We are wasting the world's water, the one resource essential to human survival. But there is enough water for all if we just find better ways to manage it. Encouraging examples from all over the world show how this can be done.
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The way we use water has to change. Rapid population increases, surging economic development, and climate change are all conspiring to deplete the world's water resources to less than can sustain a growing a population.
"We will not be able to feed the extra billions if it remains business as usual in agriculture and water management," warns Colin Chartres, director of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).
The problem is not that there is insufficient freshwater, nor that there are too many people using it, but that they are using it so inefficiently. One reason for this lavish use is that water is used by many different people for many different purposes - agricultural, industrial, and domestic. Often people do not realize that they are all sharing the same, limited resource.
"The classic example is where groundwater is managed totally separately from surface water, by different government agencies," says Chartres. "But in reality, 90 percent of groundwater is linked to surface water. We have to manage water holistically and in an integrated manner."
Chartres says an example of better practice is the recently established collaboration between federal and state governments in Australia to address the problems of the drought-stricken Murray-Darling river basin. In the past two years, the volume of water flowing into the Murray from the rivers that feed it was the lowest since records began in 1892. Eighty percent of water taken from the basin is used by agriculture; inefficiently say some, illegally claim others.
Authorities plan to invest ten billion Australian dollars to improve efficiency in the entire river system and halt environmental damage by protecting wetlands and helping farmers to invest in more efficient irrigation systems. "They will then take some of those savings in terms of water and reinvest them," says Chartres.
Different strategies are required for different situations. Sub-Saharan Africa requires water supply infrastructure. In much of the West and Asia, basic infrastructure is already in place, but needs improvement to reduce demand and rehabilitate ecosystems. In the Indian state of Gujarat, farmers with ready access to subsidised domestic electricity supplies used to pump groundwater continuously. The state government has now separated the electricity supply to the pumps from the domestic supply, only powering the pumps for a few hours a day.
"They dramatically cut down groundwater extraction while maintaining crop productivity, groundwater levels improved and the farmers didn't suffer," says Chartres. In many cases, preserving groundwater simply means putting water back into the ground. Excess monsoon waters can be harvested and fed into wells and underground aquifers.
In developed countries, this is known as artificial groundwater recharge, a sustainable alternative to dumping wastewater from agriculture, industry, and homes. Some Californian sewage is treated and pumped back into the ground where micro-organisms continue the recycling.
In much of the developing world, expansion of wastewater management infrastructure is critical. Here, almost 70 percent of effluent from agriculture, industry, and people's homes is discarded untreated. As a result, water sources are polluted and a vicious circle starts, whereby water quality degradation aggravates scarcity and decreasing water quantity concentrates pollution.
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