Contamination

Smog Over Eastern China, September 2005

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

There are five great challenges that must be addressed in the near future if the world is to meet its water needs without war, famine, demographic collapse, and possible social collapse:

1) Climate Change
2) Population Growth
3) Increased Standards of Living
4) Water Management Institutions
5) Contamination

In some respects, contamination is the best known and studied of these challenges, for at least since the emergence of the environmentalist movement in the 1960s, individuals, institutions and governments have become aware of and sensitive to matters of contamination. In many nations large government departments like the Environmental Protection Agency in the US have been established in an attempt to halt further contamination of water bodies and, where possible (think Superfund in the US) to mitigate past contaminations. In the richer and longer developed nations of Europe and North America, those departments have had some success in both preventing additional contamination and cleaning-up at least parts of the worst cases of past contamination.

The recent rapid economic growth in China, with hugely increased demands for water because of industrial and agricultural uses, has pointed to the horrifying problem of contamination of its waters. The Friday 29 October 2010 issue of the right-wing Washington Post (WP), a paper where international coverage is normally non-existent or mediocre, contains an insightful article on the contamination of a large lake not far from Shanghai, Tai Lake. Near the mouth of the Yangtze, the lake is recipient of agricultural and human waste contaminants from upstream, with more contamination coming from areas near its shores resulting in an overload of contaminants, not least Nitrogen (N), in forms that promote the growth of algae. The lake is now nearly covered with toxic forms of the simple organisms making its waters foul smelling, largely useless for agricultural and industrial purposes, destructive of its fish once used for food, and generally making the water unsafe for human consumption. While I rarely recommend the WP as a useful information source, this article is worth a read.

Pakistan Flooding - the Aftermath

Flood waters on the Indus at Kotri, barrage 19 August 2010

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

The Pakistan floods came just after I collected material on the problems of water supply in that predominantly arid country. The plan was to discuss Pakistan's problems resulting from a growing demand for water in the face of a diminishing supply. Instead of suffering from the problems of drought, in 2010 Pakistan was inundated by record rainfall with the Indus and its various tributaries flooding much of its best agricultural land, washing away crops and soil in productive agricultural areas and drowning parts of several large urban places and countless towns and villages. The lives of millions were disrupted, and the wet season crops of 2010 will be a small fraction of the expected yields in some of the more productive farming areas as flooding washed soil and growing crops off the fields and devastated irrigation facilities.

The flooding has now subsided, and post-flood recovery in Pakistan is largely absent from the world's news media. Today's (30 October) Guardian newspaper from Britain has a fine piece on the problems of recovery by Mohamed Hanif "Forgotten but not gone." Even as in the recent past the US has promised Pakistan's military about $2 billion in military aid, it is contributing a vastly smaller amount for food aid and reconstruction of infrastructure damaged and destroyed in the flooding. Yesterday the BBC reported "Pakistan Flood Food Running Out." With crops far below usually production, the country will need food supplies to carry it through to the next harvest. In addition a huge amount of resources will be needed to reconstruct houses, warehouses, transportation facilities, irrigation canals, and the other elements of life the flooding destroyed.

Discussions of a world water crisis rightly emphasize problems of water supply, and in most of the countries where a water crisis looms, the availability of adequate quantities of water is the key issue. With global climate change, some regions will be faced with additional rainfall and others will suffer from irregular and occasionally excessive precipitation - likely to be the case in much of the Indian subcontinent. A not inconsiderable portion of the subtropics may face wild fluctuations in precipitation year to year. They may then have occasional years like 2010 in Pakistan with damaging and dangerous flooding followed by numerous years with precipitation inadequate to meet basic water needs.

Related articles

• Pakistan faces long-term damage to irrigation system (nature.com)
• Report: Aid shortage in Pakistan leaves flood victims in limbo (cnn.com)

Responses to Questions from class 27 October

Mendoza, Argentina

©eop

Some brief responses to several questions raised in class on 27 October:

I. Dam Licensing. Most dam licensing in the United States is by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Draining Selenium Tainted Water from San Joaquin Valley

Source: USGS

II.  Selenium and irrigation in California.
The accumulation of selenium (Se) in the waste water draining from irrigated fields in the San Joaquin Valley has become a major problem in California water management, especially as there are only two readily available outlets for the waste water, 1) a  flow into the Sacramento Delta where the waste poisons water destined to be pumped into the California Water Project and then into San Francisco Bay where it threatens wildlife or 2) flow into the interior basin near Hanford where the water evaporates and the resulting brine and dusty soil have truly toxic levels of Se. Selenium and the San Joaquin Valley, a power point presentation from the Geochemistry program at the University of Arkansas, illustrates the sources of selenium and the problems associated with it. There have been a number of proposed solutions to the problem, including a drain into San Francisco Bay (see map above). The problem is far from resolved, and no easy solution is in sight.

Sacramento Delta

Source: Project Groundswell

III. Salinization of the Sacramento Delta.
Drought caused low water flows and the heavy duty withdrawal of water from the Sacramento River for shipment southward has led to salt water intrusion into the large delta area at the mouth of the Sacramento Rive, the zone where it flows into San Francisco Bay. That salt water intrusion, in turn, threatens the quality of the water drawn into the San Luis Reservoir at the Harvey Banks Pumping Plant near Tracy in San Joaquin County on the edge of the Delta. The State of California has a Bay-Delta Conservation Plan which illustrates the various options currently under consideration to move water from the Sacramento River around the Delta so that it does not pick up salt. Only in California could a water movement proposal this expensive be given serious consideration!

Related articles

• When Farming Turns Toxic: Time to Call it Quits in California? (food.change.org)
• Proposal: Calif. farmers could own water pipes (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Brown calls for delta canal in Calif. water plan (sfgate.com)

Urban Water III

Fountain, City of London

©eop

Today's New York Times has a good op ed piece by its regular columnist Bob Herbert concerning the pressing need for investment in urban water supply facilities. While urban uses account for less than 10 per cent of total water use, it is a crucial percentage, supplying the basic needs of millions of US citizens and residents. Saving some or most of the 10-20 per cent of water in urban systems currently lost to leakage would itself justify a large investment in new and renewed facilities, especially in cities where some of the water (and waste removal) infrastructure is over a century old. It would in most circumstances be far cheaper than expanding the supply system to bring in that much more water. Herbert further justifies the investment because it would create jobs and new opportunities for private enterprises. 

Whether the latter points are correct or not, huge investment is going to be essential in the next decade merely to maintain current standards of safety and reliability. Otherwise we are going to see many more events like those that have plagued the Maryland water utilities serving the Washington, DC slurbs. The WSSC in Maryland, in comparison to many urban and slurban water utilities elsewhere, runs a relatively new and up-to-date system. Despite that, it has suffered several major crises over the past couple of years. In those systems which are rapidly aging, it is only a matter of time before a colossal fire in one and in another one an epidemic of water borne disease happens because the water systems are beyond the breaking point, broken and dilapidated. 

Sudan, the Nile and the Merowe Dam

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

The nearly always amazing NASA Earth Observatory chose this image of a dam in the desert on its site this morning as its Image of the Day. The accompanying brief article is well worth a read, for it encapsulates the problems of water supply and management in an extremely arid environment with a growing population. It also points to some of the problems of dams in the region and the conflicts over the use of the Nile, crucial for life in both Sudan and downstream Egypt.

Climate Change and Drought

Source: NCAR

Yesterday 19 October 2010 the Universities Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) issued a press release describing its work on the water supply aspects of climate change:  Climate change: Drought may threaten much of globe within decades.  The release and the research on which it is based provide yet more evidence, as if such were needed, of how critical climate change is to the human future. No, agriculture cannot simply move from Iowa to northern Manitoba for all to be well! The drying out of middle latitude zones is ominous indeed and does not bode well for maintaining a decent standard of living for the world's increasing human population. The online version of Scientific American has an interesting article based on the UCAR report.

Related articles

• Drought could hit world's populous areas: study (scientificamerican.com)

The Desiccation of the Aral Sea

The Death of the Aral Sea

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

In the slide set on water footprints we used last session, there was a photo of fishing boats stranded in a desert, at the bottom of what was once a large saline lake, the Aral Sea. Similar to the Great Salt Lake in Utah or the Dead Sea, the Aral sea filled the lowest part of an interior basin with not outlets to the world ocean, but it was far less salty than those two inland seas because it received a much larger annual input of fresh water. Prior to the mid 1970s, it was an important supplier of fish to nearby areas and to the larger Soviet Union. As the lake has dried, the remaining water has become more saline, and many fish species that once flourished have been extinguished, unable to survive in the Aral Sea's remaining and increasingly briny waters.

During the Soviet era there was a huge push to increase crop production in the Central Asian republics, and in particular the production of cotton. The streams flowing from the Hindu Kush mountain range far to the south and east, in particular the exotic rivers the Amy Darya and the Syr Darya, were diverted to irrigate cotton fields.Most of that water has been lost to evapotranspiration, and the rivers now bring virtually no additional fresh water into the Aral Sea. The pictures above show the desiccation of the Sea, almost entirely due to diversion of streams feeding into it. The USGS has a good website describing the desiccation along with some additional photos. 

Source: Wordpress.com

Related articles

• Aral Sea Shrinking, Focus of UN Visit to Central Asia (brainz.org)

The Arid U.S. West

Grand Canyon & Colorado River, 1987 ©eop

After our meeting today, I got questions from several people about books on the arid west of the United States. In class I commented on three titles:

Webb, Walter Prescott. 1931 (original publication, there were several subsequent editions, the most recent appears to be 1983). The Great Plains. (Austin: University of Texas).  Webb was professor of history at the University of Texas and during his lifetime was a greatly influential voice in the study of American history, especially that of the west. He wrote widely on water related topics, particularly as they related to Texas, and his 1954 work More Water for Texas prompted that state to look more carefully at its use of a scarce resource. A 1957 article in Harper's Magazine "American West: Perpetual Mirage" was one of the seminal works in the formation of the environmentalist movement. He has been dead since the 1960s, and his books are a little dated, but they are immensely readable and recommended to anyone with an interest in water and the American West.

Wallace Stegner, who many consider one of the finest American writers, was best known as a novelist, but he also wrote a fine piece of history Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. It is still in print and also available for Kindle readers. Once again a great read for anyone with an interest in water, American history and the settlement of the west.


John Wesley Powell was a Civil War hero, he lost an arm, and is best known for his epic journey in 1869 through the Grand Canyon. His influence on this country was much greater than that single journey, for he was the effective founder of the profession of geology in the US and of the US Geological Survey (USGS). His Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States published by the USGS has been a touchstone in discussions of the arid regions of the west since it was first published in 1878. He noted that types of agriculture and land management common east of the Mississippi were simply not feasible in the west and made suggestions of possible alternatives. The Report is available in a rather cumbersome form from the American Memory project of the Library of Congress (did not have time to locate other online versions, but I suspect there may be one or more).


There are many, many more good books (not to mention articles) on the arid portions of the U. S. West. A few suggestions:
1. Meinig, Donald. 1968. The Great Columbia Plain. (Seattle: University of Washington Press).
2. Reisner, Marc. 1986. Cadillac Desert. (New York: Viking).
3. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. 2000. Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company).

Toxic Spill in Hungary Flows Toward the Danube

Toxic Spill, Ajkai Timföldgyár alumina plant in southern Hungary

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

At the same time there is good news that the trapped miners in Chile will likely be released from their Hades in a few days, another industrial accident related to mining threatens the water of the Danube in Central Europe. A waste reservoir at a Hungarian People's Republic era alumina plant burst and sent a wall of toxic sludge downstream, the wave from the broken reservoir killing at least four people and injuring many others while making dozens homeless. Several thousand people have been directly impacted by the spill. Some reports suggest that the remaining sludge is also likely to flow into the stream. 

As yet I have not accessed a hydrographic map of the region, so I do not know much about the flow of the small tributary of the Danube, but it appears to enter the Danube upstream from Budapest and possibly also of the city of Györ. Not far away to the south of the spill, but apparently on the opposite side of a divide and in another watershed is Lake Balaton, Hungary's natural treasure. A shallow lake, a plume of toxic materials entering Balaton would be devastating for the economy and the psyche of Hungary. 

A news report on the Scientific American site suggests that the effects on the Danube are likely to be limited, but downstream users of that water, including many in the various Balkan Republics and on to the Black Sea are anxiously watching the spill.  In an earlier posting I discussed the possibility of an oil pipeline bursting and contaminating a major stream in the United States. The aging infrastructure in much of the western world presents many similar risks to rivers and lakes outside of North America.

Area downstream of the Ajkai Timföldgyár alumina plant

Source:  NASA Earth Observatory

Related articles

• Toxic Spill in Hungary Could Take One Year to Clean Up [Video] (gawker.com)
• Hungary spill pollution eases, no big risk to Danube (scientificamerican.com)
• Toxic Sludge Could Spill Again, Hungary Government Warns (huffingtonpost.com)

Water and Development in Sub-saharan Africa: a few more notes

Drought in Central Africa 2002-2009

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

A posting or two back I made some comments about a fantasy of economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa delivered by a speaker from the Mercatus Centre at George Mason University. In her presentation she utterly ignored the immense environmental issues which must be faced if the region is to enjoy even modest rates of economic growth over more than a year or two. Those environmental challenges combine with demographic problems and political instability to make extremely modest projections of future economic expansion for many of the countries in the region little more than wishful thinking. While there are several environmental issues of concern, and all of them are immense impediments to economic growth, at the moment, and likely for the foreseeable future, drought, the absence of adequate water to support rain fed agriculture, is the most significant one.

Drought in central Africa, during the period shown on the map above extending even into normally very humid areas, is the key problem for agriculture on the continent. Raising the currently abysmally low levels of food and fiber output per unit of land (or of labor) requires reliable water sources. In most areas that means adequate rainfall  given the absence of irrigation infrastructure. Recent climatic data, reflecting ongoing climate change, raise substantial doubt that adequate water will be reliably available even in some areas where adequate precipitation was once taken for granted. Shy of huge investments in irrigation facilities farmers will either have to shift to drought resistant crops and new cultivation techniques, usually lowering output per hectare, or face catastrophic decline in output using current crops and techniques.

Drought is also important for burgeoning urban populations. Not a few of those people driven into cities, thereby generating breathtaking rates of urban population growth in some Sub-Saharan countries, have left impoverished agricultural zones where drought has made crop and animal production and therefore subsistence rural living impossible. A number of African cities do not have reliable water supplies adequate even for their present populations, and any population growth means even less water available per capita without large investments to increase urban water supplies. If there is no reliable source of water near a city, then it is nearly impossible to bring adequate quantities of water into it at a feasible investment of resources.

I do not have the time between now and the end of the term further to investigate the dimensions of the problems of drought in Africa, so the topic will be mentioned but not discussed in detail in our course. Anyone who has a serious interest in the continent and its prospects for the future must invest time assessing the impact of drought. That assessment needs to include the immediate term future, for drought in Kenya and adjacent areas has been linked by some observers to the political problems currently brewing there and may also have links to political unrest elsewhere. Anyone who fails to make such an assessment is thoroughly unqualified to consider him or herself an "expert" on Sub-Saharan Africa or its prospects for the future. Hungry people are not easy to govern, and the food scarcity implicit in droughts is hardly conducive to economic growth! 

The Water Cycle

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

NASA's Earth Observatory, one of the great treasures of the internet and proof, as if it were needed, that government can do some wonderful things, has just published a web page closely related to our 29 September discussions on the earth's climate and the hydrologic cycle. The Water Cycle discusses climate and the cycling of water and has some excellent illustrations to support the discussion. If ours were an undergraduate class for university credit, I would assign that web page as required reading (viewing?). While ours is not a course for credit, I very strongly urge you to look at The Water Cycle for it reiterates some of what I said and provides some additional information related to our course on world water supply and more importantly, material useful in developing an understanding  of the world's water situation..

Notes VII

Mendoza, Argentina  ©eop

In our first session we talked about siltation and the failure of dams. Over the past week, a small dam in the Kingstowne section of Fairfax County failed draining small lake and leading to the death of wildlife. Fortunately no human lives or even housing units were damaged by the dam failure, but it left a mess that will require a substantial sum of money to repair. That break was not unexpected, for the dam was in need of rebuilding, and the lake behind it had been fouled by silt. Left behind is a swamp, probably a stinking swamp should warmer weather return in the next week or two. Dams, like all human devices for water control, need constant maintenance if they are to continue in service. Failure to maintain can lead to catastrophic collapse, and a dam failure can lead to loss of property and even loss of human life.

The last half of the session today, 6 October, and a substantial part of the next session on 13 October depend on a Power Point presentation developed by Prof. Arjen Hoekstra at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. To review the materials used today and to preview those to be discussed in the next session, the Power Point or a PDF version of it can be downloaded from the page: http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/Presentations 

Mercatus and African Development

Source: http://printable-maps.blogspot.com/2008/09/map-of-climate-of-africa.html

This morning I had the unsettling experience of listening to a lecturer from the Mercatus Center of George Mason University (of which more below) preach to an OLLI audience why she thinks Africa has a bright future. The underlying gospel message was "if only unfettered 'free market capitalism' is allowed, all will be well." For the sake of the people of Sub-Saharan Africa, one must hope that the conclusions drawn from the shockingly incomplete and biased sermon are correct, but Ms Boudreaux's explanation of why the situation is improving is so far removed from any reasonable enumeration and analysis of facts on the ground as to beggar a point by point refutation. Indeed, one wonders what sources she may have used to reach her fanciful conclusions - the only sources she cited were a few commercial web sites, including one about public toilets in Kenya, and her personal experiences. Those of us who are concerned outside observers making a serious effort to keep ideology and personal bias out of our conclusions find it very hard to share even a smidgen of her optimism, for most of the published evidence suggests that in the most optimistic overview conditions are not getting any worse. Of course Sub-Saharan Africa is a very large area with many countries, and not all of them face an equally grim future, especially if Chinese mining companies expand at the rate currently projected.

It is worth briefly noting several statements and omissions in Ms. Boudreaux's sermon. A statement that Africa is somehow less prone to conflict than in the past can only come from a Panglossian ignorance of the contents of serious news sources which suggest that nasty conflict has died down only slightly and  for the moment, probably due in some measure to sheer exhaustion of the combatants in several countries. Some of the largest, and until recently more pacific and successful, states, notably Kenya and Nigeria, are threatened by the kind of conflicts which in the recent past resulted in perhaps as many as 5 million deaths in Congo, hideous civil warfare in various West African countries, the deadly chaos in parts of Sudan and Somalia, and the genocide in Rwanda. The statistics of a year or two simply do not trump trends shown by the events of decades. Economic growth rates of 5 per cent were claimed, perhaps correctly though the source of the information was not stated, but when the labor force is growing at that rate or more, it merely means running fast to stay in place. Trying to make the sermon gender friendly, Ms. Boudreaux talked about female empowerment. Never mind that some parts of Africa have a longer tradition of active female participation in the economy, as entrepreneurs and decision makers and not just as labor, than many northern countries including the US.  

Meanwhile the sermon completely omitted mention of  most aspects of the severe environmental problems blighting Africa's future, not least those arising from climate change. Water is now a critically scarce resource in some areas and will become scarce in more regions should climate change be at levels currently projected. Africa may have a great deal of unused farm land, but that is a debatable point if one values wildlife, ecological balance, and the rights of indigenous people (to her credit Ms Boudreaux did mention that last concern). Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from rates of debilitating and fatal diseases, especially AIDS, far in excess of those recorded elsewhere, those diseases ravaging a population with some of the highest birth and death rates presently being recorded. Data on population size and growth, life expectancy, the sex-ratio and the dependency ratio  should be startling to anyone with the background of even a single undergraduate demography course. No valid evaluation of Africa's future prospects can fail to include environmental and demographic variables.

I am not an African specialist and would not presume to offer a lecture on the subject without heavy dependence on and citation of sources. That said, I could with little additional research give a better balanced and more insightful lecture on the topic than the one I heard this morning! That is not a claim of virtue on my part but rather a severe indictment of the quality of the sermon I heard.

The message that human progress requires unfettered "free market capitalism" (some leftist critics call that same phenomenon "late-stage monopoly-capitalism") is the basis of the economic theology promoted by Mercatus affiliated "scholars." In fact, Mercatus is a propaganda mill (aka "think tank") serving some immensely wealthy capitalists who wish to negate all taxation and economic regulation and the radical right-wing in American politics who represent those interests in Congress and other legislative bodies. It provides messages of comfort to the comfortable while enjoying the status of a research center at a state-funded  (second-tier) university, one with a fortunate location in the richest county of the United States. Of course, Fairfax is rich because it is home of thousands of highly paid government employees and various "beltway bandits," companies extracting rents from the federal government. While richer and more sophisticated than most of the state, Fairfax is a part of Virginia, itself a welfare state with an economy outside the Washington area heavily dependent on federal spending for the military and crop supports in agriculture, especially tobacco . The dependence on government expenditures for economic success makes  the presence of Mercatus with its central creed of  free market fundamentalism truly ironic! 

In an article in the 30 August 2010 issue of the New Yorker, Jane Mayer "Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama" discusses the Koch brothers of Kansas, part of the big money interests behind the supposedly grass-roots "tea party movement." Wishing to halt taxation of their immense wealth and government regulation of various mining and industrial activities they control, the brothers have been active in funding right-wing politicians and causes. The Mercatus Center is important among recipients of Koch brothers funds. Mayer's article raises important questions about the propriety of a state university housing a partisan propaganda mill, especially one funded by private interests with a very specific agenda.

"Liquid Assets," CNBC Programme

Last evening CNBC broadcast "Liquid Assets - The Big Business of Water - 'The host explores the coming water crisis as fresh water becomes harder to find.'" As is often the case with television specials, it tried to cover too much territory in just an hour, but most of its contents were reasonably presented. It could have been edited to omit the the section on bottled water and the repellant comic Black whose obnoxious presence merely ate up time that could have been better devoted to other issues. Bottled water is significant as a matter for concern, but it really deserves a separate discussion, for it is not directly related to most of the other issues the programme raised when less than an hour is available.

That said, the documentary pointed to some of the key issues in the current water situation, including population growth, improvement in living standards and climate change leading to a growing demand for water, competing demands for scarce supplies in arid areas, and questions about how the distribution of increasingly scarce water supplies should be decided. In the coming weeks we shall look at most of those issues and in rather greater detail than a one hour television show (actually only about 45 minutes when advertising is removed) can offer. If you missed "Liquid Assets" and CNBC or some related television channel broadcasts it again, I strongly recommend devoting an hour to viewing it.