The Guardian- George Monbiot We need to talk about water– and the fact that the world is running out of it.On a planet getting hotter and drier by the year, governments are wilfully ignoring a looming crisis Guardian 8 March 2024 There’s a flaw in the plan. It’s not a small one: it is an Earth-sized hole in our calculations. To keep pace with the global demand for food, crop production needs to grow by at least 50% by 2050. In principle, if nothing else changes, this is feasible, thanks mostly to improvements in crop breeding and farming techniques. But everything else is going to change.Even if we set aside all other issues – heat impacts, soil degradation, epidemic plant diseases accelerated by the loss of genetic diversity – there is one which, without help from any other cause, could prevent the world’s people from being fed. Water.A paper published in 2017 estimated that to match crop production to expected demand, water use for irrigation would have to increase by 146% by the middle of this century. One minor problem. Water is already maxed out. In general, the dry parts of the world are becoming drier, partly through reduced rainfall; partly through declining river flow as mountain ice and snow retreats; and partly through rising temperatures causing increased evaporation and increased transpiration by plants. Many of the world’s major growing regions are now threatened by “flash droughts”, in which hot and dry weather sucks moisture from the soil at frightening speed. Some places, such as the southwest of the US, now in its 24th year of drought, may have switched permanently to a drier state. Rivers fail to reach the sea, lakes and aquifers are shrinking, species living in freshwater are becoming extinct at roughly five times the rate of species that live on land and major cities are threatened by extreme water stress.

Already, agriculture accounts for 90% of the world’s freshwater use. We have pumped so much out of the ground that we’ve changed the Earth’s spin. The water required to meet growing food demand simply does not exist.

That 2017 paper should have sent everyone scrambling. But as usual, it was ignored by policymakers and the media. Only when the problem arrives in Europe do we acknowledge that there’s a crisis. But while there is understandable panic about the drought in Catalonia and Andalusia, there’s an almost total failure among powerful interests to acknowledge that this is just one instance of a global problem, a problem that should feature at the top of the political agenda.Though drought measures have triggered protests in Spain, this is far from the most dangerous flashpoint. The catchment of the Indus river is shared by three nuclear powers – India, Pakistan and China – and several highly unstable and divided regions already afflicted by hunger and extreme poverty. Today, 95% of the river’s dry season flowis extracted, mostly for irrigation. But water demand in both Pakistan and India is growing rapidly. Supply – temporarily boosted by the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush – will, before long, peak and then go into decline. Even under the most optimistic climate scenario, runoff from Asian glaciers is expected to peak before mid-century, and glacier mass will shrink by about 46% by 2100. Some analysts see water competition between India and Pakistan as a major cause of the repeated conflicts in Kashmir. But unless a new Indus waters treaty is struck, taking falling supplies into account, this fighting could be a mere prelude for something much worse.There’s a widespread belief that these problems can be solved simply by enhancing the efficiency of irrigation: huge amounts of water are wasted in agriculture. So let me introduce you to the irrigation efficiency paradox. As better techniques ensure that less water is required to grow a given volume of crops, irrigation becomes cheaper. As a result, it attracts more investment, encourages farmers to grow thirstier, more profitable plants, and expands across a wider area. This is what happened, for instance, in the Guadiana river basin in Spain, where a €600m investment to reduce water use by improving the efficiency of irrigation has instead increased it. You can overcome the paradox through regulation: laws to limit both total and individual water consumption. But governments prefer to rely on technology alone. Without political and economic measures, it doesn’t work. Nor are other technofixes likely to solve the problem. Governments are planning massive engineering schemes to pipe water from one place to another. But climate breakdown and rising demand ensure that many of the donor regions are also likely to run dry. Water from desalination plants typically costs five or 10 times as much as water from the ground or the sky, while the process requires masses of energy and generates great volumes of toxic brine.

Above all, we need to change our diets. Those of us with dietary choices (in other words, the richer half of the world’s population) should seek to minimise the water footprint of our food. With apologies for harping on about it, this is yet another reason to switch to an animal-free diet, which reduces both total crop demand and, in most cases, water use. The water demand of certain plant products, especially almonds and pistachios in California, has become a major theme in the culture wars, as rightwing influencers attack plant-based diets....read on and act!    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/04/water-world-run-out-planet-hotter-looming-crisis   

Airports, subway tunnels, and nuclear plants are at risk along the U.S. East Coast as the ground sinks and sea levels rise Weather Network May. 17, 2024,   A recent study found that land subsidence—the ground sinking in elevation—is a growing hazard along the U.S. East Coast, and it’s one that puts millions of people at risk in some of the continent’s most densely populated cities. Flooding is an ever-present hazard for communities along the coast. Every major storm serves as a constant reminder that living near the ocean is a precarious balancing act. While most folks are prepared to deal with rising waters rushing inland, few are ready for the consequences of the land sinking beneath our feet. 

Subsidence compounds the effects of sea level rise........Scientists have long warned about the dangerous effects of sea level rise. It’s already a problem in Charleston, South Carolina, which routinely experiences coastal flooding during both storms and high tides. It’s likely that sea level rise plays a significant factor in this tidal flooding on otherwise calm days. Over time, that elevation loss could expose more areas to the effects of sea level rise, storm surge flooding, and infrastructure damage from the stress of the changing land itself.

Some cities are sinking faster than others.......Researchers from Virginia Tech and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) analyzed satellite data from 2007 and 2020 to measure how much the land sank or rose along the East Coast from Maine all the way to the southern tip of Florida. The analysis found that most coastal cities are subsiding at a rate of 1 mm per year. That may not seem like much, but some communities are subsiding at a rate of 5+ mm per year.  A few high-population cities are subsiding at a sharp clip. Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, are each home to about 150,000 people. Each of these low-lying cities on the southeastern coast are sinking at more than 4 mm per year—a particularly harrowing prospect for flood-stricken Charleston.
Atlantic City, New Jersey, is also sinking at the same rate. This popular tourist destination is particularly vulnerable to landfalling storms, and parts of the area are still recovering from Hurricane Sandy more than a decade later.  Much of North America remains depressed from the weight of glaciers that covered the continentmore than 10,000 years ago. The land is still bouncing back from the weight of those glaciers. This pattern on its own should lead to an overall net rise in elevations over time.  However, widespread subsidence is working against the land adjusting from the last ice age. Researchers worked to identify several factors driving this sinking trend along the East Coast....read on and watch the Videos......    https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/science/earth-science/millions-at-risk-as-land-sinks-beneath-major-us-east-coast-cities-study-finds 

 The world has witnessed a tenfold increase in the number of natural disasters since the 1960s, the 2020 Ecological Threat RegisterETR) shows. Increase in Natural Disasters on a Global Scale by Ten Times

NAWI Awarded Funding to Continue to Accelerate Research and Development for a Secure Water Future. A research consortium led by Berkeley Lab, along with three other national labs, will continue to lead a DOE desalination hub to drive innovation for sustainable water security. The National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), which is led by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has been extended for five more years with $75 million in funding from DOE. NAWI will continue its contributions to helping decarbonize the water and wastewater sectors through investments in technologies that enhance the efficient use of energy for water use, treatment, and distribution. “Water and energy are interdependent – water is used to produce nearly every major energy source, and energy is critical to transporting and treating water,” said Jeff Marootian, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. These new directions will enable NAWI to continue to accelerate breakthroughs towards a circular water economy, where water is treated to fit-for-purpose standards and reused locally, rather than transporting freshwater long distances. “Desalination and innovative water treatment technologies hold great promise for helping us meet our planet’s growing demand for one of our most precious resources: water,” says Mike Witherell, Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “The Department of Energy’s renewed support for NAWI enables the continuation of cutting-edge research and development which is needed to not only treat unconvenection between these two resources demands an integrated approach that considers the challenges and opportunities inherent to both sectors.

Over the next five years, NAWI is shifting its focus to include regional water systems planning – and will partner with water planners at the state and regional level to develop and use new tools for water supply forecasting, water demand forecasting, and water portfolio optimization. NAWI will also spearhead water resilience pilot projects and implement regional watentional sources of water for re-use but to lower their cost and energy use. Over the past five years, NAWI has supported a robust research portfolio with 60 original and innovative research and development projects that span analysis for water-energy grid integration to the development of algorithms, models, and adaptive process controls for resilient operations. In addition, NAWI has supported the implementation of 11 pilot projects that have begun work demonstrating some of these innovative technologies in real-world environments. NAWI has also developed the NAWI Alliance with over 1,670 members, and partnered with over 420 leading industry, academic, and government stakeholders. NAWI has also developed a suite of knowledge products, including a master roadmap and series of industry-specific roadmaps to prioritize the highest impact technology options, and its 60 projects support those priorities. To date, NAWI researchers have published more than 100 articles in high-impact research journals. 

“Our research program remains steadfast in its commitment to reducing the price, energy cost, and greenhouse gas emissions of new water technologies,” said Peter Fiske, Executive Director of NAWI. “Our work also bridges cutting-edge research with real people and places, such as producing secure, reliable, and affordable water for communities that are most in need.” “Our research program remains steadfast in its commitment to reducing the price, energy cost, and greenhouse gas emissions of new water technologies.” – Peter Fiske, Executive Director of NAWI NAWI’s plan for the next five years aligns well with the California’s Water Supply Strategy (WSS) – Adapting to a Hotter Drier Future, which outlines a strategy and priority actions to adapt and protect water supplies from the effects of rising temperatures and drier conditions due to climate change. It also aligns with the updated California Water Plan that demonstrates how planning at the watershed scale provides the most comprehensive solutions for climate-resilient water supplies for all Californians. The NAWI program will significantly contribute to the implementation of the updated water plan, demonstrating novel methods for water reuse at the community and premise scale, along with further advancing key reuse technologies such as desalination and fit-for-purpose treatment. “Securing a more resilient water future for California means investing and building meaningful relationships with key partners like NAWI. This collaboration will help drive innovation for new, affordable water supplies for a more water resilient future for generations to come,” said California Department of Water Resources Director Karla Nemith.https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2024/04/11/nawi-awarded-funding-to-continue-to-accelerate-research-and-development-for-a-secure-water-future/