Finding Solutions to the Growing Problem of Freshwater Scarcity

May 13, 2019 – Please welcome Hanna Johnson to our growing family of contributors to 21st Century Tech Blog. Hanna is a free-spirited world traveler currently living in Italy. She loves nature and the environment. When she’s not behind her computer working on a new writing project, you will probably find her browsing museums or in a local café. Today Hanna writes about a growing worldwide challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. In a special report on water published March 2nd in The Economist, it states that “water is a proxy for life itself.” It goes on to note that “it is perhaps not surprising that worries about the health and availability of supplies here on Earth can take on apocalyptic overtones.” In a time when atmospheric warming is altering precipitation patterns and causing glacial melting at unprecedented levels at the source of the world’s greatest rivers, we can little afford to be frivolous in our use of freshwater resources. As always please send your questions and comments and I promise to reply with reasonable haste.

In recent years the lack of sufficient available freshwater resources to support water requirements of many areas of the planet has grown immensely, so much so that drought risk is on the rise and that nations affected are threatened by significant economic impacts in the coming decades.

Here are some water facts to ponder:

• 70% of the Earth is covered by water of which 97.5% is salty and undrinkable.
• 1.75% of the freshwater on Earth is tied up in glaciers, sea ice, and permafrost.
• that leaves 0.75% of the water on our planet as the resource we humans share together with all other life on land.
• the majority of that 0.75% is located in subterranean sources.
• the resource we humans use primarily is above ground representing 0.3% of all the water found on the planet.

Is it no wonder then that freshwater scarcity is being defined as one of the most significant issues of our time.

According to the United Nations, “Water scarcity can mean scarcity in availability due to physical shortage, or scarcity in access due to the failure of institutions to ensure a regular supply or due to a lack of adequate infrastructure. Water scarcity already affects every continent. Water use has been growing globally at more than twice the rate of population increase in the last century, and an increasing number of regions are reaching the limit at which water services can be sustainably delivered, especially in arid regions.”

What technologies and innovations can we bring to bear to address freshwater scarcity?

In a number of cities and countries around the world, solutions are being found to tackle scarcity. Some of these are traditional (damming rivers for irrigation), and some are potentially problematic in terms of environmental impact, and others are truly innovative. Here are a few examples:

• The country of Tajikistan’s entire freshwater capacity is currently 77 cubic kilometers, required to meet the needs of its 8 million people. Only 7% of its land is considered arable and 96% of current freshwater resources are consumed by farms. To expand freshwater capacity, the country is damming its largest river resource, the Vakhsh to provide irrigation to areas currently deemed marginal for farming. 
• The city of Las Vegas, Nevada has sprung out of a desert and freshwater scarcity in its early days was overcome by tapping into the Colorado River. When the Hoover Dam created Lake Mead, it became a freshwater resource for cities as far away as Los Angeles, California. At the same time, it made it possible for Las Vegas to grow. But Lake Mead has seen its water levels drop in recent years as the Southwestern United States experienced a megadrought. Now the city has contracted for the building of a tunnel to draw water from deeper in Lake Mead to meet its growing demand.
• California, the most populous American state, is also the one most impacted by freshwater scarcity. The city of Los Angeles in order to preserve its water resources in the Los Angeles Reservoir is using 96 million shade balls, small plastic spheres that float on top of the water to minimize evaporation, and improve water quality. The officials at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power have stated that the annual savings from shade ball deployment amounts to as much as 11.4 million liters (approximately 300 million gallons) of freshwater.
• In Qingdao a coastal Chinese city that is home to nearly 9 million people, freshwater demand has necessitated the development of a desalination facility which uses a reverse osmosis process to convert ocean water to drinking water. Increasingly, desalination plants are springing up all over the globe. There are more than 18,000 presently and many more being built annually. The plant in Qingdao is expected to produce 100,000 cubic meters of freshwater daily to meet the requirements of 25% of its downtown population. 
• Singapore is perfecting a “toilet-to-tap” technology to help solve the city-state’s freshwater scarcity. An island nation of five million it has few surface freshwater resources. So it has focused on conservation by collecting the water used for sanitation, grey water, and reclaiming it at four facilities that pump out almost 600 million cubic meters of refurbished water to meet freshwater demand.
• Israel is considered to be the greatest innovator of freshwater scarcity solutions. Not only has the country developed state-of-the-art desalination, the world’s largest facility, and greywater recycling technology, its agricultural sector has spawned innovative developers of drip-irrigation systems that are increasingly being used globally to deal with crop freshwater scarcity.

Miroslav Lajčák, President of the United Nation’s General Assembly, has called for greater international cooperation around the issue of freshwater scarcity. At a recent meeting he stated, “Scarcity of water – exacerbated by climate change or humanitarian disasters – can cause tensions between people, communities, and countries….We will need more than action from governments…Strengthening water infrastructures and systems costs money. And we will need a lot more of it, from different sources. We also need to create environments in which innovation and entrepreneurship can flourish.”