Many countries are facing dangerous water shortages. As world demand for food has soared, millions of farmers have drilled too many irrigation wells in efforts to expand their harvests. As a result, water tables are falling and wells are going dry in some 20 countries containing half the world’s people.
The overpumping of aquifers for irrigation temporarily inflates food production, creating a food production bubble that bursts when the aquifer is depleted. Read more
Postwar Angola is keen to expand irrigation for much-needed development, Namibia is prioritising clean drinking water and sanitation, while Botswana wants to preserve the integrity of the world-renowned Okavango Delta for tourism.
All three depend on an equitable share of quality water from the Okavango River, the fourth largest in Africa, running 1,600 kilometres from Angola to its inland delta in Botswana. Read more
As freshwater disappears from the super-populated Peruvian coast, the most water-intensive crops are expanding unabated as highly profitable exports. Observers warn about the harm this is causing and demand greater responsibility from the government and all involved.
With rising international commodity prices, the value of Peruvian exports reached more than 3 billion dollars between January and November 2010 — 30.2 percent more than the same period in 2009.
One example of this boom is the asparagus industry, which employs 120,000 people in the fields alone, according to official figures. But this crop requires huge volumes of water. Read more
A primary topic of discussion at a weeklong international water conference here can best be summed up in two words: ‘dirty water’.
Ironically, the venue for the vibrant debate – focusing mostly on pollutants, industrial waste and human sewage – is a city described as home for ‘world class water’.
And rightly so, claims Gosta Lindh, managing director of the municipally-owned Stockholm Water Company. Unlike people in most other parts of the world, ‘We are blessed with an almost limitless supply of good, clean drinking water,’ he boasts.
The company, which provides fresh water to some 1.2 million consumers, claims a functioning ecological cycle: re-use of waste products after sewage water-treatment and the use of sludge as agricultural fertiliser. Read more
Failure to protect and invest in nature has left the world’s rivers in crisis, threatening the water supply of more than five billion people according to a new study. Pollution, dam building, agricultural runoff, conversion of wetlands, and water-works engineering have severely impacting global river systems, the first- ever health assessment of the planet’s riverine ecosystems reported in Nature last week.
‘What made our jaws drop is that some of the highest threat levels in the world are in the United States and Europe,’ says Peter McIntyre, a co-author of the report who is a zoologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S. Read more
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