Poor water quality increases the risk of diarrhoeal diseases including cholera, typhoid fever, salmonellosis, other gastrointestinal viruses, and dysentery. Water scarcity may also lead to diseases such as trachoma, plague and typhus. Everyone needs water and everyone needs to take responsibility. Actively support governments, non-governmental organizations and private foundations which are making it a priority to deliver affordable good quality water to people. In short, do your part by conserving, recycling and protecting water more efficiently. Here are the news:

First, as an avid reader of all things published in pdf format, here’s an interesting one on water scarcity, commissioned by the UN and published in 2005, a good, interesting read and still relevant today.
Spain plans pipeline to avert Catalan water crisis:

Spain – Spain’s national government in Madrid, after much wrangling with the drought-stricken region of Catalunya (Catalonia), announced that a pipeline would be built to pump water from the Ebro River to the regional capital, Barcelona. It’s a reversal of Madrid’s former position, but Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega conceded that the situation was an emergency, since Barcelona will run out of drinking water by October. (Source: SignOnSanDiego by Martin Roberts and Sonya Dowsett)

Lake Albert rescue begins:

Australia – Earthmoving machinery is building a wall between Lake Albert and Lake Alexandrina in the Australian state of South Australia prior to the pumping of water from Alexandrina into its dried-out neighbor. Andrew Beal of the government’s technical working group explained that artificially recharging Lake Albert was the only way to prevent falling water levels from exposing the lakebed and raising the concentration of sulfuric acid in the water. This would, in turn, threaten ecological collapse, he said. (Source: ABC News Online)
Four people killed in tribal clashes in Yemen:

Yemen – Four people were killed and five others wounded during clashes between two tribes in Yemen’s Dalei Province, reported national security officials. The dispute arose over the digging of a well. (Source: Saudi Press Agency)

Gila River on List of Most Endangered Rivers:

New Mexico – The Gila River, shared by New Mexico and Arizona, has appeared on American Rivers’ annual list of the country’s most endangered waterways. The environmental group pointed to a proposed water-diversion project on the upper Gila as a threat to both that river and its tributary, the San Francisco. In 2004, Congress approved the Arizona Water Settlements Act, which affirmed New Mexico’s right to take about 14,000 acre-feet of water from the two rivers. (Source: Albuquerque Journal)

Mauritius: The seawater desalination project is underway:

Mauritius – Preliminary work is underway to construct two seawater desalination plants at Pointe-Venus and Songes on the island of Mauritius (Ile Maurice). Commissioner Louis-Ange Perrine of Agriculture and Water Resources said that the projects will cost a total of 34 million rupees. Together, they’ll produce 1000 cubic meters of potable water per day and are scheduled for completion by the end of May. (Source: allAfrica.com by Anil Ramessur)

Govt rules speculators out of water trading:

Australia – The Department of Environment and Natural Resources in Australia’s Northern Territory announced that it would monitor the state’s fledgling water market carefully to be sure that out-of-state speculators didn’t jump in. Katherine farmers will be able to trade their irrigation licenses for the first time later this year. (Source: ABC News Online)

80% of groundwater in Sindh not fit for consumption:

Pakistan – Professor Muhammad Yar Khuhawar, project director of Sindh University’s High-Tech Resources Central Laboratories in Jamshoro, Sindh, Pakistan, revealed that 80% of the groundwater in the province is either too saline to be fit for human consumption or impregnated with arsenic. (Source: The News)

Not all bad news: West Africa – Hope revives thanks to Eau Vive

Burkina Faso – The French-based non-governmental organization Eau Vive, in partnership with the Regional Council of Sahel Unions (CRUS), launched three nutrition and water projects in Dori, Seno Province, Burkina Faso, on 12 April. They’re designed to alleviate potable water shortages and a lack of sanitation infrastructure in the rural communes of Mansila and Tankougounadie; to bolster food security in the area; and to build public latrines and a sewage treatment facility in Dori itself. (Source: allAfrica.com by Lassina Fabrice Sanou)

Melting Mountains A “Time Bomb” For Water Shortages:

Austria – Hydrologist Wouter Buytaert of Bristol University in England told a meeting of geoscientists in Vienna, Austria that global warming was melting glaciers and snowcaps earlier each year, creating “a time bomb” for the world’s water supplies. The sooner snowmelt runs off, the less is available during the summer when rainfall is lower and people need it the most, she said, adding that small glaciers could vanish in 30-50 years. (Source: New York Times)

Feds not addressing drugs in water:

Washington, D.C. – In Washington DC, a government task force responsible for devising a Federal plan to deal with pharmaceuticals in drinking water missed its deadline and failed to produce mandated reports and recommendations. White House spokeswoman Kristin Scuderi said that task force agendas and minutes were classified as internal documents and couldn’t be released at this time. (Source: Denver Post Online by Martha Mendoza)

The main conflicts in the world during the next 25 years could be over that most precious of commodities as countries fight for access to scarce resources. We have available less than 0.08% of all the Earth’s water. Yet over the next two decades our use is estimated to increase by about 40%. Something has to give.

The inconvenience of a lengthy presidential election means that a great amount of time is lost. Instead of preparing for this incoming disaster, we are bombarded with inanities from the wingnuts about Obama’s choice of orange juice over coffee. WTF is wrong with them?

We use about 70% of the water we have in agriculture. But the World Water Council believes that by 2020 we shall need 17% more water than is available if we are to feed the world. Meanwhile many countries suffer accelerating desertification. Water quality is deteriorating in many areas of the developing world as population increases and salinity caused by industrial farming and over-extraction rises. Exacerbating the problem, about 95 percent of the world’s cities still dump raw sewage into their waters.

It’s not all grim. There are some ways to begin to tackle the problem. I read that irrigation systems which drip water directly onto plants are one, precision sprinklers another. I’m a great fan of the CSIRO, Australia’s prime research organization which strives to come up with less water-intensive crops among other things. Desalination may play a part though it is energy-hungry and leaves quantities of brine for disposal. However, reverse osmosis has gained traction and has made great strides. The idea is to use the membrane to act like an extremely fine filter to create drinkable water from salty (or otherwise contaminated) water. The salty water is put on one side of the membrane and pressure is applied to stop, and then reverse, the osmotic process. It generally takes a lot of pressure and is fairly slow, but it works. This link provides 146 Products from 76 Companies involved in reverse osmosis, worth looking at. Osmosis, by the way, is why drinking salty water (like ocean water) will kill you. When you put salty water in your stomach, osmotic pressure begins drawing water out of your body to try to dilute the salt in your stomach. Eventually, you dehydrate and die slowly. Same thing if you drink your own urine if you happen to be stuck in a desert: you can drink your own urine but it decreases your period of survival. This I know from reading Bill Bryson’s excellent book on Australia.

If you thought the title of this diary a tad feverish (and it is) the following extracts will not put your mind at rest either.

Fears of food shortage as rice prices keep climbing:

Food prices are continuing to sky-rocket throughout Asia, causing many governments to intervene to try to stabilise their domestic rice prices for fear of acute shortages in the future and possible food riots.

A shortage of water allows more dust in the air, causing more respiratory problems:

Besides diseases caused by shortages of clean water, Health Minister Khristos Patsalides of Cyprus noted that decreased rainfall also allows more dust to circulate in the air, causing more respiratory problems. A similar warning came from Shigeru Omi, head of the World Health Organization’s Western Pacific Office, who noted that at least 150,000 more people are dying each year of malaria, dengue fever, waterborne diseases, famine, and floods, all of which can be traced to climate change.

Alarm bells sound over arid land in Greece:

At a climate conference in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, researchers from the University of Thessaloniki said that changes in farming techniques and better management of groundwater were the keys to reducing the risk of desertification in several parts of the country. Professor Nikolaos Sillaios listed temperature increases, more wildfires, and more frequent flooding as the chain of events that led to soil erosion.

As the world warms, water, either too little or too much of it, is going to be the major problem for the United States:

Reduced snow melt supplying water for the Sacramento Valley in California means that by 2020 there won’t be enough water to meet the needs of the community. That will step-up the competition for water. On the East Coast, rising sea levels will make storm surge “the No. 1 vulnerability for the metropolitan East Coast,” said study lead author Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA. “It’s a very real threat and needs to be considered for all coastal development.”

A few weeks ago I wrote another diary on water. The links provided in that diary are relevant to this piece today.