Water We Talking About Too?

“The world is low on water, from the standpoint of supply needed for human use, and the problem has grown rapidly. Worse still, the problem has no ready solution — and probably has no solution at all...The World Resources Institute predicts that ‘By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in water-scarce countries or regions, with alarming implications for human wellbeing and global security.’ Much of this water will be needed to irrigate crops. That makes the problem a dual one — water for drinking and water for food.” 247WallSt.com, October 28^th. Clearly, the future of human existence is significantly predicated on the ability to find and access enough water to sustain and nurture life. Here are some basic numbers from the United Nations (reproduced from worldometers.info) that tell us how we allocate that resource and how fast demand is increasing:

Worldwide, agriculture accounts for 70% of all water consumption, compared to 20% for industry and 10% for domestic use. In industrialized nations, however, industries consume more than half of the water available for human use. Belgium, for example, uses 80% of the water available for industry.

Freshwater withdrawals have tripled over the last 50 years. Demand for freshwater is increasing by 64 billion cubic meters a year (1 cubic meter = 1,000 liters)

• The world’s population is growing by roughly 80 million people each year.
• Changes in lifestyles and eating habits in recent years are requiring more water consumption per capita.
• The production of biofuels has also increased sharply in recent years, with significant impact on water demand. Between 1,000 and 4,000 litres of water are needed to produce a single litre of biofuel.
• Energy demand is also accelerating, with corresponding implications for water demand.

Almost 80% of diseases in so called "developing" countries are associated with water, causing some three million early deaths. For example, 5,000 children die every day from diarrhoea, or one every 17 seconds.

According to the U.N., Americans and Canadians consume over sixteen hundred cubic meters of water per person per year, while Europeans and most Asians make do with about six hundred cubic meters. With dams and diversions, the United States opened up vast tracts of desert to agriculture by transporting water into previously unusable land, a fact which probably amplified our water use; that the United States and Canada rely heavily on irrigation of huge farms probably tips the scales on water usage heavily towards those nations, and the fact that North Americans have bigger homes on larger parcels only exacerbates the water usage statistics. Canada and much of the eastern part of the United States probably have enough water for a very long time, but the west of the Mississippi, access to water isn’t so easy.

I’ve already blogged about that massive underground water source that is dwindling away – the Ogallala Aquifer that stretches from the Dakotas south to Texas – so today, I would like to focus on the desert communities in California’s Imperial Valley, a place where agricultural has become big business, ever since the Colorado River was seriously diverted to turn desert sands into productive farms. In the late 1800s, engineers proposed a use for the water that overflowed the Colorado into the Almo River.

The initial efforts resulted in the Almo Canal that began to produce water flow into the Imperial Valley in 1901, but silting and other difficulties resulted in new waterways and new diversions until the flow became more consistent and controllable in 1907. By 1911, financial pressures resulted in the formation of the Imperial Irrigation District. Today, what little remains of the Colorado River by the time it hits Mexico is shallow enough for someone to walk across the river. And the upgrades to the Irrigation District (including the Imperial Dam pictured above) have created a permanent and modern diversionary structure that makes the Imperial Valley among the most productive agricultural areas in the state.

Meanwhile, the big cities in Southern California, notably Los Angeles and San Diego, have grown and created new demands for potable water (and of course, to water lawns and golf courses along the way). Farmers can make money by allowing acres to lie idle and transfer the concomitant water usage rights back to the cities for $500+/acre/year: “With water increasingly scarce in the West, some other communities are allowing farmers to sell their allotment of it for whatever price they can find, in some cases thousands of dollars for the amount it takes to grow an acre of a crop. But this comes with a hitch. Working farms provide jobs and income to their many suppliers. There are 450 farmers in the Imperial Valley, but half the jobs held by the 174,000 residents are tied to agriculture.

“When land is idled, the communities around the farms can wither. Residents here point to the neighboring Palo Verde Valley, where farmers can sell more than a quarter of their water supply at much higher prices in a process they control. As a result, nearly a third of the agricultural land was not farmed this year; over time, businesses and workers have suffered… Imperial’s fear is that a century after Colorado River water allowed this land to be a cornucopia, unfettered urban water transfers could turn it back into a desert. So the deal that Imperial water managers struck limits how much water can be sold and for what price, and it controls how much acreage is enrolled in the program and for how long.” New York Times, October 23^rd.

Just as a recession-driven financial reset has changed the way most Americans will live in the future, the press of a growing population will add downward pressures to how we consume and utilize natural resources, especially water. The pattern is being repeated worldwide, particularly in hyper-growth regions like China, where water diversion projects threaten to be among the largest infrastructure projects ever attempted by mankind. Certainly, we’ll be towing icebergs from the north and depending increasingly on high-energy-use desalinization techniques… relying on engineered crops that simply need less water. But whatever the solutions, life in the future will be a whole lot different from the access to seemingly unlimited resources that most of us have grown up with.

I’m Peter Dekom, and besides “death and taxes,” the other inescapable reality is change itself.