Worse Than Fossil Fuel

Source: Monbiot.com
Credits: George Monbiot
Dated: 2005-12-06

Worse Than Fossil Fuel

Biodiesel enthusiasts have accidentally invented the most carbon-intensive fuel on earth

Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained a belief in magic.

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44 x 10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota.”(1) In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries’ worth of plants and animals.

The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy - and the extraordinary power densities it gives us - with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back. But substitutes are being sought everywhere. They are being promoted today at the climate talks in Montreal, by states - such as ours - which seek to avoid the hard decisions climate change demands. And at least one of them is worse than the fossil fuel burning it replaces.

The last time I drew attention to the hazards of making diesel fuel from vegetable oils, I received as much abuse as I have ever been sent by the supporters of the Iraq war. The biodiesel missionaries, I discovered, are as vociferous in their denial as the executives of Exxon. I am now prepared to admit that my previous column was wrong. But they’re not going to like it. I was wrong because I underestimated the fuel’s destructive impact.

Before I go any further, I should make it clear that turning used chip fat into motor fuel is a good thing. The people slithering around all day in vats of filth are perfoming a service to society. But there is enough waste cooking oil in the UK to meet one 380th of our demand for road transport fuel(2). Beyond that, the trouble begins.

When I wrote about it last year, I thought that the biggest problem caused by biodiesel was that it set up a competition for land(3). Arable land that would otherwise have been used to grow food would instead be used to grow fuel. But now I find that something even worse is happening. The biodiesel industry has accidentally invented the world’s most carbon-intensive fuel.

In promoting biodiesel - as the European Union, the British and US governments and thousands of environmental campaigners do - you might imagine that you are creating a market for old chip fat, or rapeseed oil, or oil from algae grown in desert ponds. In reality you are creating a market for the most destructive crop on earth.

Last week, the chairman of Malaysia’s Federal Land Development Authority announced that he was about to build a new biodiesel plant(4). His was the ninth such decision in four months. Four new refineries are being built in Peninsula Malaysia, one in Sarawak and two in Rotterdam(5). Two foreign consortia - one German, one American - are setting up rival plants in Singapore(6). All of them will be making biodiesel from the same source: oil from palm trees.

“The demand for biodiesel,” the Malaysian Star reports, “will come from the European Community … This fresh demand … would, at the very least, take up most of Malaysia’s crude palm oil inventories”(7). Why? Because it’s cheaper than biodiesel made from any other crop.

In September, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impacts of palm oil production. “Between 1985 and 2000,” it found, “the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia”(8). In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5m in Indonesia.

Almost all the remaining forest is at risk. Even the famous Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan is being ripped apart by oil planters. The orang-utan is likely to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species could go the same way. Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist(9). The forest fires which every so often smother the region in smog are mostly started by the palm growers. The entire region is being turned into a gigantic vegetable oil field.

Before oil palms, which are small and scrubby, are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon, must be felled and burnt. Having used up the drier lands, the plantations are now moving into the swamp forests, which grow on peat. When they’ve cut the trees, the planters drain the ground. As the peat dries it oxidises, releasing even more carbon dioxide than the trees. In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm biodiesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria.

The British government understands this. In the report it published last month, when it announced that it will obey the European Union and ensure that 5.75% of our transport fuel comes from plants by 2010, it admitted that “the main environmental risks are likely to be those concerning any large expansion in biofuel feedstock production, and particularly in Brazil (for sugar cane) and South East Asia (for palm oil plantations).”(10) It suggested that the best means of dealing with the problem was to prevent environmentally destructive fuels from being imported. The government asked its consultants whether a ban would infringe world trade rules. The answer was yes: “mandatory environmental criteria … would greatly increase the risk of international legal challenge to the policy as a whole”(11). So it dropped the idea of banning imports, and called for “some form of voluntary scheme” instead(12). Knowing that the creation of this market will lead to a massive surge in imports of palm oil, knowing that there is nothing meaningful it can do to prevent them, and knowing that they will accelarate rather than ameliorate climate change, the government has decided to go ahead anyway.

At other times it happily defies the European Union. But what the EU wants and what the government wants are the same. “It is essential that we balance the increasing demand for travel,” the government’s report says, “with our goals for protecting the environment”(13). Until recently, we had a policy of reducing the demand for travel. Now, though no announcement has been made, that policy has gone. Like the Tories in the early 1990s, the Labour administration seeks to accommodate demand, however high it rises. Figures obtained last week by the campaigning group Road Block show that for the widening of the M1 alone the government will pay £3.6 billion - more than it is spending on its entire climate change programme(14). Instead of attempting to reduce demand, it is trying to alter supply. It is prepared to sacrifice the South East Asian rainforests in order to be seen to do something, and to allow motorists to feel better about themselves.

All this illustrates the futility of the technofixes now being pursued in Montreal. Trying to meet a rising demand for fuel is madness, wherever the fuel might come from. The hard decisions have been avoided, and another portion of the biosphere is going up in smoke.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Jeffrey S. Dukes, 2003. Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption Of
Ancient Solar Energy. Climatic Change 61: 31-44.

2. The British Association for Biofuels and Oils estimates the volume at 100,000 tonnes a year. BABFO, no date. Memorandum to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. http://www.biodiesel.co.uk/press_release/royal_commission_on_environmenta.htm

3. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

4. Tamimi Omar, 1st December 2005. Felda to set up largest biodiesel plant. The Edge Daily.
http://www.theedgedaily.com/cms/content.jsp?id=com.tms.cms.article.Article_e5d7c0d9-cb73c03a-df4bfc00-d453633e

5. See e.g. Zaidi Isham Ismail, 7th November 2005. IOI to go it alone on first biodiesel plant.
http://www.btimes.com.my/Current_News/BT/Monday/Frontpage/20051107000223/Article/; No author, 25th November 2005. GHope nine-month profit hits RM841mil. http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/11/25/business/12693859&sec=business; No author, 26th November 2005. GHope to invest RM40mil for biodiesel plant in Netherlands. http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/11/26/business/12704187&sec=business; No author, 23rd November 2005. Malaysia IOI Eyes Green Energy Expansion in Europe. http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/33622/story.htm

6. Loh Kim Chin, 26th October 2005. Singapore to host two biodiesel plants, investments total over S$80m. Channel NewsAsia.

7. C.S. Tan, 6th October 2005. All Plantation Stocks Rally. http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/10/6/business/12243819&sec=business

8. Friends of the Earth et al, September 2005. The Oil for Ape Scandal: how palm oil is threatening orang-utan survival. Research report. www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/oil_for_ape_full.pdf

9. ibid.

10. Department for Transport, November 2005. Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) feasibility report.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_roads/documents/page/dft_roads_610329-01.hcsp#P18_263

11. E4Tech, ECCM and Imperial College, London, June 2005. Feasibility Study on Certification for a Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation. Final Report.

12. Department for Transport, ibid.

13. ibid.

Food Price Crisis Imperils 100 Million in Poor Countries, Zoellick Says

The surge in food prices could push 100 million people into deeper poverty, World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick said at the International Monetary Fund-World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington.

April 14, 2008 – The surge in food prices could push 100 million people into deeper poverty, World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick said at the International Monetary Fund-World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington.

Global food crisis forecast as prices reach record highs

By John Vidal, guardian.co.uk, 25 October 2010

Cost of meat, sugar, rice, wheat and maize soars as World Bank predicts five years of price volatility.

Rising food prices and shortages could cause instability in many countries as the cost of staple foods and vegetables reached their highest levels in two years, with scientists predicting further widespread droughts and floods.

Although food stocks are generally good despite much of this year's harvests being wiped out in Pakistan and Russia, sugar and rice remain at a record price.

Global wheat and maize prices recently jumped nearly 30% in a few weeks while meat prices are at 20-year highs, according to the key Reuters-Jefferies commodity price indicator. Last week, the US predicted that global wheat harvests would be 30m tonnes lower than last year, a 5.5% fall. Meanwhile, the price of tomatoes in Egypt, garlic in China and bread in Pakistan are at near-record levels.

"The situation has deteriorated since September," said Abdolreza Abbassian of the UN food and agriculture organisation. "In the last few weeks there have been signs we are heading the same way as in 2008.

"We may not get to the prices of 2008 but this time they could stay high much longer."

However, opinions are sharply divided over whether these prices signal a world food crisis like the one in 2008 that helped cause riots in 25 countries, or simply reflect volatility in global commodity markets as countries claw their way through recession.

"A food crisis on the scale of two or three years ago is not imminent, but the underlying causes [of what happened then] are still there," said Chris Leather, Oxfam's food policy adviser.

"Prices are volatile and there is a lot of nervousness in the market. There are big differences between now and 2008. Harvests are generally better, global food stocks are better."

But other analysts highlight the food riots in Mozambique that killed 12 people last month and claim that spiralling prices could promote further political turmoil.

They say this is particularly possible if the price of oil jumps, if there are further climatic shocks – suchas the floods in Pakistan or the heatwave in Russia – or if speculators buy deeper into global food markets.

"There is growing concern among countries about continuing volatility and uncertainty in food markets," said Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank. "These concerns have been compounded by recent increases in grain prices.

"World food price volatility remains significant and in some countries, the volatility is adding to already higher local food prices."

The bank last week said that food price volatility would last a further five years, and asked governments to contribute to a crisis fund after requests for more than $1bn (£635m) from developing countries were made.

"The food riots in Mozambique can be repeated anywhere in the coming years," said Devinder Sharma, a leading Indian food analyst.

"Unless the world encourages developing countries to become self-sufficient in food grains, the threat of impending food riots will remain hanging over nations.

"The UN has expressed concern, but there is no effort to remove the imbalances in the food management system that is responsible for the crisis."

Mounting anger has greeted food price inflation of 21% in Egypt in the last year, along with 17% rises in India and similar amounts in many other countries. Prices in the UK have risen 22% in three years.

The governments of Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil and the Philippines have all warned of possible food shortages next year, citing floods and droughts in 2010, expected extreme weather next year, and speculation by traders who are buying up food stocks for release when prices rise.

Food prices worldwide are not yet at the same level as 2008, but the UN's food price index rose 5% last month and now stands at its highest level in two years.

World wheat and maize prices have risen 57%, rice 45% and sugar 55% over the last six months and soybeans are at their highest price for 16 months.

UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier de Schutter, says a combination of environmental degradation, urbanisation and large-scale land acquisitions by foreign investors for biofuels is squeezing land suitable for agriculture.

"Worldwide, 5m to 10m hectares of agricultural land are being lost annually due to severe degradation and another 19.5m are lost for industrial uses and urbanisation," he says in a new report.

"But the pressure on land resulting from these factors has been boosted in recent years by policies favouring large-scale industrial plantations.

"According to the World Bank, more than one-third of large-scale land acquisitions are intended to produce agrofuels."

But the World Development Movement (WDM) in London warned that food speculation by hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks was likely to prompt further inflation.

According to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, speculators on the trading floor of the Chicago Exchange bought futures contracts for about 40m tonnes of maize and 6m tonnes of wheat in the summer.

Longtime hedge fund manager Mike Masters, who has worked with WDM, said: "Because there is already much more capital available in the world than hard commodities, speculators can increase the price of consumable commodities, like foodstuffs or energy, much higher than traditional consumers and producers can react.

"When derivative markets are linked to commodity markets, this nearly unlimited capital from the financial sector can cause excessive price volatility."

US government reports of much cooler-than-normal water temperatures in the Pacific, which traditionally lead to extreme weather around the world, last week added to food price uncertainties.

Original article

Hunger index shows one billion without enough food

By Ania Lichtarowicz, BBC, 11 October 2010

One billion people in the world were undernourished in 2009, according to a new report.

The 2010 Global Hunger Index shows that child malnutrition is the biggest cause of hunger worldwide, accounting for almost half of those affected.

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia were shown to have the highest levels of hunger.

The report's authors called on nations to tackle child malnutrition in order to reduce global hunger.

The Global Hunger Index is produced by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines hunger as the consumption of fewer than 1,800 kilocalories a day - the minimum required to live a healthy and productive life.

Despite the number of undernourished people in the world falling between 1990 and 2006, the report's authors say in that number has crept up in recent years, with the data from 2009 showing more than one billion hungry people.

The most recent figures from 2010 suggest the number may again be falling but this data is not yet complete.

The Global Health Index (GHI) is calculated for 122 developing and transition countries.

Twenty-nine countries - mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia - have levels of hunger described as "extremely alarming" or "alarming".

The GHI shows hunger increasing in nine countries; North Korea and eight sub-Saharan African nations. The Democratic Republic of Congo saw the biggest increase; GHI rose by more than 65%.

The scores are based on the proportion of people who are calorie deficient, the proportion of children under five who are underweight and the child mortality rate.

The global food price crisis and the worldwide recession have contributed to the recent rise, says the report.

Children under the age of two are considered to be at most risk. Malnourishment at this stage harms physical and mental development and its effects are mostly irreversible causing life long damage.

In some sub-Saharan African countries, for example Burundi and Madagascar, about half the children have stunted growth because of they do not have access to an appropriate diet.

The authors argue that improving child nutrition would have the biggest effect on reducing global hunger.

They estimate that child malnutrition could be cut by about a third by providing improved health care and nutrition, not only to young children but also to mothers during pregnancy and breastfeeding.

Marie Ruel, director of IFPRI's Poverty, Health and Nutrition Division and co-author of the report, said many countries had to accelerate progress in reducing child malnutrition.

"Considerable research shows that the window of opportunity for improving nutrition spans from conception to age two," she observed.

"After age two, the negative effects of undernutrition are largely irreversible."

The report adds that reducing the numbers of hungry people will also significantly improve productivity and economic development.

Original article

New forecast: 'Mass starvation' Commodity analyst says crop failure would shock more than $150 oil

By Staff Writer, WorldNetDaily, June 19, 2009

A commodities expert has launched a warning that the next major crop failure around the world could be a bigger shock than $150 oil and result in "mass starvation."

The forecast comes from Chicago-based Don Coxe, a leading agricultural industry expert, in a report in the Commodity Online publication.

"When we have the first serious crop failure, which will happen, we will then have a full-blown food crisis, which we will not be able to get out of because we will still be struggling to catch up (as a result of diminished crop yields)," he told the publication.

He suggested that even could happen this year.

Coxe explained climate change will make growing seasons shorter, generating lower crop production, which would squeeze supplies.

Coxe, whose credentials include analysis of agriculture interests for more than three decades in the U.S. and Canada, including management of Harris Investment Management, said the result would be a domino effect.

A crop collapse in North America would hit hard among international markets that depend heavily on U.S. exports.

The lower food production also is being aggravated, he noted, by governments in North America.

"We've got a situation where there has been no incentive to allocate significant new capital to agriculture or to develop new technologies to dramatically expand crop output," he said in a statement to BNW News Wire. "We've got complacency. So for those reasons I believe the next food crisis – when it comes – will be a bigger shock than $150 oil."

Coxe, a leader of the Coxe Commodity Strategy Fund, said farms operations around the world also have cut back on expansion plans because of the worldwide economic crisis, calling into question whether production could meet demand.

Already, he suggested, demand for staples is moving beyond supply.

"During this decade, the annual increase in hectares of global cultivated farmland has been roughly 1.5 percent, at a time global demand for grains and soybeans has been growing at double that rate," he told Commodities Online. "We will be dealing with mass starvation with the first serious crop failure. It could happen as early as this fall if for instance we have a killing freeze in Iowa in August."

He said a reduction of just four weeks in the growing season would "dramatically reduce yields."

Coxe said one only has to reach back 35 years to review an era when there were shortages because of poor crops. The surpluses that had existed suddenly were gone, he noted.

"In fact, the major inflation of the 1970s was driven more by food than by oil,” he said.

He suggested the next global food shortage could destabilize the world's political order, according to the Commodities Online report.

In a related development, the Associated Press reported a U.N. agency is confirming that already more than a billion people around the globe now are hungry as fallout from the worldwide economic turmoil and high food prices.

The report said the Food and Agriculture Organization said that figure is up 100 million from a year ago.

"The silent hunger crisis, affecting one-sixth of all of humanity, poses a serious risk for world peace and security," said Jacques Diouf, the agency's director.

The biggest problem is in sub-Saharan Africa, with some 265 million people who do not get enough food.

Original article

Russian crop misery spreads to world’s supermarkets

By Diana Markosian, RIA Novosti, 20/09/2010

The hulking green combine tractor clatters across a wheat field at the sprawling Maslovka farm, a typical autumn scene in Russia’s agricultural heartland.

This year however, the machine is not harvesting wheat but ploughing dead crops back into the cracked, sun-scorched earth, a symbol of a land hit by an unprecedented summer drought and savage forest fires.

“These are scary times,” says Karpa Osipova, 84, who lives on Lenin Street, a few blocks from the Maslovka farm.

“The prices of crops are slowly rising, and my pension isn't big enough,” says Osipova. “I don’t even know how I am going to be able to afford bread.”

The situation on Maslovka farm will affect not just whether Osipova gets her daily loaf of bread, but may also have a far-reaching impact on global bread supplies and food prices.

Not far from Osipova’s tiny brick cottage, Victor Milovanov, the director of Maslovka farm, speeds across fields in his silver SUV, monitoring winter-grain planting. Milovanov says this year’s harvest on his farm was three times lower than last year’s.

“We’re preparing for the winter, but we can already see that not much will grow,” he says. “This year was very hard for us. We lost 85 percent of our planned output. What will happen next year, we don't know.”

Russia’s worst drought in more than a century cut the wheat harvest forecast dramatically in farms across the country. The projected grain harvest has been estimated at 60-67 million tons, down from 97.1 million tons in 2009, hitting world grain markets.

On August 15, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced a ban on wheat exports, saying it was needed to ensure domestic supply. The initial announcement said exports would be banned until the end of this year, but the embargo was later extended until next autumn’s harvest.

Within a day of Putin’s announcement, world wheat futures reached a two-year high of nearly $8 a bushel, from just about $4.50 in early June.

“We can only review lifting the ban on grain exports after next year’s crop is harvested and we have clarity on the grain balances,” Putin said at a government meeting in Moscow. “Extending the export restrictions will add predictability to the market”

Russia’s extended ban may contribute to higher global food prices, raising concern of a repeat of the 2008 food crisis, when grain prices reached record highs and riots broke out worldwide, according to analysts.

“The situation is serious. Many farms this year have harvested half last year’s figures,” says Andrei Sizov, the executive director of SovEcon, an agricultural research firm in Russia. “They now face a choice: either not to sow winter wheat, or sow it in the dry earth.”

Russia is one of the leading global grain exporters, accounting this year for 14 percent of global exports of wheat, flour and related products in the year to June 30, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The effect of rising wheat prices is reflected in the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) global food price index, which covers 55 food commodities. In the first week of September, the FAO said the index for August had hit its highest level in two years, largely driven by higher wheat prices.

The FAO has called a special meeting on September 24 for policy makers to discuss the recent rise in global food prices. The FAO says it is concerned by the speed at which prices have increased over the past two months

“In the past few weeks, global cereal markets experienced a sudden surge in international wheat prices on concerns over wheat shortages,” says the UN agency. “The purpose of holding the meeting is for exporting and importing countries to engage in constructive discussions on appropriate reactions to the current market situation.”

Despite concerns over global food prices, the head of the Russian Grain Union, Arkady Zlochevsky, is optimistic about the situation and doesn’t think the country is facing a grain deficit.

“There is no grain shortage in Russia and still no threat of a shortage,” Zlochevsky says.

“A lot will depend on the weather. Extremely bad weather is always a possibility, and if this comes to pass, then the ban on exports will likely remain in place so that we can meet domestic demand. I consider the current export ban a form of insurance.”

Amid the crop damage, Osipova and many other pensioners look back with nostalgia on the Soviet Union, saying its centrally-planned economy at least guaranteed they would have bread to eat.

“I may have had to stand in a long line, but at least I got my bread,” Osipova recalled. “Life was much easier back then. Now it’s just unpredictable.”

VORONEZH, September 20 (RIA Novosti)

Original article

The Coming Food Crisis

Source: Foreign Policy.com
Credits: John D. Podesta, Jake Caldwell
Dated: 2010-08-26
Refer Also: A Food Program That's Not About Food By Purnima Menon

The Coming Food Crisis

Global food security is stretched to the breaking point, and Russia's fires and Pakistan's floods are only making a bad situation worse.

There was already little margin for error in a world where, for the first time in history, 1 billion people are suffering from chronic hunger. But the fragility of world food markets has been underscored by the tragic events of this summer.

The brutal wildfires and crippling drought in Russia are decimating wheat crops and prompting shortsighted export bans. The ongoing floods and widespread crop destruction in Pakistan are creating a massive humanitarian crisis that has left more than 1,600 dead and some 16 million homeless and hungry in a region vital to U.S. national security. These and other climate crises trigger widespread food-price volatility, disproportionately and relentlessly devastating the world's poor.

Less noticed has been the spiking price of wheat -- up 50 percent since early June. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization recently cut its 2010 global wheat forecast by 4 percent amid fears of a scramble among national governments to secure supplies. As wheat prices climb, demand for other essential food crops such as rice will increase as part of a knock-on effect on world food markets, driving up costs for consumers. In particular, Egypt and other countries that depend heavily on Russian wheat might see dramatic price increases and unrest in the streets.

Fortunately, there are signs we will likely avoid a repeat of the 2007-2008 food crisis, when prices jumped as much as 100 percent and led to deadly riots in Port-au-Prince and Mogadishu. This year, bumper crops in the United States, alongside replenished wheat stocks globally, may be adequate to offset shortages due to the fires in Russia. But these short-term measures should not lull us into complacency or a false sense of confidence. We still have neither a strategy nor a solution to ending global hunger.

In the short term, the United States must implement U.S. President Barack Obama's promise to commit $3.5 billion to food security assistance. Since he made the pledge in 2009, only $812 million has been allocated. Surely the United States can do better, and at a faster pace. Emergency food aid is needed now to prevent famine and needless deaths in Niger, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and northern Nigeria. Congress should increase U.S. contributions to the World Food Program and insist on accountability and reform in the distribution of more than $2 billion in annual U.S. food aid. And the Emergency Food Security Program, which allows greater flexibility in international food assistance by allowing purchases from local producers, cash transfers, and food vouchers, is a step in the right direction and deserves congressional support.

Looking beyond the immediate crisis, the United States and other developed countries must renew long-neglected investments in agriculture assistance across the developing world, targeting small farmers as the fundamental drivers of economic growth. In Africa, for example, agriculture employs more than 60 percent of the labor force and accounts for 25 percent of the continent's economic output. And yet, Africa continues to struggle: Nearly 10 million people in the northern Sahel region are suffering from extreme hunger, and most countries still lack adequate investment in agricultural and road infrastructure to facilitate the development of value-added products and new markets.

While the United States provides more than half of the world's food aid, agriculture assistance today stands at only 3.5 percent of overall U.S. development aid, down from 18 percent in 1979. Not surprisingly, agricultural productivity growth in developing countries is now less than 1 percent annually.

We must also improve how this assistance is targeted. We can reap lasting results by focusing on soil and water conservation and improved crop varieties rather than carbon-intensive fertilizers. Scientific research and appropriate biotechnology can deliver significant crop yield gains and water savings if conducted in a safe and transparent manner. We also must invest in women, who represent up to 80 percent of the food producers in many developing countries, but frequently lack the support and services that will allow them to reinvest hard-earned agricultural gains into health and education for their families.

Internationally, the United States must lead efforts to ensure open and well-regulated agricultural markets. Farm subsidies and tariffs in rich countries must be reduced and commodity markets made more transparent. A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development indicates subsidies for agriculture in the world's richest countries rose to $252.5 billion, or 22 percent of farmers' total receipts in 2009. And impediments to free trade between developing countries must be eliminated.

The Group of Twenty leading developed and developing nations must uphold their pledges of $22 billion to enhance global food security by sending real money out the door. The multilateral Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, a new global partnership funded by commitments from the United States, Canada, South Korea, Spain, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is to be commended for issuing $224 million in initial grants to help increase food security and reduce poverty in five developing countries. 

But lasting gains in agricultural productivity will require something more -- action to confront climate change. Food shortages resulting from severe crop losses will occur more frequently and take longer to recover from as more people become vulnerable to extreme weather events like the droughts and flooding we see today in Russia and Pakistan. The World Bank predicts that developing countries will require $75 billion to $100 billion a year for the next 40 years to adapt to the effects of climate change on agricultural productivity, infrastructure, and disease.

This year, we may be able to limit the damage to a single supply shock in Russia and Eastern Europe. But even in the best of times, our global food system is stretched to the breaking point by the ever-present challenges of population growth, increased demand from changing diets, higher energy costs, and more extreme weather. Experts at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimate global agricultural productivity must double by 2050 to keep pace with increased demand. Unless we take immediate action, we are destined to race from food crisis to food crisis for generations to come, with grim consequences for the world's poor and our own national security.

USDA Says Crop Shortfalls Deplete Global Coarse Grain Supplies

From USDA report: Grain - World Markets and Trade

Global coarse grain supplies  available to the world are expected to fall dramatically, as forecast crop reductions in key countries have significantly altered the supply outlook.  In the United States, lower-thanexpected corn yields have sharply reduced crop prospects.  In the EU, where barley accounts for 40 percent of coarse grain production, lower area  and yields have reduced the crop by 15 percent to the smallest level in over 10 years. Not all supplies are available to the world market. Many countries’ stocks are held only for domestic use and strategic reserves, with China as the classic example.

At the same time, coarse grain stocks in the United States and the EU are forecast to drop nearly 50 percent (35 million tons). Corn stocks in the United States are expected to fall almost 50 percent (20 million tons) to the lowest level in 14 years (which is very tight in the context of the stocks-to-use ratio).  Similarly, EU barley stocks are  projected  to fall 70 percent. The combined shortfalls present a much tighter supply picture than just a few months ago. However, Southern Hemisphere crops, currently in the early stages of planting, could help offset lower supplies in the Northern Hemisphere.

Complete report is attached in the *.pdf file.

World Bank warns on food-price rise

Recent rises in food prices are once again weighing on some developing nations amid growing global currency frictions, World Bank president Robert Zoellick said on Monday.

‘‘For many developing countries, the food crisis of 2008 has never gone away. And recent prices are a serious cause for concern,’’ Zoellick said.

Zoellick said the 187-nation development lender had reinstated a fast-track financial aid program it had used to help nations cope with the 2007-2008 food crisis that wiped out years of development gains.

‘‘The rise in wheat prices over the last few months is affecting the price of other staples due to the increased demand for substitutes,’’ Zoellick said in a briefing ahead of annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington set to open on Friday.

‘‘So we’ll have to find a way to avoid food crises becoming the new normal.’’ (solution - Integral Farms - Rakovi)

Since July, international wheat prices have soared 60-80 per cent and maize rose about 40 per cent, according to recent UN Food and Agriculture Organization figures.

Zoellick noted the gap between slow economic growth in the developed world and fast growth in developing countries was causing distortions in global financial markets.

‘‘You’ve heard the warnings of currency wars,’’ he said.

‘‘Money is chasing yield, it can’t find those yields in developed economies and this is not only pushing up currency values in emerging and developing countries, it’s also pushing up the price of some assets with the risk of bubbles in property and some commodities.’’

Zoellick said he did not foresee the world moving into an ‘‘era’’ of currency wars, but noted the tensions add to the ‘‘overall sensitivity’’ as the global economy recovers from the worst recession since World War II.

Meanwhile, the largest international group of financial institutions urged major economies to take steps to improve policy co-operation, and decried what it saw as rising unilateralism that threatens global stability.

The Institute of International Finance, which groups the major banks of 70 countries, said urgent action was needed to broker agreements on macroeconomic and exchange-rate issues.

‘‘As countries struggle to cope individually with the lack of upward momentum in global growth -- and in many cases unacceptably high unemployment -- urgent action is needed to arrest the disturbing trend towards unilateral moves on macroeconomic, trade and currency issues,’’ the IIF said in a letter to finance chiefs who will be meeting this week as part of the IMF’s International Monetary and Finance Committee.

‘‘Today, these are more pressing than ever issues,’’ Charles Dallara, the IIF managing director said.

‘‘You see that in 2010, US, Japanese and Chinese imbalances on the current account have all moved again in the wrong direction.

‘‘If we continue on this path on unilateralism over multilateralism, we could end up in a state that is unstable.’’

Original article

Worrying Over China and Food

By Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times, October 11, 2010

Are the Chinese coming?

That’s the important question now being asked in Saskatchewan, a prairie province in Canada. It is also the question of the moment on Wall Street.

Saskatchewan is home base for the Potash Corporation, the fertilizer company. If you care at all about the future of the world’s food supply, you care — whether you know it or not — about Saskatchewan.

A consortium of state-backed Chinese companies and financiers may make a takeover offer for Potash that rivals a $38.6 billion hostile bid from BHP Billiton, and that prospect has lawmakers in Washington, regulators in Canada and bankers on Wall Street all talking.

The politically charged subtext is this: Do we really want the Chinese to control the company that has the largest capacity to produce fertilizer?

If that reminds you of 2005, when the China National Offshore Oil Company, or Cnooc, sought to buy Unocal, until an outcry from Congress stopped it, you would be right.

But that outburst of protectionism was only about the nation’s oil supply, and this would be about something much more vital, food: 45 percent of Potash’s production is sold to farmers in North America. The big worry, in part, is that the Chinese could seek to redirect that supply to China, starving other countries of a much-needed commodity.

Even for free marketers who say they believe that transactions should be able to cross borders without political constraints, the questions being raised in Saskatchewan and elsewhere are the ones that need to be asked.

Indeed, concern that politics may drive Chinese deal-making has grown amid recent reports that China has banned exports of rare earth minerals to Japan. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China has denied that the country has issued such a prohibition, but he acknowledged that the owners of rare earth metals may have halted shipments because of their own feelings toward Japan.

(At the same time, however, another Chinese deal announced on Monday — Cnooc’s $1.08 billion investment for a third of Chesapeake Energy’s oil and natural gas shale assets in Texas — is not expected to meet political resistance because the stake is passive.)

In the case of Potash, the Sinochem Group, China’s largest fertilizer company, has been exploring a possible bid, according to several media reports, and may win backing from funds like the China Investment Corporation.

“It seems fairly certain that even if Sinochem puts together a financing consortium, the underlying motivation would be to secure access to a key commodity,” the Conference Board of Canada wrote in a report about possible Chinese interest in Potash. “Food security is an overriding concern in China, arguably even more important than access to industrial materials.”

It is that kind of talk that has many analysts betting that the Chinese do not ultimately move ahead with an offer.

“We believe that any bid from a Chinese state-owned entity would likely face significant Canadian regulatory scrutiny,” Glyn Lawcock, an analyst with UBS, wrote in a note to investors.

Under Canadian law the deal would have to pass muster with the government through Investment Canada, which would need to rule that the deal was a “net benefit” to the country.

You might ask why BHP, the Australian commodities giant that is steadily cornering the market on a variety of commodities, is not facing the same sort of scrutiny.

True, some questions are being raised, but the “back up against the wall” feeling doesn’t seem to be nearly as pronounced with BHP as it is with a Chinese state-sponsored bid.

For Saskatchewan, the deal boils down to which buyer is more likely to try to keep the price of fertilizer high, therefore helping the tax base. Of course, that would also help keep food prices high, which would arguably be bad for consumers all over the world, from Canada to China.

But Saskatchewan may be more concerned about local tax revenue. The Conference Board report noted: “As a state-owned enterprise acting on behalf of consumers of potash, we assume that Sinochem has strong incentives for lower prices and that it will not be guided by the same market discipline and profit motive as commercial players,” noting that “China was one of the few countries not to cut potash production in 2009 in response to falling demand and prices.”

In the new world of mergers and acquisitions — one that turns China into a central actor — the highest bid may no longer be the ultimate criterion for accepting a deal or the test of whether the deal is a success.

“The Chinese could justify a takeover premium as a sort of insurance premium to prevent BHP from exercising similar market power in potash,” the board wrote. “Yet given the state-owned nature of Sinochem, it becomes unclear whether this would be a corporate counterstrategy or state counterstrategy.”

Original article

Aquifer Depletion

Source: Encyclopedia of Earth
Credits: Lester Brown
Dated: 2010-01-23

Aquifer depletion

Australia's largest river close to running dry

By Toni O'Loughlin, The Guardian, 16 April 2009

Australia's biggest river is running so low that Adelaide, the country's fifth-largest city, could run out of water in the next two years.

The Murray river is part of a network of waterways that irrigates the south-eastern corner of Australia, but after six years of severe drought, the worst dry spell ever, its slow moving waters are now almost stagnant.

Water levels in the Murray in the first three months of this year were the lowest on record and the government agency that administers the river, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA), said the next three months could be just as grim.

With meteorologists predicting another year of below-average rainfall, the MDBA, is bracing for worse to come.

"We do need to ensure that we have a range of secure water sources for Adelaide and other towns along the Murray," agency head, Rob Freeman said.

But the MDBA faces an uphill battle, as the drought has drained water supplies across the south-eastern corner of Australia. The Murray-Darling basin named after the two biggest rivers that join to form the south-eastern catchment area now holds just 18% of its water capacity.

Although Freeman said he could not guarantee critical human water needs would always be secure, he added "It's important that we don't panic here."

Not even torrential rains, which flooded Queensland and NSW in the past month, have managed to rejuvenate the Murray.

Instead of rolling south, the waters seeped into the flat, parched earth, scorched by the long dry spell, the most severe of which has hit in the past three years.

The Murray currently holds 940 gigalitres, of which just 350 gigalitres are needed to meet the requirements of the three states.

But the problem is that most of the water in the river is lost through evaporation and seepage before reaching urban centres. One thousand gigalitres are needed to transport the 350 gigalitres along the river.

Now the MDBA is being forced to make hard choices. Over the past two years the MDBA has taken drastic measures, such as cutting off wetlands in South Australia, where Adelaide is the capital. But environmental scientists have warned the once teeming habitats may be permanently damaged.

So the MDBA has been releasing water to some of the more "iconic" flood plains, which have become tourist attractions.

Searing temperatures and stagnating flows have already begun to spawn algae outbreaks, rendering the water unsafe for drinking or recreational purposes.

Farmers are also facing more hardship as new plans are being drafted with new limits on the water they can extract from the Murray-Darling basin.

The neighbouring states of NSW and Victoria have offered to top up Adelaide's drinking supplies. But as they also draw water from the Murray-Darling river systems, they have made it clear that Adelaide, home to 1.1 million people, must repay the debt once the drought breaks.

But the MDBA, in its latest monthly drought update, says there's no sign of rain on the horizon.

"Overall, the outlook for the beginning of the 2009-10 water year is not good, and is likely to be similar to the previous two years," it said, adding that the drought will only break when "above average rainfall occurs for a sustained period of time".

Original article

California water crisis' human face

By Harry Cline, Farm Press Editorial Staff, Nov 9, 2009

A water bond to finance solutions to California’s water crisis on the ballot would face no better chance of passing than a snowball surviving in Death Valley.

Experts say only 36 percent of Californians would approve a major water bond issue today in a state that is riddled with debt and a projected continuing budget deficit reaching into the billions.

While the fiscal malaise continues to hang over the state like a black cloud, California’s water crisis is really the No. 1 mess facing this state, according to agricultural lobbyist/attorney and Hanford, Calif., dairyman George Soares.

Soares, whose law firm represents a host of agricultural and commodity groups, told the annual Western Cotton Shippers Association conference at Harris Ranch on the West Side of the San Joaquin Valley that California’s water crisis is in a race against money, politics and time.

Agriculture has mounted a well-funded, well-orchestrated headline-grabbing campaign to improve those odds. California’s water crisis now has a face; a human element that for the first time focuses on people rather than farms and farmers.

Soares told the annual conference of cotton merchants that there are photographs in the state Capitol of thousands of farmworkers, farmers, business owners, town mayors and others marching head down into howling, dust choking wind on the West Side of the San Joaquin Valley last spring. They were marching for water in an area that has 40-percent unemployment because the drought and environmental laws have reduced the water supply to one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world.

Politicians and bureaucrats see those photos and read the headlines that continue to herald California’s water crisis.

Soares says agriculture is “seriously engaged” with “direct involvement” in efforts to increase the state’s water supply and delivery system that was built to service 20 million in a state with a current population of 38 million.

Everyone is “desperate to one degree or another” for current and future water supplies which bring all political elements of the state together. Heretofore, the state water crisis has been primarily an agricultural issue. Now it cuts across the spectrum and is statewide.

A regular legislative session failed to reach a compromise water package to put on the ballot. Soares said the emphasis is not for the governor to call a special session to deal with the water crisis. Soares said the “momentum” to reach an agreement will continue into the fall and next year.

He said there must be a comprehensive water bond on the ballot in 2010. Term limits will change the structure of the Legislature afterwards. Following that, “we have to start all over” with a significant batch of new legislators. “We do not have time to start over,” remarked Soares.

Agriculture has put a “human face” on the water crisis in the fields and that has given the issue considerable traction with the public and the politicians; it will take more than that to solve the issue. It will take political coalitions.

One of the strongest voices in resolving the water crisis has been the Latino political caucus. It is the strongest caucus in the Legislature with 26 members. “This caucus is sensitive to the human conditions brought on by a lack of water for agriculture,” he says. This group of legislators has put together one of the most comprehensive water solution packages yet.

“Trade unions are part of this effort. When is the last time a union stood up for us in ag? The carpenters’ union said they supported the Latino caucus’ water package.”

The water crisis is a jobs issue with many unions, according to Soares.

Amazingly, the United Farm Workers of America have not supported the water bond measures. The UFW has boycotted marches and rallies focusing on the water crisis. Soares said the UFW recently donated $1 million to defeat a water bond issue. That may seem puzzling, but Soares explained that the UFW is allied with the state workers union. These groups do not want the bond issue to pass because the debt service to finance a major bond issue might take money from state workers.

The focus of the water crisis is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. It is in need of repair and it is also the hub for controversy. Many farmers and towns in the Delta do not want a canal built because they see it as a threat to the Delta’s water quality.

Soares said ag must embrace the concerns of the Delta and work to restore the Delta as well as improve water conveyed through or around it.

However, the Delta is only part of what must be a comprehensive water bond package that includes above and underground storage and water rights issues.

It will take a solid coalition to get a comprehensive package passed.

“I call it relationships … relationship to relevancy. Unfortunately, everyone in ag does not appreciate that relationships have value. Without relationships we will not have success,” he says.

He cited the appeal in 2001 of the state tax on farm equipment. Soares said this was the result of relationships created with urban legislators. It was a victory for ag that continues to pay off to the tune of $150 million in savings for agriculture.

“It has been eight years since the tractor tax victory and it is still intact, even after this year’s budget crisis,” said Soares.

The long time Hanford resident did not guarantee victory for a 2010 water bond issue. “It is too soon to tell if all segments of society will be with us,” said Soares. However, he made it clear agriculture has a dog in the fight with perhaps a better chance of winning than ever before.

It is a daunting task with a dysfunctional fiscal system that continues to allow the state to spend more than it takes in.

Soares admits to bewilderment with a process that results in political leaders being happy reducing the deficit from $26 billion to $5 billion in the last state budget. That $5 billion, projects Soares, will likely grow to $15 billion by the spring. However, the attitude remains that it’s better than $26 billion.

“The budget will continue to be a problem long term in this state,” Soares told the farmers and cotton merchants at the WCSA gathering.

Original article

China drought deprives millions of drinking water

By Andrew Torchia, Reuters, Feb 7, 2009

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Millions of people and cattle in north China face shortages of drinking water because of a severe drought, the government said on Saturday, promising to speed up disbursement of billions of dollars of subsidies to farmers.

State television quoted disaster relief officials as saying 4.4 million people and 2.1 million cattle lacked adequate drinking water. Official media have described the drought as north China's worst in half a century.

The Ministry of Finance said it would accelerate disbursement of 86.7 billion yuan ($12.7 billion) of annual subsidies for farmers to assist grain production and minimize the impact of the drought on rural incomes.

The government is particularly anxious to avoid a drop in rural incomes because of the threat of social unrest as millions of migrant workers, laid off from urban jobs during China's economic slump, return to the countryside.

Instead of distributing the farm subsidies evenly over this year as it did in the past, the finance ministry said it was immediately disbursing the entire 15.1 billion yuan earmarked to supplement the incomes of grain farmers.

It is also immediately disbursing part of a 71.6 billion yuan sum earmarked to aid capital spending by farmers. The ministry called on provincial governments to deliver that money into the hands of farmers in the worst-hit areas within a month.

However, meteorological officials said there were signs that better rainfall in coming weeks would ease the crisis. Rainfall is forecast for the next 10 days, the official Xinhua news agency quoted the China Meteorological Administration as saying.

Xiao Ziniu, director of China's National Climate Center, was quoted as saying most of north China's wheat belt was expected to receive slightly less than or nearly normal rainfall in March.

Xiao said earlier in the week that losses in China's winter wheat fields could be limited to just 2.5 percent if farmers moved quickly enough to irrigate their fields.

The drought is hitting eight provinces which contain about half of China's wheat-growing areas. As of Friday, 10.7 million hectares of wheat-growing fields had been affected in those provinces, the Ministry of Agriculture said.

Of that area, 4.5 million hectares were seriously damaged and 420,000 hectares suffered destruction of wheat shoots, the ministry said. Just over half of the total affected area had been irrigated so far.

Original article

Drought May Threaten Much of Globe Within Decades, Analysis Predicts

By ScienceDaily, Oct. 19, 2010

The United States and many other heavily populated countries face a growing threat of severe and prolonged drought in coming decades, according to a new study by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Aiguo Dai. The detailed analysis concludes that warming temperatures associated with climate change will likely create increasingly dry conditions across much of the globe in the next 30 years, possibly reaching a scale in some regions by the end of the century that has rarely, if ever, been observed in modern times.

Future drought: These four maps illustrate the potential for future drought worldwide over the decades indicated, based on current projections of future greenhouse gas emissions. These maps are not intended as forecasts, since the actual course of projected greenhouse gas emissions as well as natural climate variations could alter the drought patterns. The maps use a common measure, the Palmer Drought Severity Index, which assigns positive numbers when conditions are unusually wet for a particular region, and negative numbers when conditions are unusually dry. A reading of -4 or below is considered extreme drought. Regions that are blue or green will likely be at lower risk of drought, while those in the red and purple spectrum could face more unusually extreme drought conditions. (Credit: Courtesy Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews, redrawn by UCAR)

Using an ensemble of 22 computer climate models and a comprehensive index of drought conditions, as well as analyses of previously published studies, the paper finds most of the Western Hemisphere, along with large parts of Eurasia, Africa, and Australia, may be at threat of extreme drought this century.

In contrast, higher-latitude regions from Alaska to Scandinavia are likely to become more moist.

Dai cautioned that the findings are based on the best current projections of greenhouse gas emissions. What actually happens in coming decades will depend on many factors, including actual future emissions of greenhouse gases as well as natural climate cycles such as El Niño.

The new findings appear as part of a longer review article in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, NCAR's sponsor.

"We are facing the possibility of widespread drought in the coming decades, but this has yet to be fully recognized by both the public and the climate change research community," Dai says. "If the projections in this study come even close to being realized, the consequences for society worldwide will be enormous."

While regional climate projections are less certain than those for the globe as a whole, Dai's study indicates that most of the western two-thirds of the United States will be significantly drier by the 2030s. Large parts of the nation may face an increasing risk of extreme drought during the century.

Other countries and continents that could face significant drying include:

• Much of Latin America, including large sections of Mexico and Brazil
• Regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea, which could become especially dry
• Large parts of Southwest Asia
• Most of Africa and Australia, with particularly dry conditions in regions of Africa
• Southeast Asia, including parts of China and neighboring countries

The study also finds that drought risk can be expected to decrease this century across much of Northern Europe, Russia, Canada, and Alaska, as well as some areas in the Southern Hemisphere. However, the globe's land areas should be drier overall.

"The increased wetness over the northern, sparsely populated high latitudes can't match the drying over the more densely populated temperate and tropical areas," Dai says.

A climate change expert not associated with the study, Richard Seager of Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, adds:

"As Dai emphasizes here, vast swaths of the subtropics and the midlatitude continents face a future with drier soils and less surface water as a result of reducing rainfall and increasing evaporation driven by a warming atmosphere. The term 'global warming' does not do justice to the climatic changes the world will experience in coming decades. Some of the worst disruptions we face will involve water, not just temperature."

A portrait of worsening drought

Previous climate studies have indicated that global warming will probably alter precipitation patterns as the subtropics expand. The 2007 assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that subtropical areas will likely have precipitation declines, with high-latitude areas getting more precipitation.

In addition, previous studies by Dai have indicated that climate change may already be having a drying effect on parts of the world. In a much-cited 2004 study, he and colleagues found that the percentage of Earth's land area stricken by serious drought more than doubled from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Last year, he headed up a research team that found that some of the world's major rivers are losing water.

In his new study, Dai turned from rain and snow amounts to drought itself, and posed a basic question: how will climate change affect future droughts? If rainfall runs short by a given amount, it may or may not produce drought conditions, depending on how warm it is, how quickly the moisture evaporates, and other factors.

Droughts are complex events that can be associated with significantly reduced precipitation, dry soils that fail to sustain crops, and reduced levels in reservoirs and other bodies of water that can imperil drinking supplies. A common measure called the Palmer Drought Severity Index classifies the strength of a drought by tracking precipitation and evaporation over time and comparing them to the usual variability one would expect at a given location.

Dai turned to results from the 22 computer models used by the IPCC in its 2007 report to gather projections about temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind speed, and Earth's radiative balance, based on current projections of greenhouse gas emissions. He then fed the information into the Palmer model to calculate the PDSI index. A reading of +0.5 to -0.5 on the index indicates normal conditions, while a reading at or below -4 indicates extreme drought. The most index ranges from +10 to -10 for current climate conditions, although readings below -6 are exceedingly rare, even during short periods of time in small areas.

By the 2030s, the results indicated that some regions in the United States and overseas could experience particularly severe conditions, with average decadal readings potentially dropping to -4 to -6 in much of the central and western United States as well as several regions overseas, and -8 or lower in parts of the Mediterranean. By the end of the century, many populated areas, including parts of the United States, could face readings in the range of -8 to -10, and much of the Mediterranean could fall to -15 to -20. Such readings would be almost unprecedented.

Dai cautions that global climate models remain inconsistent in capturing precipitation changes and other atmospheric factors, especially at the regional scale. However, the 2007 IPCC models were in stronger agreement on high- and low-latitude precipitation than those used in previous reports, says Dai.

There are also uncertainties in how well the Palmer index captures the range of conditions that future climate may produce. The index could be overestimating drought intensity in the more extreme cases, says Dai. On the other hand, the index may be underestimating the loss of soil moisture should rain and snow fall in shorter, heavier bursts and run off more quickly. Such precipitation trends have already been diagnosed in the United States and several other areas over recent years, says Dai.

"The fact that the current drought index may not work for the 21^st century climate is itself a troubling sign," Dai says.

Original article

EPA Launches New Program to Sustain Water Resources

Think water is an infinite resource? Well, it’s not. Wouldn’t it be crazy to see states pushing their boundaries and calling for water rations/reductions? Look around you. It’s already happening.

In 2007, the midst of drought, Georgia tried to expand their boundaries so they could claim part of the Tennessee River to help replenish their declining water supply. [NYtimes]

In March 2009, Gov. Schwarzenegger called for Californians to reduce their water usage by 20% to help quell the drought. [cbs8]

Several other states are also dealing with water shortage issues. This is due in part to our misinformed notions about water and irresponsible use of such a vital gift. [NPR]

In 2008 the Environmental Protectioin Agency warned: “…since usable water is a limited resource, 36 states could be facing water shortage problems by 2013.” [epa]

That’s over half the USA struggling for water.

Source: http://www.wwdmag.com/EPA-Launches-New-Program-to-Sustain-Water-Resources-article7280
Credits: Benjamin H. Grumbles (assistant administrator for water for the U.S. EPA)
Dated: 2009-11

WaterSense seeks to enhance consumer market for water efficiency.

“Every drop counts.” That’s the motto for WaterSense, a new partnership program the U.S. EPA recently launched to stimulate more efficient use of water in homes and businesses.

America’s supplies are precious, but not unlimited. We have long enjoyed abundant water supplies from rivers, lakes, streams and underground sources for drinking, bathing, recreation and sustaining ecosystems. Growing demand and competing needs increase, however, as communities expand, businesses grow and changing weather conditions create unpredictable rainfall patterns.

Growing and shifting populations call for not only investment and maintenance of the infrastructure but also innovative approaches to emerging water and wastewater issues. The need for change is underscored by a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office survey, reporting that 36 states anticipate local, regional or statewide water shortages by 2013, even without drought conditions.

In addition, the wastewater and drinking water systems are aging. Some system components have not been replaced in more than a century. The EPA’s 2002 Clean Water and Drinking Water Infrastructure Gap Analysis estimates the potential funding shortfall for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure could exceed $500 billion by 2020.

Managing the nation’s water supply is a rising concern for communities across the country. From coast to coast, state and local governments face challenges from water shortages that are affecting the infrastructure.

In response, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson announced the WaterSense program in June. This new, voluntary partnership program promotes water efficiency and primes the market for water-efficient products and services just as the market has embraced energy-efficient products.

“Inefficient water use is like money slipping through your fingers,” Johnson told attendees of the annual meeting of the American Water Works Association in San Antonio, Texas, this past June. “Easily correctable water leaks rob the average homeowner of 8% of their water bill.”

The WaterSense program is part of the EPA’s broader sustainable water infrastructure initiative that emphasizes public and private partnerships. Sharing information on cutting-edge research, innovative technologies and management tools is integral to this effort. The objective is to rethink the way the nation manages water resources and its infrastructure. At the EPA, the challenges of water infrastructure are approached with four main strategies, called the four “pillars” of sustainable infrastructure:

1.Better management uses the approach of stewardship and collaboration to help make better use of water resources.

2.Full cost pricing focuses on developing methods of financing that reflect the true cost of water to meet essential infrastructure needs.

3.Watershed approach allows utilities, communities and states to make infrastructure decisions within a given watershed.

4.Water efficiency emphasizes the need to use water more wisely, which is the focus of the WaterSense program.

WaterSense promotes water efficiency by demonstrating that efficient water use can help communities preserve water supplies, save money, and reduce stress on water systems and the environment. This effort will also help governments, utilities, businesses, communities and individuals save water by promoting high-performance, water-efficient products and practices.

How the program works

WaterSense is building a national brand for water efficiency, a symbol that represents the importance of conserving and protecting water resources. Vendors may label their products as meeting EPA’s criteria for water efficiency and performance by following testing and verification protocols specific to each product category.

Efficient water use doesn’t mean asking consumers to make sacrifices. It is just a smarter way of accomplishing the intended purpose, whether it is better irrigation equipment, toilets that flush well with less water or better controls on industrial cooling towers. Independent testing protocols will ensure that products carrying the WaterSense label will be 20% more efficient than the average product in the same category.

WaterSense will also provide technical information and recognize leadership in water efficiency through formal partnership agreements. Manufacturers committed to water efficiency and product innovation can distinguish their products from others in the marketplace. Using the WaterSense label will help build consumer demand and gain national recognition for high-efficiency, high-performance products. Utilities will help promote the WaterSense program through public-awareness campaigns to reach local water-conservation goals. Retailers and distributors will stock and promote certified water- efficient products.

The EPA anticipates that local, state and federal governments, service providers, businesses and trade associations will join them as partners. The EPA will continue to build brand awareness across a wide range of industrial, commercial and consumer sectors through extensive outreach and education campaigns.

Irrigation that makes sense

Non-agricultural irrigation will be the first focus area for WaterSense. Commercial and residential outdoor water use in the U.S. accounts for more than 7 billion gal of water each day, mainly for landscape irrigation. As much as half of that is wasted due to evaporation, wind, or improper irrigation design, installation and maintenance. An efficient irrigation system must be outfitted with water-efficient products that are properly designed, installed and maintained. WaterSense will promote water efficiency in irrigation products as well as professional irrigation services.

WaterSense is in the process of certifying programs for irrigation professionals who advance the principles and applications of water-efficient irrigation. To qualify for the label, certification programs must verify their professional proficiency in water-efficient irrigation systems and be subject to independent review.

WaterSense is conducting research on several water-efficient irrigation technologies. The first products to be labeled will be weather-based irrigation control technologies and soil-moisture sensors. These products can minimize water demands for irrigation by tailoring watering schedules to local weather or landscape and soil conditions. This can significantly improve irrigation efficiency for homes, businesses, parks and schools nationwide.

Retrofits and new homes

Americans use significant quantities of water inside their homes. The average family of four consumes 400 gal of water every day, about 70% of which is used indoors—mostly in the bathroom. The toilet alone can use 27% of household water.

WaterSense is developing specifications for labeling high-efficiency toilets (HETs), which are expected by the end of 2006. Toilets that bear the WaterSense label will use less than 1.3 gal per flush and be tested independently to ensure that these products meet water efficiency and performance criteria. Specifications for residential faucet accessories are also under development. The EPA will promote both HET and faucet retrofits.

In addition, the EPA will fund a project to collect water-usage data in new homes from several water utilities across the U.S. The goal is to better understand water use for the estimated 14 million new homes that are likely to be built in the next 10 years. Water Efficiency Bench-marking for New Single Family Homes is a nine-city research study that seeks to establish baseline water-use patterns for new homes by collecting data from billing records, surveys and indirect measurements.

The study will look at “standard” new homes and “high-efficiency” new homes built to enhance water conservation. This will help establish targets for builders who wish to provide buyers with increased water-efficiency options and develop performance criteria. A special designation will also be created to help consumers identify these products. Results will help states and water utilities establish performance criteria for water use in new homes.

Meeting the challenge

The vision of WaterSense, based on President George Bush’s ethic of Cooperative Conservation, is to encourage Americans to make sound decisions about water and the envir-onment. Product labeling, education and outreach campaigns, and partnerships with governments and other interested groups will help transform the marketplace by encouraging consumers and organizations to purchase water-efficient products and wisely use this precious resource.

Farmers suffer double whammy of financial crisis and drought

By Lin Jianyang and Zhang Xingjun, Chinaview.cn, 2009-02-11

XIPING COUNTY, Central China, Feb. 11 (Xinhua) -- Pan Fuzhong scoops up a handful of dirt from his wheat field and lets the gray dust sift between his fingers.

"I've never seen such a severe drought. Some seedlings are yellow and some are dead," says the 37-year-old farmer, who lives with his family in a populous village in China's central Henan Province.

In normal years, the wheat would be green and higher than his ankles at this time.

DROUGHT CUTTING INTO WHEAT YIELDS

Though the authorities used cloud-seeding technology to create rain on Saturday, Pan's 6 mu (0.4 hectare) harvest will still be well down.

He reckons he will lose 600 kg, or 1,080 yuan in income, as a result of one of China's worst droughts on record.
Pan and other farmers also have the extra costs of electricity and water fees to irrigate their crops or the price of irrigation machinery.

According to the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, extremely low rainfall since late October has created an unusual drought in north China, traditionally the country's breadbasket.

As of Monday, about 136 million mu (9.1 million hectares) of winter wheat in eight major producing provinces was affected, of which 36 percent, or 49 million mu, was seriously affected. In addition, 3.5 million people and 1.66 million livestock had no access to drinking water.

Henan, which produces a quarter of China's wheat, is worst hit. Since October, it has seen about 10 mm of rain, 80 percent less than average, making it the worst drought since 1951. The provincial government says about 43.5 million mu of wheat is affected, 8.7 million seriously. In neighboring Anhui Province, drought has hit 25.9 million mu of wheat crops.

Agriculture Minister Sun Zhengcai said Friday in Anhui that more than 2.3 million mu of seedlings in Anhui, Henan and Shandong had died.

He warned the dry spell was forecast to continue and cause more losses.

Rain and mild temperatures in spring are key to determining wheat yields. Most of China's wheat production is in the North China Plain in central and eastern areas, which has been susceptible to drought.

The Agriculture Ministry has no estimates of wheat yield losses this year, but a senior weather official said on Feb. 3 that production was likely to be down 2 to 2.5 percent from last year, when China produced around 110 million tons of winter wheat.

Xiao Ziniu, director of the National Climate Center of the China Meteorological Administration, has warned the "once-in-a-half-century" drought will continue until next month.

The Anhui provincial government says the drought has caused losses of 1.6 billion yuan (234 million U.S. dollars). Henan has published no estimated losses, but Party chief Xu Guangchun said the drought had affected people's livelihoods and could undermine social stability.

"The drought is adding difficulties to an already grim economic situation owing to the impact of the global financial crisis," he said.

The futures market and investors quickly reacted to the prospect of lower yields. On Feb. 9, the major wheat futures for March delivery closed at 2,056 yuan per ton at Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange in Henan. It rose 6.1 percent, or 118 yuan per ton, in the nine trading days since Jan. 21.

RISING UNEMPLOYMENT AND FALLING PRICES

Fortunately Pan's family also raises pigs, which brought in 300,000 yuan in 2007 when pork prices soared due to the blue-ear pig virus.

But the global financial crisis has led to plunging produce prices since the second half of 2008, significantly cutting revenues for pig breeders, including Pan, who is now surviving on his savings.

The financial crisis is a serious threat to income growth for Chinese farmers. The central government's first policy document of the year, issued on Feb. 1, said 2009 would be "the toughest year" so far this century for agriculture and the rural economy given the falling produce prices and grim employment situation of migrant workers.

The main sources of income for China's 700 million rural people are the sale of produce, remittances from migrant workers, government subsidies and property-related business.

Last year, the average per capita net rural income reached 4,761 yuan, a real annual growth of 8 percent, or 621 yuan. The rate was 1.5 percentage points down from 2007.

Chen Xiwen, director of the office of the central leading group on rural work, says migrant worker remittances contributed more than 60 percent of the increase. But the swelling ranks of jobless migrants could seriously jeopardize further rises.

Chen said on Feb. 2 that more than 20 million rural migrants, 15.3 percent of the 130 million migrants working outside their hometowns, had returned home without jobs. With this year's 7 million new entrants to the rural labor market, China will have 25million jobless rural people.

"We are facing great pressure in migrant workers' employment this year. This means bigger difficulties in increasing (farmers') incomes."

Plunging produce prices are another major concern for farmers. Live pig prices have dropped from a high of 20 yuan per kg in late2007 to about 12.6 yuan. Oranges fell from 1.6 yuan per kg to 0.6 yuan; peanuts from 9.6 yuan per kg to 4.2 yuan; and cotton from 6.4 per kg to 4.2 yuan.

The financial crisis and the drought also worry the government, which pinned its hopes for an economic revival on stronger rural demand as exports fell. The Feb. 1 policy document said explicitly: "The biggest potential for boosting domestic demand lies in rural areas."

The export-dependent Chinese economy has slowed markedly. In the last quarter of 2008, GDP growth slid to 6.8 percent year-on-year, sharply down from 9 percent in the previous quarter. The rate was also the slowest since the fourth quarter of 1999, when the economy grew only 6.1 percent as a result of the Asian financial crisis.

COUNTERMEASURES

The ruling Communist Party of China and the government fear a major failure concerning agriculture, farmers or rural areas, where more than half of China's population lives, could have serious social repercussions.

They have acted aggressively to minimize the impact of the twin crises.

President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao and Vice Premier Li Keqiang have all given direct instructions on drought relief. At the weekend, Wen toured Henan, urging officials to make drought relief their top priority.

Drought was as much about stimulating domestic demand as it was about grain supply, said Wen. "It is of vital significance to the overall economy to boost steady growth of grain production and farmers' incomes."

On Thursday, the government declared the highest level of emergency and poured billions of special funds into drought relief. Local governments have organized millions of farmers to water wheat and other crops.

In Henan, the authorities hung red banners in villages to urge farmers to act quickly, sent text messages to farmers on how to irrigate crops in a scientific way, and even dispatched firefighters to help. Henan alone had spent nearly 700 million yuan in helping farmers fight the drought.

The Feb. 1 policy document also demanded governments spare no effort to maintain stable prices of agricultural produce, increase subsidies and create more jobs for migrants.

The government also urged firms to avoid layoffs if possible and employ more migrants in public works projects. A wave of construction projects in sectors such as transportation and energy have been launched since the government unveiled a 4-trillion-yuanstimulus package in November.

Chen Xiwen said the policy of purchasing grain from farmers at a state-set minimum price would continue to maintain price levels.

The government was considering raising minimum prices by 0.22 yuan per kg on average this year, which could see farmers' revenues up by more than 100 billion yuan, based on last year's record output of 528.5 million tons.
Last month, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the top economic planner, said it will raise the minimum purchase price for rice by up to 16.9 percent this year. It had already hiked the minimum price for wheat by as much as 15.3 percent starting this year.

Chen said the government would increase subsidies to grain producers this year to more than 120 billion yuan, 17 percent or 17.1 billion yuan more than last year. In addition, the NDRC and five other government agencies on Jan. 21 issued the country's first action plan to maintain the prices of live pigs and protect the livelihoods of people like Pan.

Original article

Groundwater depletion rate accelerating worldwide

AGU Release No. 10–30, 23 September 2010

WASHINGTON—In recent decades, the rate at which humans worldwide are pumping dry the vast underground stores of water that billions depend on has more than doubled, say scientists who have conducted an unusual, global assessment of groundwater use.

These fast-shrinking subterranean reservoirs are essential to daily life and agriculture in many regions, while also sustaining streams, wetlands, and ecosystems and resisting land subsidence and salt water intrusion into fresh water supplies. Today, people are drawing so much water from below that they are adding enough of it to the oceans (mainly by evaporation, then precipitation) to account for about 25 percent of the annual sea level rise across the planet, the researchers find.

Soaring global groundwater depletion bodes a potential disaster for an increasingly globalized agricultural system, says Marc Bierkens of Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and leader of the new study.

“If you let the population grow by extending the irrigated areas using groundwater that is not being recharged, then you will run into a wall at a certain point in time, and you will have hunger and social unrest to go with it,” Bierkens warns. “That is something that you can see coming for miles.”

He and his colleagues will publish their new findings in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

In the new study, which compares estimates of groundwater added by rain and other sources to the amounts being removed for agriculture and other uses, the team taps a database of global groundwater information including maps of groundwater regions and water demand. The researchers also use models to estimate the rates at which groundwater is both added to aquifers and withdrawn. For instance, to determine groundwater recharging rates, they simulate a groundwater layer beneath two soil layers, exposed at the top to rainfall, evaporation, and other effects, and use 44 years worth of precipitation, temperature, and evaporation data (1958–2001) to drive the model.

Applying these techniques worldwide to regions ranging from arid areas to those with the wetness of grasslands, the team finds that the rate at which global groundwater stocks are shrinking has more than doubled between 1960 and 2000, increasing the amount lost from 126 to 283 cubic kilometers (30 to 68 cubic miles) of water per year. Because the total amount of groundwater in the world is unknown, it’s hard to say how fast the global supply would vanish at this rate. But, if water was siphoned as rapidly from the Great Lakes, they would go bone-dry in around 80 years.

Groundwater represents about 30 percent of the available fresh water on the planet, with surface water accounting for only one percent. The rest of the potable, agriculture friendly supply is locked up in glaciers or the polar ice caps. This means that any reduction in the availability of groundwater supplies could have profound effects for a growing human population.

The new assessment shows the highest rates of depletion in some of the world’s major agricultural centers, including northwest India, northeastern China, northeast Pakistan, California’s central valley, and the midwestern United States.

“The rate of depletion increased almost linearly from the 1960s to the early 1990s,” says Bierkens. “But then you see a sharp increase which is related to the increase of upcoming economies and population numbers; mainly in India and China.”

As groundwater is increasingly withdrawn, the remaining water “will eventually be at a level so low that a regular farmer with his technology cannot reach it anymore,” says Bierkens. He adds that some nations will be able to use expensive technologies to get fresh water for food production through alternative means like desalinization plants or artificial groundwater recharge, but many won’t.

Most water extracted from underground stocks ends up in the ocean, the researchers note. The team estimates the contribution of groundwater depletion to sea level rise to be 0.8 millimeters per year, which is about a quarter of the current total rate of sea level rise of 3.1 millimeters per year. That’s about as much sea-level rise as caused by the melting of glaciers and icecaps outside of Greenland and Antarctica, and it exceeds or falls into the high end of previous estimates of groundwater depletion’s contribution to sea level rise, the researchers add.

Original article

Huge Parts of World Are Drying Up: Land 'Evapotranspiration' Taking Unexpected Turn

ScienceDaily, Oct. 11, 2010

The soils in large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including major portions of Australia, Africa and South America, have been drying up in the past decade, a group of researchers conclude in the first major study to ever examine "evapotranspiration" on a global basis.

Most climate models have suggested that evapotranspiration, which is the movement of water from the land to the atmosphere, would increase with global warming. The new research, published online this week in the journal Nature, found that's exactly what was happening from 1982 to the late 1990s.

But in 1998, this significant increase in evapotranspiration -- which had been seven millimeters per year -- slowed dramatically or stopped. In large portions of the world, soils are now becoming drier than they used to be, releasing less water and offsetting some moisture increases elsewhere.

Due to the limited number of decades for which data are available, scientists say they can't be sure whether this is a natural variability or part of a longer-lasting global change. But one possibility is that on a global level, a limit to the acceleration of the hydrological cycle on land has already been reached.

If that's the case, the consequences could be serious.

They could include reduced terrestrial vegetation growth, less carbon absorption, a loss of the natural cooling mechanism provided by evapotranspiration, more heating of the land surface, more intense heat waves and a "feedback loop" that could intensify global warming.

"This is the first time we've ever been able to compile observations such as this for a global analysis," said Beverly Law, a professor of global change forest science at Oregon State University. Law is co-author of the study and science director of the AmeriFlux network of 100 research sites, which is one major part of the FLUXNET synthesis that incorporates data from around the world.

"We didn't expect to see this shift in evapotranspiration over such a large area of the Southern Hemisphere," Law said. "It is critical to continue such long-term observations, because until we monitor this for a longer period of time, we can't be sure why this is occurring."

Some of the areas with the most severe drying include southeast Africa, much of Australia, central India, large parts of South America, and some of Indonesia. Most of these regions are historically dry, but some are actually tropical rain forests.

The rather abrupt change from increased global evapotranspiration to a near halt in this process coincided with a major El Nino event in 1998, the researchers note in their report, but they are not suggesting that is a causative mechanism for a phenomenon that has been going on for more than a decade now.

Greater evapotranspiration was expected with global warming, because of increased evaporation of water from the ocean and more precipitation overall. And data indeed show that some areas are wetter than they used to be.

However, other huge areas are now drying out, the study showed. This could lead to increased drought stress on vegetation and less overall productivity, Law said, and as a result less carbon absorbed, less cooling through evapotranspiration, and more frequent or extreme heat waves.

Some of the sites used in this study are operated by Law's research group in the central Oregon Cascade Range in the Metolius River watershed, and they are consistent with some of these concerns. In the last decade there have been multiple years of drought, vegetative stress, and some significant forest fires in that area.

Evapotranspiration returns about 60 percent of annual precipitation back to the atmosphere, in the process using more than half of the solar energy absorbed by land surfaces. This is a key component of the global climate system, linking the cycling of water with energy and carbon cycles.

Longer term observations will be needed to determine if these changes are part of decadal-scale variability or a longer-term shift in global climate, the researchers said.

This study was authored by a large group of international scientists, including from OSU; lead author Martin Jung from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany; and researchers from the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Switzerland, Princeton University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, Harvard University, and other groups and agencies.

The regional networks, such as AmeriFlux, CarboEurope, and the FLUXNET synthesis effort, have been supported by numerous funding agencies around the world, including the Department of Energy, NASA, National Science Foundation, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States.

Original article

Las Vegas water source could run dry by 2021

Chances are about even that Lake Mead, the prime source of water for the desert city of Las Vegas, will run dry in 13 years if usage is not cut back.

Reuters, February 13, 2008 09:40 AM

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Chances are about even that Lake Mead, the prime source of water for the desert city of Las Vegas, will run dry in 13 years if usage is not cut back, according to study released on Tuesday.

Low snow, reservoir levels force rationing

By Kelly Zito, San Francisco Chronicle, May 1, 2009

Storage in Lake Shasta, the largest reservoir in California, is at a critically low 76 percent of normal after three dry winters. (Michael Macor / The Chronicle)

April's warm, dry weather melted the Sierra Nevada snowpack to two-thirds of normal, according to the last measure of the season Thursday, as agencies serving cities and farms across California prepare to cut water use this summer.

State officials say this is shaping up to be the 10th-driest three-year period on record, based on the amount of meltwater expected to run from the mountains and into streams and reservoirs this spring.

A month ago, snowpack was 80 percent of normal. Now it is 66 percent, compared with 72 percent at this time last year.

"Normally, we would have kept more of (the snowpack), but April was sunny and windy, and so a lot of it melted into the ground," said Elissa Lynn, chief meteorologist with the state Department of Water Resources, which conducts the winter snow surveys. "We have the snowpack we're going to have."

The precipitation that is forecast this weekend isn't expected to add much to snow levels and reservoir levels hammered by three dry years in a row. Storage in Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville, two of the largest reservoirs in the state, are at 76 percent and 70 percent of normal, respectively.

While those figures don't appear staggeringly low, such reservoirs are required to release certain amounts of water for flood control, recreation, power generation and fish-spawning - uses that don't always coincide with peak water urban and agricultural demand.

The water network is further impacted by federal orders to limit pumping through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to protect the endangered delta smelt. The delta funnels water to about 25 million Californians.
As a result, water agencies that rely heavily on the state and federal systems are taking steps to protect dwindling supplies. Almost 30 water districts around the state have enacted some form of mandatory rationing, up from just over 20 last week, Lynn said.

The Santa Clara Valley Water District and city of Antioch are instituting 15 percent reductions. Agencies serving cities from Calistoga to Livermore are urging customers to curb water consumption by 10 or 15 percent, while others are restricting certain uses, such as landscape irrigation or car-washing.

Central Valley farmers face even deeper cutbacks. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the system that delivers water to most of the agriculture industry, recently said farmers south of the delta would receive about 10 percent of their normal supply. Earlier this year, the bureau said farmers would receive no water at all.
The state's water agency expects California to lose about 20,000 agriculture jobs and as much as $644 million as a result of the drought - figures that spurred thousands of farmworkers to take part in a four-day march last month to draw attention to the impacts of the water crisis on the Central Valley.

For its part, the state has launched a $4 million "Save Our Water" public education campaign aimed at helping people gauge their water consumption and improve indoor and outdoor water efficiency.

Many experts agree that widespread use of drought-resistant landscaping and less-thirsty appliances is long overdue and offers the best chance of preserving a resource that will grow less plentiful as the population expands and climate change brings longer dry spells.

With cities, farmers and advocates for the environment increasingly vying for that resource, behaviors will probably change even more in the years ahead, according to Spreck Rosenkrans, an analyst at Environmental Defense Fund.

"California will be forced to make difficult choices between our natural environment and significant investments in water use efficiencies in our farms and cities," Rosenkrans said. "If the drought continues, we'll be forced to make those kinds of decisions sooner rather than later."

Summer of conservation

Some of the Bay Area agencies taking steps to promote water conservation this summer:

• San Francisco: 10 percent voluntary reduction
• Santa Rosa: 15 percent voluntary reduction
• North Marin, Novato: 15 percent voluntary cut
• Zone 7, eastern Alameda County: 10 percent voluntary cut
• Santa Clara Valley Water District: 15 percent cut
• Antioch: Mandatory cuts of 15 percent for homes, businesses and farms, and 5 percent for industry

Source: Association of California Water Agencies, E-mail Kelly Zito at kzito@sfchronicle.com

Original article

Running Out of Water

By Brita Belli, Emagazine, November 15, 2010

The Arab world is heading for a huge water crisis in just five years. A recent report by the Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED) found that water levels are already dangerously low for the region, which contains 5% of the world’s population—about 360 million people—but only 1.4% of freshwater access. Today, the Arab region—including Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq—must manage with less than a quarter of the freshwater supplies available in 1960. The poorest Arab state—Yemen—is expected to literally run out of water in a few years. As population numbers swell—and they are expected to grow to nearly 600 million in the Arab region by 2050—the competition for scarce water resources will increase. Climate change will hurt water availability, too, and increase droughts. That, in turn, will impact agriculture yields. Already, some 85% of the Arab world’s water is used for agriculture—compared with 70% on average worldwide.

"Without fundamental changes in policies and practices, the situation will get worse, with drastic social, political and economic ramifications," reports the AFED.

Wealthier oil-producing Arab nations in the Persian Gulf rely mostly on expensive desalination plants for usable drinking water. But that’s less feasible for other nations, both because of the high cost and the need to power the plants. Egypt and Jordan have plans to build nuclear plants to power desalination facilities in the works, but those major undertakings will take years to achieve. The report urges the Arab world to act quickly, particularly in instituting better water management. A related article in Reuters notes that: “Governments, which often focus on seeking new supplies of water, should instead concentrate on improving water management, rationalizing consumption, encouraging reuse and protecting water supplies from overuse and pollution, AFED urges.”

Original article

Snow Pack Still Not Enough; Drought Worsens

By Ariana Duarte and Kyra J. Neyland, KMPH News, March 3, 2009

Several weeks of storms have added to the Sierra snow pack, but after two critically dry years California may not be able to make up for lost time.

"Since we're in our third year of a drought it's a cumulative problem, so even if this year should somehow end up like a normal year we still have two years of deficit to make up for. Our reservoirs are still really low," said Elissa Lynn, Department of Water Resources.

On Friday Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state drought emergency, asking Californians to cut back their water use by 20%, but water officials say with no real relief in sight jobs will be lost and the price of produce could soar by summer.

"Our county will be very hard hit by this, trying to support all those jobs, all those jobs that are lost and those families that don't have a regular impact at this point in time," said Sarah Woolf, Westlands Water District.

Experts say unless major changes are made to California's infrastructure, the current crisis could turn into a permanent problem.

"We need a combination of conveyance around the Delta that means bringing water from the north to the south around the estuary in the Delta, additional storage in places like Temperance Flat and conservation in our communities," said Woolf.

In the meantime, the Department of Water Resources says California residents should take it upon themselves to use only what they need to get by.

"Water is a precious resource and we can't act as if we have an unlimited supply in California. It only falls one season out of the year and sometimes not so well, like we've had three poor winters in a row. We have to treat it like gold," said Lynn.

Original article

UK must ‘act now’ to prevent severe water shortage

by David Masters, Fair Home, March 31, 2009

All UK homes should have a water meter installed within the next twenty years if the country is to avoid a severe water crisis, the Environment Agency (EA) said this week.

The EA set a 2030 deadline for compulsory water meter installation in all homes, saying that climate change could reduce Britain’s water supplies by up to 80%.

The Water Resources Strategy document proposes a major rethink of how water is supplied in the UK.

It urges a major review of the way water companies are funded, so firms are rewarded for reducing, rather than increasing, the amount of water they supply.

Furthermore, it calls for the construction of desalination plants at sites around the UK.

“Near-universal water metering of households” and VAT removal on water efficient products are also proposed in the report.

In addition, the report points out that the CO2 produced by water and sewage treatment plants account for 6% of the UK’s emissions - more than the aviation industry - and that this needs to be dealt with.

Paul Leinster, EA chief executive, said: “Water is essential for life and vital to our economy.

“But climate change and population growth mean there may not be enough water in England and Wales in the future for people and the environment unless we start planning and acting now.

“People and businesses need to use less water and wasting water needs to cost a lot more.

“The proposals in our new strategy cover actions that need to be taken by water companies, government, regulators, businesses and the public, and we need a joined up approach to this problem to prevent it becoming a crisis.”

Chris Smith, EA chairman, added: “Fresh water is a fragile and vulnerable resource.

“Already there is less water available per person in England and Wales than in Egypt or Spain.

“If we fail to act now, we could face severe consequences such as water rationing, standpipes in our streets and the loss of wetlands and native wildlife.”

Original article

Water - another global 'crisis'?

By Richard Black, BBC News, February 2, 2009

If you look at the numbers, it is hard to see how many East African communities made it through the long drought of 2005 and 2006.

Among people who study human development, it is a widely-held view that each person needs about 20 litres of water each day for the basics - to drink, cook and wash sufficiently to avoid disease transmission.

Yet at the height of the East African drought, people were getting by on less than five litres a day - in some cases, less than one litre a day, enough for just three glasses of drinking water and nothing left over.
   
The scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality
UNDP, 2006

Some people, perhaps incredibly from a western vantage point, are hardy enough to survive in these conditions; but it is not a recipe for a society that is healthy and developing enough to break out of poverty.

"Obviously there are many drivers of human development," says the UN's Andrew Hudson.

"But water is the most important."

At the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), where Dr Hudson works as principal technical advisor to the water governance programme, he calculated the contribution that various factors make to the Human Development Index, a measure of how societies are doing socially and economically.

"It was striking. I looked at access to energy, spending on health, spending on education - and by far the strongest driver of the HDI on a global scale was access to water and sanitation."

Different lives

Two key questions arise, then.

Why do some communities have so little access to water? And how will the current picture change in a world where the human population is growing, where societies are urbanising and industrialising, and where climate change may alter the raw availability of water significantly?

The UNDP is unequivocal about the first question.

"The availability of water is a concern for some countries," says the report.

"But the scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical availability."

Statistics on water consumption appear to back the UN's case.

Japan and Cambodia experience about the same average rainfall - about 160cm per year.

But whereas the average Japanese person can use nearly 400 litres per day, the average Cambodian must make do with about one-tenth of that.

The picture is improving to some extent.

Across the world, 1.6bn more people have access to clean drinking water than in 1990.

But population growth and climatic changes could change the picture.

In some regions, "the scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis" could become one of physical availability, especially in places where consumption is already unsustainably high.

"There are several rivers that don't reach the sea any more," says Mark Smith, head of the water programme at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

"The Yellow River is one, the Murray-Darling (in Australia) is nearly another - they have to dredge the mouth of the river every year to make sure it doesn't dry up.

"The Aral Sea and Lake Chad have shrunk because the rivers that feed them have been largely dried out; and you can see it on a smaller scale as well, where streams that are important for small communities in Tanzania may go dry for half the year, largely because people are taking more and more water for irrigating crops."

Wet and dry

Last year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) took an in-depth look at how the raw availability of water might alter in the future as climatic patterns change.

Its projections are derived from computer models of the Earth's hugely complex climate system, and as such are far from being firm forecasts.

A warmer climate overall means a wetter climate; warmer air can hold more moisture.

But weather patterns are likely to shift, meaning that water will be deposited in different places with a different pattern in time.

"In general we see drying in the sub-tropics and mid-latitudes, from southern Europe across to Kazakhstan and from North Africa to Iran," recounts Martin Parry, who as co-chair of the IPCC's working group on climate impacts oversaw the water report's compilation.

"And the drying extends westwards into Central America. And there are equivalents in the southern hemisphere - southern Africa, Australia."

In some populated parts of North Africa and Central Asia, he says, people may struggle simply to get enough to drink.

Other areas, meanwhile, are projected to receive more rain - considerably more, in some cases.

The question then is whether societies can make use of it.

"If you look at India, Bangladesh and Burma, there are indications of an increase in water availability," says Professor Parry.

"But when you look in more detail you see that monsoonal precipitation will become more intense - there'll be a heavier downpour but over fewer days - so you might just end up with more runoff, which could actually mean less availability of water to the community."

Thirsty work

A changing climate is only one of the factors likely to affect the amount of water at each person's disposal in future.

A more populated world - and there could be another 2.5 billion people on the planet by 2050 - is likely to be a thirstier world.

Those extra people will need feeding; and as agriculture accounts for about 70% of water use around the world, extra consumption for growing food is likely to reduce the amount available for those basic needs of drinking, cooking and washing.

Industry can also take water that would otherwise have ended up in peoples' mouths.

	How much is available The overall availability of water per person has fallen markedly since 1950, according to UN figures. Developed countries have fared better than the developing world, largely because population growth has been significantly lower.
	How much we use People use vastly different amounts of water in their daily lives. The average US citizen uses nearly 600 litres each day, whereas people in some of the world's poorest countries must make do with less than 10% of that. The single biggest reason for the discrepancy is the scale of a country's infrastructure.
	What we use it for Globally, agriculture remains the biggest user of water. As societies industrialise and move away from a farming-based economy, they may reduce their water consumption. However, on a global basis, farming is projected to need more water in future as the climate warms and the world's food requirements rise.
	Running dry? The number of people living in "water stress" and "water scarcity" is projected to increase in future, with most of the rises taking place in poorer countries.
	Urban islands More than half of the world's people now live in cities. But not all governments are providing infrastructure to meet the expanding urban demand. In many developing countries, as the size of a city grows, the proportion of people in it with access to clean water goes down. All figures adapted from UNDP Human Development Report 2006

On the other hand, as a society industrialises it tends to become less reliant on farming - which could, in principle, reduce its local demand.

It is a tremendously complex picture; and forecasting its impacts makes simple climate modelling look a trivial task by comparison.

Researchers at the University of Kassel in Germany, led by Martina Floerke, have attempted it.

Their projections suggest that some regions are likely to see drastic declines in the amount of water available for personal use - and for intriguing reasons.

"The principal cause of decreasing water stress (where it occurs) is the greater availability of water due to increased annual precipitation related to climate change," they conclude.

"The principal cause of increasing water stress is growing water withdrawals, and the most important factor for this increase is the growth of domestic water use stimulated by income growth."

The modelling suggests that by the 2050s, as many as six billion people could face water scarcity (defined as less than 1,000 cubic metres per person per year), depending, most importantly, on how societies develop - a significant increase on previous estimates.

Ideas pipeline

The irony is that the richer societies are the ones most likely to be able to adapt to these changes - perhaps relatively easily.

A century ago, a 500km-long pipeline was built to bring water from the Western Australian coast to the parched inland goldfields around Kalgoorlie; the economics of gold made it viable.

Now that the coastal capital Perth is drying out, there is talk of building an even longer pipeline to bring water from the north of the state.

The state recently acquired a desalination plant - an effective, but expensive, way of increasing the raw supply of clean water. A number of Middle Eastern countries are doing the same; it is even being contemplated near London.

Rivers can be diverted huge distances, as China is contemplating. Spain and Cyprus can take water deliveries by ship.

But can all societies afford such measures?

In any case, is adaptation possible to some of the really big projected changes, such as the rapid shrinking of Himalayan glaciers which may lose four-fifths of their area by 2030, removing what is effectively a huge natural reservoir storing water for more than a billion people?

"In principle you could do it, if you're equipped to do the engineering," says Mark Smith.

"But societies are going to have to get much better at deciding how they're going to use their water.

"And very often, in developing countries where institutions are not well established, decisions are made in a very ad-hoc way - someone says 'yes let's use this much for irrigation' but you're already using that much for a sugar mill, and before you know it you've allocated more than you actually have."

Two years ago I stood in a forest clearing in the west of the Amazon basin talking to researchers studying the deforestation and fires that are an increasing plague in the region.

They told me that some villages around there were experiencing water shortages.

How can that happen, I asked incredulously, in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, in one of the most luxuriously verdant places on Earth?

What had brought the shortages was a combination of increased human settlement, deforestation, and a drying of some streams, possibly related to climate change.

If even the Amazon can feel these pressures, it is difficult not to think that the same picture will be played out in much starker and possibly much messier colours in parts of the world that are already feeling the heat of dwindling supplies and growing needs.

Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Original article

Water Crisis Threatens Asia's Rise

By Alan Wheatley, The New York Times, October 11, 2010

JINGHONG, CHINA — Framed by banana and eucalyptus trees, the caramel-colored Mekong River rolls through this lush corner of Yunnan Province in southwestern China with an unerring rhythm that is reassuring in its seeming timelessness.

Yet as recently as April, a fearsome drought had shriveled the Mekong to its narrowest width in 50 years. Water levels were so low that at Guanlei, a river town not far from here, dozens of boats were laid up for more than three months.

Alarmed at the drying up of the world’s largest inland fishery, the four members of the Mekong River Commission — Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam — called a special summit meeting.

“Without good and careful management of the Mekong River as well as its natural resources, this great river will not survive,” Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva of Thailand warned.

The commission’s political leaders suspected that China was hoarding water behind dams it has built on the Mekong, exacerbating the effects of the drought.

China presented data to allay these fears. Finally, the rains returned and the tensions dissipated.

But the incident highlighted the strains that are being generated as the unslakable Asian thirst for water collides with the reality of a supply that is limited and, if climate change projections are borne out, may shrink sharply.

The Asian Development Bank speaks of a looming crisis that threatens access to water and sanitation needs for millions of households and industries.

The bank is holding a high-level conference at its headquarters in Manila this week to chart solutions and canvass greater regional cooperation.

“In the next 5 to 10 years, if the initiatives to secure greater efficiencies in water are not put in place, you really are at risk,” said Arjun Thapan, the bank’s special senior adviser for infrastructure and water.

Projections last year by the Water Resources Group, a consortium of private-sector companies formed to tackle water scarcity, point to a global gap of 40 percent between the supply and demand for water by 2030 under a business-as-usual scenario.

The imbalance is particularly daunting in India, where the trend toward a middle-class diet will increase demand for meat, sugar and wheat, which require a lot of water to produce.

Agriculture uses almost 90 percent of India’s water.

By 2030, demand will grow to almost 1.5 trillion cubic meters, or 53 trillion cubic feet, compared with the current supply of about 740 billion cubic meters, according to a report for the Water Resources Group by the consultant firm McKinsey.

As a result, in the absence of concerted action, most Indian river basins could face a severe water deficit by 2030.

The probable water deficit for China is more manageable on paper — a shortfall of 200 billion cubic meters — but 21 percent of the country’s surface water resources are unfit even for farming, which consumes about 70 percent of the country’s water.

What makes such forecasts even more daunting is evidence that global warming is already eroding the Himalayan glaciers covering the Tibetan plateau, which feed China’s neighbors, including India and Pakistan, as well as China itself.

More than 80 percent of the glaciers in western China are in retreat, according to a study by a group of mainly Chinese climate change scientists in the September issue of Nature.

Over all, 5 percent to 27 percent of China’s glacial area is forecast to disappear by 2050, the study said.

“Even though the exact timing and magnitude of the ‘tipping point’ of each glacier is still uncertain, the projected long-term exhaustion of glacial water supply should have a considerable impact on the availability of water for both agricultural and human consumption,” the scientists wrote.

Because 60 percent of the runoff from China glaciers flows out of the country, this can spell only trouble.

China’s plans for more dams on the Mekong and on other major rivers that tumble down from the Tibetan plateau already have its southern neighbors on edge.

“As far as transboundary management of water is concerned, I think certainly the Himalayas are likely to be a flash point,” said Mr. Thapan of the Asian Development Bank.

The risk of conflict over water rights is magnified because China and India are home to more than a third of the world’s population yet have to make do with less than 10 percent of its water.

“Although both nations are seeking to become the superpowers of the 21st century, their weak point is water,” according to Yoichi Funabashi, a prominent foreign-affairs commentator and editor in chief of the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper.

India and Pakistan are another potential point of friction.

The Indus Waters Treaty, which parceled out river-use rights after India’s partition in 1947, has survived three wars between the two neighbors since it was signed in 1960. But the pact is under strain from Indian plans for more upstream dams and water diversion.

So what is to be done? Given that agriculture accounts for almost 70 percent of global water use, it will be critical to increase “crop per drop” through improved irrigation techniques and by growing food that needs less water.

In the words of the Water Resources Group, “While the gap between supply and demand WILL be closed, the question is HOW.”

As Mr. Funabashi puts it, oil can ultimately be replaced by other resources, but the same is not true for water. Water is also closely tied to food, energy and climate change.

“In that sense, water is a key component of national security,” Mr. Funabashi wrote last month.

“If the 20th century witnessed the rise and fall of nations over oil, the 21st century could be one in which the rise and fall of nations is determined by water,” he added.

Original article

Water crisis 'a security threat'

By Geoffrey Bew, Gulf Daily News, 4th March, 2009

BAHRAIN and its neighbours could face a potential security crisis unless they take steps to protect their diminishing water resources, a government official warned yesterday.

There could be serious threat if the region does nothing to ensure there is enough water to go round, said Works Minister Fahmi Al Jowder, who is also in charge of the Electricity and Water Authority.

His warning echoed an alert raised last week by Saudi Arabia's Interior Ministry Under-Secretary Dr Ahmed Mohammed Al Salem, who said a water shortage could spark war in the region.

The struggle for limited resources amid growing demand and rising population levels is likely to end in conflict, Mr Al Salem told the Bahrain Security Forum, at the Ritz-Carlton Bahrain Hotel and Spa.

"Thirty per cent (of the population) in the year 2025 will not find water for drinking or agriculture," he said.

"What further complicates the situation is that 60pc of the Arab water resources come from outside our homelands.

"This no doubt is a sign of a potential war that could take place in this region as a result of the struggle and strife for its resources."

Mr Al Jowder was speaking at the opening of the Innovative Water and Wastewater Reuse Technolog-ies conference.

Failure to act could have disastrous consequences for the region's security, he said.

"We have to work on several fronts to try and manage the demand," said Mr Al Jowder.

"Management of demand is an issue and we should work on (reducing) leaks from our network."

Experts from around the world are attending the two-day event, being held at the Gulf Hotel's Gulf Convention Centre.

It is being organised by the Saudi Arabia Water Environment Association (SAWEA), US-based Water Environment Federation and US-based International Desalination Association.

An exhibition on the sidelines of the event is also showcasing the latest innovations and technologies in water production and conservation systems.

The conference continues today with a series of technical sessions about desalination and sanitary wastewater treatment.

Mr Al Jowder called for campaigns to educate the public on how to avoid wasting water.

"We have to work on awareness programmes," he said.

"We are not doing enough to educate the young generation, consumers and investors."

Mr Al Jowder said Treated Sewage Effluent (TSE) should be fully utilised for agricultural purposes, to reduce the impact of depleting natural ground water resources.

"Currently, TSE daily production in Bahrain is in the range of 100,000 cubic metres per day and is expected to double in the near future," he told delegates.

Mr Al Jowder also called for more co-operation between the government and private sector to protect water resources.

"The exponential growth in water demand presents extraordinary concerns and challenges," he said.

"The Middle East and the GCC countries in particular are considered to be amongst the worst areas that suffer from scarcity of water resources.

"The current financial crisis and future demands dictate stronger interaction and alignment between the public and private sectors.

"Water losses create huge stress on efficient water provision, which in turn necessitates that a proper strategy be implemented to reduce water losses and re-track it in the overall water balance."

SAWEA executive director and conference committee chairman Mazen Snobar believes more cost effective and sustainable technologies are needed to prevent future water shortages.

"Non-renewable resources such as sea water desalination and innovative reuse technologies and water conservation policies can play an important role in mitigating water shortages but they must be properly managed," he said during a keynote speech.

"We believe the best way to maintain and improve our water environment is through the education of our water industry professionals and the public. "Our goal is to promote dialogue and networking between all water industry stakeholders to better address the vital issues of water availability and management." geoff@gdn.com.bh

original article

World Bank finds Israel’s water policy hard to swallow

Stephen Glai, The National, April 28. 2009

As a former, and by many accounts successful, finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu presumably knows his way around economics. So when the Israeli prime minister says he will work to provide the Palestinians with economic, if not political, independence, might that not suggest his hard-line government understands that a prosperous Palestine would be an important first step towards a more stable Middle East?

Not according to the World Bank, which last week issued the latest in a series of reports about how the Israeli government is systematically pre-empting the evolution of a viable Palestinian economy. The 154-page “Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Sector Development” is written with a blandness suited to the banality of this particular Israeli outrage. The report offers a detailed look at how Israel deprives the West Bank and Gaza of the most basic commodity for human survival, a deficit that consumes a growing share of Palestinian GDP.

The report is another indictment, as if one were needed, of the now-defunct Oslo Accords. Just as Oslo lacked adequate mechanisms to enforce Israeli pledges to sharply reduce its occupation of Palestinian land, so too has Israel been allowed to abrogate its commitment to revise interim agreements relating to water systems in the Arab territories it controls.

Instead, according to the World Bank report, Israel has aggrandised a growing share of available water supplies while intensifying Palestinian reliance on Mekorot, the Jewish state’s national water carrier. The report states that Israel, without the approval of the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee (JWC) – a legacy of the Oslo process – draws more than 50 per cent from the aquifers that support both the West Bank and Israel beyond what it is authorised under the accords. Needless to say, Palestinian protests of such violations are routinely ignored, according to the report.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as much about resources as it is about land. It is no coincidence, for example, that West Bank settlements are located on top or near groundwater wells, a strategy that dates back to the earliest days of the settler movement. But the situation has worsened over the past decade, when Israel began restricting mobility in the West Bank and Gaza following its “withdrawal” from certain Palestinian areas under the terms of Oslo. Palestinians must now pay an estimated 8 per cent of their household budgets for adequate water supplies, about double the globally accepted standard. That is beyond the capacity of many Palestinian families, and revenues have fallen precipitously in the parts of the West Bank under Palestinian administration.

Rural villagers who are unconnected to the water grid must allocate up to 20 per cent of their household income for tanker-born drinkable water, an increasingly expensive enterprise due to the proliferation of Israel-controlled checkpoints, the massive, serpentine security wall and other barriers to mobility throughout the West Bank. The World Bank estimates the added expense of transporting water by tanker amounts to about 1 per cent of the Palestinian GDP. In Gaza, water availability has reached “crisis levels”, while utility revenues have collapsed and tax collections rates are down 20 per cent.

Water quality is deteriorating and there is growing evidence of rising water-related diseases. The public health costs of waterborne illness for children below the age of five alone is 0.4 per cent of GDP, the report estimates. The environmental impact, meanwhile, is devastating. Sanitation and sewage systems have been badly neglected due to unstable security conditions and Israeli restrictions on movement. Sewage is returned untreated into lagoons, wadis and the sea or seeps into the soil where it ultimately contaminates aquifers. In rural areas, septic tanks are not properly emptied, while Israel’s settler population routinely dumps raw sewage on to Palestinian soil.

Just as Israel controls the borders, roads, air and sea ports, airspace and export revenue on which the Palestinian economy vitally depends, so too does it control Palestinian water resources via Mekorot, an unhealthy reliance intensified by Israeli over-extraction of available supplies. Mekorot’s dominant role in water distribution, the report states, “makes [the West Bank and Gaza] vulnerable to Israeli decisions and interventions, and may increase commercial risks and costs”.

The report concludes with a raft of proposals that might ameliorate the crisis, all of which require Israeli co-operation and consent. It suggests, for example, the wholesale reform of the JWC, which is strongly biased in Israel’s favour due to its disproportionate levels of power and capacity. Only half of the US$121 million (Dh444.4m) worth of Palestinian-proposed projects have been approved since 2001, while all but one mooted by Israel have been granted. Israel, the report lays out, routinely decides unilaterally how regional water sources will or will not be developed.

An economy without access to clean water supplies is by definition unsustainable. Mr Netanyahu either fails to understand this or his commitment to Palestinian economic independence is nothing more than political palaver. Either way, Palestine’s man-made water crisis should be at the top of the agenda when the Israeli leader meets his US counterpart early next month.

Original article

World facing bleak water future, warns UN

By Girish Chadha, NDTV.com, March 17, 2009

The world is staring at a bleak water future. Rapidly increasing global population levels, widespread mismanagement and rising demand for energy are tightening the grip on the world's evaporating water supplies, with climate change exacerbating the problem.

This stark warning was issued by the United Nations in a report released on March 16 at the World Water Forum in Istanbul. The third edition of World Water Development Report, entitled Water in a changing world paints a grim scenario for the world's freshwater resources, especially in developing countries, and described the outlook for coming generations as deeply worrying.

The warning from the UN is based on one of the most comprehensive assessments the global body has undertaken on the state of the world's fresh water. As many as 26 UN agencies were involved in the making of the report which was part of the UN World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP).

Releasing the report formally, UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said the report has for the first time examined how changes in water demand and supply interact with other global dynamics such as climate change, population growth and increasing food and security consumption as well as the current economic crisis.

"The report tries to look outside the water box and like this Forum, seeks to bridge the many divides that stand in the way of an effective understanding of and response to world water needs", said Matsuura.

The world's population has swollen to well over 6 billion people and some countries have already reached the limits of their water resources. The water crisis is particularly strong in several parts of Africa and Asia and threatens to unsettle the economic gains achieved by some of the countries. Previous assessments by other global agencies have also warned that global players like India and China could also see their some dent in their economic development in the wake of the water crisis.

Stating that conflicts about water can occur at all scales, the report warns that hydrologic shocks that may occur through climate change increase the risk of major national and international security threats, especially in unstable areas.

The warnings given by the report come against a backdrop of several stand-offs being witnessed across the world following acute shortages. The dwindling water resources have also led to several intra-country conflicts breaking out.

The United Nations is worried that the growing number of conflicts over the fast depleting resources could raise the spectre of political instability in some hitherto stable regions. This may require developing a new security regime to tackle such national and international situations. Experts have been warning that several countries, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, are vulnerable to conflicts.

Climate change is exacerbating the problem and the report estimated that almost half the world's population would be living in areas of high water stress by 2030, including between 75 million and 250 million people in Africa. In addition, water scarcity in some arid and semi-arid places will displace between 24 million and 700 million people.

Africa and several parts of Asia are already being bracketed in water stress areas and some have even witnessed civic unrest in the wake of water supplies getting exhausted. Lack of access to water helps drive poverty and deprivation and breeds the potential for unrest and conflict, it warned.

The UN report mentions that a strong link exists between poverty and water resources, with the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day approximately coinciding with the number of those without access to safe drinking water.

The report highlighted the major impact this situation has on health, as almost 80 per cent of diseases in developing countries are associated with water, causing some three million early deaths. For example, 5,000 children die every day from diarrhoea, and roughly 10 per cent of all illnesses worldwide could be avoided by improving water supply, sanitation, hygiene and management of water resources.

The report said that water shortages have already started to impede economic growth across the world, including China, India and Indonesia.

According to the report, demographic growth is boosting water stress in developing countries, where hydrological resources are often meagre. The global population is growing by 80 million people a year, 90 per cent of it in poorer countries. Demand for water is growing by 64 billion cubic metres (2.2 trillion cubic feet) per year, roughly equivalent to Egypt's annual water demand today.

On the crucial issue of the UN Millennium Development Goals, the report says the outlook remains mixed. The UN had set in 2000 the deadline of 2015 for halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. The target on drinking water is on track but the tally of people without improved sanitation will have decreased only slightly by 2015, from 2.5 billion to 2.4 billion.

Going ahead, the report states that conservation and reuse of water, including recycled sewage, are the watchwords. There is a need for sustainable water management, with realistic pricing to curb waste. The report gives the example of India where free or almost-free water had led to huge waste in irrigation, causing soils to be waterlogged and salt-ridden.

Matsuura said one of the report's main messages is that leaders must recognize water's role in obtaining their objectives and involve water specialists in decision making. "Water is so essential and cross-cutting that it must be an integral part of the planning and investments of all sectors and all stakeholders", he said.

Stating that there cannot be development without water security, the UNESCO chief said water must be given higher priority on the development agenda. "Developing countries themselves need to increase investment in water and systematically integrate water in poverty reduction strategies. The international community must also dramatically scale up its support", he added.

Disclaimer: Girish Chadha is a freelance journalist and NDTV.com takes no responsibility for the views expressed in the article. The article published does not in anyway reflect the opinion of NDTV.com.)

Original article

Extinction event

Extinction event

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vertical axis - percentage extinction of genera, horizontal axis - mya (millions of years ago)

An extinction event (also known as: mass extinction; extinction-level event, ELE, or biotic crisis) is a sharp decrease in the diversity and abundance of macroscopic life. They occur when the rate of extinction increases with respect to the rate of speciation. Because the majority of diversity and biomass on earth is microbial, and thus difficult to measure, mass extinctions have little effect on the total diversity and abundance of life, but rather affect the easily observed, biologically complex component of the biosphere.^[1]

Over 98% of documented species are now extinct, but extinction occurs at an uneven rate. Based on the fossil record, the background rate ofextinctions on Earth is about two to five taxonomic families of marine invertebrates and vertebrates every million years. Marine fossils are mostly used to measure extinction rates because of their superior fossil record and stratigraphic range compared to land organisms.

Since life began on Earth, several major mass extinctions have significantly exceeded the background extinction rate. The most recent, Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, which occurred approximately 65.5 million years ago (Ma), was a large-scale mass extinction of animal and plant species in a geologically short period of time. In the past 540 million years there have been five major events when over 50% of animal species died. There probably were mass extinctions in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons, but before the Phanerozoic there were no animals with hard body parts to leave a significant fossil record.

Estimates of the number of major mass extinctions in the last 540 million years range from as few as five to more than twenty. These differences stem from the threshold chosen for describing an extinction event as "major", and the data chosen to measure past diversity.

Latest Extinction is the Greatest

Source: Wired Science
Credits: Brandon Keim
Dated:  2008-09-02

Latest Extinction is the Greatest

Earth may be in the midst of the greatest extinction ever, according to a new mass extinction scoring system."The current extinction resembles none of the earlier ones, and may end up being the greatest of all," write Istanbul Technical University researchers A. M. Celal Sengor, Saniye Atayman and Sinan Ozeren.Their system, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, attempts to quantify those periods when more than half of all species disappeared. In addition to the current mass extinction, this has happened at least five times: the End Ordovician, Late Devonian, End Permian, End Triassic and End Cretaceous. The latter — marking the end of the Age of Dinosaurs — receives the most attention, but scientists have been unable to decide which extinction was most significant.That debate may finally be settled, though the answer is unsettling."If unchecked, the current extinction threatens to be the greatest killer of all time," write the researchers.By multiplying the number of organismal groups that went extinct with the time it took, they arrived at a metric called
"greatness." According to this, the dinosaur-ending End Cretaceous event, possibly caused when asteroid strikes or volcanic explosions sheathed the Earth in ash, was twice as great as any previous extinction.The Permian extinction event, caused 250 million years ago by the formation of the Pangea supercontinent and volcano-induced oceanic poisoning, placed third on the researchers’ rankings — and it still encompassed the loss of 96 percent of Earthly life.According to the researchers, the current global die-off combines elements of both the End Cretaceous and the Permian.
The global dominance of humans "represents a virtual Pangea formation," and human activities are a "global annihilating agent" comparable to any asteroid.The International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimates that 800 plant and animal species have gone extinct in the last 500 years, with more than 16,000 currently threatened with extinction — and those lost or threatened organisms come the from mere 41,000 species so far assessed by science. More than a million have been described but remain unstudied.The most troubling figures, however, come not from the total species lost but the rate at which they’re vanishing: 1,000 times faster than usual. But even that alarming rate may be too conservative. According to a paper recently published in Nature, modeling errors led scientists to grossly underestimate the survival chances of threatened species."The older models could be severely overestimating the time to extinction," said University of Colorado ecologist and Nature study co-author Brett Melbourne to the Guardian. "Some species could go extinct 100 times sooner than we expect."A scale of greatness and causal classification of mass extinctions: Implications for mechanisms [PNAS] [not yet online]

Image: Blu

See Also:

• The Sixth Extinction: Yawn
• Geoengineering for Animals
• Evolution Races Cancer to Save Tasmanian Devils
• A Human-Like Race Is Going Extinct
• ‘Goddess of the Yangtze’ Driven to Extinction
• A Species Waves Goodbye

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Mass Extinctions

Source: PNAS

Quotation: 

The present extinction, which seems greater than any thus far, has elements of those of both the Cretaceous and Permian. It represents a virtual Pangea formation by providing human-caused transfer of organisms world-wide simulating a world with no oceanic barriers, leading to increased competition without opening new niches and the introduction of a global annihilating agent, namely humans, that creates functional deserts for much of the rest of the biosphere (human dwellings) at a rate unknown in the history of the biosphere during the Phanerozoic. It is a Lyellian event accelerated and magnified to Cuvierian dimensions. If unchecked, the present extinction threatens to be the greatest killer of all time.

A scale of greatness and causal classification of mass extinctions: Implications for mechanisms

The Current Mass Extinction

The aerial photograph on the left shows the Transamazonian highway just after completion. The satellite photograph on the right shows a much larger area, revealing the wake of destruction fanning out from either side of the highway. Large deforested areas, resembling perpendicular stitches along the "scar" of the highway, have been cleared by farmers. Credits: Photographs from Diversity and the Tropical Rain Forest by John Terborgh. Copyright © 1992 by W.H. Freeman and Company. Used with permission. Graph from Biology: The Dynamics of Life by Alton Biggs, et al. Copyright © 1991 by Merrill Publish

Is the biosphere today on the verge of anything like the mass extinctions of the geological past? Could some equivalent of meteorite impacts or dramatic climate change be underway, as humankind's rapid destruction of natural habitats forces animals and plants out of existence? 

Increasingly, researchers are doing the numbers, and saying, yes, if present trends continue, a mass extinction is very likely underway. The evidence is pieced together from details drawn from all over the world, but it adds up to a disturbing picture. This time, unlike the past, it's not a chance asteroid collision, nor a chain of climatic circumstances alone that's at fault. Instead, it is chiefly the activities of an ever-growing human population, in concert with long-term environmental change. 

The background level of extinction known from the fossil record is about one species per million species per year, or between 10 and 100 species per year (counting all organisms such as insects, bacteria, and fungi, not just the largevertebrates we are most familiar with). In contrast, estimates based on the rate at which the area of tropical forests is being reduced, and their large numbers of specialized species, are that we may now be losing 27,000 species per year to extinction from those habitats alone. 

The typical rate of extinction differs for different groups of organisms. Mammals, for instance, have an average species "lifespan" from origination to extinction of about 1 million years, although some species persist for as long as 10 million years. There are about 5,000 known mammalian species alive at present. Given the average species lifespan for mammals, the background extinction rate for this group would be approximately one species lost every 200 years. Of course, this is an average rate -- the actual pattern of mammalian extinctions is likely to be somewhat uneven. Some centuries might see more than one mammalian extinction, and conversely, sometimes several centuries might pass without the loss of any mammal species. Yet the past 400 years have seen 89 mammalian extinctions, almost 45 times the predicted rate, and another 169 mammal species are listed as critically endangered. 

Therein lies the concern biologists have for many of today's species. While the number of actual documented extinctions may not seem that high, they know that many more species are "living dead" -- populations so critically small that they have little hope of survival. Other species are among the living dead because of their interrelationships -- for example, the loss of a pollinator can doom the plant it pollinates, and a prey species can take its predator with it into extinction. By some estimates, as much as 30 percent of the world's animals and plants could be on a path to extinction within 100 years. These losses are likely to be unevenly distributed, as some geographic areas and some groups of organisms are more vulnerable to extinction than others. Tropical rainforest species are at especially high risk, as are top carnivores, species with small geographic ranges, and marine reef species. 

Humanity's main impact on the extinction rate is landscape modification, an impact greatly increased by the burgeoning human population. Now standing at 5.7 billion and growing at a rate of 1.6 percent per year, the population of the world will double in 43 years if growth continues at this pace. By draining wetlands, plowing prairies, logging forests, paving, and building, we are altering the landscape on an unprecedented scale. Some organisms do well under the conditions we've created: They tend to cope well with change, tolerate a broad range of habitats, disperse widely, and reproduce rapidly, and they can quickly crowd out more specialized local species. City pigeons, zebra mussels, rats, and kudzu and tamarisk trees -- these are examples of what biologists call "weedy" species, both animals and plants. Many weedy species will probably survive, and even thrive, in the face of the current mass extinction. But thousands of others, many never known to science, are likely to perish. 

And what is the fate of our own species likely to be, if we really are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction? One possibility is that as diversity and abundance wither, the species causing it all -- Homo sapiens, the most dominant species in history -- could also be on the road to oblivion. But another possibility is that Homo sapiens, which has proved to be a very effective weedy species itself, will persist. That's the view of paleobiologist David Jablonski, who sees us as one of the survivors, "sort of picking through the rubble" of a world that has lost much of its biodiversity -- and much of its comfort. For along with that species richness, the ecosystem is likely to loose much of its ability to provide many of the valuable services that we take for granted, from cleaning and recirculating air and water, to pollinating crops and providing a source for new pharmaceuticals. And while the fossil record tells us that biodiversity has always recovered, it also tells us that the recovery will be unbearably slow in human terms -- 5 to 10 million years after the mass extinctions of the past. That's more than 200,000 generations of humankind before levels of biodiversity comparable to those we inherited might be restored.

Original article

The Sixth Extinction: Yawn

Source: Wired Science
Credits: Brandon Keim
Dated:  2008-08-12

 The Sixth Extinction: Yawn