Tag Archives: water resources

mandatory urban water restrictions in California

According to NPR, the drought in California is leading to mandatory water restrictions in urban areas.

  • A reduction in water use by 25 percent for California cities and towns.
  • New pricing structures by local water agencies to encourage conservation.
  • Replacement of 50 million square feet of lawns throughout California with “drought tolerant landscaping.”
  • Rebates for water-efficient appliances.
  • New reporting guidelines for agricultural water users.

According to Slate, urban areas and industry together make up about 20% if water use in California. Agriculture makes up the other 80%.

groundwater

This paper in Water Resources Research is about global groundwater depletion and pollution, and how groundwater can be managed better.

With rivers in critical regions already exploited to capacity throughout the world and groundwater overdraft as well as large-scale contamination occurring in many areas, we have entered an era in which multiple simultaneous stresses will drive water management. Increasingly, groundwater resources are taking a more prominent role in providing freshwater supplies. We discuss the competing fresh groundwater needs for human consumption, food production, energy, and the environment, as well as physical hazards, and conflicts due to transboundary overexploitation. During the past 50 years, groundwater management modeling has focused on combining simulation with optimization methods to inspect important problems ranging from contaminant remediation to agricultural irrigation management. The compound challenges now faced by water planners require a new generation of aquifer management models that address the broad impacts of global change on aquifer storage and depletion trajectory management, land subsidence, groundwater-dependent ecosystems, seawater intrusion, anthropogenic and geogenic contamination, supply vulnerability, and long-term sustainability. The scope of research efforts is only beginning to address complex interactions using multi-agent system models that are not readily formulated as optimization problems and that consider a suite of human behavioral responses.

They get something important right here, which is that if you are formulating a question in a way that the answer can be “optimized”, you have probably defined the question much too narrowly. Water resources are one part of much larger complex natural and social systems. Modeling and technical analysis is important to pare the universe of all possible decisions down to a smaller set where each possible decision is close to “optimal” or efficient in the technical and economic senses. But then this information needs to be fed into a stakeholder or political process where a much wider range of factors can be considered and decisions made.

I am concerned that the current laser focus on “science, technology, engineering, and math” in education is pushing people too far down the path of expecting clear-cut technocratic answers to questions that have messy political and cultural dimensions in reality. All these subjects are good to study, but they need to pared with solid education in planning processes and tools, and an appreciation of systems in general.

water and social unrest

This interview with “British-born novelist and author Rana Dasgupta” talks briefly about economic growth, inequality, and water in India:

There is the potential for immense wealth creation in India in the next 40 or 50 years, so there will be money and resources to redistribute and resources and as long as the tides of poverty and violence are not too catastrophic, then I think probably the system can readjust itself. Right now, within India, without anything else happening outside, there’s enough prospects for growth. In 40 to 50 years, economies of the West are going to be in dramatic decline, and in the longer term, I think the global system as a whole will face some sort of crisis and that will affect India, too. But in the medium term, India has pretty good growth prospects and hopefully there’s the quality of leadership and ideas that can redistribute some of that wealth and find livable solutions to some of these problems.

But inequality and the environment are going to be massive in Indian politics. Really, no one is talking about water, but giving 1.3 billion people clean water to drink is becoming very difficult. And you can’t survive for very long without it, so if a city of 25 million people — and there are at least two Indian cities that have that kind of number — has no water, the effects are immediate. When there’s no housing the effects could be years away, but when there’s no water, there are water riots immediately. People who don’t have it will steal it because they have to.

So water could be one of the triggering events in Indian cities for how a sort of mini-political revolution might happen and realization on the part of the middle classes that there is actually a wider world that is up against its limits.

mining sewage for gold

Japanese sewer authorities are now profitably mining sewage for gold.

A sewage treatment facility in central Japan has recorded a higher gold yield from sludge than can be found at some of the world’s best mines. An official in Nagano prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, said the high percentage of gold found at the Suwa facility was probably due to the large number of precision equipment manufacturers in the vicinity that use the yellow metal. The facility recently recorded finding 1,890 grammes of gold per tonne of ash from incinerated sludge.

more on the western U.S. drought

I knew about low rainfall and depleted groundwater in California, loss of snowpack in Colorado, and the not-at-all-surprising lack of water in Las Vegas. I didn’t know that Oregon is in the early stages of beginning to feel the drought. From Wired:

Snow-starvation might seem like a PR tactic invented by Oregonians to dissuade out-of-staters keen on moving in, but it’s a real problem. Though known for rain, most of the state relies on snowpack to sate its thirst throughout the year. But Oregon’s last three winters have been too warm, and the much of the expected snow has instead fallen as rain, devastating more than just the state’s ski industry. (To be fair to Oregonians, a busted ski season is a huge bummer.) Without melting snow, the rivers are coming up short, and many farmers are having to rely on groundwater. But even in soggy Oregon, there isn’t always enough to go around.”The way water is portioned out in the American west is that if you got here first you get to use it first,” says Kathie Dello, a climate researcher at Oregon State University. When there’s a shortage, then farmers with so-called “junior rights” get their water use cut off early in the season. This has led some farmers to look south for clues about what their future might be like.

All this comes to a head because Oregon is currently the peak influx of any state in the nation. “The biggest fear of most Oregonians that Californians are going to flood the state,” says Dello. (Not a water-flood; a people-flood.) But the fear of being bred out by Golden State refugees might soon be supplanted by an even worse threat: being invaded by California’s drying climate.

National Geographic on the California drought

Here is National Geographic weighing in on snowpack, drought, and climate change in the western U.S.:

As in most of the rest of the American West, fortunes depend less on how much precipitation falls from the sky than how much of it falls as snow and how long that snow stays in the mountains. Despite the occasional severe winters, western snowpacks have declined in recent decades, and key researchers expect the trend to accelerate. “Warmer winters are reducing the amount of snow stored in the mountains, and they’re causing snowpacks to melt earlier in the spring,” says Philip Mote, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University. Shrinking snowpacks and earlier snowmelts mean—in practical terms—that the region faces a persistent and worsening drought.

They talk about the parallels with Australia, which has faced similar issues and seemingly handled them better:

Australia’s Big Dry, a decade-long drought that began around the start of this century, led at first to the same kind of political bickering heard recently in California. But after years of environmental destruction, urban water stress, and great suffering by many dryland farmers, Australian politicians—and farmers—took some serious risks. “At the peak of the drought, it became very apparent that the environment doesn’t lie,” says Mike Young, a professor at the University of Adelaide who was active in the country’s drought response. Australia reduced urban water use by investing billions in conservation, education, and efficiency improvements. Most important, it began to reform the old water allocation system, which, like California’s, had promised specific amounts of water to rights holders. The country instituted a system that guaranteed a minimum supply of water for the environment, then divided the remainder into shares that could be quickly sold and traded—or stored for the next season. Farmers fought the changes, but with a financial incentive to use less water, they soon got more creative and more efficient. Water use dropped, and though consumption has risen since the drought eased in 2010, it remains below pre-drought levels in towns and cities.

I wonder if any other cultures have ever dealt with something like this. From Wikipedia:

Ancient Pueblo peoples, Ancestral Pueblo peoples, or Ancestral Puebloans were an ancient Native American culture centered on the present-day Four Corners area of the United States, comprising southern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado.[1] They lived in a range of structures, including pit houses, pueblos, and cliff dwellings designed so that they could lift entry ladders during enemy attacks, which provided security. Archaeologists sometimes refer to the unique set of material culture remains as “Anasazi”, although the term is not preferred by contemporary Pueblo peoples and often loosely used as a name for the occupants…

After approximately 1150, North America experienced significant climatic change in the form of a 300-year drought called the Great Drought. This also led to the collapse of the Tiwanaku civilization around Lake Titicaca in present-day Bolivia.[22] The contemporary Mississippian culture also collapsed during this period…

In this later period, the Pueblo II became more self-contained, decreasing trade and interaction with more distant communities. Southwest farmers developed irrigation techniques appropriate to seasonal rainfall, including soil and water control features such as check dams and terraces. The population of the region continued to be mobile, abandoning settlements and fields under adverse conditions. Along with the change in precipitation patterns, there was a drop in water table levels due to a different cycle unrelated to rainfall. This forced the abandonment of settlements in the more arid or over-farmed locations.[citation needed]

Evidence suggests a profound change in religion in this period. Chacoan and other structures constructed originally along astronomical alignments, and thought to have served important ceremonial purposes to the culture, were systematically dismantled. Doorways were sealed with rock and mortar. Kiva walls show marks from great fires set within them, which probably required removal of the massive roof – a task which would require significant effort. Habitations were abandoned, tribes split and divided and resettled far elsewhere.

Uh oh, so it looks like times got a little crazy, and people started burning stuff down. Hopefully we can do better than this. From what I know, this was a fairly urban, densely settled, agricultural civilization. When water got scarce, they probably just dispersed. Back then, there was a fair amount of open space to disperse in. I’m not so sure that is going to work for us, unless we are talking about spaceships.

By the way, if you happen to be interested in a story where a whole civilization goes crazy and starts burning shit down, try this:
Nightfall

By the way, this is a novel based on a short story old enough to be in the public domain, which someone has posted online here.

Endogenous technological and population change under increasing water scarcity

This article in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (which is open access) is a great simulation-based study of how natural resource scarcity, the economy and technological change interact. First, they take an economic production function and add water to it as a factor of production. Then, they simultaneously allow population growth, increasing water scarcity, and technological innovation. Technological innovation is driven by scarcity, the level of investment the society chooses to make in innovation activities, and an assumed success rate. To invest more in innovation activities, the society has to save more, which means incomes have to decline in the short term.

So, this model answers the criticism economists often make that other models have ignored the effects of scarcity on innovation. With reasonable inputs the simulation always ends in declining water consumption, declining incomes, and eventually declining population. They relate this to real case studies from Australia where drought did drive innovation (for example drip irrigation), but ultimately it was not enough – agricultural output declined, incomes declined, and eventually population declined (they didn’t die of thirst, they just moved away).

you know nothing, snow

From Wired Science:

The western United States is undergoing a major shift in precipitation patterns. Large swaths of the West that have historically been dominated by snow in the winter months are starting to see a lot more rain instead. A new study that maps out the predominant form of precipitation shows that this trend could result in an average reduction in snow-dominated area of around 30 percent by the middle of this century.

The western US depends heavily on snowpack to sustain its water supply through the dry summertime, but the new research, published in Geophysical Research Letters in July, suggests this may have to change.

Hmm…here’s the abstract of the paper…not quite so sensational sounding although it still clearly says there is going to be a lot less snow:

This approach identifies areas most likely to undergo precipitation phase change over the next half century. At broad scales, these projections indicate an average 30% decrease in areal extent of winter wet-day temperatures conducive to snowfall over the western United States.