Home » Posts tagged 'water stress'

Tag Archives: water stress

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Water Wars: India Facing “Worst Crisis In Its History”

June 22, 2018

Water Wars: India Facing “Worst Crisis In Its History”

India is facing its worst-ever water crisis, with some 600 million people facing acute water shortage, a government think-tank says.

The Niti Aayog report, which draws on data from 24 of India’s 29 states, says the crisis is “only going to get worse” in the years ahead.

Around 200,000 Indians die every year because they have no access to clean water, according to the report. And as The BBC reports, many end up relying on private water suppliers or tankers paid for the by the government. Winding queues of people waiting to collect water from tankers or public taps is a common sight in Indian slums.

Indian cities and towns regularly run out water in the summer because they lack the infrastructure to deliver piped water to every home.

  • 600 million people face high-to-extreme water stress.
  • 75% of households do not have drinking water on premise. 84% rural households do not have piped water access.
  • 70% of our water is contaminated; India is currently ranked 120 among 122 countries in the water quality index.

India faces more than one problem – all compounding the nation’s crisis:

Droughts are becoming more frequent, creating severe problems for India’s rain-dependent farmers (~53% of agriculture in India is rainfed17).

When water is available, it is likely to be contaminated (up to 70% of our water supply), resulting in nearly 200,000 deaths each year.

Interstate disagreements are on the rise, with seven major disputes currently raging, pointing to the fact that limited frameworks and institutions are in place for national water governance.

And that means massive problems lie ahead…

40% of the Indian population will have no access to drinking water by 2030 with 21 cities running out of groundwater by 2020 – affecting 100 million people which will cut 6% from GDP by 2050.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

With One-Third of Largest Aquifers Highly Stressed, It’s Time to Explore and Assess the Planet’s Groundwater

July 13, 2015

With One-Third of Largest Aquifers Highly Stressed, It’s Time to Explore and Assess the Planet’s Groundwater

NASA’s twin-satellite mission known as GRACE has helped scientists estimate how much water is being depleted from the world’s major aquifers, but there is great uncertainty about how much water these aquifers hold. Image courtesy of NASA.

NASA’s twin-satellite mission known as GRACE has helped scientists estimate how much water is being depleted from the world’s major aquifers, but there is great uncertainty about how much water these aquifers hold. Image courtesy of NASA.

Imagine if your bank statement arrived each month and told you how much money you had withdrawn and deposited, but told you nothing about how much money you had at the beginning or end of the month.

You’d know whether your balance had grown or shrunk, but you’d have no idea whether you could afford to buy a new house, take a vacation, or make it through that last year of college without bussing tables on the weekends.

This is pretty much the state we’re in with the world’s groundwater accounts, which supply 2 billion people with drinking water and irrigate a large share of the world’s food.

“[I]n most cases, we do not know how much groundwater exists in storage,” write the authors of a study published last month in Water Resources Research (WRR), a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

As a result, we’re clueless about how long we can keep drawing down these water reserves before they run out.

And we are indeed drawing many of them down.

One-third of the world’s 37 largest aquifers are highly stressed to over-stressed, according to a companion study published in the same issue of WRR. The eight most highly stressed aquifers receive almost no natural recharge to offset human use – including aquifers in Saudi Arabia, northwestern India and Pakistan.

Scientists at the University of California at Irvine led both studies, with doctoral student Alexandra Richey serving as lead author. Other team members came from NASA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Taiwan University and UC Santa Barbara.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress