drought

Here is another episode from World Without Water, a series by Vanguard correspondents for the San Francisco based Current TV. The topic this week deals with water scarcity.

As the 21st Century begins as the Age of Drought, a look at three places–Florida, China, and Nevada–where dryness has gone big. In Florida, the world’s most famous swamp, the Everglades, has been turning into a salt flat. In China, vast problems with water pollution have been compounded in some areas by problems of having no water. And Nevada’s Lake Mead, once the largest reservoir in the world, now is given a 50% chance of drying up completely in the next dozen years.

Vanguard airs weekly on Current TV.

[Via Current TV]

San Francisco based Current TV brings us this excellent, short piece on Lake Mead and the threat of it drying up.

World Without Water airs weekly on Current TV and is currently focusing on water resource issues.

[Via Digg and Current TV]

Arguably Earth’s most dire resource, but only recently receiving any major discussion, is water. As a previous post pointed out the American Southwest is projected to become a drier climate while funding for monitoring and mitigation continues to decrease.

Over the past few years the plight of the Southeast has received a fair bit of press, but overshadowed by Atlanta’s water woes is the brilliance of Clayton County. In the 1980’s the Clayton County Water Authority built a series of wetlands to replace the last step of the water reclamation process. Water entering the sewers continue on to the reclamation facility and pass through the standard filtration systems designed to remove large debris, sediment and any other solids. The purification process is completed by feeding the water into their wetland systems where organisms, from single-celled bacteria to water lilies, do the rest. After the water is gravity-fed through a series of four wetland pools, the water enters their reservoir and is available for reuse. According to a recent story on NPR, of the 26 million gallons used a day in Clayton County, the wetland reclamation process returns 10 million gallons of potable water for future use. Not only are they getting 40% of their water back but the wetlands have created 4,000 acres of green space.

Source: Clayton County Water Authority.

Constructed wetlands are proving to be more efficient, more cost effective, and more environmentally sensitive than comparable secondary treatment methods. The wetlands allow the CCWA to increase its wastewater treatment capacity, while dropping the costs incurred in the process. The cost to build wastewater facilities using constructed wetlands is $4.73 a gallon, compared to nearly $10 a gallon using the more conventional methods.

The Authority’s LAS fields and constructed wetlands are included among the over 4,000 acres of protected green space that will never fall prey to residential or commercial development. This acreage provides for hearty forests and wildlife, not to mention incredible recreational opportunities located in such a close proximity to a major metropolitan city.

In addition to money saved, there have been no complaints about odor and unlike neighboring Atlanta, the residents of Clayton County were never in danger of running out of water during the recent drought.

The once mighty Colorado River, a source of drinking and agricultural water for much of the Southwestern United States is severely threatened by the effects of climate change according to a report by the USGS. Researchers there say that a small temperature increase of about 0.9 degrees Celsius would reduce the average flow of water in the river to its lowest flow in nearly 500 years.

Source: James Neely on flickr.

A “modest” 0.86 degree Celsius (1.5 degree Fahrenheit) increase in the 21st century could trim the average flow of the river — the primary water supply for residents in much of the U.S. Southwest — to the low end of a range marked between 1490 and 1998, USGS scientist Gregory McCabe said yesterday.

The Earth is likely to warm by more than twice that amount in the period, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said last month. McCabe will brief Congress on the findings in June, when legislators expect to debate plans for the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases to begin capping its emissions.

“A 2-degree Celsius warming pushes the risk so high that it’s beyond anything that has happened in the last 500 years,” McCabe said on a conference call yesterday. “The average flow in the Colorado drops to lower than anything we’ve seen.”

[Via Bloomberg.com]