ’round.
I wonder how much longer that will last.
