food security

As the River Runs Dry: The Southwest’s water c

LAS VEGAS – The patroller stopped his water district truck and grabbed his camcorde “Here we go,” he said, sliding from the cab and pointing his lens at the fine spray of water and rainbow rising from pop-up sprinklers on the lawn of a low-slung ranch home.

Central Arizona Project Canal

“Thursday,” he spoke, recording the day as evidence. No watering allowed on Thursdays.

Welcome to the future, where every drop of Colorado River water is guarded and squeezed. Only here, in the city that gets 90 percent of its water from the fickle and fading river, the future is now.

The vast and highly urbanized Southwest, built on the promise of a bountiful river propped up by monumental dams, is up against its limits. Already tapped beyond its supply, the river is now threatened by a warming climate that shrinks its alpine source.

To support fast-growing urban populations in a time of dwindling supply, the Southwest is due for rapid and revolutionary changes.

A region that uses two-thirds of its water outdoors, and mostly for agriculture, will have to find ways of sharing and boosting efficiency — a shift that many experts believe will mean city dwellers paying to upgrade rural irrigation systems.

Cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, which have reduced their per-person water usage through better landscaping and appliances, will have to do better. They lag behind Los Angeles, whose growing population, by necessity, uses no more water than it did 40 years ago.

Water suppliers from Denver to San Diego will spend billions of dollars to squeeze more out of each drop, and to clean and use wastewater and salt water. It means a future of higher water bills, further promoting conservation.

Problem can’t be deferred

“We’re in a drought,” water patroller Robert Kern said after hanging a warning notice on the home’s doorknob. Two more violations and the water district will fine the owner $80.

“Everyone has to do their part.”

Residents in this part of town — known as Zone C to the Las Vegas Valley Water District — may only water on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from fall through spring. They’re freer to soak their grass at will in summer, when the withering heat demands it.

The cooler months are for austerity, to give the plummeting water levels behind Hoover Dam a break. The river’s massive storage tub, Lake Mead, is draining.

The Colorado isn’t all that we thought it would be when we divvied up the rights in the Roaring ’20s. Most years, it gives less than it once did, and there are more users taking from it.

A 2012 government study of supply and demand predicted a 2060 annual shortfall of nearly a trillion gallons — enough to cover the sprawling city of Phoenix 9 feet deep or to supply 6 million Southwestern households for a year.

How the Southwest’s leaders, farmers and lawn waterers respond will help decide how many millions of people this drying corner of the continent can sustain in the next century.

Throughout this year, The Arizona Republic will examine the twin stresses of climate change and population growth, and ways to ensure reliable water for the next generation of Southwesterners.

“This is not one of the problems you can defer and let your grandkids deal with,” said Doug Kenney, a University of Colorado law professor.

Last year, the Arizona Department of Water Resources published a “strategic vision” for the coming century. The department stopped short of calling the state’s current situation a “crisis,” but said Arizona is at a “crossroads” and needs to decide on actions to secure new water.

Many potentially costly steps for metro Phoenix were included: conservation, treated water recycling, watershed forest thinning, cloud seeding and seawater desalination among them.

Kenney chairs the newly formed Colorado River Research Group, an independent group of 10 river and climate experts from regional universities. This winter, they made a simple recommendation that would have sounded outlandish in the past century.

Use no more water.

Cities will have to grow within their means, through conservation and by paying farmers to save and transfer water, he said. When the river already falls short of supplying everyone who has a legal right to it, there’s no sensible way of taking more from it.

“If everyone takes what they’re legally entitled to,” Kenney said, “the system crashes.”

That’s true even if the wetter 20th century hydrology repeats. But that’s not what the big water suppliers are expecting.

Actual flow of Colorado River versus water promised for Southwest

Agreements have promised 16.5 million acre-feet of water annually to come out of the Colorado River for use by Western states and Mexico. But in many years, the actual flow of the Colorado has been lower than what’s promised, which is marked by the solid line. The 110 year average is shown by the dotted line.

“In my opinion, the future of the Colorado Basin is a future where we have less water than we have right now,” said John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

“The future of the Colorado Basin also has less grass.”

But it won’t be just the urban lawns that attract scrutiny. Farmers from Wyoming to Mexico — by far the biggest users of the river — will have to back off on hay production

They’ll also have to embrace expensive but efficient drip irrigation, Entsminger said. Urban water users will help pay for that through higher rates.

“Everybody’s going to have to figure out how to do the same or more with less water.”

Robert Kern, a Waster Water Investigator for the Las Vegas Valley Water District, documents a watering restriction violation in a west-central Las Vegas neighborhood. Las Vegas residents are only allowed to water on assigned days, Kern issued a warning to the homeowner.

At Lake Mead, America’s most voluminous water impoundment when it was full and a lifeline to everyone from Phoenix to San Diego, the crisis has already arrived.

Lake Mead Water Level

Desiccated palm trees flap over the cracked and peeling shell of a resort hotel at Echo Bay Marina at the northern end of the lake, the tattered banners of a man-made oasis now drained and vacant. Dormant boat docks lie stacked against each other.

To nearby innkeeper Chris Wiggins, it’s a sign of government mismanagement.

“Climate change?” he scoffed. “That’s the biggest joke.”

You don’t have to believe in a climate connection to recognize the risks in doling out on paper more water than a river can give.

“In the lower basin, we use more water than in a normal year we receive,” said Chuck Cullom, Colorado River program manager for the Central Arizona Project, whose canal pumps water to Phoenix and Tucson.

“Even absent the drought we would still be facing a declining Lake Mead.”

A sustained regional drought that started in the late 20th century shrank the reservoir to its record low by last summer. Federal officials say there’s a 1-in-4 chance it will sink low enough — to 1,075 feet above sea level — by next year that Arizona will have to cut back substantially on what it takes from the river.

After that, the government projects, the odds are better than even — about 60 percent — for a declared shortage and restrictions in 2017.

The reservoir has fallen by more than 100 feet since 2000. Its stored water, paired with upriver sister reservoir Lake Powell, is at about half-capacity.

The water’s retreat is a slow-blooming crisis that many have seen coming for years. Some communities have used the time to curb their thirst.

Los Angeles residents use 129 gallons a day each. That’s stingier than the 160-gallon average in Phoenix, whose use rate has nonetheless plummeted in recent years.

Now, though, even conservation-minded Los Angeles is following the unlikely lead of a gaudy, electrified billboard for sustainability. Still ridiculed in some corners as a wasteful and whimsical boomtown in the desert, metro Las Vegas has nonetheless turned its precarious relationship with the river into a powerful incentive to cut back.

Southern Nevadans use 212 gallons a day, which is more than their counterparts in either Los Angeles or Phoenix. But they also return almost 40 percent of that to the river as treated and reusable wastewater, making their net usage rate 124 gallons.

They have slashed usage steeply and deeply, by more than 100 gallons in about a decade.

Las Vegas has cut use of the river by nearly a third in a 12-year period that saw its metro population grow by 25 percent.

Vegas did it by regulating outdoor watering, and by paying $205 million — up to $2 a square foot — to entice people to remove lawns and “embrace living in the Mojave Desert,” Entsminger said.

That was crucial, because in 2002, Nevada was using more than its legal entitlement to the river.

Now Los Angeles is following, paying homeowners even more money to strip lawns.

For decades, the Colorado River hasn’t typically flowed as high as it did about a century ago, when Congress authorized impounding it at what would become Hoover Dam.

Climate scientists say there’s a strong chance it never — or rarely — will again. Yet unlike in those pioneering days of last century, more than 30 million people and several billion dollars in farm production are now counting on a river that is so tapped that in most years it no longer reaches the sea.

What’s left after the U.S. uses most of the water is diverted to farmers in Mexico.

“The Colorado River Compact appears to have been negotiated during an unusually wet period,” said Connie Woodhouse, a University of Arizona geosciences professor who has studied historic flows on the river. “I don’t think anyone would argue with that.”

The 1922 agreement split the river’s flow between upper- and lower-basin states, with the divide just upstream of Grand Canyon, at Lees Ferry. In the first few decades of the 20th century, an average approaching 17 million acre-feet — each acre-foot gushing 326,000 gallons, 51/2 trillion gallons in all — flowed past Lees Ferry every year.

For most of the past 90 years, though, the average flows have sagged below even the 15 million acre-feet that the states legally share, let alone the 1.5 million owed to Mexico by treaty.

The enormous but shrinking reservoirs at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, capturing spikes in runoff during occasional wet years, have forestalled shortages. The flow was 20 million acre-feet in 2011, and just half that in 2013.

That Colorado, Wyoming and Utah weren’t using their full shares also postponed a reckoning.

Until now.

The drought that started in 2000 and sent the reservoir holdings plunging is a preview of expected dry spells unprecedented in recent centuries, Woodhouse said. Temperatures are higher than those of the last century’s droughts, compounding the intensity.

“The (rising) temperatures are only going to exacerbate conditions that we would normally expect under natural conditions,” she said.

There are lots of reasons to think the droughts of coming decades will be worse than anything we’ve ever experienced — regardless of whether there’s any change in precipitation.

The first is that as the region warms, the trees and plants using the snowmelt will need and tap more of it before it ever reaches the river or pipes.

The next and arguably bigger threat is that the warmth will melt snow faster or even make it fall instead as rain. Either change will lead to more evaporation and less seepage into the soils that, in turn, release water to streams feeding the river.

Four years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation — the Southwest’s federal water managers — crunched all of the climate model projections for the Colorado River watershed and determined the average outlook was for a river pumping 9 percent less water through the region by 2050.

There is always a chance that monstrous snowstorms and winter rains will bring enough new winter precipitation to offset the warming’s worst effects, said Jeff Lukas, climate scientist with the University of Colorado’s Western Water Assessment team.

“Increasing flow isn’t precluded,” he added. “It just appears to be less likely.”

Past warm spells, etched as living history in the West’s tree rings and lake beds, indicate that where there’s heat there’s often stinging drought, according to Woodhouse’s work.

She co-authored a 2010 study using regional tree rings from an unusually long and hot medieval drought to project that each increase of a degree Celsius results in a decrease in Colorado River flows of between 2 percent and 8 percent.

Most of the region already has warmed by more than a degree on average in the past quarter-century, according to last year’s U.S. National Climate Assessment. Further warming of at least a couple of degrees in a few decades and up to 5 degrees by 2100 is expected even if global carbon emissions are substantially reduced.

The medieval drought, in its worst decade, baked the river down to about two-thirds of what the U.S. and Mexico draw out of it today.

The drought lasted 60 years, but it was not as hot as today. So it seems the next time there’s a repeat of whatever natural phenomena conspired back then to produce such a long, dry spell, the river will be even drier.

Since Woodhouse’s study, a team of 14 university and government researchers has conducted what Woodhouse calls the “best synthesis” of existing climate and flow models — with jaw-dropping, if imprecise, predictions.

The river’s flow probably will drop between 5 percent and 35 percent in response to warming by midcentury, according to that team, which published a January 2014 report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Lukas’ University of Colorado colleague, snow researcher Jeffrey Deems, said there’s reason to believe the bureau’s predicted 9 percent reduction in flow is optimistic.

Already, the Rocky Mountain snowpack is melting three to six weeks earlier than before American settlement of the region, Deems’ studies have found, because dust drifting up from grazing lands and other disturbances collects solar heat on the snow’s surface. Today’s snowmelt is measured by direct observation and compared with computer models of older trends.

Without emissions curbs, Deems said, his modeling and others project flows slashed by about a fifth on average by midcentury.

“Even if it’s only 9 percent,” he said, in a nod to the Bureau of Reclamation study, “that’s a huge shock to any overallocated system.”

A 9 percent reduction would roughly equal the 1.5 million acre-feet that Arizona is allowed to pump through CAP’s 336-mile canal every year.

But that’s a midcentury outlook with lots of climate variables. What about the near-term effects of the existing drought?

If the government declares a Lake Mead shortage because the water drops below the mandated trigger elevation of 1,075 feet — the 58 percent probability that managers have projected by 2017 — then Arizona would lose 320,000 acre-feet every year that the water is so low.

An acre-foot of water is about the amount two Southwest families use each year. So the loss would be about three times the potable water that Tucson Water pumps to customers each year. But it’s not the cities and their residents who will suffer first or most.

CAP was built largely to fuel growth in metropolitan areas of Arizona. The farmers who have used what until now was excess water have the lowest legal priority. Some of them will voluntarily cut back on watering hay and other crops this year, in an effort to help keep Lake Mead from falling.

In December, CAP signed an agreement with the Bureau of Reclamation and water providers for Southern California and Nevada to save 740,000 acre-feet over the next three years, and to keep it in Lake Mead. Each of those organizations would sacrifice water or improve efficiency.

Arizona, with the most to lose from a shortage, is responsible for the largest share: 345,000 acre-feet.

Of that, the deepest cuts — nearly half — will come out of farm irrigation districts. But CAP will pay those farmers $5 million.

“It could actually protect us (from shortage) for a couple of years, and that would more than repay our efforts.” said Cullom, CAP’s Colorado River program manager.

But in the same agreement, the states predicted that these savings might be only half the job of restoring reliable water by 2019. So they also will join Denver Water in sponsoring $11 million in pilot programs that other customers can use to suppress their needs — some of it perhaps for farm upgrades such as drip irrigation or laser field leveling.

If Lake Mead drops another 25 feet after the first shortage, central Arizona would lose nearly a third of what it draws off the Colorado. Farmers there would get nothing from the river, and cities such as Phoenix, Mesa and Scottsdale could start to lose some of the canal water they’re now leasing from Indian tribes.

Best to act now, Cullom said, and reload Lake Mead.

“It’s like a scene from ‘Jaws,’ when one of the characters says, ‘We need a bigger boat,’ ” he said. “We’re trying to find ways to get a bigger boat.”

Some water managers and politicians have mused about importing the solution, from the Great Lakes or the Mississippi River Basin by pipe, or even from Alaska by ship. But the U.S. Interior Department effectively called those schemes pipe dreams, in a study of options for the Southwest.

For one thing, other states may guard their resources as jealously as Arizona would covet them in a water-strapped future. The Great Lakes states even have a compact prohibiting export, and it is being invoked to prevent a Wisconsin county that touches on the drainage from piping water over the line.

Also, the costs, both environmental and financial, caused the Obama administration to reject the idea. Pumping water from the Missouri River to Denver would cost 21/2 times the predicted price to conserve the same amount within the Southwest.

Conservation probably can provide only a third of the new water needed in 50 years.

Environmentalists generally have recommended starting there, though, and then adding treatment plants to clean salt from used irrigation water and return it to the river. Utility managers are also looking to add costlier, more energy-intensive seawater desalination, which could reduce coastal cities’ reliance on the river.

An old car on the Baker Ranch near Baker, Nev.

The biggest sponge out there, though, is agriculture. Its use of two-thirds of the Colorado’s bounty offers future urban residents a tantalizing buffer for growth — or a water grab — if it can be reallocated.

About a third of the Colorado River’s annual flow goes just to alfalfa, pasture and other forage for livestock, according to a 2013 analysis of farming in the 256,000-square-mile watershed, conducted by the Pacific Institute.

Much of that grass is flood-irrigated, putting to work water that farmers earned through settlement claims under a “use it or lose it” system that predates the West’s urban population explosion.

The institute modeled other options for ranchers — modern irrigation equipment and a more judicious schedule for watering — and projected a potential savings of 1 million acre-feet a year.

Farmers won’t give up water if they think it means losing their rights to it, and to the income it can bring them, said Kenney, the University of Colorado law professor. But states are free to change the laws, to ditch “use it or lose it.” They can ensure that farmers and rural areas are compensated.

Kenney expects change to come, and city dwellers to pay up, as the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District is doing in an experimental program that gives 33 farmers $750 per acre per year for three years to cut and fallow some citrus orchards.

“Scarcity drives innovation,” he said.

Back in Las Vegas, water patroller Robert Kern spotted a wet sidewalk near the first violator he nabbed. It wasn’t a sprinkler, though. What grass the lawn had was yellowed and crisp.

“I had to mow her lawn the other day because I was afraid there’d be a fire,” said a neighbor, Danny Hinchcliffe, standing on his own dewy grass.

Kern climbed from the truck, knelt to find moss growing in a slight but steady stream of water flowing from a broken underground pipe. He attached another warning to her doorknob.

Hinchcliffe said his own yard used to be rock, but he switched to grass because it helped cool his home and keep down the electric bill.

Reminded that his grass blades shouldn’t be glistening with water on a day when sprinkling is banned, he said his landscaper likely hadn’t had a chance to adjust his timer for the season.

But he didn’t get a citation.

Kern can’t issue a warning or a ticket unless he actually sees the water spraying.

“Our biggest thing is education,” he said. “Without the water, we’re not going to be here.

“We’re in the middle of a desert.” More

 

 

 

The Guardian view on food security: if the dreamers lose, we face a nightmare

By the time nations once again get round a table in Paris in December to discuss climate change, hunger should be on the menu. Researchers have just warned that a new and aggressive strain of yellow rust fungus is now a threat to Britain’s wheat harvest.

Another team has calculated that average yields of wheat per field, which only two decades ago were rising rapidly, are now down 2.5%, and barley by 3.8%. In each case, the scientists identify climate change as a contributing factor. Global warming has barely begun but climate scientists have been warning about the consequences for food security for 30 years.

The two latest bits of research into wheat yields are not isolated indicators of tomorrow’s troubles. The big heat has yet to arrive. It will be catastrophic. Another group has studied the consequences for harvests of extremes of heat and calculated that for each 1C notch in the thermometer, global wheat yields could fall by 6%. Some latitudes will benefit, but overall, world harvests could fall. This is very bad news: wheat is one of the world’s staples, and the world’s largest source of vegetable protein. There are other factors at play in the fields. Within a decade, 2.9 billion people in 48 nations will experience chronic water scarcity, another research team warns.

Agriculture consumes 70% of the world water supplies and action is needed “to pre-empt looming conflicts born of desperation”. Separately, US geologists have used historical analyses to work out what modern agriculture does to topsoil. When European settlers took the plough to the American heartlands, erosion accelerated one hundred-fold. At peak, an inch of soil was lost every 25 years. Before the Europeans, wind and water erosion took 2,500 years to remove the same thin layer. Because of erosion, overgrazing and drought, the planet’s farmland is being degraded at a catastrophic rate. An estimated 10m hectares are now abandoned each year; something the size of a family farm every minute. And as the food supply is threatened, demand will accelerate. There will be many more hungry people at the table.

In the last year, researchers re-examined UN population projections and decided that the global numbers may not peak at 9 billion. By 2100, the world could be home to 12 billion and still rising. By 2100, according to business-as-usual climate projections, temperatures will have risen by 4C and sea levels by a metre or so. So land that is ever less productive will be expected to deliver vastly more food at ever greater cost in fossil fuel energy to feed increasingly conflict-torn nation states.

Solutions exist but none are easy. All will require a generous adjustment between the haves and the have-nots and sustained global cooperation. That sounds like a dream, but the alternative is a nightmare. The enduring lesson of history is that drought and famine feed conflict, and conflict breeds more privation, and despair. Come December, each aspect of the climate challenge will have become more pressing, and more complex. Everything should be on the table in Paris except perhaps, symbolically, lunch. More

 

Turning Yards into Gardens & Neighborhoods into Communities by Food Not Lawns & Heather Jo Flores

Bring the author & founder of Food Not Lawns to your town to teach workshops, plant gardens & build community.

Lawns are the Worst!

Americans spend over $30 billion every year to maintain over 40 million acres of lawn. Yet over 40 million people live below the poverty level. Even if only ⅓ of every lawn was converted to a food-producing garden, we could eliminate hunger in this country.

Lawns use more equipment, labor, fuel, and agricultural chemicals than industrial farming, making lawns the largest (and most toxic) agricultural sector in the United States. Lawnmowers burn more fuel every year than all industrial oils spills of the last twenty years, combined. Growing Food Not Lawns is a beautiful, responsible and empowering step towards finding real solutions to the major problems we face as a global society.

Grow Food, Not Lawns!

When the original chapter of Food Not Lawns started in 1999, in a tiny space behind a park in Eugene, Oregon, our vision was to share seeds and plants with our neighborhood, to promote local awareness about food security, and to learn about permaculture, sustainability and organic gardening.

Our project blossomed. We received a Neighborhood Improvement Grant from the City of Eugene, and conducted a low-cost permaculture design course for the neighborhood. We transformed most of the neighborhood lawns into lush organic gardens. We hosted annual seed swaps. Soon, we started to get mail from people around the country who were starting up local Food Not Lawns chapters of their own, and a movement had been born.

In 2006, co-founder Heather Flores published Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community (Chelsea Green.) The first half of the book is about gardening in the city, with no budget and on shared land. The second half is about working with people to build community around shared food and resources.

The book sold over 25,000 copies, and now there are more than 50 affiliated Food Not Lawns groups in the United States, Canada, and the U.K.. The original Food Not Lawns collective just hosted its 16th annual seed swap, and the meme, “Food Not Lawns,” has taken root in the mainstreamconsciousness.

We need your Support!

Stickers, T-shirts and Yard Signs help spread the message

This campaign is a tool to raise funds for outreach and education, and every donation comes with a Reward that helps everyone.

Starter kits help you establish and expand your local Food Not Lawns project.

Website sponsorships connect people to your work (we place your logo on our website) and support the expansion of the long-standing website, www.foodnotlawns.org, into a user-generated network for sharing skills, knowledge, photos, events and other resources.

Consultations with Heather Flores help you get creative with your garden design and/or community project.

“50 ways to Grow Food Not Lawns,” a new audio handbook from Heather Flores, gives a fun overview of urban permaculture and lawn-transformation techniques.

Workshops in your community will help jump-start new gardens and strengthen local networks by bringing people together to share seeds, resources, tools and knowledge about permaculture, sustainability and organic food.

Food Not Lawns Workshop Tour

This is the main focus of this campaign, and if funding is successful, Heather Jo Flores will travel all over, teaching workshops and helping people turn lawns into gardens and neighborhoods into communities. Please note that all events on this tour will be booked through this Kickstarter campaign, as premium rewards. If you want your town to be on the tour, pledge $500 or more. You can sponsor the event yourself, collaborate with a local nonprofit or university, or sell advance tickets to workshop participants. Funding deadline is March 21 and at that time tour schedule will be confirmed and announced.

Hosting Heather Jo Flores in your community means so much more than just hearing her talk. Heather literally wrote the book on Food Not Lawns, and as one of the founding members, she has had her thumb on the pulse of this movement since the beginning. She emphasizes friendship-based learning, and her events always incorporate a heavy dose of community interaction and team-building play. Specific curriculum will be tailored to meet the needs of your community.To learn more about workshop details, visit foodnotlawns.org/events.html.

It’s Not Just About Gardening!

Food not Lawns is not just about gardening. It’s not just about food. And it is certainly not just about social media. We are about building neighborhood-based, friendship-driven communities, on the ground, in person, and for real.

FNL has always maintained a very simple approachWe help each other turn yards into gardens;

We host events to share seeds, plants, skills, tools, land and information;

And we educate and advocate for communities that want to take back control of their food from the corporate profiteers.

These actions, when combined, build empowered local networks, and help foster a strong sense of community-wide security, stability and sustainability.

Remember, if we don’t reach our goal of $10,000 by March 21, we don’t get any of the funding!

This means no tour, no t-shirts and no audiobook! We really want to share all of this with you, so please help us make it happen.

We Love you! See You Soon! More

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Thirsty, Violent World

They say you learn something new everyday. For me, this day qualifies. Michael Specter writes at the New Yorker on the increasingly dire prospects for water — of the clean, unpolluted kind — for a clamoring humankind and of the water wars that are surely on the horizon.

And he has this, on the origins of the word “rivals”: “After all, the word 'rivals' has its roots in battles over water—coming from the Latin, rivalis, for 'one taking from the same stream as another.'” Who knew? Not me. Specter's prognostication on our looming water disasters is a grim but important read and not just for Pakistanis or Nigerians, but for us in a country in which California is parched for water in a prolonged drought and researchers are predicting humongous droughts coming later in the century for our breadbasket, the Midwest! TomDispatch



A Thirsty, Violent World

Angry protesters filled the streets of Karachi last week, clogging traffic lanes and public squares until police and paratroopers were forced to intervene. That’s not rare in Pakistan, which is often a site of political and religious violence.

But last week’s protests had nothing to do with freedom of expression, drone wars, or Americans. They were about access to water. When Khawaja Muhammad Asif, the Minister of Defense, Power, and Water (yes, that is one ministry), warned that the country’s chronic water shortages could soon become uncontrollable, he was looking on the bright side. The meagre allotment of water available to each Pakistani is a third of what it was in 1950. As the country’s population rises, that amount is falling fast.

Dozens of other countries face similar situations—not someday, or soon, but now. Rapid climate change, population growth, and a growing demand for meat (and, thus, for the water required to grow feed for livestock) have propelled them into a state of emergency. Millions of words have been written, and scores of urgent meetings have been held, since I last wrote about this issue for the magazine, nearly a decade ago; in that time, things have only grown worse.

The various physical calamities that confront the world are hard to separate, but growing hunger and the struggle to find clean water for billions of people are clearly connected. Each problem fuels others, particularly in the developing world—where the harshest impact of natural catastrophes has always been felt. Yet the water crisis challenges even the richest among us.

California is now in its fourth year of drought, staggering through its worst dry spell in twelve hundred years; farmers have sold their herds, and some have abandoned crops. Cities have begun rationing water. According to the London-based organization Wateraid, water shortages are responsible for more deaths in Nigeria than Boko Haram; there are places in India where hospitals have trouble finding the water required to sterilize surgical tools.

Nowhere, however, is the situation more acute than in Brazil, particularly for the twenty million residents of São Paulo. “You have all the elements for a perfect storm, except that we don’t have water,” a former environmental minister told Lizzie O’Leary, in a recent interview for the syndicated radio show “Marketplace.” The country is bracing for riots. “There is a real risk of social convulsion,” José Galizia Tundisi, a hydrologist with the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, warned in a press conference last week. He said that officials have failed to act with appropriate urgency. “Authorities need to act immediately to avoid the worst.” But people rarely act until the crisis is directly affecting them, and at that point it will be too late.

It is not that we are actually running out of water, because water never technically disappears. When it leaves one place, it goes somewhere else, and the amount of freshwater on earth has not changed significantly for millions of years. But the number of people on the planet has grown exponentially; in just the past century, the population has tripled, and water use has grown sixfold. More than that, we have polluted much of what remains readily available—and climate change has made it significantly more difficult to plan for floods and droughts.

Success is part of the problem, just as it is with the pollution caused by our industrial growth. The standard of living has improved for hundreds of millions of people, and the pace of improvement will quicken. As populations grow more prosperous, vegetarian life styles often yield to a Western diet, with all the disasters that implies. The new middle classes, particularly in India and China, eat more protein than they once did, and that, again, requires more water use. (On average, hundreds of gallons of water are required to produce a single hamburger.)

Feeding a planet with nine billion residents will require at least fifty per cent more water in 2050 than we use today. It is hard to see where that water will come from. Half of the planet already lives in urban areas, and that number will increase along with the pressure to supply clean water.

“Unfortunately, the world has not really woken up to the reality of what we are going to face, in terms of the crises, as far as water is concerned,” Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the International Panel on Climate Change, said at a conference on water security earlier this month. “If you look at agricultural products, if you look at animal protein, the demand for which is growing—that’s highly water intensive. At the same time, on the supply side, there are going to be several constraints. Firstly because there are going to be profound changes in the water cycle due to climate change.”

Floods will become more common, and so will droughts, according to most assessments of the warming earth. “The twenty-first-century projections make the [previous] mega-droughts seem like quaint walks through the garden of Eden,” Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said recently. At the same time, demands for economic growth in India and other developing nations will necessarily increase pollution of rivers and lakes. That will force people to dig deeper than ever before into the earth for water.

There are ways to replace oil, gas, and coal, though we won’t do that unless economic necessity demands it. But there isn’t a tidy and synthetic invention to replace water. Conservation would help immensely, as would a more rational use of agricultural land—irrigation today consumes seventy per cent of all freshwater.

The result of continued inaction is clear. Development experts, who rarely agree on much, all agree that water wars are on the horizon. That would be nothing new for humanity. After all, the word “rivals” has its roots in battles over water—coming from the Latin, rivalis, for “one taking from the same stream as another.” It would be nice to think that, with our complete knowledge of the physical world, we have moved beyond the limitations our ancestors faced two thousand years ago. But the truth is otherwise; rivals we remain, and the evidence suggests that, until we start dying of thirst, we will stay that way. More

 

How do agri-food systems contribute to climate change?

Agriculture and food security are exposed to impacts and risks related to the changing climate in several ways. On the other hand, agriculture and food production activities are also responsible for part of the greenhouse gas emissions that in turn cause climate change.

According to the latest conclusions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agriculture, together with deforestation and other human actions that change the way land is used (codename: AFOLU, Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use), accounts for about a quarter of emissions contributing to climate change.

GHG emissions from farming activities consist mainly of non-CO2 gases: methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) produced by bacterial decomposition processes in cropland and grassland soils and by livestock’s digestive systems.

The latest estimates released in 2014 by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization [pdf] showed that emissions from crop and livestock production and fisheries have nearly doubled over the past fifty years, from 2.7 billion tonnes CO2e in 1961 to more than 5.3 billion tonnes CO2e in 2011.

During the last ten years covered by FAO data (2001-2011) agricultural emissions increased by 14 percent (primarily in developing countries that expanded their agricultural outputs), while almost in the same years (2001-2010) net GHG emissions due to land use change and deforestation decreased by around 10 percent (due to reduced levels of deforestation and increases in the amount of atmospheric carbon removed from the atmosphere as a result of carbon sequestration in forest sinks).

The current situation, as highlighted by a recent study led by FAO and published in Global Change Biology, sees farming activities more responsible for climate pollution than deforestation. Even thought emissions from agriculture and land use change are growing at a slower rate than emissions from fossil fuels, emissions reduction achieved thanks to better forest and soil management are cancelled out by a more intensive and energy-consuming food production systems. The FAO estimated that without increased efforts to address and reduce them, GHG emissions from the sector could increase by an additional 30 percent by 2050.

In a recent study published on Nature Climate Change, scientists pointed out that “the intensification of agriculture (the Green Revolution, in which much greater crop yield per unit area was achieved by hybridization, irrigation and fertilization) during the past five decades is a driver of changes in the seasonal characteristics of the global carbon cycle”.

As shown in the graph below, livestock-related emissions from enteric fermentation and manure contributed nearly two-thirds of the total GHG agricultural emissions produced in the last years, with synthetic fertilizers and rice cultivation being the other major sources.

According to another report by FAO (“Tackling climate change through livestock”, accessible here in pdf), the livestock sector is estimated to emit 7.1 billion tonnes CO2-eq per year, with beef and cattle milk production accounting for the majority of the sector’s emissions (41 and 19 percent respectively).

Emission intensities (i.e. emissions per unit of product) are highest for beef (almost 300 kg CO2-eq per kilogram of protein produced), followed by meat and milk from small ruminants (165 and 112kg CO2-eq.kg respectively). Cow milk, chicken products and pork have lover global average emission intensities (below 100 CO2-eq/kg). However, emission intensity widely varies at sub-global level due to the different practices and inputs to production used around the world. According to FAO, the livestock sector plays an important role in climate change and has a high potential for emission reduction.

Together with increasing conversion of land to agricultural activities and the use of fertilizers, increasing energy use from fossil fuels is one of the main drivers that boosted agricultural emissions in the last decades. FAO estimated that in 2010 emissions from energy uses in food production sectors (including emissions from fossil fuel energy needed i.e. to power machinery, irrigation pumps and fishing vessels) amounted to 785 million tonnes CO2e.

FAO latest data show that in the past two decades around 40 percent of GHG agricultural outputs (including emissions from energy use) are based in Asia. The Americas has the second highest GHG emissions (close to 25 percent), followed by Africa, Europe and Oceania.

According to FAO, since 1990 the top ten emitters are: China, India, US, Brazil, Australia, Russia, Indonesia, Argentina, Pakistan and Sudan.

Agricultural emissions plus energy by country, average 1990-2012. FAOSTAT database

The need for climate-smart agriculture and food production systems becomes even more compelling when considering the shocking level of waste within the global food system. According to the first FAO study to focus on the environmental impacts of food wastage, released in 2013 (accessible here in pdf), each year food that is produced and gone to waste amounts to 1.3 billion tonnes.

Food wastage’s carbon footprint is estimated at 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent released into the atmosphere per year, to which must be added significant amounts of agricultural areas (1.4 billion hectares, globally) and water (250km3) used annually to produce food that is lost or wasted.

How to meet global food needs (with global population projected to reach 9 billion in 2050) without overexploiting soil and water, and with lower emissions contributing to climate change (whose impacts in turn affect water and food security) is the greatest farming challenge of of today’s and tomorrow’s world. More

Credit: Best Climate Practices

 

Climate change may dramatically reduce wheat production, study shows

Vara Prasad, professor of crop ecophysiology and director of the USAID Feed the Future Sustainable Intensification Innovation Lab at Kansas State University, is part of a collaborative team that found wheat yields are projected to decrease by 6 percent for each degree Celsius the temperature rises if no measures to adapt to extreme weather fluctuations are taken.

Based on the 2012-2013 wheat harvest of 701 million tons worldwide, the resulting temperature increase would result in 42 million tons less produced wheat — or a loss of nearly one-quarter of the current wheat production.

“It’s pretty severe,” Prasad said. “The projected effect of climate change on wheat is more than what has been forecast. That’s challenging because the world will have to at least double our food supply in the next 30 years if we’re going to feed 9.6 billion people.”

Prasad and colleagues published their study, “Rising temperatures reduce global wheat production,” in a recent issue of the scientific journal Nature Climate Change. The study was supported through the Kansas Wheat Commission and the Kansas Wheat Alliance, two organizations seeking ways to increase wheat yield.

For the study, researchers systematically tested 30 wheat crop models against field experiments from around the world that were conducted in areas where the average temperature of the growing season ranged from 15 to 32 degrees Celsius. The models accounted for planting dates, planting rates, temperatures and other crop management factors.

With the models, researchers were able to look at the effects of temperature stresses on wheat and predict future changes based on temperature changes.

Researchers found that the effects from climate change and its increasing temperatures on wheat will be more severe than once projected and are happening sooner than expected. While Prasad said increases in the average temperature are problematic, a bigger challenge is the extreme temperatures that are resulting from climate change.

“Extreme temperature doesn’t only mean heat; it also means cold,” Prasad said. “Simply looking at the average temperature doesn’t really show us anything because it’s the extremities that are more detrimental to crops. Plants can handle gradual changes because they have time to adapt, but an extreme heat wave or cold snap can kill a plant because that adjustment period is often nonexistent.”

Researchers also found that increasing temperatures are shortening the time frame that wheat plants have to mature and produce full heads for harvest, resulting in less grain produced from each plant.

“It’s like having one minute to fill a tall glass with water. Under optimal conditions, we can fill that glass pretty well,” Prasad said. “But now we’re factoring in extreme temperatures that are affecting the growing window and the grain size. So it becomes like trying to fill that same glass, but now we only have 40 seconds to do it and the faucet is running slower.”

Currently, Prasad and colleagues at Kansas State University, in collaboration with the university’s Wheat Genetics Resource Center, are using growth chambers and heats tents to quantify the effects of temperature. The data will help in refining the crop models so that they can be more accurate in predicting wheat responses.

Their work will help scientists develop more robust models that can help farmers globally select more weather-tolerant and resilient wheat varieties based on their location. Additionally, farmers can determine the optimal planting date to avoid stress and minimize possible exposure to extreme weather events, such as heat and cold snaps, during the growing season. More

 

Antibiotics, bacteria, resistance genes found in dust from feedlots

After testing dust in the air near cattle feedlots in the Southern High Plains, researchers at The Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University found evidence of antibiotics, feedlot-derived bacteria and DNA sequences that encode for antibiotic resistance.

The study was published online in the National Institutes of Environmental Science’s peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Health Perspectives. The research was funded through a grant from Texas Tech’s College of Arts and Sciences. It is the first study documenting aerial transmission of antibiotic resistance from an open-air farm setting.

Phil Smith, an associate professor of terrestrial ecotoxicology at the institute, said that while scientists couldn’t assess if the amounts of these materials were dangerous to human health, it helped explain a previously uncharacterized pathway by which antibiotic-resistant bacteria could travel long distances into places inhabited by humans.

The findings come weeks after a report commissioned by British Prime Minister David Cameron concluded that failure to battle drug-resistant infections and their causes could result in 10 million extra deaths a year by 2050 at a cost of $100 trillion to the global economy.

“You can look in the news, and people are raising red flags about antibiotic resistance all the time,” Smith said. “Microbes are pretty promiscuous with their genetic information, and they share it across species fairly easily. We know it’s there. We know what causes it, but we don’t have a really good handle on how it’s transmitted and how it moves in the environment. This is an attempt to provide better clarity on that issue.

“Everyone is fairly certain antibiotic resistance comes from extensive use of antibiotics in animal-based agriculture. About 70 percent of all antibiotics used are for animal agricultural purposes. Overuse contributes to antibiotic resistance. But how does it happen? How does it get from where the drugs are used into the human environment and natural environment?”

Smith said scientists collected air samples upwind and downwind of each feedlot. After analysis, they found greater amounts of bacteria, antibiotics and DNA sequences responsible for antibiotic resistance downwind of the feedlots compared to upwind, which helped scientists determine the source of the materials they found.

Because the antibiotics are present on the particulate matter with bacteria, the selective pressure for bacteria to retain their resistance remains during their flight, said Greg Mayer, an associate professor of molecular toxicology at the institute.

With wind blowing regularly on the Southern High Plains, the antibiotics and bacteria can travel on the dust and particulate matter far from the original starting point at the feedlot. Add the infamous West Texas dust storms into the picture, and these materials have the potential to travel hundreds of miles into cities and towns and possibly around the globe.

“I think implications for the spread of some feedlot-derived, antibiotic-resistant bacteria into urban areas is paramount to the research,” Mayer said. “Now, we haven’t yet taken samples from an urban area to determine whether bacteria from that particulate matter originated from feedlots or whether it still has antibiotic resistant bacteria on it. However, this study is proof of the principle that antibiotic-resistant bacteria could plausibly travel through the air.

“Further studies are now needed to show where the particulate matter is traveling and what is happening to its passengers when it gets there.” More

 

 

That Was Easy: In Just 60 Years, Neoliberal Capitalism Has Nearly Broken Planet Earth

A pair of new studies show how various forms of human activity, driven by a flawed economic system and vast consumption, is laying waste to Earth's natural systems

The conclusion that the world's dominant economic model—a globalized form of neoliberal capitalism, largely based on international trade and fueled by extracting and consuming natural resources—is the driving force behind planetary destruction will not come as a shock, but the model's detailed description of how this has worked since the middle of the 20th century makes a more substantial case than many previous attempts. (Photo: NASA)

Humanity's rapacious growth and accelerated energy needs over the last generation—particularly fed by an economic system that demands increasing levels of consumption and inputs of natural resources—are fast driving planetary systems towards their breaking point, according to a new pair of related studies.

“It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In a single lifetime humanity has become a geological force at the planetary-scale.” —Prof. Will Steffen

Prepared by researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the first study looks specifically at how “four of nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed as a result of human activity.” Published in the journal Nature on Thursday, the 18 researchers involved with compiling evidence for the report—titled 'Planetary Boundaries 2.0'—found that when it comes to climate change, species extinction and biodiversity loss, deforestation and other land-system changes, and altered biogeochemical cycles (such as changes to how key organic compounds like phosphorus and nitrogen are operating in the environment), the degradation that has already take place is driving the Earth System, as a whole, into a new state of imbalance.

“Transgressing a boundary increases the risk that human activities could inadvertently drive the Earth System into a much less hospitable state, damaging efforts to reduce poverty and leading to a deterioration of human well-being in many parts of the world, including wealthy countries,” said Professor Will Steffen, a researcher at the Centre and the Australian National University, Canberra, who was lead author for both studies.

In addition to the four boundaries that have already been crossed, the study looked five other ways in which the planetary systems are under assault by human activity. They include: stratospheric ozone depletion; ocean acidification; freshwater use; atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that affect climate and living organisms); and the introduction of novel entities into ecosystems (e.g. organic pollutants, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics).

“I don't think we've broken the planet but we are creating a much more difficult world,” Sarah Cornell, another report author, told Reuters.

In this interview with Wired last year, Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, described the idea about planetary boundaries in details:

Related to the findings of the first study, the second report examines what it calls the “Great Acceleration” and is an assessment of the speed and influence that specific factors have had in damaging the planetary systems described in Planetary Boundaries 2.0. Using a series of indicators, the study compares the relationship, over time, between 12 'socio-economic factors'—including economic growth (GDP); population; foreign direct investment; energy consumption; and water use—on one side with 12 'Earth system trends'—like the carbon cycle; the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity—on the other.

Using what it calls a “planetary dashboard,” the research charts the spread and speed of human activity from the start of the industrial revolution in 1750 to 2010, and the subsequent changes in the Earth System – e.g. greenhouse gas levels, ocean acidification, deforestation and biodiversity deterioration. The analysis found that increased human activity—and “predominantly the global economic system”—has unseated all other factors as the primary driver of change in the Earth System, which the report describes as “the sum of our planet's interacting physical, chemical, biological and human processes.” The most striking, i.e. “accelerated,” changes to that system have occurred in the last sixty years.

“It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive. History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.” —Prof. Will Steffen”It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In a single lifetime humanity has become a geological force at the planetary-scale,” said Steffen, who also led the Acceleration study.

The conclusion that the world's dominant economic model—a globalized form of neoliberal capitalism, largely based on international trade and fueled by extracting and consuming natural resources—is the driving force behind planetary destruction will not come as a shock, but the model's detailed description of how this has worked since the middle of the 20th century makes a more substantial case than many previous attempts.

“When we first aggregated these datasets, we expected to see major changes but what surprised us was the timing. Almost all graphs show the same pattern. The most dramatic shifts have occurred since 1950. We can say that around 1950 was the start of the Great Acceleration,” says Steffen. “After 1950 we can see that major Earth System changes became directly linked to changes largely related to the global economic system. This is a new phenomenon and indicates that humanity has a new responsibility at a global level for the planet.”

The paper makes a point to acknowledge that consumption patterns and the rise of what has become known as the Anthropocene Era does not fall equally on the human population and its examination of the economic system which is underpinning planetary destruction is one rife with inequality, in which certain populations consume at vastly higher levels than others.

According to the report, “The new study also concludes that the bulk of economic activity, and so too, for now, the lion's share of consumption, remain largely within the OECD countries, which in 2010 accounted for about 74% of global GDP but only 18% of the global population. This points to the profound scale of global inequality, which distorts the distribution of the benefits of the Great Acceleration and confounds international efforts, for example climate agreements, to deal with its impacts on the Earth System.”

A worrying trend, notes the paper, is how a growing global middle class—exemplified by those in the BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—is an increasing threat to the planet as the consumer mindset established in the OECD nations, particularly the U.S., spreads.

In an interview with the Guardian, Steffen spoke clearly about the overall impacts of the two new studies as he sounded the alarm over humanity's trajectory. “People say the world is robust and that’s true, there will be life on Earth, but the Earth won’t be robust for us,” he said. “Some people say we can adapt due to technology, but that’s a belief system, it’s not based on fact. There is no convincing evidence that a large mammal, with a core body temperature of 37C, will be able to evolve that quickly. Insects can, but humans can’t and that’s a problem.”

“It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive. History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.”

What increasing amounts of strong evidence shows, he said, is that that there “tipping points” that the human race should simply not “want to cross.” More

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Global warming reduces wheat production markedly if no adaptation takes place

Future global wheat harvest is likely to be reduced by six per cent per each degree Celsius of local temperature increase if no adaptation takes place. Worldwide this would correspond to 42 million tons of yield reduction, which equals a quarter of current global wheat trade, experts warn.

Future global wheat harvest is likely to be reduced by six per cent per each degree Celsius of local temperature increase if no adaptation takes place. Worldwide this would correspond to 42 million tons of yield reduction, which equals a quarter of current global wheat trade.

Wheat plays an important role in feeding the world, but climate change threatens its future harvest. Without adaptation, global aggregate wheat production is projected to decline on average by six per cent for each additional degree Celsius temperature increase. Worldwide this would correspond to 42 million tons yield reduction for one 1°C global warming.

This result has been generated by an international research consortium to which Natural Resources Institute Finland (previously known as MTT Agrifood Research Finland) substantially contributed. The results were published online in the high impact journal Nature Climate Change.

Losses expected throughout the world

The researchers found out that in response to global temperature increases, grain yield declines are predicted for most regions in the world. Considering present global production of 701 million tons of wheat in 2012, this means a possible reduction of 42 million tons per one degree Celsius of temperature increase.

“To put this in perspective, the amount is equal to a quarter of global wheat trade, which reached 147 million tons in 2013. In addition, wheat yield declines due to climate change are likely to be larger than previously thought and should be expected earlier, starting even with small increases in temperature,” points out Prof. Dr. Reimund Rötter from Natural Resources Institute Finland.

“Therefore it is essential to understand how different climate factors interact and impact food production when reaching decisions on how to adapt to the effects of climate change.”

Increased variability weakens stability in grain supply

In the study, the researchers systematically tested 30 different wheat crop models against field experiments in which growing season mean temperatures ranged from 15 °C to 26 °C. The temperature impact on yield decline varied widely across field test conditions. In addition, year-to-year variability increased at some locations because of greater yield reductions in warmer years and lesser reductions in cooler years.

“Increased yield variability is critical economically as it could weaken regional and global stability in wheat grain supply and food security, amplifying market and price fluctuations, as experienced during recent years,” says Professor Rötter.

In its recent Assessement Report (AR5), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that global mean temperature may rise up to 5 °Celsius by the end of this century.

“Timely and adequate adaptation, such as cultivating more heat-tolerant wheat cultivars could substantially reduce climate change induced risks,” Rötter continues.

Unique and multi-locational study

Agrosystems modellers, Dr. Fulu Tao, Dr. Taru Palosuo and Prof. Dr. Reimund Rötter from Natural Resources Institute Finland participated to this collaborative research under the umbrella of AgMIP, The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project coordinated by Columbia University, NASA and University of Florida, USA. Apart from Finland, scientists from Germany, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, UK, Columbia, Mexico, India, China, Australia, Canada and USA participated in this global study.

In a unique study set-up, the scientists first compared simulation results from a large ensemble of wheat crop growth models with experimental data, including artificial heating experiments and multi-locational field trials. They found that discrepancies between observation and simulation varied among individual models, whereby deviations increased with increasing growing season temperature.

Most reliable estimates of observed yields over the range of temperature regimes were achieved by using the multi-model ensemble median estimate. Based on these test results, scientists subsequently applied the multi-model ensemble to estimate wheat yields under increasing temperature in the main cultivation areas of the world. More

 

Abu Dhabi summit to discuss water security challenges

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More than 32,000 global leaders from 170 countries representing government, industry, investment and research to Abu Dhabi, will provide an upfront look at affordable technologies to enable sustainable water resource management to help meet the Middle East’s rising demand for water.

Hosted by Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy company, ADSW is a yearly platform that addresses the interconnected challenges of energy and water security, climate risk and sustainable development.

Running from January 17 to 24, ADSW includes the World Future Energy Summit (WFES), the world’s foremost event dedicated to the advancement of renewable energy, energy efficiency and clean technology; and the International Water Summit (IWS), which provides a business approach to addressing water scarcity, sustainable growth and economic development in arid regions.

“The Mena region is in a truly unique position to solve the challenge of water security,” remarked Raed Bkayrat, vice president of development for Saudi Arabia at First Solar, which is participating in WFES.

“While the region is quite arid, it also has one of the highest solar irradiances of any region in the world, and much of the population has ready access to seawater. Accordingly, solar photovoltaic projects are proving to be sustainable means of powering water desalination in the region, ensuring that the supply of clean water will keep up with the region’s increasing demand for it,” he noted.

Masdar took a major step by launching a pilot project to test energy-efficient desalination technologies – such as reverse osmosis and forward osmosis – powered by renewable energy.

The company awarded contracts to Abengoa, Degremont, Sidem/Veolia and Trevi Systems to build the desalination plants, which are expected to enable the implementation of cost-competitive desalination plants powered by renewable energy in the UAE and abroad.

“Engaging different sectors of the industry is really crucial to bring forward innovative solutions, as well as pilot projects that demonstrate to governments the value of new integrated systems,” Bkayrat added.

Both WFES and IWS will offer numerous keynote addresses, panel discussions and workshops as well as exhibitors introducing affordable technologies to enable sustainable water resource management.

Along with WFES and IWS, ADSW will include the second EcoWaste and the seventh Zayed Future Energy Prize Award Ceremony; it also coincides with the Fifth General Assembly of the International Renewable Energy Agency.-TradeArabia News Service More