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News -01-25-08 UN Calls Water Top Priority (Time.com) "U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the world on Thursday to put the looming crisis over water shortages at the top of the global agenda this year and take action to prevent conflicts over scarce supplies." 01-08 -06-12-08 Mayors Ask Congress to Help Fix Infrastructure (CNN News) "Big-city mayors told Congress on Thursday that they are overwhelmed by the infrastructure needs of their regions and cannot maintain well-functioning water systems, roads and rail networks without more federal help." "To answer such demands, Sens. Chris Dodd, D-Connecticut, and Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, are pushing a bill to create a National Infrastructure Bank that would raise money for major national projects by issuing up to $60 billion in tax credit bonds, which could then be leveraged into greater funding." 06-08 -09-27-07 China and Others Running Out of Water (New York Times) "The North China Plain undoubtedly needs any water it can get. An economic powerhouse with more than 200 million residents, the region has limited rainfall and depends on groundwater for 60 percent of its water supply. Other countries have aquifers that are being drained to dangerously low levels, like Yemen, India, Mexico and the United States. But scientists say the aquifers below the North China Plain may be drained within 30 years." "'There’s no uncertainty,' said Richard Evans, a hydrologist who has worked in China for two decades and has served as a consultant to the World Bank and China’s Ministry of Water Resources. 'The rate of decline is very clear, very well documented. They will run out of groundwater if the current rate continues.' " 09-07 -10-03-07 America's Water Infrastructure Crisis (USNews.com) "Rep. Earl Blumenauer called for a Clean Water Trust Fund at a rally today in support of buttressing America's aging infrastructure." "Organized by Food & Water Watch, the rally highlighted a number of ills facing the country's water and sanitation systems. The average American pipe is 33 years old, while 72,000 miles of pipe are 80 years or older. Holding up today's Washington Post with a story detailing how a failed water main impeded efforts to fight a fire in a city neighborhood, group President Wenonah Hauter announced that it's 'time Congress does something about the water infrastructure crisis we're facing.' " 10-07 -10-22-07 "The Future Is Drying Up" (New York Times) "Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. 'There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,' Chu said, 'and that’s in the best scenario.' " 10-07 -10-22-07 Atlanta Faces Possible Empty Faucets (New York Times) "For more than five months, the lake that provides drinking water to almost five million people here has been draining away in a withering drought. Sandy beaches have expanded into flats of orange mud. Tree stumps not seen in half a century have resurfaced. Scientists have warned of impending disaster." "And life has, for the most part, gone on just as before." "The response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion. All summer, more than a year after the drought began, fountains blithely sprayed, football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. In early October, on an 81-degree day, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million gallon mountain of snow." 10-07 Facing the Global Freshwater Crisis (Scientific American) "As demand for freshwater soars, planetary supplies are becoming unpredictable. Existing technologies could avert a global water crisis, but they must be implemented soon." "Not surprisingly, staving off future water shortages means spending money—a lot of it. Analysts at Booz Allen Hamilton have estimated that to provide water needed for all uses through 2030, the world will need to invest as much as $1 trillion a year on applying existing technologies for conserving water, maintaining and replacing infrastructure, and constructing sanitation systems. This is a daunting figure to be sure, but perhaps not so huge when put in perspective. The required sum turns out to be about 1.5 percent of today’s annual global gross domestic product, or about $120 per capita, a seemingly achievable expenditure." "Unfortunately, investment in water facilities as a percentage of gross domestic product has dropped by half in most countries since the late 1990s. If a crisis arises in the coming decades, it will not be for lack of know-how; it will come from a lack of foresight and from an unwillingness to spend the needed money." 08-08 Virtual Water Footprints (Waterfootprint.org) Describes the concept of virtual water footprint in the world economy. 08-08 Water Footprints (Waterfootprint.org) "People use lots of water for drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, etc. The water footprint of an individual, business or nation is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual, business or nation." "The water footprint of a nation shows the total volume of water that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the inhabitants of the nation. Since not all goods consumed in one particular country are produced in that country, the water footprint consists of two parts: use of domestic water resources and use of water outside the borders of the country. The water footprint includes both the water withdrawn from surface and groundwater and the use of soil water (in agricultural production)." 08-08 Water Footprints of Nations and Foods (Waterfootprint.org) "With every step of food processing we loose part of the material as a result of selection and inefficiencies. The higher we go up in the product chain, the higher will be the virtual water content of the product. For example, the global average virtual water content of maize, wheat and rice (husked) is 900, 1300 and 3000m3/ton respectively, whereas the virtual water content of chicken meat, pork and beef is 3900, 4900 and 15500m/ton respectively." 08-08 Papers -Editorial: Innovation and Education Needed to Head Off Water War (WorldPress.org) "For 2ie's dean, Paul Ginies, Africa's water shortage needs money to be thrown at it. But Africa also needs trained people to manage that influx of cash, he says. 'The main problem here is the lack of capacity of governance and the under-capacity of companies to respond,' he said." "Ginies estimated one trained engineer should be in place to manage every $1 million invested in a country's infrastructure. In Burkina Faso, because of austerity measures imposed on the civil service, if there is not a major new recruitment drive natural attrition will mean there are no trained engineers in the Ministry of Agriculture and Water within 10 years, according to 2ie's calculations." 09-07 Sewage and Wastes Contaminating Water Supplies (FoodandWaterWatch.com) "During moderate to heavy rainfalls, the volume of sewage and storm water can exceed the capacity of the sewer system, which discharges the excess untreated sewage – including garbage, syringes, tampon applicators, and toxic industrial waste – into the nearest body of water. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1.28 trillion gallons of raw sewage are discharged by overflows from these sewer systems each year3, requiring $50.6 billion to clean up.4" "Even the newer sewer systems, which do not collect storm water, do sometimes overflow because of broken pipes or mechanical problems caused by the general wear and tear on system pumps, valves, and lifts. EPA estimates that such failures in the systems discharge between three and 10 billion gallons of raw sewage each year.5" "Municipalities already invest $63 billion a year for clean water, second only to their spending on education. Meanwhile, the federal share of funding for water and sewer systems declined from 78 percent in 1973 to 3 percent today.25 Therefore, each year we fall more than $20 billion short of what is needed to maintain our public water and sewer systems." "This is why Congress should establish a clean water trust fund that would give communities the financial help they need to invest in healthy and safe drinking water for every American and for future generations. Such a fund also would protect wildlife and maintain healthy ecosystems." 10-07

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