The World Is Water stressed and this is in the news more and more. Last November, CBS’s 60 Minutes featured a report by Lesley Stahl on water that aired again at the end of May. It opened like this: “It’s been said that the wars of the 21st century may well be fought over water. The Earth’s population has more than doubled over the last 50 years and the demand for fresh water—to drink and to grow food—has surged along with it. But sources of water like rainfall, rivers, streams, reservoirs, certainly haven’t doubled.” Let this information about the huge increase in the number of people on earth sink in for a moment, bearing in mind that world population is expected to swell even more.
What is not swelling is the ground; in some places it is sinking. In regions of California’s Central Valley, where agriculture reigns supreme, subsidence has been substantial, and the US Geological Survey has created a Land Subsidence Monitoring Network largely from the work of hydrologist Michelle Sneed.
Stahl’s 60 Minutes spot went on to compare the worldwide reliance on pumped groundwater to drawing from savings accounts that are not being replenished at the rate of withdrawal. She focused primarily on California and ended with the recent trend—or some would say necessity—to adopt reuse in the state, injecting wastewater that has undergone advanced purification into aquifers to augment supplies.
As a large state that brings a lot of fresh produce to the rest of the world and a progressive state that circulates forward thinking, California often makes national headlines. The California drought is not only in the news far beyond its borders; one important group of scientists believe “the lessons learned from addressing the California drought can lead to insights that will help water-starved locales around the world.” These are the researchers at Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute, and on June 18, executive director Neil Fromer put forth a three-point prescription. When I read his points I am reassured that our coverage in Water Efficiency, in the current issue and always, is reaching these front lines of where water resource management needs to be. Fromer’s recommendations are:
- Build infrastructure that enables the capture of most or all of the incoming precipitation and runoff; treat and reuse as much of the wastewater as possible; and make sure long-term groundwater is recharged to storage basins when water is plentiful. Some of the technology for this exists already, some needs improvement to reach cost-effectiveness, and some are still challenging science projects.
- Learn from the current transformation of the electricity sector and previously the telecommunications sector: as the infrastructure is updated and upgraded with these new technologies, install a smarter system with new sensing and measurement capabilities that can tell us exactly where the water is, what is being used and in what way, what the water quality is, and if there are weak points in the infrastructure.
- Develop tools that put this data together in real time to model the system as a whole and provide feedback. Create algorithms and smart infrastructure that can use the data and the models as feedback to ensure the system is as efficient as possible. This system will become adaptable and responsive as new capture, treatment, and storage options become available.
