LeakBird

(May 11, 2009, Meaghan Daly, AlterNet)
Most of the time, when you hear about environmentalists decrying the construction of a new coal-fired power plant, their objections are in relation to localized pollution or carbon dioxide emissions. Less frequently do you hear about protests related to the vast amounts of water that are needed to keep these [...]

(April 26, 2009, Sand Gets in My Eyes)
The “raw” water in Saudi isn’t really fit to drink, so bottled water, rather than being a luxury like it is in other places, is a necessity.
Anyway, awhile back I started noticing that when I drank certain brands of water, my gut really started to hurt. More specifically, [...]

(April 21, 2009, The Arizona Republic)
The Colorado River provides one-third of the state’s water…
The seven states – Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico – that use river water have agreed to reduced deliveries if the lake drops to an elevation of 1,075 feet. Arizona would absorb most of the initial shortages because [...]

(April 14, 2009, The San Francisco Chronicle)
Our state’s broken water delivery system – originally built more than 30 years ago to accommodate a state of 18 million people – now must supply this precious resource to more than 36 million people. By 2020, California’s population is expected to reach up to 48 million. The hub [...]

(April 12, 2009, The San Francisco Chronicle)
The San Francisco Chronicle invites you to decide by playing our online water game. As you play, you’ll hear from a water manager about how cities can use less water, from a Central Valley farmer close to losing his crops and from a conservationist on why we need adequate [...]

(April 2, 2009, The New York Times)
For about a mile, a steady stream of water flows down Bear Canyon before finally petering out in the sand near a golf course. The arroyo is not supposed to be wet this time of year; the spring snowmelt does not usually occur until later in the season. But [...]

(March 26, 2009, The Wall Street Journal)
Last month, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, a utility that provides power to mostly rural areas, agreed to conduct a major study to see if it might meet growing energy needs through energy efficiency and not a big, new coal-fired power plant, as it had proposed for southeast Colorado.
One [...]

(March 23, 2009, William Eagle, VOA News)

Development experts are looking at better ways to cope with water shortages. They’re worried about predictions from scientists that population pressures will increase the demand for water to meet needs for food and energy. This concern comes as countries try to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals.  Among them [...]

(March 22, 2009, The Mercury News)

As California’s drought continues, water rationing is becoming a reality in many cities — and Antioch is no exception.
On Tuesday, the City Council will be asked to weigh in on a water shortage contingency plan to cut consumption by an estimated 25 percent — the amount by which Antioch’s water [...]

(March 21, 2009, Treehugger)
Last summer I posted on Tampa Bay Florida’s new desalination plant, an expensive technology that was needed to cope with the growing demand for potable water, amidst falling supplies (due to extended drought). See Tampa Bay Florida Area Drinks Oil-Fired Water for details. Since then, surface water supplies have fallen off further [...]

(March 22, 2009, GreenCarCongress)
Xinhua. North China’s Hebei Province, the major water supplier to Beijing, has over-extracted its groundwater, causing major subsidence according to a water conservancy official.
“Water shortage has become a big problem facing the province’s social and economic development,” Li Qinglin, director of Hebei’s water conservancy department, told a forum marking the 17th World [...]

(Feb. 10, 2009, Forbes Magazine)
We want oil and iPods, but we can’t live without water. That alone makes it the world’s most precious commodity. But, still, most casual investors might be hard pressed to think of ways to play H20, as it is seemingly free. There is no Exxon of water.
But maybe there should be. [...]

(March 17, 2009, The Associated Press)
The global economic crisis threatens to shrink investment in water infrastructure, an already underfunded sector vital to growth and public health, the World Bank said Tuesday
The first global economic contraction since World War II threatens to overshadow the scarcity of clean water in many poor regions, where inadequate sanitation is [...]

(March 9, 2009, Reuters)
From cotton farms to factories that make high-tech computer chips, companies face huge risks from droughts like those searing California and Australia and that recently parched the U.S. Southeast.
Climate scientists say droughts will become more common as higher temperatures evaporate water supplies and overuse drain aquifers faster than they can be replenished [...]

(March 10, 2009, The Europa Research Information Centre)
Since world governments decided that improving the management of the planet’s water reserves was a major priority, the threats hanging over groundwater have suddenly become front-page news. However, inconsistencies remain…
Since ancient times, water diviners have doused for water armed only with a wooden stick (or divining rod). Most [...]

(March 10, 2009, Reuters)
It’s hard to visualize a water crisis while driving the lush boulevards of Los Angeles, golfing Arizona’s green fairways or watching dancing Las Vegas fountains leap more than 20 stories high.
So look Down Under. A decade into its worst drought in a hundred years Australia is a lesson of what the American [...]

(March 10, 2009, Aguanomics)
The title of this post is my reformulation of “missing the forest for the trees,” and the subject of the post is a new report from the Pacific Institute.
In Water Scarcity and Climate Change: Growing Risks for Businesses and Investors, the PI assesses the various risks to water supplies that companies should [...]

(March 10, 2009, China Daily)
The authorities need to push ahead with a price hike, reflecting accurately the growing shortage of water in China and help plug further depletion of the resource, an official has said.
“We must set up a rational water pricing system adapted to the country’s severe shortage of water. So some cities will [...]

(March 9, 2009, The Californian)
The slogan, “food grows where water flows,” is part of a water education campaign by the California Farm Water Coalition (www.CFWC.com). You’ve probably seen it on signs and banners in the San Joaquin Valley. It’s just as true in the Salinas Valley.
There are some important differences here.
Water for farms doesn’t flow [...]

(March 7, 2009, Arizona Geology)
There have been 550,000 applications to appropriate deep, “non-potable” water in New Mexico in recent months according to story in the Alamagordo Daily News.
The New Mexico legislature and the state engineer are seeking to take state control of water deeper than 2,500 feet in anticipation of efforts to desalinate brackish water [...]

(March 8, 2009, SramanaMitra)
While people focus on carbon footprints and potential ways to reduce the impact man-made CO2 emissions, the world is running out of another of its key elements: fresh water.
We use fresh water much faster than it can replenish: it is increasingly scarce and has no alternative.
Water is a strategic resource for countries [...]

(March 7, 2009, The Merced Sun Star)

Kenneth Shackel is feeling more like an emergency-room doctor than an agricultural researcher these days as he helps west Valley farmers cope with little to no irrigation water this season.
“It’s like triage,” said Shackel, a University of California at Davis pomologist and plant science professor. “For some, this isn’t [...]

(March 5, 2009, Crikey Creek)
What John Fleck refers to as “one of climate change’s most important equations”, just happens to be one of hydrology’s most important equations too – probably the most.
In the previous post I showed annual data sets of rainfall and temperature for the whole of Australia. In the last seven years, rainfall [...]

(March 4, 2009, David Zetland, Aguanomics)
RT writes:
I am an economist from Australia who works on among other issues urban water policy.
I read with interest your nicely-written Forbes article.
We seem to have pretty much a similar situation here in Australia and a few of us make similar suggestions.
I’d love to understand more about the your situation [...]

(March 3, 2009, Aguanomics)
I talked to Ray Walker, a retired water rights analyst, about the “new source” of water he’s been mentioning in comments to this blog. Since both of us are interested to find out if any water managers are interested in this new supply, I am posting his request for expressions of interest. [...]

(Feb. 28, 2009, Kelly Zito, The San Francisco Chronicle)
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a statewide drought emergency Friday, urging cities to cut their use of water 20 percent and paving the way for projects such as desalination plants and water recycling projects to bypass standard environmental reviews.
Despite heavy rainstorms this month, state officials say California’s water [...]

(Feb. 26, 2009, The Mercury News)

In March, after a series of cold winter storms, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada was above normal. That seemed to be good news for California’s water supply, which relies heavily on Sierra Nevada snow.
But after a record heat wave in the early spring, it was as if the winter’s [...]

(Feb. 26, 2009, Associated Press)
As more companies become conscious of their carbon footprint, a new movement is urging corporations to track their “water footprint” as well, or risk financial losses as freshwater supplies dry up around the globe.
Major corporations such as Coca-Cola Co. now disclose the amount of water they use in financial reports, in [...]

(Feb. 23, 2009, The Ludwig Von Mises Institute)
It is near impossible to imagine any private company not enjoying the “problem” of high demand for its products and services. Yet there are some products that are repeatedly reported as shortages. There is one thing these products have in common: government intervention, typically in the form of [...]

(Feb. 22, 2009, News24)
African economies are especially vulnerable to water shortages, delegates to the Implementing Environmental Water Allocations (IEWA) conference heard on Monday.
“Many African economies are held hostage to hydrology,” World Bank senior water resources specialist Rafik Hirji said at the start of the four-day event in Port Elizabeth.
It has attracted more than 300 experts, [...]

(Feb. 19, 2009, Christian Science Monitor)
On the Colorado River Delta, some 250 miles west southwest of Tucson as the crow flies, sits Cienega de Santa Clara.
It’s a 63-square-mile patch of wetland – a key stop for migrating birds along an arid stretch of the Pacific flyway. It’s the largest remaining wetland on the Colorado River [...]

(Feb. 21, 2009, John Laumer, Treehugger)
Last minute negotiations may have solved California’s budget crisis; but, a far more protracted problem shadows the future of civilization-as-they-know-it: water reservoirs are drying up; and climate change is likely to worsen the problem. Food prices throughout the nation will be affected in the short-term. Long-term prospects point to an [...]

(Feb. 18, 2009, Steve Gorman, Reuters)
With a recent flurry of winter storms doing little to dampen California’s latest drought, the nation’s biggest public utility voted on Tuesday to impose water rationing in Los Angeles for the first time in nearly two decades.
Under the plan adopted in principle by the governing board of the L.A. Department [...]

(Feb. 17, 2009, The Wall Street Journal)
Taking a Cue From Carbon Tracking, Companies and Conservationists Tally Hidden Sources of Consumption
It takes roughly 20 gallons of water to make a pint of beer, as much as 132 gallons of water to make a 2-liter bottle of soda, and about 500 gallons, including water used to grow, [...]

(Feb. 15, 2009, Jack Rosebro, Green Car Congress)
Xinhua. Faced with widespread drought and water shortages, China’s Water Resources Minister Chen Lei has announced a national goal of reducing the country’s water use, as measured by the amount of water used per unit of GDP, to about 55% of current consumption by 2020. The target is [...]

(Feb. 14, 2009, The New York Times)
Officials say that a major source of drinking water for about 25 million Californians is at risk. That water currently comes from the delta where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers meet, and the levees that protect the region are more than 100 years old and are vulnerable to [...]

(Feb. 12, 2009, The Montreal Gazette)
Even the Great Lakes aren’t great enough to sustain North Americans’ reckless water use in the event of a continentwide water shortage, according to a new report.
The report — titled Sentinels of Change and set for release in Friday’s edition of Science — suggests the Great Lakes’ scant renewal rates [...]

(Feb. 11, 2009, Boise Weekly)
After weeks of shoveling driveways several times a day and mornings spent sliding down busy roads, it’s hard to believe that a lack of snow could be a problem. But the snow gods are a fickle group, and now the valley is facing the threat of a summer water shortage if [...]

(Feb. 10, 2009, The Seattle PI)
SPOKANE, Wash. — The record storms that pounded the state earlier this winter haven’t meant there will be more precious water in dry summer months.
The mountain snowpack is only about 82 percent of normal across Washington, thanks to little snow in the past month, a federal water supply expert said [...]

(Feb. 10, 2009, ChennaiOnline)
India is expected to experience severe water stress by 2020 with the per capita availability of water projected to be less than 1,000 cubic metres.
Indian water scenario was a matter of grave concern, as 85 per cent of water was used for agriculture, 10 per cent for industry and five per [...]

(Feb. 8, 2009, Michael Bristow, BBC News)
A multi-billion-dollar project to divert water from southern China to the arid north is already four years behind schedule.
The news comes as parts of northern and central China struggle to cope with severe drought.
Officials recently admitted that water would not flow along the project’s central route – a total [...]

(Feb. 7, 2009, AFP)
BEIJING (AFP) — China will divert water from its two longest rivers to help farmers hit by the country’s worst drought in decades, state media said Sunday.
Water from the Yangtze River, the country’s longest, will be diverted to the northern areas of eastern Jiangsu Province, the Xinhua news agency reported, citing Zhang [...]

(Feb. 6, 2009, Phoenix Business Journal)

A bill in the Arizona Legislature would allow Colorado River water to be used for municipal and consumer needs in northwestern Arizona.
Current water laws state Colorado River water pumped into Mohave County may be used only for industrial applications such as mines, mills, utility plants and golf courses. The requirement [...]

(Feb. 2, 2009, Pat Gao, The Tawain Review)
Though hindered by the artificially low price of water, Taiwan is making headway in conservation and recycling efforts.
According to a report by the Water Resources Agency (WRA) under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, by 2021 Taiwan’s total demand for water from conventional sources like rivers and dams will [...]

(Jan. 22, 2009, The Times Online)
A swelling global population, changing diets and mankind’s expanding “water footprint” could be bringing an end to the era of cheap water.
The warnings, in an annual report by the Pacific Institute in California, come as ecologists have begun adopting the term “peak ecological water” — the point where, like the [...]

(Jan. 22, 2009, Associated Press)
Some of the nation’s largest farms plan to cut back on planting this spring over concerns that federal water supplies will dry up as officials deal with the drought plaguing California.
Farmers in the Central Valley said Thursday they would forego planting thousands of acres of water-thirsty canning tomatoes and already have [...]

(Jan. 22, 2009, Visalia Times-Delta)
Don’t be fooled: The latest rain offers no real relief from dry conditions that could cost Central Valley agriculture more than 40,000 jobs.
That was the message delivered Wednesday to the State Board of Food and Agriculture in a session on water conditions that increasingly are putting a squeeze on agricultural operations.
“The [...]

(Jan. 21, 2009, MSNBC)
Some Central Asian countries could be hit by severe water shortages this year because power-starved Tajikistan has been draining its reservoirs to generate electricity, the country’s foreign minister said Wednesday.
To compensate for a shortfall caused by the suspension of electricity from Turkmenistan, Tajikistan is taking unusually high volumes of water from its [...]

(Jan. 21, 2009, Gary Robbins, Science Dude)
The northern Sierra — which provides about half of Southern California’s water – is experiencing a dry year that might be made worse by La Nina, says Elissa Lynn, a senior meteorologist at the California Department of Water Resources.
“We average 9 inches of precipitation in the northern Sierra in January and have [...]

(Jan. 19, 2009, Aguanomics)
A few months back, I blasted East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) for their badly-designed water conservation scheme. Last week, I got my water bill for the past two months, and now I see that I was too kind.
EBMUD is really NOT doing a good job at handing the water shortage.
Here [...]